aws

I use both IBKR and Fidelity still. When I called Fidelity to rate match they just wanted me to say what I was getting from the other broker and they would write a message to their back office to request the match. He strongly hinted that if I say I would be willing to move assets over from that broker if I received the better rate that it would be more likely they would approve it, and they did. Fidelity's customer support is generally much better when you call the active trader services team. They did help me with a very complicated transaction which required hand signed documents in multiple languages, whereas IBKR basically just ghosted me when I asked about the same transaction and almost caused me to miss the deadline on the offer. I still use IBKR for some things because they have rebates when providing liquidity, but beyond that the vast majority of my activity went to Fidelity.

Looks like over 3k volume too. Someone's algorithm made a $2b mistake? Better not be Citi again

Your 1099 will not always be correct for a variety of reasons. It's probably easier to just fix it on your tax return than try to deal with the brokerage, especially for a small sum. Just enter the numbers as reported for misc income, then add another entry with a negative misc income to zero it out. I would do something like: "Qualified dividend incorrectly listed as miscellaneous income" And then do an additional qualified dividend for that amount to bring everything where you think it should be. The IRS might come back to you, but you can explain yourself to them. It's unlikely you ever hear about it again, and worst case scenario they propose an adjustment that puts you back in the same spot you were originally.

I did a double whammy of paying off the 3% mortgage on my old house (which I kept as a rental) and paying cash for my new house. Both of those happened in 2021. In hindsight, I know I would be financially better off if I had more leverage from the mortgages. But I don't regret it at all. I was caught flat-footed by the drawdowns in 2020 and was more than happy to get rid of the leverage while I was in a good place the next year. And now that I have no debt, it's kind of nice knowing that another big market crash wouldn't affect me as hard as it would have in the past. Also just one less thing to worry about having to do every month.

I also used to be a CPA and was doing a tax return for a dentist in his early thirties. The guy made what would be the equivalent of 800k today, but had too little withholdings and owed about 25k to the IRS, basically one paycheck worth of debt. He freaked out when he heard this and asked us to set him up with a payment plan for the IRS. I filled out the paperwork to have him settle it at 1k per month, but he called back saying he couldn't afford that and we had to drop it to $500 a month.

That's interesting. I thought odd lot bids would never be filled unless someone happened to place a matching round lot offer that hit your hidden odd lot bid. Let's say the stock had a 50.00 bid and 52.00 ask and you put a 99 share bid at 50.50. If someone else tried to sell 10 shares at a market order then I would expect the seller's broker to internalize the order and fill it at something like 50.0001. Since your bid wasn't on the NBBO it would be ignored until something like a seller offers 1000 shares at 50.25, then your resting bid will hit their offer and fill. At least that was my understanding, but it probably depends on both your broker and the seller's broker as to whether your orders could get matched.

I flipped the OZ I bought a couple weeks ago. It still trades at a hefty discount to their claimed NAV, but I can't pass up a nearly 50% gain in two weeks on no news. Just got kind of lucky catching a bottom on it.

A sale or other disposal of shares by you is called an inclusion event, which is treated as an exact reversal of the deduction you receive when you buy it. In my case I am deferring short-term capital gains, so at the end of 2026 when OZ rules sunset, or whenever I sell it, I would have a short-term capital gain again as of that new date. You don't have to pay back interest and penalties like you underpaid taxes for the year of the original gain. If you bought and sold the same day or something just to try to push your tax bill out a year that would likely be quashed in an audit as a sham transaction, but if you simply bought because it traded at a huge discount and sold when that discount narrowed I would think that would be easily defensible. That's what I have done in the past and may likely do again since the stock is bouncing back nicely, but luckily I haven't been audited yet. The entity is a partnership so all activity, including sales of assets, flows out to you on a k-1.

I wrote some Jan 2025 $470 calls on a chunk of my Berkshire

OZ. I need to do some more work on it to see if there is any fundamental reason for the selloff this year but I wanted to pickup some. It's an Opportunity Zone fund and has been beaten down to less than half NAV. I suspect it could just be capitulation in a thinly traded stock. It looks like they had to take out a high interest mezzanine loan this month on their new retail/luxury apartment building they are supposed to finish this year. Possibly they expected to be able to issue more stock at NAV as they had an outstanding offer for $1 billion at $100/sh, but only sold a little over $300 million worth. Either they are crimped on cash and running into issues on their development, or there is fear they are and they will need to dilute at even lower prices. It's been a favorite trading vehicle of mine in the past because it is has the unique trait of being the only publicly traded stock in the market that allows you to take a dollar for dollar tax deduction when you buy it. And the deduction is retroactive to last year so long as you have a gain in the past 6 months to offset.

I own a decent amount of PSH as well. The way I've looked at it is, the discount to NAV is basically enough to zero out the 1.5% management fee. Meaning the accretive aspect of the buybacks and dividends at such a big discount replace the NAV that is spent on the fee. I'm not sure what I would do with the position if the discount narrowed significantly, but that's unlikely to be an unpleasant scenario.

At first I used too much leverage and had some near disasters. Luckily I caught the covid recovery in a massive way, and now that I have basically enough to live on in almost any scenario I've let the pendulum swing the other way to give me a strong aversion to leverage. I even paid off my 3% mortgage 21 years early. Occasionally I have a small margin deficit when I need to pay a tax bill or something, but even then I want to pay it off within a few days at most.

I've transferred too many assets around to easily calculate things in my taxable accounts, but my Roth IRAs are pretty clean and it looks like things came in at +34% for the year. That's about the same return as I got last year, but it sure looked a lot better last year when it was crushing the market instead of matching it. I had no big home runs this year. A few small positions crushed, like META, INTC, X. My China positions languished and a couple of microcaps I had positions in circled the drain. Nothing had a huge outsized impact on my portfolio. The most interesting trade of the year ended up being BSMX. It should have been very straightforward. The company was being taken private by the majority shareholder at a fixed price, and I was buying shares at discounts starting at 10% which slid into 25% discounts by the day of the delisting. However, taking part in the buyout was not as straightforward as I thought. I had to convert my ADR shares to local shares to take part, and do so on a tight timetable before the books closed. IBKR dropped the ball and almost nuked the trade for me. Luckily I transferred my shares to Fidelity one day before the books closed and they processed the conversion immediately. Then came the much harder part of actually selling the shares. To simply sell the shares required months of back and forth with expensive lawyers and accountants, international tax treaties, a critical document misplaced my Mexican customs, etc. In the end after all the drama and something like 35k in expenses related to the transaction, I made a net profit of about 20% on a trade that dragged out 6 months. A good result that I never want to repeat, and one that reinforced how good we have things with our markets in the US. Doing business internationally was so much more difficult, slow, and expensive.

I probably helped create the best investment ever for another person when I sold my hobby Bitcoin mining business in 2011, along with roughly 1000 Bitcoin at about $10 each. Other than that I've not had anything too spectacular. I've had a 200x on an option, but the position size was tiny. My biggest dollar gain is in Berkshire, but that's just because of the size of the position.

Santander Mexico… finally. This one was way more of a struggle than I expected. Long story short Santander took their Mexican subsidiary listing private, which gave shareholders the right, but not the obligation to sell their shares back to the bank within a 6 month window of the date they took it private. In the few days leading up to the delisting, the shares sold off hard, falling as much as 20% below the buyback price. I scooped up the majority of the trading volume in the final days, thinking this was a no brainer flip. Turns out it is way more complicated for a foreigner to sell shares than I expected. I needed to engage costly lawyers and a Mexican accountant, as well as wait for months to get my broker to actually follow through on the steps needed to take advantage of the buyback offer. In the end I sold the shares just days before the offer closed. A very nice profit, but an experience I never wish to repeat.

The point was that the operating earnings are inflated by the cash interest income, so it should be discounted versus if they were growing profits in the businesses.

Make sure when you are thinking about the operating earnings you are considering the huge impact of interest income on the cash pile, a factor that wasn't there at all a couple years ago. $150b+ at 5.25% is almost $2b a quarter in pretax operating income.

You can't just look at population size of each country and assume that will determine the outcome. That would require assuming that the average Russian cares as much about subjugating their neighbor as the average Ukrainian cares about defending their homeland. Ukraine has shown a willingness to sacrifice more, while Russia has sheltered the rich areas of the country from the realities of war and relied on contract soldiers from the poor regions that will fight for money, or convicts that will fight to get out of prison. The summer counter offensive has gone slower than most hoped, but this time last year morale was also quite low, and then in quick succession Ukraine reclaimed most of the area around Kharkiv and retook Kherson.

Took down the Wagner #2 as well, the guy with all the nazi tattoos. Putin finally did some actual denazification.

Did we take a time machine back to 2021? I thought the days of SPACs and random tiny EV companies hitting $50b+ valuations were behind us.

And if he were there since day one personally handing out aid, they would say he's just doing it to distract from the house GOP inquiry into his family, or Hunter Biden's latest legal woes, etc.

Yeah, that one is especially cultlike, but you can at least see how it caught on since it originated with the Gamestop guy. Why they still think he's coming back to an empty shell to bail them out after pumping and dumping on them a year ago is another matter. Others seem like they must have a promotional aspect behind them, like Yellow or Tupperware recently.

It is strange which meme stocks catch on. Obviously most bankruptcy announcements do not have this impact even in this environment (see PTRA today for example), but once they do the pumps seem pretty durable. Almost seems like there is some paid promotion going on behind the scenes. Just when it looked like Yellow would start to bleed out, it jumped as much as 50% right before the close on a report by Charlie Gasparino which essentially said: If you ignore the $1 billion in unsecured claims, there might be money leftover for shareholders.

Not sure what the game plan is for MFN but it sure added a lot of fuel to that squeeze. AFAIK they can't simply flip their shares since they crossed the 10% threshold and would be subject to the short swing rule. It seems like Apollo controls the purse strings and will make sure they get paid in a bankruptcy, but I can't imagine there being anything left for unsecured debt or shareholders. I bought some put spreads yesterday and today that I think will still work out well, but definitely would have been more profitable in any case to just ride the squeeze.

Horrible story regardless, but striking how much more coverage the disaster of the five rich adventurers got than the 500 migrants that died in the Greek shipwreck last week.