Daniel Koontz

Not Financial Advice: Reviews:

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

Gen X here: they had us practice duck and cover drills under our desks in elementary school... as if they would protect us from nukes?

And "acid rain"... that was a good one.

Running out of oil was imminent too.

[nic carter @nic_carter]

Was there a time in the last century when we _didn’t_ believe the apocalypse was imminent?

We seem to have transitioned seamlessly from climate to AI x risk. Before that, I assume it was nuclear.

Was there ever a moment where we didn’t indulge in millenarianism?

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

American military "strategists" ought to be reading Edward N. Luttwak's "The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century AD to the Third" https://t.co/cqDr81CaaW

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

Satellite imagery reveals how much Iran damaged a major American naval base https://t.co/SRfA4AG8KY

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

!!!

[Lee Roach @leevalueroach]

I have read approximately 3,000 10-Ks in my life. I have read my wife’s emotional state correctly maybe 11 times. This is troubling because the skills should transfer. Both require you to look past the headline. Both require you to read the footnotes. Both require you to notice what was said last quarter that is not being said this quarter.

I can spot a goodwill impairment from 40 pages away. I cannot spot that my wife has been quietly furious since Tuesday. In a 10-K I notice when management changes the word “challenging” to “dynamic” and I correctly interpret this as a warning. In my marriage my wife changed the word “fine” to “fine.” and I did not notice the period. The period was the entire disclosure.

I missed it. I read a footnote last week in a packaging company’s annual report that disclosed a related-party transaction worth $400,000 and I caught it in 90 seconds. My wife told me three times this month that she was tired and I interpreted this as “tired” when in fact it was a Level 3 disclosure requiring immediate management response. I have a system for 10-Ks. I read the MD&A first, then the risk factors, then the cash flow statement, then the notes. I have no system for my wife. She is a company that does not file. She reports continuously and without warning and the format changes every quarter. Her risk factors are not enumerated.

Her MD&A is delivered through sighs of varying length and I have not yet developed the ear. Last week she said “do whatever you want” and I did whatever I wanted and it turns out the correct interpretation of “do whatever you want” was “do not do that specific thing” and I have no idea how I was supposed to know that, and yet, looking back, the signals were all there. The signals are always there. I have been trained to find signals. I find them in companies I will never meet. I miss them in the person I have lived with for nine years. My wife has started saying things like “you would notice this if I were a stock” and she is correct. She is correct. If she had a ticker I would have already built a 6,000-word model on her. I would know her seasonality.

I would know her capex cycle. I would know which quarters historically run hot. Instead I treat her like a private company and I am surprised every time the auditors arrive. I am going to bed now. She said good night in a tone. I do not know what the tone meant. I will find out in the morning. Or I will not. The 10-K of my marriage is filed in real time and I am, as always, three quarters behind.

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

Important tweet. 2 vs 4 seems like a minor difference. But the human brain doesn't handle compounding/non-linear trajectories well.

Your government is practically shouting what they are going to do: inflate away the debt. You have to prepare.

[BowTiedBull.eth - Read Pinned or NGMI @BowTiedBull]

4% inflation vs. 2% goal inflation is huge. Most just think "$4 vs $2 per $100... no big deal"

At 4% it means everything doubles by 2043-2044
AT 2% it means everything doubles by 2061-2062

Not even remotely close to the same. You need to be an owner this decade.

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

They said it was "transitory" too...

[jbulltard @jbulltard1]

I like how 4.2% is now a cool cpi. Pavlov would be fascinated with you people

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

Excellent writeup here on Braskem, good stuff.

$BAK

[🏴‍☠️ @calvinfroedge]

Free public post regarding what appears to be the turning point in the Braskem saga

I increased my position yesterday

$BAK #BRKM3 #BRKM5

https://t.co/vk5UGPAEed

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

Two very useful and intriguing ideas here.

Can be inverted and flipped around in lots of ways, too: think about them as an investor (where is the sustainable margin), also think about them as a consumer (where are you getting scammed out of value needlessly).

[Eric Jorgenson 📚 ☀️ @EricJorgenson]

Everyone can use @elonmusk's "Magic Wand Number" and "Idiot Index"

They're universal ideas, helpful in any industry.

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

You *are* right, for sure.

But it's just... when? Is this 1996 or is it 1999? If you're short and it's 1996 you are dead several times over. In 1999 alone the Nasdaq was up 85%...

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

Useful analogy.

Or in 1990s Internet/Nasdaq boom terms: it's 1996, not 1999.

[Labubu Enjoyer (Hippopotamus) @whippobackup]

@hkuppy The AI capex race & the shale boom have incredible parallels and are extremely similar.

With that said, this type of activity occurred in the 3rd-5th innings, so this may mean we have years left before capex drops.

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

Yup.

[X_times_1 @x_times_1]

No one good at investing needs to sell subscriptions.

Spend time thinking about this.

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

@etbadabimbim @Scholars_Stage No idea.

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

Very interesting tweet right here:

[T. Greer @Scholars_Stage]

Again: IMHO Tocqueville is at his most valuable not as an interpreter of things American, but as an interpreter of things modern—what happens to societies when the old categories that defined social and political life (eg “nobility,” France’s three estates) disappear, and men are thrust into a social reality where abstract equality is a guiding cultural ideal, markets are the main mediating social force, and there are few intervening social or political groupings between citizens and centralizing states?

This process is what Tocqueville means by “democracy.” Democracy to him means social leveling and atomization that comes with the dissolution of the old aristocratic order.

Many Europeans who observed this process in Europe thought the answer would be something like “bloody anarchy.” But Tocqueville had been to the country where this process was furthest along, and he knew that bloody anarchy was not what he saw there. What he saw there was very different—but why?

So he has to explain the American of the 1830s. He has to explain many of its unique features. Then he has to argue which of these features are incidental to modernization (due instead to geography, religion, the American constitutional order etc) and which are byproducts of modernization (“democracy”) and likely to be manifested elsewhere. And then he asks which aspects of American culture and its constitutional order actually dampen the effects of democracy. He makes a great of American localism in that discussion, for example. And then he makes predictions for what will happen in countries that ride the democratic wage but don’t do the things Americans in the 1830s are doing—and in doing this he makes some very good predictions for what America looks like in the 20th century. Many of his most famous passages are these ones, where he describes constitutional orders that did not exist in the 1830s, but which look very familiar today.

Finally he turns his attention back to Europe and looks at many aspects of European culture—poetry, religion, science, industry, and so forth—and asks, “in a general sense cross-cultural sense, how will these things change as equality becomes the guiding social ideal and the social reality of aristocracy and commoner melts away? Will they be like what I saw in America, or will they be different? What does this idea of human equality, and the experiences people have with it, mean for thing x, and thing y, and thing z?”

Tocqueville’s answers to these questions are often brilliant and always interesting. And if you think—and I do—that the most important transformations of human life happened in the 1750-1850 timeframe, that there things “modern” that distinguish how the people who lived after these transformations lived and thought and worked and fought from those who lived before these transformations—well then I suggest that Tocqueville is the most discerning guide to this revolution.

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

@calvinfroedge, spitting truths with an edge as always...!

[🏴‍☠️ @calvinfroedge]

I present to you

"Make the 1970s Great Again" featuring "Too Late" by Carole King

Find your 1970s crisis vibe

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

Reading now a superpower.

[🏴‍☠️ @calvinfroedge]

Literally half of American adults can barely read

They'll likely never read a book their entire lives

It gets worse every year

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

I remember when the big fear with $NMM 2-3 years ago was they ordered wayyy too many newbuilds, they wouldn't be able to fund them, etc.

Shipping is a very humbling sector

[Chris Shipping 🚢🚢 @christankerfund]

From the $NMM earnings report, 2 Capesize newbuilds have been chartered out for 5 years at $25,000 PLUS 50% profit share.

Tells you the strength of the Capesize outlook.

$HSHP $SHIP $SBLK $CMBT

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

I wish this weren't so true.

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

@KJosephAuthor Interesting to see this in astronomy even.

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

Very interesting chart here.

[Ethical Skeptic ☀ @EthicalSkeptic]

The custodians of science have become the architects of its demise.

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

Welcome!

[Gail Alfar @gailalfaratx]

@elonmusk @SERobinsonJr I literally never thought about chips in my life before this. It might sound stupid, but the truth is I’m learning so much about tiny things now, and I never thought it could be so exciting to learn about them.

[Daniel Koontz @danielckoontz]

Yet another really good reason to read old books.

[Patrick Skeels @bas_logic]

In all seriousness, one of the best ways to build and maintain your memetic resistance is to make sure that at any given time, you’re reading something from before 1900. It doesn’t much matter what it is.