muscleman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Sharpton Alfred Charles "Al" Sharpton Jr.[2] (born October 3, 1954) is an American Baptist minister, civil rights activist, television/radio talk show host[3][4] and a trusted White House adviser who, according to 60 Minutes, has become President Barack Obama's "go-to black leader. Really? So this guy is Obama's go-to black leader? Maybe his voice will become important to Obama then. ::)

Would you go as far to say the government's most logical choices at this point are to either (1) try again to get an extension (delay) beyond the 10th, (2) push to settle or release rather than let Sweeney decide on whether or not to unseal, (3) hope for the best with Sweeney's decision on whether or not to unseal, or (4) other? I would think #1 might not be a possibility since she has already set August 10th as the date after the government asked for August 17th. It's probably an unanswerable question, but I'd be interested in what you believe are the probabilities of 2, 3, or 4? I don't have any expectation for government to become realistic and settle. You would have to think they operate as one highly intelligent person good at game theories to come out and start talking about settlement right now. Governments are usually a group of most bureaucratic people who don't have high IQ. These behaviors usually lead things to extremes, if you read and thoroughly understand George Soros' books that mention the interplay between government regulators and financial markets. Don't want to upset any reader here who work for the government, so I wanted to elaborate a bit about my thinking above. 1. A psychological study shows that people's brain activity levels are the lowest in group discussion and highest in independent ventures. When highly intelligent people join the government and participate in group discussions all day long, the brain activity levels will drop and these highly intelligent people as a group, will act like an idiot. 2. Governments are usually highly bureaucratic. There will always be a lot of finger pointing and blaming against each other, leaving the whole group in a frozen state until a disaster has already happened. Then consensus will be reached again and actions will be taken promptly. Governments are usually backward looking when making decisions instead of forward looking. Therefore, I do not expect any settlement here.

Can anyone please help me understand the situation here? It sounds like when gas is produced, it was selling at 2.82 in Henry Hub, but when it got transported all the way to New york, it traded at 1.5-1.8? Why would this happen? ::) http://www.wsj.com/articles/natural-gas-futures-extend-slide-1437747176 "Physical gas for next-day delivery at the Henry Hub in Louisiana last traded at $2.82/mmBtu, compared with Thursday’s range of $2.90-$2.94. Cash prices at the Transco Z6 hub in New York last traded between $1.50 and $1.80/mmBtu, compared with Thursday’s range of $1.44-$1.53."

Yes. On FINRA's website it is asking for this CRD #. I will be the IA myself, so it sounds like I need to establish my firm first to get the CRD # before I can take the series 65 exam?

Be aware of Glen Bradford. Back in 2011, he had a lot of articles like the following, and he had a slogan in Seeking Alpha like: "Follow me to be a millionaire", and this guy recommended selling puts to buy call options on these Chinese companies. Eventually all those reverse merger Chinese companies were proven to be fraud and got delisted. This guy probably got wiped out along with all his followers. I am surprised that this clown had the courage to try again after 4 years, which makes me start to worry about my Fannie positions. ::) http://www.thestreet.com/story/10986595/1/ccme-the-biggest-short-squeeze-of-2011.html

I tried to create an account. It asked me for the FINRA ID, which I don't know how to get. Has anyone taken the exam? Can you please tell me where to get that ID?

Wow. Didn't know you have a p85 Tesla, Eric. Did you also buy its stock? :D

Confirms my hunch that the court has allowed for documents to be filed under seal in the Perry appeal. The reason that Grant Thorton wants a motion for extension is pretty thin. (I suspect that the Government's will be thin as well.) Both of them have had an extension already to boot. I would love to see Sweeney deny them the extension, but I don't know if she's willing to do that. But I saw this: "Plaintiffs have consented to these extensions". So this means plaintiffs have agreed to this extension? That's weird. Isn't the plaintiff pushing for quicker response? Maybe they are trying to settle?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/13/greek-debt-crisis-tsipras-resists-key-bailout-measures-after-15-hours-of-talks I don't understand why Tsipras is doing this. He is objecting IMF participation in the new bailout? Why? Also, German is proposing that Greece post a $50 bn collateral but Tsipras said 17 bn is the maximum. Why? I can't see the difference between these two numbers. I would either say, no this is not possible. I am not giving up fiscal sovereignty to you, or I would say, ok, the conditions are so bad and you don't trust me to implement these reforms. I will post $50 bn collateral. It seems very dumb to me to say, ok I will give up fiscal sovereignty to you but I would only want to post at most $17 bn collateral. Once fiscal sovereignty is given up, there is no difference between 17 and 50 bn.

It is fascinating about the Chinese stock market right now. The market is failing like a knife, and the Chinese president ordered his right hand man to be the vice policy minister and threatened whoever makes large sales of stocks may be considered as "illegal shorts" and thrown into jail, and this finally stopped the crash temporarily. I have no clue what will happen next. This is completely out of my circle of competence. :D

Is there something there in particular that you find funny/objectionable/etc.? Yes. They just had a referendum a week ago that had almost the exact same proposals as this one. Sure, they will get some more money, but what did the last 6-8 months cost their economy? What about respecting the 'No'? So yes, quite funny and absurd to me. So long for being extremist lefties. Btw, I "get" it. Their bluff was called and they had to fold. Tsipras isn't an extremist in the end. It just goes to show that the last half year was completely hopeless and gave the Greek people false hope. There is no other way that is sensible. I am confused to see lots of "Starting from July 1st 2015, we will xxxxx" statements. If this is submitted on July 9th, why do they say starting from July 1st? Is this an old proposal that they submitted and got turned down by EU? Or did they do the job in such a lousy way that they didn't even bother to proof read and modify ""Starting from July 1st 2015" to ""Starting from July 13th 2015"? Also, if they had agreed on this same terms 6 months ago, Greece would have been in a much better shape. Unfortunately Tsipras is an idiot.

Just curious, why would he do this?

This is one of my all-time favourites... One can you think that Varoufakis was not full of shit? The guy promised three days ago on BBC that the negotians would be resumed on Monday "With 100% chance of success" and that "banks will reopen for sure on Tuesday". now that the got what he campaigned for, he just disappeared. Agreed! I am having more fun watching this than Breaking bad or other TV shows. Tsipras promised that if he gets the no vote, he will get a great deal from EU within 48 hours, guaranteed. And this guy Varoufakis also said that if referendum comes out as an YES, he would resign immediately because he cannot play the hide and pretend game anymore. Now he got this NO result and he resigned right away? WTF? Now we will see how this clown Tsipras is going to pull out a better deal within 48 hours. :D

ZeroHedge has been a perma bear and has successfully predicted 10 out of the last one crisis in the past decade. :)

I am still holding on to my High way bonds. I think if a debt restructuring is needed, it will not cut to as deep as my cost basis of 36 cents on the dollar. Since other munis sell around 3.5% coupon, both the coupon rate of 5% and the principle has room to be cut. Are your highway bonds secured or unsecured? Can someone talk to the issue of muni bond workouts: how often do unsecured government bonds get left with zero recovery in a workout? In corporate bankruptcies, it is of course quite common for unsecured bonds to be left with no recovery. If you got a muni bond secured by a particular tax at 36% of par that sounds like a good position. Secured. And the highway company has 100 Million free cash flow per year. Its situation is much better than the electric company. However, PR constitution says if the state runs out of resource to pay the GO bonds, then it can divert the resources from the utility companies to pay the GO bonds first. The constitution also explicitly says paying muni debt is the first priority, above all other things, like pension and wages. With that said, if there is no cash, there has to be some kind of restructuring. But I don't think it will be a huge cut.

http://puertorico.municipalbonds.com/bonds/recent#srt=Trade.yield&direction=desc I use this website to track the prices. I am still holding on to my High way bonds. I think if a debt restructuring is needed, it will not cut to as deep as my cost basis of 36 cents on the dollar. Since other munis sell around 3.5% coupon, both the coupon rate of 5% and the principle has room to be cut. Assuming a restructure that changes coupon rate from 5% to 3.5% and a principle cut from 100 to 70, that will bring tremendous debt relief to PR and should be able to jump start the economy. Everything should be alive again and that's still a double for me. If I were the creditor on the table, I would give them a 5 year 0% payment deal with principle cut from 100 to 90 and ask for local sales tax DECREASE to jump start the economy. However, I would also ask for a GDP linked call option to recover my losses as well as a local sales tax INCREASE if the economy later improves to a good condition.

I have some PR highway bonds, bought last year around 36 cents on the dollar. I am still receiving interest payments. If they need creditor cooperation, I will. :)

How to get good clients is a very important factor here. What do you mean by "self-made clients"? Do you mean they came to you to sign up instead of you poaching them?

SMAs are cheaper to operate since it avoids the legal costs of an offering document. You still have to register as a RIA, create an advisory agreement and Form ADVs to file, etc. With SMAs you do lose out on carried interest. You also have more paperwork. For example every trade must be recorded for each account. So a hedge fund is one account and you record everything for it. For SMA's you are going to have a spreadsheet for each account. Billing each account is a pain. Interactive Brokers is nice because you don't have to have a certain level of AUM in order to do auto billing, but there statements and interface are horrible. And my experience is that a high number of clients will watch, some will copy trades in another account, and they will question mistakes much more strongly than crediting successes. My experience has been that the hedge fund client retention rate is far higher than the SMA rate. By focusing on SMA's you may have much higher office costs - rent, utilities and staff versus possible working at home. SMA means individually managed accounts? Yeah I am aware of these cons. Do you think it is a good idea to start as an SMA and convert to HF later? What about mutual fund? Will that be cheaper?

You have to define "short term" though. Is that one day? One month? One year? Let's look at SHLD for example. Would you say that people who blame ESL or Fairholem because it hasn't been working for the past 10 years are all "short term" oriented people? Seriously, how many more 10 years do we have in our life span? Of course, if people ask you "the S&P is up X% in this short time frame, why is the portfolio not at least matching it?", these clients should be kicked out. I definitely agree.

Regarding AMZN, you can read JAllen's comments in our board's AMZN idea thread. I'd like to add the following for you to be aware of. It is definitely more complex to value. http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/value-investing-is-a-mistake/msg225231/#msg225231 Stock compensation is a large part of AMZN employee's income, so AMZN is essentially using the overvalued stock to invest in new projects through stock compensation. Suppose AMZN's stock "Fundamental value" is $150 and it is currently trading at $450, that's 3 times overvalued. Suppose a project's cash rate of return is 15%, which is common for software industry, by using overvalued stock compensation to pay employees to build these projects, the actual rate of return on these projects suddenly become 45% instead of 15%, and this fact along would increase the "Fundamental value" of the stock. :) On the other hand, if value investors think AMZN is worth $120 and suppose tomorrow it opens at $40, value investors would buy hand over fist. But one thing they ignored is that a lot of talented engineers will be unhappy and leave and that will further deteriorate the fundamentals. Then the fundamental's deterioration will further induce the price drop, not to say that based on my logic above, a 15% cash rate of return project will suddenly become 5%. Eventually the situation will either stabilize like BBRY after losing a ton of value, or it will directly go bankrupt. ================== In regards to CHTR, it is trading at 20x FCF. The stock is overvalued in terms of FCF, but it is using the overvalued stock to acquire other companies. After every acquisition, the fundamental value of the company goes up. It is simple math if you use overvalued stock to acquire companies at an undervalued or even fair valued price. Therefore after each acquisition, the fundamental value increases, which would further push up the value of the stock. In both cases CHTR and AMZN, the margin of safety is in the business moat. There is no hard way to say, this company's liquidation value is 10 and stock is trading at 5, that's safe. let's buy it. That's the investment thesis applied to SHLD and it hasn't been working for the past 10 years. :)

Wait... You said if I register as an RIA and do managed individual accounts, I would not be allowed to charge performance fees at all? In order to charge performance fees the investor must be considered a "qualified investor" meaning having a net worth of $2 million or greater excluding their primary residence), or at least $1 million invested with the advisor. The requirement is the same for clients whether in a hedge fund or separate accounts. The figures were raised in 2014, it was $1.5 million and 750k, respectively. You can have accredited investors ($1 million minimum net worth, excluding primary residence, or income of $200,000 plus, or $300,000 combined with spouse) in a hedge fund but you cannot charge them performance fees. Got it! I wonder if that's why Arlington Value Management started with a 2% annual fee structure and then changed to 1/10 later? They probably started small and couldn't charge performance fees.

Wait... You said if I register as an RIA and do managed individual accounts, I would not be allowed to charge performance fees at all?

It was interesting that when the congressman asked Lew that question, he did not dare to answer. He turned back and looked at people sitting behind him, and only after those guys said yes did he answer "Yes". I wonder what those guys are. Treasury lawyers?

Got it. I thought RIA means managed separate account LOL.