The Too Hard Pile
“Charlie says we have three boxes: “In,” “Out” and “Too hard.” You don’t have to do everything well. At the Olympics, if you run the 100 meters well, you don’t have to do the shot put…” – Warren Buffett Investing in individual companies is easy to do but hard to be good at. Online brokerages with zero commissions have made it so you can buy stocks at the click of a button. But it doesn’t guarantee you will make money doing it. Statistically, very few investors will outperform
Why I Sold My Shares of JD.com
“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who has been swimming naked” – Warren Buffett. Buffett likely wasn’t the first person to ever say something like this (as with all vague quotes), but the meaning holds true nonetheless. What he is eloquently saying is, that, in financial markets, when shit hits the fan, you realize who has just been bullshitting this entire time. At this point in the cycle, those bullshitters reside in China. Last week, Luckin Coffee, one of the ho
Getting Real With Tesla Stock
Please note I do own a minuscule amount of Tesla put options that shouldn’t but probably will make you think I am biased against the company With delivery numbers down heavily for the 1st quarter, the bull case for Tesla is looking weaker by the day. I believe investors in the company are overestimating vehicle demand by a wide margin, which is the main reason Tesla slashed selling prices at the end of the quarter. Why do I think this? Because I used to be the biased Tesla bu
Why did iQIYI Raise Money?
On Friday, March 29th, Chinese video streaming platform iQIYI announced it had closed its convertible bond offering of $1.2 billion. It is a six-year deal, and one of the largest bond offerings ever for a U.S. listed Chinese stock. I’ll talk about the potential upside and downsides of a large debt deal, but first let’s talk about what convertible bonds are, as it is important to know the nuances when evaluating a deal like this. Convertible bonds are a special typed of fixed-
IQiyi Earnings: Sales Growing Fast, Costs even Faster
iQiyi, the Netflix/YouTube hybrid in China, reported its 4th quarter and full year 2018 earnings after the bell on Thursday. It is typically at this point in an earnings article when the author regurgitates whether the stock beat or missed analyst expectations. I don’t know and don’t care about what analysts were expecting iQiyi to do. Arbitrary benchmarks like estimates disproportionally skew investor opinions and make people focus on the wrong things. With that aside, here