Fat Pitch

+1. boards are an echo chamber; people are wired to derive psychological comfort out of making bias confirming statements we are still in highly speculative mode in terms of trying to understand what mnuchin/trump's intentions are.. some caution is in order agree with caution statements. sometimes, the less you know about something, the more convinced you are. in this case, i must say that the more i read (briefs etc) the more convinced i am, but lamberth told me that i might be emphasizing the wrong thing, such as the rule of law. i reread mnuchin's tv statement, and i want to ask this board whether you guys think this is an interesting tell. whenever someone is generally antaganostic to GSEs, they talk about "reforming" the GSEs...that they should be wind down and replaced, or reformed to the core. here is the convo: “Maria: Would you move to have these privatized? Mnuchin: Absolutely. We gotta get Fannie and Freddie out of government ownership. It makes no sense that these are owned by the government and have been controlled by the government for as long as they have. In many cases this displaces private lending in the mortgage markets and we need these entities that will be safe; so let me just be clear we’ll make sure that when they’re restructured they’re absolutely safe and they don’t get taken over again but we gotta get them out of government control.” notice mnuchin used the word "restructured". now when i think a finance guy uses the word restructured, he is talking about a finance fix, a fix to balance sheet, not a fix to the core of the enterprise that would involve reform. am i reading too much into this distinction? (ie confirmation bias). frankly, i think it is telling what mnuchin's current mindset is...doesnt mean we can tell with any specificity what he and trump admin will do, but i don't think it was just a meaningless word choice. Mnuchin got his marching orders from the top. He's looking to restructure the company and release them back into the wild. This of course will enrich his friends greatly which might hinder his progress.

Aaaaaaand another... Carl Icahn. According to CNBC and WSJ, Trump to name Carl Icahn as special advisor on regulatory overhaul; Icahn also playing role in selecting next SEC chief These guys are going to get ripped apart by the liberal media when they do right for GSE stakeholders. Do we know if Carl Icahn still holds his stake in the GSEs? With all the $$$ on the line do you think they care about what the liberal media has to say? They are going for the win and they are telegraphing it, though I could be wrong.

It would have mattered greatly. If dividends accrued then the gov't would have been forced to deal with the issue at hand... ie zeroing out the shareholders or buying back the jr prefs. Being non cum. it was easy not to pay and kick the can down the road which is where we are at.

Mulvaney had a bill doing away with the Sr. preferred shares. So if a congressman already proposed it, why not next Treasury Sec.? You must consider a scenario in which the Sr. shares are considered fully repaid. Next problem would be building a minimum of 2.5% capital. How many here think they are going to recap the entire structure of the GSE? Makes more sense to recap a smaller portion of the giants and release them back to the public. Let what's left go into runoff and pay the gov't off and residual common stock. This allows them to recap to 5% and get it done quickly. Basically the Bruce,Millstein plans.

I’ve been looking at some companies in South America and noticed a trend of declining revenues, but if you adjust for the FX losses many of this companies are growing like weeds. Many of them are trading at 52 week lows and I’m wondering how others are thinking about the strong dollar vs foreign currencies? Are these FX losses real or just temporary and this provides an opportune time to load up?

I analyzed their database of loans (50k+) and on average you'll lucky to be making 5%. There's a reason why credit cards charge people high interest rates... to make up for the losses. As long as they can issue more loans they can keep the stats on their loans looking good.

The long bull market has definitely reduced the amount of opportunities, but at the same time I agree there has been a general decline in the quality of posts here. I’m seeing lots of posts that begin with “xyz is down 6%, there’s no news, what gives?” Really? Or my favorite mentioning a new company and expecting others to do the work for you. I am grateful for this board since there are incredibly smart individuals here, but many of them moved on. I’m finding Twitter to be a superior source of information since you can filter out the noise and really narrow down your interests to certain individuals who contribute immensely. There were many gems in the SPAC field that wasn’t mentioned here and these are the classic “work out” situations, but they showed up on Twitter incredibly quick.

Hello Team CoBF! I want to undertake a research project in which I run due diligence on a select few companies (3-5) that are operationally PROFITABLE publicly traded companies whose true value stems from the real estate that they own. My prime example is RICKS cabaret. A 200m market cap company that has an EPS of 8-9...and trades at 90% of book value. The big ticket item on this is that they own about 80% of the properties that their business operates. I wanted to reach out to the group and open a discussion on other companies that fit this bill. FatPitch

DVR'd this when it came out on H channel. I agree its 5 star material. Also available on Netflix is the 2 hour bio-doc on Ford by PBS. His strategy on buying back Ford from the public is absolutely brutal.

Oddball, meiroy, & meph. You all bring very valid points and I appreciate it very much. People wise the small company is almost creepy friendly! The large one, well I think there will be a lot of egos to deal with. This is definitely a big factor. The other big thing I am mulling over is the name recognition of the national firm would be incredible on my resume for the future. (BTW I am 28 and its my first new gig after graduating with my MBA.) Isn't it best to go with a big firm after graduating? Seems like its much easier to get a great gig at a small company later down the line after "doing time" at a powerhouse firm. Here is the other factor. I love the financial analyst role much more. Plus its a small company so I will learn every facet of the business including training on the acquisition side. Now the big company and "research analyst" seems more like a dead end and a shitton of risk for very little extra yearly salary. However my hope is that I kick ass in the first two years and they transition me to a sr financial analyst/assocate. Oddball tomorrow morning first thing I will make a pro con list.

Hey all! I am at a crossroads right now. Basically the past two months I have been job hunting like a hound. The results have been spectacular but now I am split between two job offers that both look really good and I am having trouble deciding which is best for the long term. 1) Financial Analyst at a small firm. 2) Sr. Research Analyst at a nationwide firm. If you have questions fire away. I wanted to keep it short and sweet.

+1

My family who have always been by my side, my friends who make life more enjoyable in conversation and antics! Being blessed with a clear mind, body, and soul. Living in the land of the free where truly anything is possible with hard work and persistance. Having the ability to love others even in the recent occurance of a terrible breakup with the gf!

Nope, this version is actually the tried and true correct way to calculate the levered and unlevered IRR. Project_Financials.xlsx

I may have solved my issue...updated version attached. Updated_Commercial_RE_Project.xlsx

Hey all! Right now I am working on a Commercial RE project viability excel. However I am having trouble with the levered v unlevered IRR calculation. I have attached the excel to this posting and the calculation error can be found on tab #2 called "cash flow". I know it has to do with how I am reporting NOI with the loan. Thanks everyone, I greatly appreciate it! Commercial_Real_Estate_Project_Excel.xlsx

ASPS as well. I almost doubled my position today. Ex. OCN and Insurance kickbacks you still have ~50M in net income. This is 21x for a business growing at 25-35% yoy, a good value. Add to this any of the 100M+ of OCN related revenue (ex insurance kickbacks) and you are paying a sliding scale of 7-21x for company with a long runway of 25%+ growth in front of it. What are the odds Erbey doesn't take ASPS private? I would hate to load up just to see a take-under from management.

Thanks for the replies! I was able to install the JSON script and I ran the following command: =importjson("http://financials.morningstar.com/financials/getFinancePart.html?&t=XNAS:MSFT&region=usa&culture=en-US&cur=&order=asc",,"noInherit,NoTruncate,rawHeaders") Now the data that gets pulled in only shows this: /componentData <div class="col5" style="display:inline;"><div id="financials"><div class="hspacer6"></div><div class="r_tbar0 positionrelative"><h3>Financials</h3><div class="export_list_financials"><div class="list_select"><li id="Li2" class="r_dd1" onclick="showDropdow It looks like this is the minimized version of the data since I was able to insert the URL into a JSON viewer website and I was able to get everything to display. Any ideas on how to expand the data?

Does anyone know how to pull the Financials from Morningstar into Googlespread sheet? For example I'm trying to pull the 10yr financial summaries from this link http://financials.morningstar.com/ratios/r.html?t=MSFT&region=usa&culture=en-US I played around with every table/row/column combination, but the table won't pull through.

I think I read somewhere that the world needs to bring online another Saudi Arabia every 3 years just to offset the decline rates from the world’s mature oil fields. The cost of new oil is increasing each year due to lower energy yields. On the flip side, the main use of oil is transportation. How much demand can be displaced by natural gas via battery powered vehicles? I find it easier to bet on an energy renaissance with the emergence of LNG.

The only real danger we need to be aware of is if climate change increases the variance in temperatures between night and day? Higher temperature variances will mean catastrophe crop failures. All of civilization has been built on narrow temperature variances.

Im short TPX...Tempur Pedic...the valuations are disgusting. And sitting in a good deal of cash right now.

I nearly rolled off my chair laughing at this comment! I don't know if we will see something quite like the mortgage bubble which stimulated the housing price bubble we saw in 06-08. I don't know if we can quite say its 90% but its definitely over 80% based on #of loans. Hard Money, Jumbo, and asset depletion loans are out there and do command market space. Which brings me to suggest that people on this forum that are having trouble qualifying for mortgages due to income should definitely look in ASSET DEPLETION based qualifying loans. Basically we qualify the loan by using your stock/cash/401k account and infer that you can withdraw an amount from this and it equals your monthly income.

I understand how you might think that right off the bat. However the 0% and the negative equity (102%) loans are not really "theoretically" predatory. -However I must note that yes predatory lending, or as we say in the industry reverse-redlining, is prevalent and most commonly happens with the low down payment loans. Anyways the 0% and 102% loans are 90% of the time either VA or USDA loans. VA loans with no down payment are options for our honorable military forces. (Its a spectacular loan literally you can buy a house with no down payments and no Mortgage Insurance, I would serve just for that reason! Along with shooting a .50 cal!/ flying a heli!) The USDA loans are created to propagate rural development. The rules are very particular "zoning wise" in which areas are considered USDA approved. Literally you have to live in the farmland like areas...but still not farm for commercial production. In the end yes, US housing and lending practices are very...well...artificially inflated. Keep this thread running, I am enjoying explaining these nuances.

This is a great question Eric. I am in the field of mortgage lending and this issue can come up quite often. So the make or break on this issue is your down payment. Naturally with your 30% D.P. you and the lender have little to worry about. However if the situation was such that you were choosing the 3.5% FHA option and you really only had 4-5% in your bank account this can become quite an issue. Like literally kill the deal. This is due to the peg of LTV being the lesser of either the purchase price or the appraised value. So for example sake lets say your buying a home at sale for 100k, and putting 3.5% down The appraisal comes in at 110K, spectacular you just bought yourself a home with 10% in return right off the bat. Unfortunately your loan and your equity in the lenders eyes, including interest rate pricing, will be for 96.5k Shitty situation, lets say the home appraisal comes in at 90k. Well unfortunately your still going to buy the home for 100k and the lender is going to only make the loan for 86.85k. Which means you now have to bring 13.15k to the closing table to close the deal. (aka 13.15% down payment) This is why the appraiser is issued the purchase contract, so he knows not to f%*#k with it too much. However in my honest opinion this is still an issue of coercion on the lenders part to make appraiser assign values. And your dead on about if the appraiser creates too many issues with value, well he's not going to get anymore job assignments from NOT the lender, but the AMC. Lenders no longer can talk to appraisers they have to go through a middleman that apparently will stop manipulative practices. HA, such a joke. Anyways. In your situation, with such a large down payment you have very little to worry about. UNLESS, it comes in for 5% below the sales price, at which time you will most likely receive unfortunate news from the LO who now tells you your rate is probably 30-40 bps more expensive. Shit could get really dicey if the appraised value is 15% lower. Which means you would then have MI attached to your loan unless you brought more to the closing table. All in all your probably all-right. This is a situation that most affects low down payment loans with borrowers who have very limited funds.