GT
Goodyear Tire & Rubber
stock NASDAQ

S: MIT(clear #1), Princeton, Harvard
A: CMU (SCS), Stanford, Columbia, Caltech, UChicago
Somewhere in between: Yale, Penn
B: UCB, UIUC (almost S tier for Chicago firms), UMich, GT, Brown, Dartmouth, Duke, Cornell, UT Austin
C: NYU, UCLA, USC, Purdue, UCSD, UW Seattle, etc
D/F: everything else
Keep in mind at the end of the day, school name only gives advantage in resume screen and it is purely based on your skill after that. Schools like MIT places the most not only cause they get auto OAs, but also cus the most cracked students go there.

S: MIT(clear #1), Princeton, Harvard
A: CMU (SCS), Stanford, Columbia, Caltech, UChicago
Somewhere in between: Yale, Penn
B: UCB, UIUC (almost S tier for Chicago firms), UMich, GT, Brown, Dartmouth, Duke, Cornell, UT Austin
C: NYU, UCLA, USC, Purdue, UCSD, UW Seattle, etc
D/F: everything else
Keep in mind at the end of the day, school name only gives advantage in resume screen and it is purely based on your skill after that. Schools like MIT places the most not only cause they get auto OAs, but also cus the most cracked students go there.

#Happy Wednesday, Barkada --
#The PSE lost 120 points (!!) to 6335 ▼1.9%
MB is struggling with food poisoning today. Thankfully, I wrote most of it before I went out for aburi.
#▌[In today's MB](https://mailchi.mp/merkadobarkada/vreit-q1-div-up-189-yy):
- **GTCAP likes healthcare and energy**
- Up to $200M for "direct investments"
- Filter: consumer-facing, fragmented, less regulated
- **VREIT Q1 div up 18.9% y/y**
- Down 3.8% q/q
- Confirming 1st phase of 3-phase pattern
- **QUESTION: "Why doesn't the market share your doomsday view of DDMPR?"**
- Two "unsatisfying" concepts
- Maybe the market does agree?
#▌[Daily meme](https://i.imgur.com/6L7V4xT.png) | [Subscribe (it's free)](https://mailchimp.us12.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=925d69480ecfc297864a79dc6&id=17742706f1&utm_source=mb) | [Today's email](https://mailchi.mp/merkadobarkada/vreit-q1-div-up-189-yy)
#▌Main stories covered:
>- **[UPDATE] GTCAP confirms interest in healthcare and energy for “direct investments”...** **GT Capital** [GTCAP 535.00 ▼1.5%; 88% avgVol] [[link](https://edge.pse.com.ph/openDiscViewer.do?edge_no=ab9f7e7cafd1a189ec6e1601ccee8f59)] confirmed a **BusinessWorld** report on its plan to pursue direct investments in the healthcare and energy sectors. In the report, GTCAP’s CFO is quoted as saying that the company is looking for domestic-consumption opportunities in “fragmented” sectors that are not highly regulated, and that it is looking to deploy up to $200 million to “fund expansion in underpenetrated segments.” GTCAP confirmed the report, but said that it had no definite plans, and that any investment would be subject to several considerations, like the company’s “minimum return hurdles”.
> - ***MB:*** I said earlier this week that GTCAP feels like a conglomerate at a crossroads, but the more I see and hear, the less confident in their approach I become. Getting into healthcare just sounds like a cynical move to invest in some stuff that will somehow eventually end up in Metro Pacific Health’s financial statements, not something that will take root and grow to provide income over the coming generations. And don’t get me started about energy. I love energy, we need more energy, but “maybe we’ll do energy” is a thing that literally any company can say. Why is GTCAP ignoring its primary competitive advantage, which is **Toyota Motor Philippines Corporation**? The new/used car game is definitely domestic-consumption driven, and the industry is still quite fragmented. Car sales are not a heavily regulated industry, and given TMPC’s massive jump in profitability in FY24, whatever they do with cars is bound to step over those internal return hurdles like LeBron could step over Manny Pacquiao.
>- **[DIVS] VREIT Q1 div up 18.9% y/y...** **VistaREIT** [VREIT 1.89 unch]] [[link](https://edge.pse.com.ph/openDiscViewer.do?edge_no=e28a8d805ade066eec6e1601ccee8f59)] declared a Q1 dividend of ₱0.04912/share (+18.9% y/y, -3.8% q/q) on ₱368.4 million in distributable income (+18.9% y/y, -4.7% q/q), for a payout ratio of dividends to distributable income of 100%. The dividend is payable on July 4 to shareholders of record as of June 13.
> - ***MB:*** Judging by its annualized yield (10.4%), the market does not trust Manny Villar’s REIT. And yet, it just keeps delivering. This is a mall-focused REIT, and it seems like there is a bit of seasonality to the income that it generates, and a little bit of an emerging pattern with respect to the dividends that it declares. Intuitively, as a mall operator, Q4 is a big period for VREIT. Its Q4 divs are always the fattest. Sure, its Q4/24 div (₱0.05107) was noticeably smaller than its Q4/23 div (₱0.0538), but what’s interesting is how the regular quarterly dividend has grown step by step in between those Viking Buffet Q4 dividends. Comparing Q1/23 to Q3/23 shows a 2% increase. Comparing Q1/24 to Q3/24 shows a 13% increase. Added together, VREIT distributed 6.8% more dividends in FY24 than it did in FY23. While I’m not willing to say that this year will be bigger than the last, I am at least willing to note that the pattern appears to be intact: higher “regular” quarterly divs. Now let’s see if the second phase of the pattern (increasing quarterly divs) holds, and if the final phase (a fat Q4 div leading to higher overall dividends) also holds.
>- **[QUESTION] Why doesn’t the market share your doomsday view of DDMPR?...** I got this question after my Monday write-up on **DDMP** [DDMPR 1.06] [[link](https://mailchi.mp/merkadobarkada/dito-lost-p41-billion-in-fy24?e=933945058a)] and its fading metrics and terrible accounts receivable situation. To give the unabridged version of the question:
> “Why does the market not share your doomsday view? What do they think they know that does alleviate this hot mess? After my morning read I had expected 0.80.”
> The answer is a combination of two unsatisfying concepts. First is the idea that whatever bad news we read about is already “priced in” to the stock, such that the revelation that DDMPR’s occupancy sucks or that its WALE is still degrading is something that has--in some way--been “baked in” to the stock’s price for a long time. The market is a forward-looking prediction machine. This is why sometimes press releases that sound really bad result in a weird uptick in the stock’s price. Perhaps “the market” expected the news to be even worse, so despite how bad it sounds, it’s actually good news relative to the market’s going assumptions. The second is the reality that our market is actually rather small and its insider information rather “leaky”, so it’s sometimes possible for stock transactions to be skewed by insider movements or random transactions more than in other markets where larger volumes smooth out these bumps and make stocks appear to act more “rational”. All things considered, DDMPR trades with a yield that is closing in on Villar territory, so I think it’s clear that the market already considers DDMPR to be a riskier bet than most of its peers.
> - ***MB:*** If the market priced DDMPR’s risk the same as it did **Filinvest REIT**, DDMPR’s stock would need to move up 14% to around ₱1.20 to match FILRT’s 7.7% annualized yield. To get to the **RL Commercial REIT** [RCR 6.55] level, DDMPR’s stock would need to rise around 38% to around ₱1.45 to match RCR’s 6.4% annualized yield. To match **AREIT** [AREIT 39.80] and its REIT-leading 5.8% yield, DDMPR’s stock would need to rise more than 50% to around the ₱1.58/share level. I know how disorienting and disappointing it can be to see a disconnect between the news and how a stock’s price acts, but in the case of DDMPR, I think the market kind of already does share my doomsday view, it’s just that we’re so used to seeing it languishing near the bottom of the REIT table that we forget what it once was, how it once ran alongside the giants. You wouldn’t know it by looking at it today, but DDMPR was (at one time) an innovative concept that stoked optimism in the hearts of many investors.
**MB** is written and distributed every trading day. The newsletter is 100% free and I never upsell you to some "iNnEr cIrClE" of paid-membership perks. Everyone gets the same! Join the barkada by signing up for the [newsletter](https://mailchimp.us12.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=925d69480ecfc297864a79dc6&id=17742706f1&utm_source=mb), or follow me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MerkadoBarkada). You can also read my daily Morning Halo-halo content on [Philstar.com](https://www.philstar.com) in the [Stock Commentary](https://www.philstar.com/business/stock-commentary) section.
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ES8 alternatives - xpent G9, Li L8, L9 super similar looks/specks but significantly cheaper. Competitors to ES6 - Li L6 and zeeker 7x, both 100k cheaper. If you go for Li L7, air suspension-standard, nappa leather-standard, seat heating, cooling, massage on all seats - standard and STILL CHEAPER than ES6 and there is more, like fridge for example. Until the new ES6 a few days ago the best1 looking 21inch wheel was 21k RMB!!! Nobody is going to pay this premium in today's market. Paint that is not white, black, gray and blue: Nio 10k, rest of the brands around 6k, nappa 20k... New ET5T is going to compete with the new Zeeker GT which is 100k cheaper and Nio is going to get smoked.
We can argue about quality and service but spec for spec Nio is getting owned on every corner and I can see that on the streets and by people talking. Nobody is going to decide to buy a car because wE HavE iN HOUse AdvAnCED ADAS ChIP.
Sorry for the rant but that's the truth. I have very little hope