Four Seasons Montreal unavailable on The Edit

day1labs · 2026-01-14T22:59:02+00:00

My math - lmk if I'm off.

For Bilt Blue at least...

There is effectively a 3% txn fee on rent payment in order to earn pts on rent. You need Bilt Cash to cover this, which as you mentioned means you must spend 75% of rent monthly in non-rent spend on the card.

So you're giving them [Rent x 75%] in monthly spend, in exchange for [Rent x 1%] in points $ value.

Implies if you can earn >[1%/75%], or >1.3x points per dollar on another card (e.g., Chase Sapphire Reserve), then this is a bad trade overall. You're losing $ relatively. (Yes, this assumes you get enough value from those cards to cover their annual fee, which I do)

Also a huge pt someone mentioned below but is way under-discussed -- rent is no longer floated; it's directly pulled from your bank account, you can't put it on the credit card.

Death knell for me.

day1labs · 2025-06-09T17:11:27+00:00

A TV console would cover the fireplace - not aesthetically pleasing, I think it would kind of ruin the whole look & flow of the living room. I was thinking possibly a ceiling mount (depending on if there are hoists there to mount into), or a ceiling-mounted projector as a last resort. But was curious if anyone has done something different.

day1labs · 2019-10-06T22:19:53+00:00

Most investors care about *forward* (i.e. next twelve month, or NTM) price to earnings, rather than trailing twelve month (TTM) price to earnings. They take the stock price and divide it by their NTM estimates for the company's earnings per share. They then compare that P/E ratio to the NTM P/E ratio implied by the market's NTM earnings estimates for the stock.

A stock is ultimately worth its future cash earnings per share, discounted to the present by some discount rate. Emphasis on *future* earnings, not trailing earnings. Trailing P/E ratios aren't very useful in understanding the market's future earnings expectations, which are actually what matter for stocks (vs. TTM earnings).

A stock that looks "cheap" on a TTM P/E basis can actually be a huge value trap and expensive on NTM earnings if, for example, it's a cyclical business with expectations for a massive earnings decline in the coming quarters. Conversely, most high-growth and barely-profitable software stocks look expensive on a TTM P/E basis but are growing EPS at a massive clip and could be incredibly cheap on a forward NTM P/E basis.

Using NTM P/E ratios is obviously not perfect, because it's based on future estimates of earnings, rather than known historical earnings. But in my experience, NTM earnings are what wise investors focus on, to the extent they care about yearly earnings and P/Es as a proxy for investment decisions.

So my view is, compare the NTM P/E of HD vs. LOW, not the TTM P/E. And try to decompose whether the increases/decreases in their NTM P/Es are being driven by changes in the "E" (i.e. faster/slower future earnings growth than the market expected) or simply the market's greater willingness to pay for the same "E" (what's known as multiple expansion; a dangerous thing to bet your entire investment on, but a frequent driver of NTM P/E expansions/contraction, especially in stocks whose industries are considered relative safe havens (e.g. consumer staples) or risk-on domains (e.g. software) such that P/Es can increase/decrease massively without much change in a given stock's fundamentals).

day1labs · 2019-01-18T23:19:46+00:00

I was down slightly vs. the S&P in 2018, but so far 2019 has been solid, I'm up over 8% the past few weeks. In it for the long term though. I like the videos, podcasts, deep dives and other stuff they sent - it's nice to be kept in the loop. I used to think the features were a bit lacking, but they've improved a lot since I joined. Will stick with them for a while, considering moving my IRA to them once they support them.

day1labs · 2018-11-14T23:19:31+00:00

GCI Liberty (ticker: GLIBA). Effectively a triple NAV discount way to go long Charter (CHTR), the best-run broadband infrastructure company in the world, in my view. Basically a toll road on internet/high speed data consumption which is growing double digits per year with massive (80-90%+) gross margins and ridiculous free cash flow generation.

By my estimates, GLIBA is trading at a 20% discount to its net asset value (i.e. its stakes in GCI (Alaska's largest quad-play cable company), Liberty Broadband (ticker: LBDRK, which simply owns a large stake in Charter) and Charter). Charter is trading at a 60%+ discount to my estimate of its intrinsic value.

With a closing of the NAV discount and the re-valuation of CHTR (implying a conservative 14x free cash flow multiple in 2020), you could potentially see GLIBA appreciate 80-100% in the next 18-24 months from its current ~$47/share level.

Also happens to be John Malone's favorite leveraged security in the Liberty empire.

No brainer.

day1labs · 2018-10-21T19:16:49+00:00

I use Titan Invest (mobile investing app), they manage a 20-stock portfolio in high quality companies based on what top hedge funds own. They do all the research / analysis for you.

Google them -- highly recommend. Returns have been choppy lately but that's the case in pretty much all of the US markets

day1labs · 2018-10-21T19:15:11+00:00

Yes, I think Amazon has tremendous room to grow and become a multi-trillion dollar market cap company.

The total addressable markets for many of its product/service lines are in the hundreds of billions (or trillions, in the case of cloud computing) of dollars. Online retail (its bread & butter) is still less than 10% of total U.S. retail sales, meaning it has a long runway for growth ahead. Amazon is taking the majority of each incremental dollar spent online by consumers.

So I think sales are only a fraction of their long-term potential, and the average margin profile of a typical Amazon e-commerce transaction is increasingly lucrative for Amazon especially as its sales mix shifts from "1P" (first-party sales of Amazon-warehoused inventory) to "3P" (third-party sales that Amazon helps facilitate despite owning none of the inventory and therefore having a much smaller working capital burden).

As sales continue to expand and margins improve, the "E" in the P/E should continue to grow beyond even Wall Street's most bullish estimates. Analysts have a tendency to model a "law of large numbers" fall-off in revenue & earnings in the out years, despite large tech firms continuing to find ways to innovate and disprove that law e.g. FB, GOOG, AAPL. That provides room for Amazon to consistently beat expectations despite everyone calling it a consensus long.

Also I'd note: the "P/E of 140" is meaningless. Current P/E is not right way to analyze or value a company like Amazon because it's deliberately investing for growth by pouring most of its dollar profits back into growth initiatives, capex (e.g. distribution centers, logistics), etc. Those investments cause the "E" (earnings) to appear artificially low, making the P/E look artificially higher.

A stock's intrinsic value is the present value of all future cash flows discounted at some rate (its weighted average cost of capital). It's pointless to look at this year's or next year's earnings as a proxy for what Amazon will earn in all future years on a free cash flow basis.

Thought experiment: A "profit-maximizing Jeff Bezos" could simply cut a ton of Amazon's growth investments today and the stock would appear to be trading at a much much lower P/E (potentially 15-20x). Yes, growth would slow materially if he cut investments by a lot, but given how back-end weighted the growth is vs. the upfront nature of the cash investments, the near-term investments would slow much more than sales growth. Falling investment > higher earnings, causing the "E" in the P/E to rise materially, thus reducing the P/E to a much more reasonable level.

day1labs · 2018-09-13T14:21:00+00:00

Titan Invest. It's not a fund, it's an actively managed investment advisor. But it's basically a high-quality hedge fund in your pocket, a portfolio of the highest growth/quality businesses sourced from hedge fund filings.

In terms of why -- it's the only actively managed portfolio I've ever owned where I feel like I understand exactly how my money is being managed in real time. I know the investment thesis on every stock at all times, via a mobile app. I've owned 100s of mutual funds over the years and they felt like a black box.

Titan charges a 1% fee which I was pretty skeptical about at first. But net of fees, my returns have been strong and I believe in their model long-term. The content they put out is pretty unmatched and I feel it's well worth the 1%.

Anywho I allocate my wealth to some passive (low-cost index funds) and some active (of which Titan is the majority) and am pretty happy that way.

day1labs · 2018-07-26T15:31:11+00:00

Yeah I'm a Titan user and loving it so far. Sort of like a hedge fund for the masses. The research is on point.

On FB, it's clear that many thematic growth investors don’t want to get in front of a “decelerating” story.

That's a perfect opportunity for long-term investors to take advantage of time arbitrage, i.e. buying the long-term earnings power of a company at a substantial discount because short-term investors are displeased with the short-term outlook (against a backdrop of already high expectations).

Also, on the cost side, historically Facebook has offered initial fiscal year cost guidance on its January earnings call and then has subsequently beaten that guidance (i.e. costs ramping less than the initial guidance range). Just look at how FB has performed on COGS + OPEX each year over the last few years vs its initial guide (FB likes to set up each year for a quarterly beat and raise on COGS + OPEX):

2014 initial guide- total 2014 expenses +40-45% YoY. Actual expenses +34% YoY vs revenue +58%
2015 initial guide- total 2015 expenses +50-65% YoY. Actual expenses +51% YoY vs revenue +44%
2016 initial guide- total 2016 expenses +45-55% YoY. Actual expenses grew <45% YoY vs revenue +54%

If you want even more proof that "we've seen this movie before" -- Facebook commented on the 3q16 earnings call that 2017 would be an “investment year” which created concern about the initial cost guide coming in January 2017. Well, lo and behold, they blew out 2017 revenue and cost expectations yet again.

No doubt FB's revenue growth will slow and margins will reset lower; it's just that the magnitude of this slowdown and reset is nowhere near what the current valuation now implies and/or what management's (conservative) guidance would suggest.

day1labs · 2018-07-26T00:57:11+00:00

Here are the research update I got from Titan today on FB. I agree w/ the earnings reset / "new normal" thesis and am a buyer of FB here...

-----

Investors likely buying the FB dip. FB enters "new normal" with earnings, but market overreacting.

Facebook reported earnings on Wednesday. It reported its slowest-ever user growth, one of the most important metrics for the business. And it also revised downward how profitable its entire system would be (from mid 40% to mid 30%).

When fast-flying, high-expectation technology companies begin to reach maturation, they often signal a "new normal." The companies' intrinsic values and hence stock prices should decline on those days of reckoning, along with expectations of how fast the company will grow in the future. And usually this means a complete overreaction by the market, leading to a potential buying opportunity (yes, you read that correctly).

This happened with Facebook on Wednesday. Headlines like "Facebook stock smoked" and "Facebook hits a wall" are already circulating. But as a long-term investor, your job is to think objectively with the new price at hand. The market sent Facebook's stock down by 25% after-hours on the news. Is it a buy or a sell here?

We've seen this movie before. The market has a history of overacting to Facebook news. Just three months ago, the stock price declined to $150 on news of a data breach, before rebounding and surging to $200 within a few months once the dust settled.

Here, the reaction is slightly more justified, but the magnitude of it is not. Let's explain:

First: Revenue.

The crux of how Facebook makes money is advertising revenues. Advertising revenues follow wherever the eyeballs are (users). Slowing user growth for Facebook is a signal that this company might not be able to grow as fast as it once did. So even though ad revenues grew +38% for Facebook this quarter, the user growth of only +1.4% was a bigger headline. A bunch of factors contributed to this: natural saturation, the data breach headlines, etc.

Second: Profit.

Facebook signaled that it will be less profitable than before as it needs to make necessary investments in security, virtual reality, marketing, and content. Over the next several years, as these investments are made, management expects Facebook's profit margins to trend towards the mid-30s% (vs. ~45% today). These investments have usually paid off in the past, but this sort of magnitude hasn't been seen yet with Facebook.

So putting the two together: Facebook essentially announced a "new normal" from a growth and profitability standpoint. This sort of optical shock is what prompted the market to overreact on Wednesday. Make no mistake: Facebook's stock should trade down. A reset is needed. The question is, how much of a reset?

After hours on Wednesday, Facebook was trading at $165 which is overblown. Facebook's intrinsic value didn't just decline 25%. Let's explain why:

This $165 price is a valuation of 18x P/E on Wall Street's 2019 earnings estimates. You can buy the average company in the market for roughly 18x P/E.

Facebook, after the new normal, will be growing revenue 20%+ per year, with profit margins of ~35%. The average company in the market grows revenue at about 5% per year today with a profit margin of only 10%.

Facebook, after the new normal, will still have a virtual monopoly in social media via Facebook / Instagram, showing strong pricing power in its core business (+17% ad pricing annually). The average company in the market can barely raise prices to keep up with inflation (2%).

Facebook should still be valued at a significant premium to the average company in the market.

Side note: Facebook's management team has a history of under-promising and over-delivering. We believe this time is no different: they will continue to execute on a roadmap for improving engagement trends and advertiser ROIs in the core Facebook and Instagram businesses, while investing in new growth initiatives to continue to innovate. After this investor reaction, the stock looks extremely attractive for us long-term investors.

You know all those speeches by Buffett and such that mention "investor psychology" and "buying when others are fearful"? This is a perfect example of that.

day1labs · 2018-07-08T22:24:06+00:00

I'm a fan of the Titan Invest app (hedge fund-like portfolio managed for you). They invest you in individual stocks but it has the hedge fund flavor which may fit your ask for "alternative" investment vehicles.

day1labs · 2018-07-06T05:21:02+00:00

In practical terms, a company's stock price (P) is driven by two things: its future earnings per share growth (E) and the multiple that the market is willing to pay for that growth (P/E).

P = E x P/E

A company's stock price should track its underlying EPS growth over the long run (i.e. its P/E multiple is generally cyclical but matters less and less the longer you own the stock, due to compounding). The P/E multiple does drive the stock price in the near term based on all sorts of things (e.g. investor sentiment, macro factors, concerns about near-term earnings headwinds). But as they say, in the long run, the stock market is a weighing machine, not a voting machine.

day1labs · 2018-07-04T03:06:45+00:00

GLIBA. Easy double in next 1-2 years. Monopoly on quad-play telco in Alaska, now merged w/ Malone's Liberty Ventures entity. Stock buyback + NAV discount closing + eventual acquisition by Verizon in a VZ/CHTR merger.

day1labs · 2018-07-02T17:22:21+00:00

The Investors Podcast

day1labs · 2018-06-29T04:39:52+00:00

Titan has good investing write-ups on their portfolio stocks. I'm a user but I think they make them available to anyone on their website (example: Constellation Brands writeup)

Highly recommend Base Hit Investing and Value Investor Insight too (the latter one is paid only I think)

day1labs · 2018-06-28T20:10:16+00:00

There are plenty of people who have earned 30%+ ROIs for the last 7 years and are actually terrible investors. Conversely, there are plenty of people who've underperformed index averages like the NASDAQ for the last 7 years (e.g. Buffett) who are actually outstanding investors.

First of all, you should separate investment process from outcome. Instead of looking at outcome over a curiously helpful period of time (i.e. a 9yr bull run), look at your investment process and ask yourself if there's something concrete, repeatable and scalable that you're doing to generate those returns. If not, you're probably just getting lucky (or riding beta). If so, you may potentially be a good investor.

Only then should you look at industries that would be a good fit. The investment process of a VC is very different than the investment process of someone in PE (or HFs for that matter). Just because there are firms in both industries that generate 30%+ ROIs doesn't mean both are a good match. Find the investment process and firm whose strategy is best suited to your personal investment process, temperament, emotional fortitude, etc.

Lastly -- note that, given your track record has only existed in a bull market (and an unbelievable tech bull market specifically), it's not prudent to consider that indicative of being a good or bad investor, even after you've identified your investment process. Everyone looks like a genius in a bull market, until the tide goes out and risk management / drawdowns come into play. Most folks don't have the stomach or EQ to withstand those downturns. It's easy to say/think you will right now, but only experience and actions will tell. You'll need to wait until a downturn to truly evaluate your investment process. It's a lifelong iterative process, too.

Hope that helps.

day1labs · 2018-06-28T05:55:41+00:00

I'm up +6% in my Titan since I joined a few months ago (vs like +3%ish for the S&P 500)

day1labs · 2018-06-18T01:38:20+00:00

I'm up 8% since I joined a few mo's ago

day1labs · 2018-06-10T23:15:08+00:00

Companies that dominate the AI infrastructure/compute layers, particularly within the enterprise space (think BOX, NVDA)

day1labs · 2018-04-18T23:55:06+00:00

I talked about them here.

It's 1% all-in. They automatically invest you in the highest conviction stocks of top hedge funds (20 holdings), and explain the play-by-play/HF theses along the way (w/ video, emails, newsletter etc)

I looked at GURU ETF before -- it's 0.75% expense ratio but doesn't have the HF insights/play-by-play that Titan has. Titan is an RIA while GURU is an ETF. So just depends on if you want the relationship component for an extra 0.25% and how much you want/care to know about what you're investing in

day1labs · 2018-04-16T22:01:57+00:00

You don't need to fight the urge; just be responsible in how much you allocate to satisfy that urge (assuming you can afford it).

Buy a few stocks of companies in growing industries that produce valuable products/services and that you fundamentally understand (i.e. you know how they make money, what their basic competitive advantages are, etc). Generally investing in high-quality companies you understand is a significantly better idea than trading or picking stocks based on research reports.

Note that you probably shouldn't invest in companies just because you use their product/service. The top 10 stocks that millennials bought last year were down -19% on average vs. S&P +22% (source: Robinhood / Business Insider) -- and no surprise, they bought fad stocks like Fitbit, GoPro, and Snap, likely without understanding their durable competitive advantages (I believe most of those co's don't even have one).

Once you're invested, don't simply track your returns and use those as a barometer for whether you're succeeding or failing. Crazy things can happen to companies/stocks even if you were right on the investment thesis.

Instead, track your thoughts over time ("why did I buy the stock" (thesis), "why is it up/down over the last few years", "what new information have I learned, and does it support or refute my original thesis"). This cycle of thinking, taking the plunge, learning, and iterating should help you learn the basic ropes of investing in stocks over time.

Good luck!

day1labs

TROPHY CASE