aws

This site helps with lots of paywalls: https://12ft.io/

The treasury always asks for public comments with proposed regulations, which could from any interested parties, not just those that would be directly affected by the tax. I don't think anything has been decided about this issue yet. A filing from just last week says this is still an open issue and I'm sure their people are on it: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-23-07.pdf pages 48-49 It would be quite unfortunate if Berkshire is caught up in the confluence of a minimum tax not really aimed at them (as they always pay a substantial amount of corporate tax) and an accounting rule that only recently brought mark-to-market gains into book income.

I didn't do any paperwork. They were automatic and had been in my account for something like a year, they just weren't tradable until sometime in April.

Luckily I had a 1000 share position (worth all of about $40) in the common right before the bankruptcy from a tracker position that I never closed. It was enough to put a few warrants in my account, so I saw immediately when they started trading. Very lucky indeed. Although it was a bit of a hassle to find a broker who would actually let me put an above market bid out there for the warrants. I felt bad taking them at pennies, but it took four phone calls before I even found a broker who would let me buy at the ask price.

+36% in my Roth, +31% in taxable My biggest gain in the year was a truly unique situation, which I have never seen before and will never see again. It was UNTCW, which are warrants with about a 5 year duration, a 63.74 strike price, and started trading with a 60.00 underlying stock price. They were given out to the original shareholders after a bankruptcy, but were tied up for almost two years such that many owners might have totally forgot about them or had no idea what fair value was. And then they started trading randomly one day with no notice and no attempt by the company to make a market for them. They just started trading at a penny a piece despite the company recording them as a liability on the books at nearly $30 per. I bought more than half of the total trading volume for the first few days, and within a week they were $15 each so I had a massive multibagger, and that happened without any real move in the underlying shares. Other impactful results came from the APTS buyout early this year where I owned a large amount of stock and calls, and from MARA puts and shorts which paid off nicely with that stock dropping 90% this year. Mostly I just didn't have positions in any of the stuff that was down a lot on the year. My largest position is still Berkshire which is up YTD and which I increased a lot more in the 260-270s, and I didn't pickup things like Google and Meta until after the big crashes.

All her big gains were when the fund was tiny, then she attracted billions of inflows and tanked. The dollar weighted returns are probably something like -50% all time now.

I'm not sure about this one...

There used to be a great opportunity with Roth conversions and recharacterizations. You could make a number of Roth conversions from your pretax accounts, make a bunch of risky and perhaps opposing bets, and then undo the losers and only keep and pay tax on the winners. I did this a lot until the Trump tax bill did away with the loophole. To my knowledge you can still effectively do the same thing by making excess annual contributions, but it's more questionable for sure. In theory you could open any number of Roth IRAs and contribute the annual limit to each. You would be penalized for doing so, but not if you remove the excess contribution by the due date of your tax return. Removing the excess contribution causes them to close the account and return whatever is left. You pay tax and penalties on profits but losses just vanish into thin air. So if you had say 2 new accounts and took opposite positions that were effectively binary, one would go to zero and one would double. You then file the form to return the excess contribution on the broke account and keep the winner. You effectively just doubled the allowable annual contribution. And then you could repeat as many times as you dare. Short of that questionable play there really isn't any way I know of to accomplish what you want. Obviously you cannot do something like trade against yourself with illiquid securities to deliberately lose money to the IRA. And if you thought you had some surefire wager that would have a 90% chance of making money for the Roth, you would just make that bet by itself instead of messing around with trying to do an opposing bet on another account.

I don't know if any actions yet deserve jail time, but I wouldn't be surprised if he eventually sees the inside of a jail cell. From the descriptions of the corporate bankruptcy I've seen, he likely fraudulently conveyed assets to keep them out of the hands of those with judgments (huge mysterious debts to entities owned by his parents happened to appear on his books to drain any equity they might have had). That combined with his contempt for the legal system that allowed for the default judgments in the civil cases likely mean that he will not meet his responsibilities in the bankruptcy process, or will do other things that leave him in contempt of court.

I've seen a similar thing when buying books on Amazon, but never within the actual main listing for the book. It would instead be a completely separate listing that would look like the real thing, but include the term summary of, or commentary on in some nondescript place. So technically they did say it wasn't the real book, but you might click through and buy if you weren't careful. I especially saw it before the books were officially released which might fool even more people because it would be the only version immediately shipping. It's hard to imagine the fraudulent sellers end up getting to keep enough money to be worth the effort, as a few complaints will shut them down, and Amazon holds the money for quite a while before disbursing to sellers such that they are probably shut down before getting anything.

Good speech yesterday on why Ukraine matters by the Secretary of Defense https://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech/Article/3224089/why-ukraine-matters-remarks-by-secretary-of-defense-lloyd-j-austin-iii-at-the-h/#.Y3oveNRofQI.twitter

I would also be careful if the play requires you to maintain a short through this redemption period. You have no idea what the borrow fee might be or the chance of a forced buy-in if you lose the short locate. Last year people were specifically targeting high redemption SPACs for short squeezes. They crash in the end but that may not matter. It wasn't exactly the same, but I remember the pain of having to close a NKLA short above $50 because the borrow fee was almost 1000%.

Ukraine has taken back slightly over half of the territory occupied since the 2022 invasion. At that rate they could liberate the rest of the country by sometime in 2023, but I wouldn't expect the progress to be linear throughout the war. Russia has taken astounding losses in materiel that they cannot replace. They have new manpower after the mobilization, but they are equipping them with body armor from Alibaba, Mosin-Nagant rifles from the late 1800s, and T-62 tanks. The Russian war machine is too hollowed out by corruption to be able build back up to the fighting strength they had at the start of the war. The way I see it going for Russia, to paraphrase Hemingway: How did you lose the war? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

Two people dying is hardly clickbait. It is clearly a newsworthy event that would be published quickly, and it is impossible to know all the facts right away. It is Russia's responsibility regardless, the only question was if it was an intentional strike on another country. It is likely that either it is a remnant from an intercepted missile, or an air defense missile that missed its mark, but either way those people would not have been dead unless Russia launched those missiles at targets near Poland's border.

If it's true that the Kremlin is ordering a withdrawal from Kherson (and that's a big if since the Kremlin always lies), that would be great, but it's definitely different vibes than the Kharkiv victory. I doubt they'll be any troves of Russian equipment left behind in this retreat. Russia also took their time and stole everything they could from Kherson, from the city buses to the museums. And after they forced civilians to flee with whatever they could carry, the soldiers probably went into their homes and stole everything that wasn't nailed down. More washing machines for the motherland. The supply situation meant holding Kherson was a huge burden for Russia, probably untenable during the winter. Maybe it's better for them to take a smaller humiliation now than risk a much bigger humiliation later, but then I guess if they were following that playbook they would have stopped escalating this war a long time ago.

Now that interest rates are getting to be substantial I wanted to make sure I understood how money market funds work for the buyer. I understand the funds earn income buying t bills and other short term government securities, but the mechanics of how this income is distributed fairly is confusing. Is interest calculated in such a way that you are paid for the average daily balance, and if so how do they accomplish that? Savings accounts make sense as the bank can calculate your balance and interest daily. Short-term bond ETFs like SHV make sense in that they creep up slowly over the month and then go ex-div to drop back down. So if you buy right before the payout you are paying more than if you bought earlier in the month and that squares up the interest income. But my SPAXX pays out a seemingly fixed amount per $1 share to all holders (0.002207413 for the month of October). What would stop someone from buying a large amount on the 30th of the month, collecting the monthly payout, and then converting the holdings into something else on the first of the next month? It seems like fair value of the money market fund should really be very slightly above or below $1 depending on the day of the month to account for accrued interest, but since you always can buy or sell at par those discounts or premiums are never visible. Is there some mechanism like with the other vehicles to make sure the interest received is "fair"? I imagine there must be for a trillion dollar market but I can't figure how it would work.

I bought some Google too for the first time since the split into multiple share classes. I'm sure it doesn't make much of a difference which class, but is there a reason GOOG is about a dime more than GOOGL? I thought GOOG shares were identical but nonvoting, so I would have expected those ones to be modestly cheaper.

Cutting territory deals with Putin in Georgia and Crimea is exactly what emboldened him to keep trying to grab new land. There doesn't need to be an offramp to end the war, there needs to be a defeat. It's nobody's fault but Putin if the situation appears more and more difficult to extricate from, and backing down to nuclear saber rattling sets a horrible precedent. We don't need to blame the defenders for winning or their allies for helping them win. Putin hopes the mobilization will be enough to win a conventional war, and that Russians will put up with the costs longer than Ukraine's allies will. Since everything else they have done in this war has underperformed expectations, I wouldn't expect the mobilization to go well, but who knows. If it goes badly for Russia, and the social unrest and economic costs of the war become too much to bear, then the safer option is just invent some new definition of victory and end the war. Maybe some type of deal where the people who identify themselves as Russians will be allowed to voluntarily relocate en masse to Russia and escape Ukrainian oppression. It would be a politically risky decision to end the war on terms that appear to be like a defeat, but mobilization was also risky and something Putin didn't do until he felt like he had no choice. It's better that than letting the pressure build until there is a coup. And the nuclear threat doesn't solve everything. If Russia is so badly weakened that they cannot continue the war, how does dropping a nuke get them out of that? I'm sure there are already planned responses in place for such an attack that can be swiftly imposed, the pain from which will surely be more severe than the pain of simply losing the war, so Putin's problems at home will only get worse. Even allies like China who have similar goals as Russia (ending western hegemony) cannot possibly condone a first strike nuclear attack as the way to achieve it, so I doubt they would be willing to jump into the war in a big way to save Russia after they just broke the nuclear taboo.

Berkshire and MKL

It's amazing how many contradictions the Kremlin can try and get away with. It's a war, but you'd go to jail if you called it a war instead of a special military operation. A war to protect the Russian speaking population, fought by laying waste to all civilian buildings and infrastructure in the area they are liberating. Russia is crushing the Ukrainian army in battle. Killing 100k vs. 6k Russian losses per their announcement this morning, but they need to mobilize 300k new troops to continue the effort. At least the most recent one is good news: A primary goal was stated as "denazification" of Ukraine, as primarily represented by the Azov battalion. But the news today is that Putin agreed to release the commanders of Azov and a couple hundred of the other Azovstal defenders. https://euromaidanpress.com/2022/09/22/more-azovstal-defenders-return-home-from-russian-captivity-after-pow-exchange/

The Russian army certainly seems to be exposed as hollow. In the Kharkiv region Ukraine has liberated all the way up to the Russian border. Along the way the Russian army left countless amounts of tanks, other military vehicles, and ammo dumps for Ukraine to capture. Not to mention troops killed or captured in the hasty retreat. The invasion force of 200k soldiers by most estimates has taken over 80k casualties, and the volunteer brigades of 60 year old men they have been fielding lately are hardly going to be enough to replace them. On the materiel side you would have thought they had endless supplies of cold war munitions, but now with the news they are turning to North Korea to buy shells you have to wonder how deep the reserves really are. It seems like Russia will soon need to contract the battle lines back to the 2014 borders to have a fight they can handle. Either that or they do have to give up the pretense of this being a "special military operation" and take the risk of actually declaring war and full mobilization. Then they will see how much their citizens truly support the war effort, when it requires more than giving up a few western comforts and wearing a Z. By the way, tonight's clip from Russian media is surprisingly candid. It's worth a watch.

Seems like a bad few days for the Russians. In less than a week Ukraine has reversed 4 months of gains. Rumor has it Ukraine has captured the Russian commanding general in the area as well: https://www.kyivpost.com/russias-war/top-russian-general-possibly-captured-in-uaf-kharkiv-offensive.html Even their propagandists on state media are starting to show fear: https://mobile.twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1568310989149605888

So what is the explanation for why the details of the sales are not reported? The link shows two sales totaling 3 million shares that have detail, but no explanation for the other decrease of 15 million shares from their reported holdings.

They own about 9% of Ally now, that's a pretty large purchase. I wonder why they didn't have to report it earlier when they crossed the 5% threshold.