kmukul

The stock has gone up significantly since the report was published, may we mr market will give a better entry point

Congraulations Mr Smith :), your returns are truly astounding

Hi Eric, I know you are a lot smarter than me but still I think this may work, it may not work also you need to check. What if you create a LLC or hedgefund based in some other state or country and have your money loaned to it.it pays tax in that state or country for trades done and pays you in cash and kind (like buying cars which are leased to you). I don't know what will require to make it legal. if it doesn't work, hope its still ok to post, By the way is this your portfolio? https://www.tickerspy.com/member.php?mid=74868&pid=105574

this might be interesting to the people... Warren buffets intrinsic value calculation. it seems there are a bunch of videos by them to learn about buffets investing

Thanks oddball, 4b is a lot of money (and its 400 times 10m) unless there is a catch, The annual report or ceo may not tell you the real catch if there is any. i don't think contract can be such a problem they can pay more to the company mining and everyone likes to get paid more. I think powerful activists like Icahn or even Prasad and Pabrai ;) should get excited enough by this to take it forward. it just appears a little too good to be true.

How could a company have no incentive to mine it if mining and selling the coal is economical? I obviously don't know the specifics of the situation, but hard for me to see how there can be no incentive. The company is paid some flat fee, they don't get paid more to mine more, so they mine what that need and that's it. I think the company is Central Natural Resources, I should look into them again. So in 10 years the contract will expire and they'll contract someone to extract the $4b worth of coal, guess this is probably worth considering. how sure are you about this. For this kind of money at stake i am sure a lot of things can be done to unlock value

Very nice videos longhaul and bargainman.. this forum has amazing people

Nice thread, Good to learn from all of you guys, Wow 228% is a lot. is this BAC? Are you leveraged using leaps. Not sure if its already shared.. Thanks a lot

atoms are so much better, you guys rock :)

Awesome thanks a lot, this was one of the nuiances for the reader and i was actually starting to write a reader which will overcome these issues

Okay, if the SPY drops 36% it will completely reimburse me if MBI goes to $0. That's because the SPY exposure is 2.7x larger than the MBI exposure. I am guaranteed a profit on this trade if SPY declines more than 36%. you are master of all these option trades :) Why not but IWM puts instead as you had said IWM falls more then spy. I closed out my IWM puts for a tax loss. I can't get back in right away due to the wash sale rules. But it doesn't matter. Because SPY puts are cheaper, for the same total outlay you can purchase more notional exposure. The market prices in the fact that IWM will fall harder (to some degree anyway... just look at how much more expensive IWM puts are as a % of notional insured value). These are at-the-money puts (more option premium). Originally when I was in IWM puts they were in-the-money (less option premium). This time I'm purchasing at-the-money to match up with the fact that I wrote at-the-money puts on MBI. hmm thanks.. I would have assumed market to be efficient about mbi like they are for iwm but thanks a lot

Yup! So do quite a few other people in the office. Be careful what you guys say! ;D Cheers! I would have expected him to learn from eric and load up bac. :P ... Not that rimm is doing bad but that would be too much fun

Okay, if the SPY drops 36% it will completely reimburse me if MBI goes to $0. That's because the SPY exposure is 2.7x larger than the MBI exposure. I am guaranteed a profit on this trade if SPY declines more than 36%. you are master of all these option trades :) Why not but IWM puts instead as you had said IWM falls more then spy.

I have both fidelity and IB, IB is cheaper but they charge you forced monthly commissions but its still cheaper, fidelity is good and easy and intuitive to use, I don't need anything complicated as I do simple trades, but viewing your account history commissions taxes dividends performance etc is much more intuitive in fidelity, In ib I still get confused they have three different places to login to start with which is account management, web trader and their tws, and not everything is available everywhere so I still find it confusing, Not just that the presentation and there are other things also which seem much more intuitive to me on fidelity.

Thanks for running this board, its a really good learning experience.

if you want to lose money ask me :) the easiest way to lose even billg's money is short whatever buffet buys and write options to whateever eric buys :) or we can do a trades of a illiquid stock at a price predetermined by me

Yes, that is the type of company that it could work for. I don't follow BBRY as closely, but understanding what their sales trends have been over the last few months, and the progress of their products would be useful. I suspect this earnings report will surprise, but once the Q10 comes out, I think that will do even better. There is a hard-core group of Blackberry users waiting for the physical keyboard phone. There is no other real product out there like that, as everyone is moving to the touch keyboard. So Blackberry could enjoy a significant short squeeze, not unlike the one we've seen for the last few months. But there has been significant positive market psychology around BBRY for the last few months. Another is Apple...but the liquidity is much higher, while product trends do not look as good right now. But the stock has been so battered (unlike BBRY), that any positive news will send the stock moving higher. The risk here with both becomes the time arbitrage. The next quarter might not be the one to create the short squeeze...it may take one or two more quarters, so you have to evaluate the timing risk. Understand that while fundamental analysis goes into the stock (Apple is cheap, BBRY sales are improving), a significant amount of speculation is occurring here because of the time arbitrage. You may have to even stagger your bets on a couple of maturities, or look for options that seem mispriced relative to risk/reward. We don't make these bets often, and they are usually on businesses we understand really well. It is very likely that we won't attempt on either of these stocks, or on any other stock for several months. Only when the pitch looks relatively fat, our assessment seems more likely, and the upside is huge, would we consider swinging because of the timing risk. Cheers! I think both appl and bbry wont give you kind of returns on overstock, as they dont have so much short interest, doesnt mean they wont give you any returns, For bbry i am not sure if i am looking at the right place (nasdaq.com) as they might have shorts on Canadian exchanges also. I guess we will have to find more ideas.

Congrats Prasad :) Money is always good. Will the same strategy make sense for apple also? earnings are around the corner and stock is trading as if they will have a big downward surprise

What % of your portfolio are you targeting? Hope that your midas touch continues for the rest of us patient FFH holders It's roughly 50% of net worth. This is partly motivated by the fact that California makes it cost prohibitive to dance in and out of holdings. So I hope I just hold this for a long time in my taxable account. I still have a lot of BAC, but not as much and it's all hedged. So this kind of leverage I find interesting -- things turn out well, I'll keep making money from BAC and FFH at the same time. Things turn out poorly, FFH will be booking big gains and hopefully BAC will still make money. If not, hopefully the big FFH gains cancel out the cost of the BAC hedges. now we know whats moving the prices of bac and ffh in recent days

Happy new year everyone.. it seems year is upto a happy start bac crosses 12

May be the metro UI of win8 will work on tablet and windows 7 will work on desktop until microsoft fixes it? that doesnt seem so bad?

Ruppee isnt undervalued... it is overvalued if anything. In india pay commission comes and doubles every govt employees salary for no reason and you expect ruppee not to depreciate with that? India has a lot of problems everyone has problems that doenst mean everyone is same. Everyone else has smart people working on problems in india either smart people leave the country or they are involved in scams to make themselves rich. India cant compete with china forget usa. there are many reasons for it. Many indians are smart however for smart people there is no place in bureaucratic india. I bet if prem watsa stayed in hyderabad this board wont be there. He wont be anybody unless he had connections with chief minister. In short india doesnt value people. it doesnt value innovation this culture

I will be surprised if people say anything other then fairfax on this board..

The stock and the earnings have been going up and i am watching for last 3-4 years

Why not look at other banks like citi which is also really cheap