JAllen

How much of the issue is about CHK?

The bid will go way up in the last few minutes/seconds, like most ebay auctions do.....

I use a combination of Google alerts and Google reader which you can input SEC RSS feeds into for any US company. I'm also using getprismatic.com for financial news (among 100+ other things). You can also add specific search terms there too, even if they don't have specific topics. But alerts is probably the most valuable one for scouring the entire web for news.

I would read the Holy Grail of Macroeconomics by Richard Koo before shorting govt. bonds in a material way. The book explains why, among other things, why govt. bond yields get and stay so low during balance sheet recessions like the one we're in now. It's one of the best macro books I've read - in the sense that I actually learned something and his model of how balance sheet recessions work fits.

That's the issue: that IB uses the end of month forex rate instead of the purchase date rate. My admin is having to recalculate the purchase date forex rate for each lot. Does anyone know if purchasing the forex outright and then purchasing the foreign securities with the currency instead of using margin would solve this problem? I'm going to ask them too.

We're currently with IB for our prime broker (I know, not very prime) and are running into foreign security cost basis reporting issues causing our administrator to spend hours each month recalculating the gains and losses with updated forex numbers. This is virtually cost prohibitive for a small partnership like us. Has anyone run into problems and extra costs for foreign securities with IB and if so, what have you done about them? And also, I'd appreciate suggestions for mini-primes if you have any. Currently talking with a couple. Costs are the biggest decision factor for us, assuming this foreign security issue basis reporting is handled properly. Thanks for your suggestions!

I have a feeling that when the JOBS Act regs making it legal to advertise are released we'll find out about a few managers we've all never heard of that have amazing performance and haven't been in the public eye at all (like you're kind of supposed to do as a fund manager).

In most cases, Chinese companies involved in accounting scandals have real and active operations. True. Then how about: "I would totally stay away from these". :D

I would stay totally away from these unless you're going to go to China to see their operations.

Wow, that's pretty scary, especially the day after the bids were due! (no position)

It's really easy to find out what he was doing! Look at his reports in the quarters preceding his double at 12/31/2008 and 6/30/2009!

Jacksonville, FL ------>>>> San Francisco

Pretty sure you can manage their accounts but you sure can't accept a dollar of compensation without being registered. Make sure to have a power of attorney so you have legal permission to make trades.

Weschler owned Davita and DTV so my guess is that it was him: http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1265816/000091957411006377/d1240019_13f-hr.txt

I'm at the tail end of starting a fund and would like a co-working space like the tech industry has many of, instead of an office where I'm the only one there(I just don't really need an office right now) and always working from coffee shops. I'm thinking of office space for 5-10 people, some of us would work there nearly full time, and other value investors could stop by when in town or just a few days a month. Depending on demand and cost of office space/financial liability for me, I might work on this soon. The location would be SOMA, FIDI, or other mass-transit easy to get to neighborhood. Thanks for your response and thoughts.

Wouldn't you want to drink more fluids in general? Perhaps another Coke? That's why bars provide free salty snacks like pretzels....

No, but that should be fairly easy to calculate. # ships * current market value of an 11 year old tanker. My guess is that the current market value is ~$35M and they have about 76 vessels paid for so ~$2.6B of current market value (of course, a liquidation would take a few years in this market so I'm not really looking at FRO like this; more of a future (very future) earnings type of investment). This is a very rough guess; I'm not an expert in these things at all. Scrap value should be: Total DWT * LWT factor * steel price/ton gives us something like: 17.6 *28.5% * ~$520/ton = $2.6B. This is an incredibly rough estimate which ignores their dry bulk fleet and post-20F ship dealings among other things. (http://www.tankeroperator.com/news/todisplaynews.asp?NewsID=2943) I was trying to envision how this plays out for them; they don't have much current capability to purchase new ships. I was thinking that maybe Fredriksen will loan FRO a few hundred million to purchase a few or perhaps he will purchase some through Knightsbridge (which raised significant capital a few months ago).

For tankers it's the Baltic Dirty Tanker Index that you want to look at: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=BIDY:IND I bought some FRO a few weeks ago but sold due to the unknown duration of the downturn; and especially the potential small U.S glut of oil. The Middle East- U.S Gulf route is the longest route; if it has low utilization the tanker downturn has just begun. The glut of tankers is absolutely huge and if you look back, there are multiple year periods (70s and early 80s) with very long periods of low rates.

Didn't Buffett say one time that Berkshire's return would be about 13% if Berkshire didn't have float? Quite sure I remember that, not sure where I read it though.....

Do you make money off Amazon referrals from this Morgan?

Do you have any insight on the market in Daytona? Any thoughts on Consolidated Tomoka's land? I'm fairly familiar with CTO but don't have any real insights. I don't own it and don't really want to (for a few different reasons, primarily because I require a higher return than what I believe current stockholders will experience and prefer to stick with higher return assets with more of a catalyst in general). I haven't valued it in a while but I wouldn't assume too many new raw land sales in the near future. Not very much is happening with raw land in northeastern Florida. Interesting things could happen now that McMunn is going to be out of the picture. Their actual land has huge potential, it's just a matter of making something happen. They could put a new mall (sell the land to SPG perhaps) at the southeast quadrant of their southern I-95 interchange at some point for example, or a theme park is another game-changing possibility(CTO isn't that far from Orlando). Have you seen their land?

The other Floridians commenting about the difference between southern Florida and JOE's land are spot on. I'm from Jacksonville and my family has been in the raw land development and brokerage businesses for 25 years (primarily Northeastern Florida). I wouldn't assume for a second that Brazilians are going to be buying condos in the Panhandle like they're doing in Miami. Miami is a destination now the Panhandle isn't. This doesn't express a value as to JOE's land (it's worth tons, not sure how much per average acre) it's just a "talking down" to the longs. JOE will take decades to play out so adjust your DCFs accordingly!

http://www.aar.org/NewsAndEvents/Freight-Rail-Traffic/2011/09/08-railtraffic.aspx?sf2151227=1 "Compared to August 2010, grain carloads in August 2011 were down 18,423 or 17.1 percent, and coal carloads were down 11,747 or 1.7 percent. Excluding coal and grain, U.S. rail carloads in August 2011 were up 26,362 carloads or 3.7 percent over August 2010." Tried to find some more info about why grain loadings are down so much but couldn't.

Grain and coal were down quite a bit: -17% and -3.1% respectively, for the week ending 8/27/11. If you mark those at the same numbers as last year, which is part of "seasonality" the AAR mentions in their below report, total loadings were up 1.79%. I think some volatility should be counted for grain and coal but not all of it, especially since the August economic commentary (http://www.aar.org/NewsAndEvents/~/media/aar/railtimeindicators/2011-08-rti.ashx) mentions that farm product shipments in general were down substantially in July due to weather; it looks like that's continued and is most of the reason the total car loadings were down but warrants further research. Also, total estimated ton-miles were flat; doesn't Powder Basin coal travel all the way to Florida sometimes? If these super-long trips were down substantially, then maybe the rest of the normal trips weren't (but I'm leaving out the even longer intermodal LA-CHI-NY type of stuff too which were slightly up). Does anyone know or have an estimate to the average lead time for the average car loading? It seems like economic fundamentals aren't too bad, but the media and associated panic in August could have reflexive effects on the fundamentals - this is my only concern. I would say that if the lead time to the average railcar loading is less than two weeks (8/27- 14 days back to the panic; note: of course some heavy equipment might be ordered months in advance) we could be quite sure that ex. grain and coal, loadings were slightly up year-over-year.

The options market-making scares me. I use them, don't get me wrong, but I'm not totally comfortable with an institutional account that my career depends upon (not even mentioning my equity in there) being intertwined with computerized market making. Hopefully there are different subsidiaries for the market-making but corporate veils do get pierced! Of course, the odds are low of something happening. I don't really understand broker-dealer financials anyways which is probably most of the reason I'm not totally comfortable. High insider ownership doesn't prevent algorithm craziness or rogue traders. They're levered 7 times. I've had personal options trades cancelled by them because the implied volatility was too high - their computers messed up.