David White

Preview from Europe: The Bear Comes to Town

Re American Chemical Society study: I love these headline statements based on incredibly spare data. They tested 234 banknotes from 18 different cities. 234 bills out of billions in circulation. The chances for sampling error are incredibly high. It probably is also likely that big cities have more rampant cocaine use than small towns (or even medium size cities). Even the article only cites 6 million admitted cocaine users out of 300+M is the US population. That's only 2%. How do you get 90% from that? Maybe people got some old Red Bull on the bills? Talk about sensationalism. They'd have to be puting cocaine in coffee or milk to make this kind of statistic true.

Replacement Candidates for David Merkel's Portfolio: From AA to ZZ

NM is a good bet. It has excellent value. It has an extremely low PE and FPE. It also has an excellent Price to Book value ratio. Further it has both a new fleet in South America (for the river traffic mostly) which is supposed to begin adding 35% to EBITDA beginning in the 4th quarter of this year. It got pushed further downward in the recent market move in that direction, so it is an excellent buy now.