Chaudhuris

@Usta Stockman If Tariffs increase prices for the end consumers (they almost always do), that will reduce demand leading to lower sales. That means local sellers will reduce their sourcing from the supplier country which will need to a dampened job situations at those companies. That means supplier countries will have job losses and income + GDP will drop.

Alternate, the local sellers will ask the suppliers to reduce their profit margin. That can only happen to a certain extent, and eventually the supplier companies will try to reduce wages, which again hurts the supplier country.

So inflation is bad for the companies in the supplier country. One way they can remediate that is by getting into a trade war and putting in place their own tariffs. That is not an easy thing to do especially against the US. At the same time, not doing anything will make you look bad in front of your voters and no politician ever wants that.

@VoiceofSanitySometimes you evidently didn’t even look at the BLS’ own reports of their data that they have published for the public which contradicts your “understanding” of the data.

Here is what BLS says:
www.bls.gov/...

Employment up 256,000 in December 2024; average gain of 186,000 jobs per month in 2024:
Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 256,000 in December 2024. Employment rose by 2.2 million in 2024 (an average monthly gain of 186,000), less than the increase of 3.0 million in 2023 (an average monthly gain of 251,000). Most major industries had lower average monthly gains in 2024 than in 2023.

@ransim7222 Any objective student of military history should be aware of the decisive role of the Eastern Front.

@JCCIII But that goes against the idea that successful companies are efficient and that the government should be run like that. If both successfully companies and governments are inherently inefficient then why are we justifying one over the other.

The other way to interpret the data is that companies had recruited because they expected to grow and are now bracing for inflation leading into a recession and are preparing in advance for that.

@VoiceofSanitySometimes For all that you wrote, you did not explicate how repeal of tax credits could be equated to wasteful spending.

If you have a problem with PR and biased reports, that axe can be taken to every industry out there and it’s a waste of breath for all.

The fact of the matter is that any new industry requires government incentives and the IRA was a great opportunity for the US to take leadership in the global green economy by supporting manufacturing and jobs in low income communities in the US. How’s that a bad thing?

@yellowpage Not quite. Again a a careful look indicates that Distribution revenue was down because Content cratered by 50%. WBD needs to bring more consistency in the Studios business and grow it. The bet is that this year they will bring the cart back on track for that. If it works that’s a net positive for the company. They also need to decelerate the loss of legacy customers in cable.

So now Musk will be able to train his AI platform on federal data, improve it so that it actually works and then sell it back to the government and other businesses. It’s a great new way to monetize his investment rapidly and create new revenue streams.

I wonder what the government or us, the tax payers, will get out of this?

The biggest driver for rerating of Alibaba (and all other China stocks) is the economic turnaround in China and renewed spending by Chinese consumers. Eventually it will happen, the question is how long will it take. Alibaba can also take advantage of its international business as providing a fillip meanwhile but what they require for that is to make that business profitable.

The only thing one can say confidently from this article is that Bill Ackman has a position around the future of interest rates that will benefit if the Fed follows his recommendation.

@chris sword Check here: icer.org/...

Not much difference really, there may be some people who don't get as much benefit from exa-cel but overall both look very compelling and the ICER decision reinforces that.

@Joe_G Can you expand why you think PARA and WBD (especially) don't have the scale to compete?

@Strategic Investor I think STLA approaches it slightly differently than GM. Barring Fiat, all their other brands are mostly limited to 1 or 2 countries where they have very strong marketshare, usually with a limited number of models. I can't say for sure if that framework will work in the future, but I think it has helped them in the past and it does provide them with strong local customer mindshare which is advantageous when you introduce new models. It allows you to do marketing that is tailored to certain geos only and not have to customize it across several geos. There are advantages to that.

I think Toyota/Lexus and Mercedes Benz are different because they have grown in very different ways as a company than STLA. They are both centered around 1 or 2 brands globally and it works for them. If STLA was to emulate them and do away with Citröen (and keep Peugeot) in France and Lancia (and keep Alfa Romeo) in Italy, it would hurt them a lot more than provide any immediate advantage. My 2 cents.

@Suspirium Puellarum @jerseyvalueinvestor My average price after adjusting for warrants is just above $2. I sold some about 2 years back at around $36 but holding on to the bulk of my shares because of the buybacks. However it is coming to the point where I am tracking the price to see if it goes too high.

Buyback is one of the reasons I have started looking at AIG again - its a reasonable business at good valuation that is limping back to decent performance, but buying back $5-6Bn worth of stock on a market cap of <$50Bn is difficult to pass up.

In the current markets cape where valuations are sky-high, the buybacks offer considerable margin of safety.

@SA Transcripts The deck uploaded is for NJR and not NRG Energy

@Robert Falcone From an article that was public in Pharma Tech magazine a couple of weeks back:

(Abbvie).... has two pipeline agents, ABBV-3067, a CFTR potentiator that is being studied in late-stage Phase II trials alone and in combination with galicaftor (ABBV-2222), a CFTR corrector. If successful, AbbVie will be Vertex’s first competitor in the CFTR modulator market.

Not sure if the above is linked to Galapagos or the CF Foundation but seems like the latter.

Thanks Roger

I don’t know specifically as I am not in this space but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s all kinds of systems from legacy ones to some which are pretty modern and ready for cloud. For large organizations that is almost always the case, ranging from mainframes to modern cloud-native apps. There will be a lot of work moving all these apps to the cloud.

Just from a business model perspective, I get where you’re coming from but being in that space, this investment just doesn’t look compelling enough. The risk-reward in my understanding is biased against SHSP. There is a lot of disruption going on in that space between trad IT firms and trad agencies. In the SMB space there will be opportunity but Hubspot is really well entrenched.

There may be a case in terms of current market cap and whether it will get rerated. Or it could also become an acquisition. It’s too speculative for me and I expect Hubspot to get acquired first before SHSP though Hubspot’s market cap is rather high.

Again just my 2 cents, I have read the tea leaves wrong in the past and this could be one of those.

I find Greenhaven’s previous investment in BXC to be far more compelling.

Mizuho just published a very bearish report reducing the PT to $18. They earlier had it at $75. Part of it seems to be because of their belief that the management is struggling to gain market share and is changing its messaging which Mizuho thinks has lower potential. Also given what they have seen so far they expect penetration to be in the 6-7% range.

Overall not a good prognosis for Adamas. Pricing needs to improve and they definitely wed much higher market penetration and quickly.

Magento gives Adobe a complete marketing suite my plugging the ecommerce gap that they had. Going ahead Adobe will try to cross sell the commerce engine to its customers. Customers who want to standardize on fewer platforms will be interested in that. Customers who prefer best of breed will still look at Shopify. This is definitely a negative for Shopify but not clear to what extent. Will Shopify buttress its capabilities bu buying out a Sitecore or something similar. That’s possible. My feeling is despite whatever Shopify will survive but the going does get a tad more competitive.