Recent content by Totoro

I use cash covered puts to basically force myself to avoid market timing: calling the bottom (or top) is impossible, but automatically buying when a discount is there can be done. It's an alternative to fixed time buying (e.g. rebalancing every half year), and I get paid for doing basically...

Would be nice if someone from the Greenblatt could comment on these results.

According to morningstar in 2018 Berkshire had ~30 billion in cash https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/xnys/brk.b/financials Still quite a lot, but only ~10% of total equity, which is pretty typical as far as I understood from Berkshire historically.

A small example with solar panels: some new houses here are building their panels not facing true south, but more on a west or east angle. This causes them to produce more power near the morning/evening and less during noon. It reduces the capacity factor overall, but makes the house itself a...

I've seen mostly single digit growth projected, more is technically possible but not politically realistic. The existing capacity is significant too, about 16% at a global level. That is a part of the 100% puzzle. Strong variance by region of course. Ranging from 0% to near 100% (e.g. New...

No pretending necessary. What Germany is doing, not what I am suggesting, is what I mentioned before and a mix of a.o. : further integrate with the European grid, biomass, hydro, capacity factor increase (e.g. offshore wind), demand management, tidal, storage, geothermal, energy productivity and...

Didn't miss it :) Two things that are relevant here: 1) Germany is part of the European grid. These links are being upgraded in the coming years too 2) The next wave of renewable productions sites have higher capacity factors. Specifically wind is being built offshore and with higher positions...

As I said, this isn't realistic. Europe is one grid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continental_Europe Germany has poor solar resources and moderate wind sources. It doesn't exist on itself, and if it would it is pretty much a worst case scenario for any major country. In...

I believe so. Battery costs also get reported on cell level vs. pack level, and with sale price vs. costs. Very confusing. Automotive car batteries (different economics, I know) should be around $150 per kWh currently at pack level. Nice write-up here about that (prices being "wrong"). Note...

Let's take reality instead: storage batteries are already at that price level for grid level applications, or soon will be. Page 19 of this report for example: https://www.lazard.com/media/450774/lazards-levelized-cost-of-storage-version-40-vfinal.pdf Page 22 has some cost decrease outlooks for...

We are making order of magnitude improvements in economics, which I believe is on par with early airplanes and cars. Solar panels keep dropping at ~7% per year in cost, batteries are dropping in price currently at nearly 15%. That's halving every 5 years. I think your definition of...

Not really. Take Facebook for example: what happens when the dollar weakens? Plenty of income and costs are in other currencies. Same thing with the other way around: Inditex is in theory a Spanish company, but with a large sales presence in the USA. And both are affected differently depending...

Wonder what their source is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_debt Lists Canada as lower, and USA as higher.

I missed Saudi Arabia and Canada, both too low. In terms of future, here's another challenge: * Estimate total population of North America, South America, Africa, Europe (West+East) and Asia * Do it again for expected population 30 years out (middle scenario) Cheat-sheet...

In the Netherlands and I'm sure other countries too banks don't have vaults anymore for consumers. You can rent a vault from a non-bank, but it's only insured up to 45k.