NA means North Asia? I have a hard time reconciling why a microcap software company would go public if it was any decent. Is capital that hard to raise over there?

NVTR!

Greatest gift this thread has ever given me. Just forever growing in the wife's accounts.

JP is up 150% and CYD up slightly since this post. JP is still discounted for being a Chinese small cap and associated possibility of fraud.

It's reacting to Amazon's interest in prescription medication. Their final decision will likely impact its future direction (at least in the near term).

ohhh well that would make sense, Glad I sold it right before the plunge. I guess I have to monitor that.

North america. They need capital for sales costs and development costs to pay their engineers.

I see software companies (mostly SaaS) being taken out left and right. One I owned was Onvia, taken out at 100% premium. So I am scouring the market to load up on the cheap ones .

Might be a good time to revisit this old blog post on Hawaiian Airlines (HA).

http://quinzedix.blogspot.com/2012/0...transport.html

The stock has gotten crushed because Southwest will be adding routes to Hawaii but as this blog post highlights: 1. Hawaiian makes their money on the inter-island flights, not the flights into Hawaii (which are already very competitive) and 2. Hawaiian will have a cost structure advantage on Southwest in Hawaii.

Stock trades at 3.5x EV/EBITDA today (by far the cheapest airline i believe) and recently announced a new buyback plan and dividend plan.

Way I see it just comes down to why is Southwest expanding into Hawaii? If they think its just something their customers want access to so they can take advantage of Companion Pass, etc and they stick to primarily west coast to Hawaii routes then I think this poses zero threat to Hawaiian. But Southwest is known for trying to breaking into high fare monopoly type routes and Hawaiian certainly has that currently with the inter island flights. I think Southwest would be foolish to try this due to their cost structure disadvantage there but if they try to break the inter island monopoly it could hurt HA profitability for sure.

Looked into that one as I held some stock on the way up. Decided against it to buy recently under $40.

Profit margins of US airliners are really inflated. This is one industry that just seems like a juicy political target at some point when Democrats get back in power. Maybe even before that. They earn more than twice the profit per passenger vs EU airlines. 20-30% operating margins for a commodity industry ffs! Letting foreign airlines in (as they are currently not allowed) could also eat their profit margins. Or banning or capping certain fees.

Loads of insider selling (something I never like)

If revenue is $2.6bn a couple years from now with more 'normal' op profit margins of 15% due to competition and higher fuel prices the stock only trades at about 9-10x earnings.

it also seems that airlines in general did not really have to give a lot of the cost savings from low oil prices to customers. But I am not sure they can raise prices once oil goes back up to $60-80.

It does look cheapish despite that though.

20-30% operating margins are less crazy when you account for the capital intensity of the business. I call out HA because I think they are unique in that they have a literally physical moat with the pacific ocean shielding them from serious competition on the routes they make most their money (interisland). That said, airlines (especially HA) are obviously going to be whipsawing with the economy no doubt.

In terms of insider selling, the HA CEO was pretty regularly selling shares every month until the stock crashed and how he has stopped and they launched buyback plan.

Another one to look at again is SAVE (Spirit Airlines). They are the lowest cost operator whos results maybe depressed due to price wars being waged by American Air. 5-6x EV/EBITDA right now

Going to do some reading on SAVE tonight, I've been eyeing ALK as a potential buy in the airline sector, i'm not sure the bottom is in yet though.

This makes a lot of sense, but I've heard very compelling arguments about "selling too soon, let the winners run" as well. I guess I haven't made up my mind as to when the right time to sell is, other than my best estimates for future revenue, earnings, and risk from company statements and financial reports. I probably tend toward selling too early most of the time, I find that the more DD I do, the more comfortable I am holding longer. Seems kind of obvious in retrospect when I type it out on the screen.

Smokey If you haven't read that HA link I posted you should it's a good read

I like the HA idea. I know UAL has some flights between the islands but I don't think there's much chance of anyone expanding to those operations due to logistical difficulties. HA is a good airline as well. Solid reputation for customer service and comfort.

BTW, biggest threat to airlines is labor shortage and rising labor costs, especially for pilots. Small airlines like Republic are actually cancelling routes because they can't find enough pilots and paying them more makes the costs too prohibitive. I'm skeptical of those 20% margins referenced, but I guess it depends on route/seat. F and J tickets are obv high margin, but I think Y seats are pretty low margin these days.

By the way a more speculative airline bet from that same author is Flybe. I own some shares in that one. The thesis there is basically that they had over capacity, and are now in a position where they can actually control their own capacity, reducing fixed costs. It could be very cheap 1-2 years out once they right size their fleet when leases run off and they increase ownership vs leasing (lowering costs). The size of their fleet peaked a few months ago.

Plus when oil goes up, they are the only ones that will have low fuel costs vs competition through hedges for a couple of years (car, rail and ships mostly).

Red thinks they can earn 50-60m or more, I think it is probably closer to 20-40m maybe 2 years from now. Which is pretty cheap on a market cap of 75m. Shouldn't be that hard to squeeze out 4-5% profit margins on about 7-800m, of revenue?

I remember the perpetual bear Myrna mentioning both HA and SAVE as good longs too. I should look into them more.

Anyone looked at Integrated biopharma? They are a major supplier of Herbalife (the bad) and so far growing revenue. trades at 50% earnings yield (assuming they utilize NOLS), while debt was issued at 4-6%.

Does anyone have any thoughts on just making macro bets on ETFs that track specific countries? EPOL is on fire YTD which makes sense; they have an educated population, good governance and a lot of runway left for growth. VNM is another. I visited last year and was really impressed by what was happening in the cities. There's a young, educated population that's essentially technocratic. The rural areas look like something out of the 19th century though. The ETF is doing pretty well recently even with the failure of the TPP (which I believe will be resurrected anyway within the next 10 years).

I think EE and certain areas of SE Asia look very appealing for the long run. There is plenty of risk and potential downside ofc.

Should look at underlying companies & sectors for these country specific ETFs. Can get pretty lol sometimes for weight of top x companies for the whole ETF, or sector brakedown for the ETF.

(Not saying it's a good or bad idea)

A chunk of my portfolio is in the 10 lowest CAPE ratio country ETF's. I add a filter to only buy if it's over the 200ma and sell below as well.

http://www.starcapital.de/research/stockmarketvaluation

Looking like a genius this year but the whole world is on fire. Can go through some hard times picking up ETF's that nobody wants. Theoretically these ETF's can go to 0 if the country goes tits up

For people into nanocaps, check out SORT (gunther international). Their ink sales have been steadily increasing, $1.25 million of EBIT in 2016. Assuming machine sales go to break even, trading at 4x EBIT. Painfully illiquid though, I own a small stake.

So this was a good warning. Stayed away back then. Just wow today. Thinking fair value may be closer to $9 now, maybe lower even.

What happens to AMZN when aws profits disappear? MSFT, IBM, even ORCL are all better cloud plays for now based on growth, but how much growth can be expected? When will the paradigm shift to blockchain-as-a-database occur? What does that do to cloud storage demand?

Bought Constellation Brands (STZ) at 159.8 and it's been doing awesome. Recent announcement is that they are partnering with Canopy Growth, getting them in to the marijuana business. This is a pretty big move, as I think it make them one of the biggest companies to get in on marijuana.

It's at about 216 now, and I'm hoping for a small pull-back after the hype settles to add more. I would definitely love to hear any thoughts about the stock.

Any RMGN holders here? Wondering what the hell is going on that share price is cratering almost 50% in the past few months? No announcements besides their new SaaS product. Luckily it is a tiny position, but the share price is all over the place. It looks like some insider with more info is looking to dump a lot of shares as fast as possible.

Also Hawaiian holdings is getting into interesting territory at $33.