alertmeipp

there are many issues/series out there plus bonds under BAC's years of M&As... CDS needs to be regulated. Period.

how can we ignore the incredible low interest rate - the funding cost to expand and grow a profitable business has never been this low.

This is not news. They sold big chunks almost right before the crash.

He may still end up be right on BAC or other financials. It's not his fault that ppl pull money out.

I think the downgrade is a wake-up call to the gov. There is no good or bad wake-up call as long as it does the job. WEB is right in saying that US can print, but is it fair to those who buy US debt? S&P is not here to protect issuers but to protect those who buy US debt. Last week's Congress childish act has to be paid somehow, too bad we will be paying for it - both from US currency and stock equities devaluation.

it depends.. as 2 out of the 3 rating agencies still rated it triple-A and with one notch down.. this maybe not big..

Margin calls I expect. I may get killed but I have to go with my gut. Any winners over the year are being sold to pay for margin calls, and redemptions. Its why I think SD and a host of other names are selling off hard.... Got killed at SD as it's a big position for me. Both leap and common. And ATPG... leveraged play in leverage concerning and commodities market ... good luck with that.

CFX again posted some solid result. The amount of cash they are giving + the share price appreciation make us FBK bagholders look kind of ... http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/370143

too early to draw conclusion on one way or the other.

it's okay to make mistake - just don't let a mistake kills you. that's why risk risk risk should be the focus always. :'(

I wonder what price he got. It's too bad that even with his resources, he can't confirm whether he is dupped or not.

Holy, do you manage $?

I must be getting into -ve area by now. Sino Forest did most, but recent weakness has been killing.

The error is one thing, but pre-sell the report and not acknowledging the errors is another.

I am not the one who compare BB report to MW's.

MW's reports contain errors and he didn't even bother to talk to management yet the impact on the company is so huge. Give me an example of a BB report that met the the above criteria

management last bot in around 1.5, buying at 1.25 seems good deal.

My point remains: Investing needs trust or faith in a sense.

EP at $3, ATSG at 20 cents, FBK at 20 cents, FFH at $80, WFC at $8, BAC at 2 bucks. Buying those back then has real risk of going zero too. Not many times we can have "baggers" with little risk. I am all for looking for multibaggers and have posted on things like bank pfds, SCP and SII which have turned out to be multibaggers. I am not averse to taking calculated risks. Neither SCP or SII were at risk of bankruptcy when I bought and with the bank pfds, I recommended them only after the govt stress tests had been done and the banks had raised additional capital to shore up their stress tested balance sheets (and even then I took a basket approach to ensure that I would lose everything only if the entire banking system had gone under). The point is that you can find baggers without taking "blind" risk (which is what one would be taking with TRE unless the questions I raised about their numbers can be explained to some degree). Bringing up hindsight examples of fortunes being made by risk takers does not prove anything. These are not random samples that validate your viewpoints; they are merely selective facts that suit your argument. Don't you think that if you took random samples of high risk investors and investments the proportion of failures would be much higher than successes? Maybe you feel that the cautionary folk here are attacking you and sometimes enthusiastic posts can appear that way. However, I think most of them are simply offering alternative views for you to consider. The problem is that we don't see you offering much by way of analysis of TRE's business or financials to explain why you think it is a good calculated risk. (I'm not suggesting that you need to explain your decisions; just that it would be more beneficial to everyone if the discussions centred on TRE's fundamentals rather than on the evilness of short sellers or the benefits of risk-taking.) You may feel that this is a 50:50 bet because it is one side's words against the other. However, you should consider the incentives that each side has. TRE mgmt has an incentive to lie because they can benefit from the lie. MW has much less incentive to lie - would you deliberately choose to short and attack a company that you sincerely believe to be sound and highly profitable? They have hundreds of companies to choose from - why choose a strong one that they have to manufacture lies on? Reminds me of the argument that Bush knowingly lied about WMD in Iraq. If he really knew that there were no WMD, would he have lied knowing that they would eventually fail to find the evidence? If the lie had been deliberate, wouldn't he have taken the logical next step to plant some WMD and then "find" it later on? Actually, my point is not even specific to TRE - all I was trying to point out is most "baggers" has huge risk. I agree with your basket approach. But it's not like ppl are saying they are going 100% all into TRE. They could be considered as basket approach too. But in your case, your basket are having related stocks while in this case, it's TRE with some other maybe totally unrelated stocks. I agree that management maybe lying for their own good as well.

What are you trying to say? The option market for Sino wasn't liquid at all.

Even WFC, you are see all the branches, but so what? WFC is not selling above book because of its branches. It's because its ability to do cross selling (higher margin), right? How do you validate that the cross-selling edge? I don't think you can. Investing needs trust or faith in a sense.

The post of the thread... Why not forget about MW and just discuss the numbers, from what oec2000 has here this company is blowing it out of the water. Similar thing happened with CCME, looking at their statements one could conclude they had the worlds most profitable business model, but in fact it turned out to be a fake. The question I keep asking is if all of those RTO Chinese companies are as amazing as their statements make them out to be why are they trying to raise capital? Cash rich companies with high growth rates, high cash returns out looking for equity? Why not bank financing, much cheaper, instead they go for the highest cost option, just seems fishy to me. Well, at least TRE has been spending the capital and has been negative FCF. That's actually a positive the way I look at it. CCME (and others) raised round after round at absurdly low valuations while generating copious amounts of FCF. Most importantly, they had no capital needs! They weren't spending money on any cap ex! Also TRE raised a lot of debt, too. Frauds usually will not raise debt. I also take aim at MW claim that it's a ponzi scheme. A ponzi scheme raises new money to pay out old investors. How did TRE do that? They just kept raising new money to (apparently) steal more and more money, not to fund the fraud and pay out old investors/bondholders, right? You know part of their capital structure is a 1.5billions from China Development Bank. I think chance are better that they are not fraud, but I just worry that it doesn't mean much at the end.

Dundee explains the same concept in their rebuttal to MW. If TRE were not a fraud, MW (or the real-entity behind it) is just way too smart to take on TRE while the RTO fear is on-going.

With the way you are thinking, most oversea companies will not be invest-able?

Your 100% right Hester, when I red about the 2$ puts I got excited. Did some research and could not find any reasons for such high put price. So I did not sell any... because I could not establish an odd. It felt like I was the patsy. The whole point of investing in higher then average risk is to have an idea of the odds. For example I bough some RIM last week but I knew dam well what were the issues with the company and the phone market. But I also tough the price was not fully accounting the possibility of a turnaround... PE expansion and earnings growth do wonders in turnarounds. Now all that is left for me to do is wait and keep focused for the risks to materialize or not... but at least I know the risks. BeerBaron You think you know the risks until you don't. Risk management is not dealing with what we know but what we don't know.