benhacker

Thanks for sharing. Good read, and he seems like he will do well (and already has). Great statement.

Great thread. Thanks for the pointers pupil. You don’t want to go wild with these, but the convexity is real... damn.

Yeah, totally agree that recovery are garbage. I would not be buying distressed with hope of recovery in the general case. My bet on Denbury is that they do not file for a variety of reasons, but agree with you point wholeheartedly.

Danbury bonds are interesting to me.

Blast from the past... about 7 Fibrek threads, so I'm putting this here. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1393066/000119312519256452/d813207d8k.htm Appraisal Rights process done in Canada for Fibrek investors... and the court agrees the acquisition prices was way below fair value: Pretty stunning, but most on this board felt it was a lowball at the time, and Fairfax/ABH (RFP)'s actions were super shady... and Fibrek board was ... something bad. :) First appraisal rights situation I had followed loosely, so I wanted to follow up.

Thanks for the kind words. After 15 years here, I’m glad I made a few friends and few (hopefully) enemies. ;) I still miss board posts by Bsilly... but I’m dating myself....

Spek, I'd be curious which of us long term investors, with our own money, would be ok to lock up $$$ in private companies where we are minorities? In principal, not different than how we *should* think about investing. In practice, quite different IMO. private businesses (even vs. truly illquid ones) should trade with a liquidity discount.... I have 1% of my assets in a liquidating co (non-traded completely) and 3% in firm(s) that could (maybe) become unquoted per the above rule. I'm a very long term investor, but for my clients, it's hard to say "yeah, you can move your money, but XYZ Co, that shit is now private..." :) Certainly, individuals can do what they please, but I think most of us would rightly hesitate giving up tradeability...

Make your voice heard.

Castanza, there is no transparency. AS RB notes, essentially entire Corporate Bond market is OTC... Level II in accounting speak. the FINRA data *is* the public domain data... used to be way worse. FYI, this is the inefficiency that Bloomberg built an empire on. :)

Actually I think USG is instructive for another reason. ***after*** emergence from bankruptcy you had plenty of time to buy below $20. My 2 cents at least. WR Grace another CH 11 reorg that worked, but I think these are vanishingly small as a % of situations.

I think Bizaro and TCC have somewhat missed the key point. #1 - as noted, the TIPs bonds pay a coupon which varies with inflation effectively. This coupon has been positive and rising recently #2 - it is not *rates* that effect the value of TIPs like other bonds... it is the "real" rate expectations (demands?) of buyers and sellers of TIPs. Here is a table of 5, 7, 10, 15, 30 year TIPs *real* rates (aka, the rate of returns, after adjusting for the coupon *and* inflation that buyers are achieving when buying TIPs). Note this REAL rate has risen while nominal rates have also risen this year... but that is not how it in fact must work, so you should not confuse the two. https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=realyieldYear&year=2018 To read the table, a 7yr TIPs buyer on Jan 2 of this year was expecting a real return of 0.42%. Now that same buyer is only willing to pay up if they achieve a 1.04% rate of return (again, after inflation). that is the equivalent of 0.6% / year in "rate rising" duration effect. This is non-trivial for a 7 yr bond... roughly I would guess that would have moved a price of the 7 yr bond purchased Jan 2 down by 3.5%... so a buyer probably lost money this year. Hope that is clear. Note nominal and real yields do not have to move in tandem.

You are a smart and very computer savvy judging by all your posts here and the fact that you have a blog, newsletter and banking website). Surely you are exaggerating. You can generate an annual statement in account management with a few mouse clicks / screen touches and find the trade in question within a few minutes. Maybe you don’t want to spend the time, but I’m 100% certain you can figure it out and 99.9% sure that you already know how to do that. The guy telling us that the IPMI module on Super Micro servers is junk doesn’t know how to find back a trade on a website? Come on. I graduated in computer science but I had to look up IPMI on Wikipedia :P . But this is getting off-topic. Apologies. Chuckle... Love me some Oddball, but +2. :) Also, for NZ stocks at Fido, don't they take a forex spread as well? It's embedded (or should be) into how you think about Commission. IB allows you buy and close forex position at the same time in spot (1-2 pips usually)... Fido charges the below: -- Just pause and think of what ya'll are saying comparing IB's commission structure to the above at Fido... but not mentioning this forex fee? Crazy talk. It's like Bond commissions when you leave out other brokers charging markups... "don't include the markup it's not a real commission". <broker somewhere salivates>

No defender of Crypto... but this criticism is odd. Dealer markets (including Forex, and Bonds) essentially operate this way as well. Given the average Crypto customers... wouldn't you want to take the other side (on average)? ;-) Does look like Crypto is coming for a reckoning though. The mating of Wall Street and Silicon Valley will need to be burnt down to a stump and start over. The corruption is endemic in many places.

Don't the Series E preferred have a put feature with DC.a at $2? Does that concern you regarding dilution as a common owner?? I own a tiny slice of the D series preferred, so not following closely.

That's a good point. However, for Lotto Max specifically, I have checked it in retrospect enough times that I'm reasonably confident the expected value does end up positive, and that is partially for psychological reasons as more tickets are not necessarily sold as the pot goes up, because the headline jackpot stops changing. The way Lotto Max works is the jackpot reaches a maximum, and then they keep adding additional $1 MM prize jackpot draws as more is wagered. I think that reduces additional players. The expected value is very sensitive to sharing the big jackpot (usually $60 MM). I think it's interesting, but cheerfully admit its totally useless information. You'd need to buy tens of millions of tickets to ensure winning, and if you bought too many that would change the expected value as you mention. And that's aside from finding tens of millions of dollars to wager and being able to physically buy that many tickets. Yeah, i think the amazing thing about this story was that two different lotteries had such low thresholds for waterfalling that made the economics for big pools reasonable for "small dollar" players to basically make the bet be risk free. Interestingly, they basically immediately started crowding each other out by betting more heavily. Fun story.