hillfronter83

CVR Partners (UAN) is a nitrogen fertilizer MLP controlled by Carl Icahn and they will buy RNF at 1.04 UAN plus $2.57 cash per RNF unit. Unit holder will vote for the deal on 2/15/2016. RNF entered some minority unit holder law suit recently. At 10% spread, market is price this deal to fail. In addition, RNF will spin off its Pasadena facility to unit holders before the merger. No idea how much it worth given it's losing money and has about $100m sales. The deal was originally scheduled to close in Q1 2016. Anyone else on the board looking at this?

Adesigar probably posted this for fun, but I'll try to relate it to Mephistopheles' question: Is the price really the decisive factor for choosing tax filing software? Isn't correctness, convenience, speed to complete the process, clarity of instructions, etc. much more important? For anyone on CoBF, IMHO, the most important feature is the capability to painlessly and correctly slurp in your stock investment transactions from your financial providers. If I were you, I'd base my decision on this rather than on other things (like price). Although if you're a buy-and-hold-forever investor or invest only in tax deferred accounts, then perhaps this is not important to you. +1 I have used H&R for years and you can get the deluxe version very cheap (<$10). However, it doesn't import the trade automatically so it's time consuming to figure out all the investment gain/loss, etc. Last year I found issues in H&R due to my flexible spending accounts so you can't rely on tax software 100%. Before H&R I used a CPA, which I don't recommend since unless he/she is very familiar with your situation, you'll still need to fill out a lot questionnaire. My CPA ended up merely as a data entry person and last time I did tax with her I found many errors in my filing. I'm thinking about TurboTax this year since I also set up an investment adviser LLC to handle my families' investment, etc. I would appreciate suggestions regarding Turbo Tax.

No. The same 30-day rule applies to IRA too.

You mean greed? lol.

There is zero trust regarding public filing and insider trading is very common. That's why people (including myself) don't rely on fundamental analysis. Right - I'm not saying people should naively adopt Western-style fundamental analysis, either. I'm just saying what I believe the consensus more or less to be. The other possible way to think about the problem, assuming fundamental analysis was impossible or useless, would be that if you cannot perform fundamental analysis, you cannot invest at all, rather than that you must invest in a more speculative fashion. No one has to enter the domestic securities market. One can always choose not to participate (although seemingly, you cannot easily choose to get out once you are in!). Sorry, I editted my post. Basically investors are responsbile for their own money and they have to do extensive due diligence. This would be hard for anyone not have a presence within China. There are great investment opportunities in China for those have the ability, as demonstrated by BYD etc.

There is zero trust regarding public filing and insider trading is very common. That's why people (including myself) don't rely on western style fundamental analysis. It is very important that you do you due diligence on the target company, similar to a venture capitalist would have done to a startup. My brother in law, who once was a CFO for a HK traded company told me company can even fake cash balance in its bank (not unreasonable if you think that both bank head and company head are appointed government officials). And we are talking about one of the big four as its auditor.

I doubt this is true. By my observation, Buffett is not popular among professionals since people want to get rich quick. And most of the investors are retail investors who probably never heard about Mr. Buffett.

It seems that many money managers charge a quarterly fee if it's a fixed percentage based on market value. I don't know how this is done with performance fee. To those of you manage OPM with performance fee, do you charge your fee all at the end of the year? Thanks.

Stable value fund, sometime called fixed income fund or capital preservation fund, if you have them in our 401K plan. They are guarranted by insurance company and currently returns about 2%.

Check out professor Damodaran's website: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/

In Snowball, it talked about all the kids on the block would crowd into Buffett's house to watch TV when the got the first color TV in the neighborhood. Probably before he got really famous and when Susie was around. I took a picture when I passed by Omaha a few years ago. Glad no security confronted me, lol.

There was a $0.5/share underwriting fee, which was eliminated or discounted for large order. So I would imagine NAV is slightly under $10/share.

+1 I looked at it in 2011 and didn't see return very attractive. In fact, I rented a townhouse worth $400k for $2600/month. Here is the math: Property tax $6800, Home owner fee $5000. So if you pay 20% down, your interest and insurance will cost about $13500. The profit is about $5900, without deducting repair/vacancy/broker, on $80k downpayment. I would rather buy REIT. This is in NJ and property tax really hurts.

Look in your 401k plan to see if it has an option named stable value fund. Some time the name varies such as capital preservation fund or fixed income fund, etc. But as its name suggests, it provides capital preservation while yields about 1-2% right now.

I'm so thankful that I found this board at the end of last year. Happy thanksgiving to everyone!

I think fantasy football is like porker. A lot of luck (injury, opponents...), but skill definitely matters. From what I saw from my league, people routinely over value super star players. I play in a standard league and most of the "draft guide" suggested RB over QB in the first round, which makes no sense to me. I'm 3-3 and hopefully will be 4-3 tonight. But I got the highest score in the league and a guy had the second lowest score is 6-1 :(

Exciting, Congrats!

For those of working in financial industry, does any of you get charged for the professional market data fee from your personal brokerage account? I just been told that I need to pay 150/month for market data since I work for an insurance company.

Certainly there are risks involving such companies. Here is a blog that might be interesting: http://www.chinalawblog.com/2011/07/thinking_clearly_about_chinese_companies_listed_on_us_stock_exchanges.html Well I learned the hard way that China really doesn't work the way I think it works. Apparently you can run away with a real business and all of the cash (!). I forgot to mention that many stocks that are listed on both PRC and non-PRC exchanges have price disparities. The shares listed in China get a premium valuation. So you have to wonder why Chinese founders would want to list their company outside of China. Chinese stocks (especially reverse mergers) are the one area of the stock market where fraud is extremely high and the shenanigans committed are rather egregious (e.g. running off with everything). Because there are close to zero consequences for committing fraud and because Chinese authorities are kind of on the fraudsters' side, you have to deal with an extreme level of adverse selection. And then when you think you understand Chinese fraud... maybe you find out the hard way that you don't understand it. For example, it's extremely unintuitive that Chinese firms were able to easily fake their cash balances to big four auditors. Cash is one of the easiest things to audit, yet local branches of banks were corrupted into providing fake bank confirmations. There are things about China that are unintuitive. I'm not sure if honest Chinese business owners would want to list their company on foreign exchanges for legitimate reasons. Not to argue the fact that there were a lot fraud in these reverse mergers. But you have to remember that most of these companies are microcap and riskier than a normal company. Here is an interesting research regarding these CRM: I can think of a few reasons why a legit Chinese company wants to list oversea: 1. The premium on Chinese exchange didn't exist until the bull run in 2007-2008. Before that, Chinese companies' share traded at a discount on Shanghai exchange compare to Hong Kong exchange. 2. There were regulation restrictions that kept many of the companies we talked about here from listing in China. One of them was showing positive profit for 3 consecutive years, which most of the internet companies were not able to in their early years. 3. Many of such companies were backed by venture investors here in US, who would probably prefer US listing. SINA was backed by Dell and SOHU was backed by Intel. Many legit companies were taken private by majority owners after muddy water short wave that drove their stock prices down. For example, SNDA was taken private at 20% premium by its founder in 2011. This suggests that there are probably value to be found.

Certainly there are risks involving such companies. Here is a blog that might be interesting: http://www.chinalawblog.com/2011/07/thinking_clearly_about_chinese_companies_listed_on_us_stock_exchanges.html

Interesting idea. I imagine it shouldn't be too difficult to create some serious voting power with the purchase power of this forum, especially with those microcap or nanocap. However, how do you define a "group". Will people communicate with each other through an internet forum loosely be viewed legally as a group? Any lawyers here?

I want to buy some shares for my 401K's brokerage window since it only allows mutual funds. However, this fund is not available with T. Rowe Price. Is it something that Francis is working on? Can I contact the fund to find out? I spoke with Francis a few weeks back on this issue and he told me that it would probably take between 3-6 months. My hope is that it is closer to three!

I was doing some research about some of the mutual funds mentioned above since my 401K brokerage account only allows mutual funds. Here is the pdf I came up, for those of you might be interested. The performance data are from Morningstar as of 3/7/2014. Total assets and holdings data are from Bloomberg and might be a little older. Mutual_funds.pdf

can you give me detail in the process you look for them ? And how you value them? Hi King, I have been thinking about giving an example. Here it is. I own a company in AU called Jumbo Interactive. I bought it @ 30 cents. The annual report laid out everything very clearly. It is trading at 2.5x P/E before cash. JIN's business is to sell lotteries on the Internet, which is highly scalable. In the last five years, the business has grown just like other online businesses. In normal condition, this kind of business should garner 20x P/E. This is an outstanding business trading at ridiculous price. You see, magic formula wants good business trading at cheap prices. That is simply not enough for me. But the situation is not normal here. JIN's online business hangs on a contract with Tatts, which is expiring at the end of 2014, although the contract will be renegotiated a year earlier. Tatts is a monopoly in the lottery industry which owns the only nation-wide license given by the government. Recently, Tatts launched its own website to compete with JIN. Therefore, the probability that JIN will renew the contract seems low. I believe each of us has different opinion about risk/reward and you can make your own guess. Here is mine. Let's say JIN simply operates until the end of 2014 and then liquidate, the cash will cover more than the current market cap. This is third grade math so I would not give the details here. This is is the bottom line. I personally believe, after some thinking, that there is around 30% chance that the contract will be renewed as it is now. If it is renewed, I will hit a home run; if it is not, I would not lose much. There are also other complications, but I will keep things simple here. This is basically how I make my investment decisions. Hope this helps. Bao, great analysis! A lot of times for micro cap there are issues with corporate governance or even fraud. How do you stay away from such companies? The same way you stay away from fraud and bad corporate governance when you invest in a large cap. It isn't a micro-cap unique problem. Agree that it's not micro-cap specific problem. However, in large cap, usually there are institutional investors or activist investors that helps keeping management or controling interest honest.

can you give me detail in the process you look for them ? And how you value them? Hi King, I have been thinking about giving an example. Here it is. I own a company in AU called Jumbo Interactive. I bought it @ 30 cents. The annual report laid out everything very clearly. It is trading at 2.5x P/E before cash. JIN's business is to sell lotteries on the Internet, which is highly scalable. In the last five years, the business has grown just like other online businesses. In normal condition, this kind of business should garner 20x P/E. This is an outstanding business trading at ridiculous price. You see, magic formula wants good business trading at cheap prices. That is simply not enough for me. But the situation is not normal here. JIN's online business hangs on a contract with Tatts, which is expiring at the end of 2014, although the contract will be renegotiated a year earlier. Tatts is a monopoly in the lottery industry which owns the only nation-wide license given by the government. Recently, Tatts launched its own website to compete with JIN. Therefore, the probability that JIN will renew the contract seems low. I believe each of us has different opinion about risk/reward and you can make your own guess. Here is mine. Let's say JIN simply operates until the end of 2014 and then liquidate, the cash will cover more than the current market cap. This is third grade math so I would not give the details here. This is is the bottom line. I personally believe, after some thinking, that there is around 30% chance that the contract will be renewed as it is now. If it is renewed, I will hit a home run; if it is not, I would not lose much. There are also other complications, but I will keep things simple here. This is basically how I make my investment decisions. Hope this helps. Bao, great analysis! A lot of times for micro cap there are issues with corporate governance or even fraud. How do you stay away from such companies?