Down goes the Dow

Thanks. I do seem to be short on pegs, though I ordered a dozen. On the holes they are definitely done by hand and not uniform machining. The possible companion piece is below, along with the plans from my wife’s grandfather.

https://imgur.com/a/obJlWT4

Opps, just noticed I copied the plans to a sewing basket. Anyway, you get the idea. Unsure of the wood, but I stripped and refinished the writing desk. Several layers of paint removed.

Ghost of Igloi wrote:

I stripped and refinished the writing desk.

Do you always do that kind of work in the nude?

really ncie, Igy. 

Clearly a family heirloom piece, and not the kind of thing one can readily have to enjoy otherwise.

seattle prattle wrote:

Looks like Uber and Lyft got some big spikes upon earning announcement after market close as well.Interesting you said that - I was on the verge of selling some Amazon after his dire take on their numbers. I didn't, and looks like their gains have been holding at least for now.

And responding to agip also.

DIsney up 9% after hours...here we go again

(cue up gente and his debbie downerish - yet accurate - talk about conference calls)

Busy day today, put down a deposit on a Mazda CX-5 Turbo, hopefully it'll be here mid March. Test drove CX-30 Turbo Premium Plus, salesman's personal car as they didn't have one at that location, great ride but too cramped. If I was single and had no grandchildren I would order one. Test drove the CX-5 Turbo, they had 2 on the lot. Again, great ride and more spacious, except the 2 colors were dark grey and cherry, wife wants white.

Re AMZN; pushing against any over exuberance about their last quarter. They faced a number of headwinds and performed slightly better than anticipated; but as they admitted during conference call, not out of the woods yet.

Mark Mahaney -- Evercore ISI -- Analyst

OK, thanks. You know, you'd lay out all of these costs that you were expecting to see in the December quarter. Just talk to whether there were any real surprises to you. So, it looked like you had a little bit greater leverage than you may have thought.

And then use that to help us think about what the -- I think you said the sun's coming out financially. Does that mean that we're going to have a kind of nice improvement in operating margins as we go through the year as some of those temporary costs, you know, get temporized and you get to absorb some of the more fixed costs? So, just talk about where the surprise was in terms of those costs that you laid out for the December quarter, the 6 billion, and how should we should think about those playing out, you know, as we go forward? Thanks a lot.

Brian Olsavsky -- Chief Financial Officer

OK, Mark. Just remember that I'm sitting in Seattle, so my view of the sun coming out is a little different than perhaps where you are. But no, we do see things improving. We do -- let's step back to Q4.

We had said that we would have about $4 billion of additional costs due to labor shortages and the inefficiencies of that cost, as well as increased labor rates and shift differentials of premiums and external transportation costs. We came in just slightly over that 4 billion. I think things went as expected. I would say that the hiring was strong, but we could have done better.

We could have had more people. So, we had to cover a lot. There was additional overtime. The -- there were some higher costs on third-party transportation.

But, you know, all in all, the challenge in Q4 was to staff or, excuse me, increase the staffing. And we said we wanted to add 150,000 people or more. We added net-net about 140,000 in the quarter, 230 -- 273,000 second half of the year. So, as you turn the page into 2022, we feel good -- better about labor, except omicron has kicked up.

And now, you have a different type of labor issue where there's a lot of people who are on leave of absences and short term as they work to have a positive test on COVID and can get back into the workforce and protect their fellow workers. So, you know, there's instances where you're paying, you know, twice or three times for the same labor hour. If someone is on leave, you're paying them and you're also paying, potentially, for someone who's covering the shift on overtime. So, you know, there's cost pressure in Q1.

I think the good news is that the labor where -- the labor challenge is not as great in Q1 as it is in Q4 -- in Q3 and Q4, so we're hopeful on that. We have to work to now make our operations more efficient as we get staffing levels up, and we're going to plow a lot of our effort into increasing our transportation speeds and beating our pre-pandemic levels. So, there's a lot of different challenges going on right now. The team is, you know, been working, you know, heads down for over two years now.

So, they need -- you know, we've got a great team, and we have confidence that we will -- things will improve as we get through the year. So, hopefully, that answers your question.

Whole transcript here:

Also should follow.

Here's a take on last weeks employment report and omicron by someone who works at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And so that agip doesn't feel left out. But first let me point out that back in the day my nickname was monkey wrench ( before that it was guru, but that's another story ). I came by that name for my ability to spot a flaw in many of my acquaintances' theses. Quick take on DIS, looking at Disney Media and Entertainment Q1s 2020 through 2022. Revenue up 9.1%, Operating Income down 45.2%. Operating income margins; Q1 2020 was 11.09%, Q1 2021 was 11.46%, Q1 2022 was 5.54%.

la gente, you the man!

Thanks, that was incredibably informative. Puts Amazon quarter in perspective, and my only question is, will Q1 be another pandemic effected quarter? My suspicion is that it may be slightly, but much less so than the Q4. 

I'm feeling better about the stock.

Car: I love my Mazda 3. Looking at that CX-30 Turbo has me drooling, but i hardly ever drive anymore, working from home. FWIW, we are helping my son get a new Subaru Crosstrek Sport, so thinking along similar lines.

Thanks much.

I want my momentum stocks gains back 😢

Bought both PLTR and SPCE at their IPO prices

Entire annual bonus went to buy PLTR stock

I was feeling prosperous last year when PLTR was up 3.5X and SPCE up 5.5X

jamin wrote:

I want my momentum stocks gains back 😢Bought both PLTR and SPCE at their IPO pricesEntire annual bonus went to buy PLTR stockI was feeling prosperous last year when PLTR was up 3.5X and SPCE up 5.5X

Congrats on investing in basic high school level linear regression and business stats re-packaged as "innovation" lmao.

Classic example of an absolute worthless company that provides nothing of value and should have never existed, but VCs gotta dump there bags on people like you.

la gente esta muy loca wrote:

Busy day today, put down a deposit on a Mazda CX-5 Turbo, hopefully it'll be here mid March.

Low-key expected you to have something like an SRT8 Trackhawk

I also love mazda. I drive a 2014 mazda3 s grand touring hatchback.

looking at those stock graphs makes me so glad I just use etfs.

Yep, that's the way it goes.

Maybe some of the old timers on here will remember a company called Internet Capital Group, ICGE, that went public in the late 90s. I had access to and got IPO shares through a special brokerage i was in at the time, and it went from something like $15 a share to, get this, $4000 per share. Well, it went pop along with the internet bubble but I held on and rode it back down, for what I would learn was called "a round trip". 

I wish i never learned that term.

I sold it eventually for something like a three-bagger, which is good, but nothing like I could have had. It proceeded to go to pennies and out of business. 

There was another one- CMGI, which did the same thing and I got that one on the open market and did okay with that, but it suffered the same fate.

I had loads of these, often as IPO allocations, and I can hardly remember them, Stamps.com was one. Flowers. com was another. Got ebay on the open market and did really well on that. 

It was a blast. LOL. Or mostly it was until lock-up periods ended, 

That's what i have, just the 2015 in the same model. 

Brakes and a new battery, a set of tires, that's all I've had to do with it.

Fun car. 

I'll probably keep mine for at least two or three more years. 

CPI 7.5%

Prof. Racket wrote:

CPI 7.5%

the 10 year just hit 2.0% for the first time since summer of 2019

but I'm not seeing a rout in bonds...if bonds take this in stride rather than yields rising....that could signal that bonds see an end to this inflationary period.

animal spirits are hopping and skipping across the savannah

ARK ETF Trust - ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK)

76.47+0.36 (+0.47%)

As of 09:56AM EST.

agip wrote:

animal spirits are hopping and skipping across the savannah

ARK ETF Trust - ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK)

76.47+0.36 (+0.47%)

As of 09:56AM EST.

Amazing how many times the lesson of "stocks only go up" needs to be taught

Bad news is good news again. :-)