Vish_ram

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The value of the call option gets reduced by the amount of the dividend. Nestle pays a high div. I don't understand how this works. Do you have articles you can refer me to? http://www.putcallparity.net/put-call-parity-of-european-options-with-dividends call = stock + put - dividend - X (capital needed to exercise the option, adj for rates)

The value of the call option gets reduced by the amount of the dividend. Nestle pays a high div.

Total return fund reminds me of Fidelity Magellan fund in late 90s.

1) your guess is as good as anybody else's 2) the indices are maintained by a company/group of people. it is on paper and they can add or remove with gay abandon. The funds (ETF's) that track the indices should buy/sell to track the index (reduce tracking error). When they do it, they'll incur capital gains that are passed to shareholders.

The fed was also confused. you had high inflation due to oil shock, fed increased rates. Then economy tanked, Fed dropped the rates. All this happened in a span of 1-2 years.

Ruhle should change her last name to "Rude"

Eric Your act of taking margin debt to buy BAC common (buying puts to hedge it) is no different than what a bank does, am I right? A bank is short near term and long the deep end of curve and profits when yield curve is upward sloping. You are like a bank that is betting on a bank. This works great as long as fed is accommodative. When yield curve inverts, will you close down the margin debt? your margin debt if tied to fed funds will keep going up and total costs (margin interest+ diminishing put premiums) may not exceed the returns on BAC.

Some might question that this is not value investing. Nevertheless, I would like to know the econ charts that you watch to gauge the economic activity, market valuations etc. Please provide the source of the chart/graph. I run some charts in St Louis fed data for GDP/market cap Tobin's Q, S&P 500 vs fed funds rate etc

I really wonder what his money weighted returns are. We know his time weighted returns starting inception. if he had 40-50% returns in initial years and lousy ones later one, then very few benefited from his returns that he is claiming. He really had some half a dozen stocks that lost more than 99%, and with permanent capital losses. some examples are cryptologic, delta financial, pncl, compucredit, TMM etc. Some others like HNR he lost 50+%. Kudos to him for bouncing back. Some lesser mortals would have been psychologically devastated.

I like the concept of legalizing pot. The challenge is how do we get it off kids? The money, untaxed that is siphoned off to columbia and other countries is halted. the illegal drug trade kills people on both side of borders, fills up our prison, cops spend time and money to control the uncontrollable. We legalize and tax it just like tobacco.

Pot stocks are on fire http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/07/investing/marijuana-stocks/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

I can make an argument that market is very cheap based on market cap/GDP. The GDP/GNP are practically same. 1) Someone (pupil I think) earlier had mentioned the profits generated by US companies in non-US soil. This reflects in market cap but not in GDP or GNP (as GNP only includes earnings by US person in foreign soil). 2) The corporate profits as a percentage of gdp historically is 6.2, right now it is more than 11%. Lets not go into details as to why it is high or will it mean revert. The profits drive market capitalizations. So all things equal, we can afford to have say 25% higher market cap due to superior profits. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=cSh If we apply both these factors and normalize it, we may be closer to the average market cap/GDP ratio of 60%. Far from the bubble territory.

no_free_lunch You are right that the long term effect of inhaled insulin on lungs is unknown. Afrezza has been used in one shape or form for last 10+ years. No matter how good the product is, a good portion of patients will be turned off by this issue. I had an email conversation with Dr Kayed year or two back ----------------------------------- From: "Kayed, Rakez" < Sent: Sun, August 15, 2010 11:37:15 AM Subject: RE: amyloid aggregates article Short answer; I do not know how it will affect other insulin inhalers, since we did not test them, and we do not know what happens in humans, since we did not have access to tissues from the lungs of humans who used the inhalers. Our research focus is amyloid formation not drugs evaluation, in this study we were investigating protein aggregation at the interface, after our initial discovery that inhaled insulin forms amyloid in the lung, we performed many experiment in vitro, and we were surprised how poor the quality of the insulin encapsulated in these kits was. Its aggregation kinetics was worst that the recombinant insulin we bought in bulk. Still we hope our novel findings will insure that scientists and companies look more carefully at insulin aggregation both in vitro and in vivo. We did not have access human tissues from people who used the inhalers. This is the first report describing these novel findings,thus we are sure that many researchers especially those who have access to human tissue will look at this phenomena in humans (remember humans are different than mice). Also we are confident that they will look more carefully at the quality of the insulin intended for human use to insure higher quality. Also we were not able to test the clearance of amyloid in the lungs after discontinuing the treatment, because we did not have enough inhaled insulin to complete these experiments (Exubera was withdrawn from the market) we tried to obtain more kits by contacting Pfizer and Necktar directly with no success, still be believe that in mice the effects are irreversible because we found caspase activation. Best Regards rakez Rakez Kayed, PhD Assistant Professor Department of Neurology George and Cynthia Mitchell Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases ----------------------------------------- My email read your article "Inhaled Insulin Forms Toxic Pulmonary Amyloid Aggregates" with lot of interest. I'm not in research, but I'm a shareholder of Mannkind corporation. I'm trying to understand how your findings impact Mannkind's Afrezza. As you may know, Afrezza is a proprietary FDKP with monomeric insulin. It is inhaled similar to Exubera. Both are different compounds. 1) Do you think inhaling afrezza will also cause amyloid aggregates? 2) In your study, the rats were subjected to Exubera for 7 days only, in Exubera trials patients were exposed for years and after the initial drop in FEV/PFT measurements, there was a non-progressive reversible decline in lung function. Why do you think in Exubera trials, over the years the amyloids didn't aggregate on and on and cause a continuous lung function decline? I would really appreciate your feedback ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I've some more info on it from other knowledgeable posters. email me in private if you are interested I've a small (speculative) position.

Place a 1 cent ask (sell ) in your account. IF you have a retirement account (non-taxable), then place a buy at same 1 cent. You are paying yourself, but taking the loss on taxable account. You only pay the trading costs in both accounts. Allow the puts to expire in retirement account

Freddie mac investor presentation http://www.freddiemac.com/investors/pdffiles/investor-presentation.pdf

Are you really asking "how much of historical growth can I project into future?" I would project more if industry is fragmented and the rollup is a leader in consolidation. I'll project less if the company fails to show organic growth in periods of no M&A. I would project more if mgmt is young and has a good track record. It is always safer to assume a base case valuation with growth=0; (last 4 Q op CF - capex)/(r-0) ; r is discount factor.

I would think that the govt will provide some catastrophic insurance (similar to the ones in terrorist attack). The influence of F&F pref in recapitalization is also questionable. In traditional bankruptcy, the debt holders (senior ones) gain full/more control during recapitalization. Here F&F are healthy profitable companies, albeit with govt support. In a year or two, they may have enough money to redeem prefs, negating their influence.

I think there are several possible outcomes , each offering a different upside to common. Option1: Privatize F&F after paying off UST; pros: pref goes to par, may also get accrued dividends, common gets all the upside cons: the new entity will be without implicit guarantee, will be a monopoly controlling >60% market. New competitors may emerge, but will be slow to catch up. A potential anti-trust action can ensue Option 2: berkowitz plan run off (govt + common benefit) + newco (mostly pref and some common) pros: pref gets more upside (no wonder berkowitz is proposing it) common: limited upside compared to Option 1 Option 3: Govt does nothing in near term (1-3 yrs) pros: pressure grows to reinstate div on pref, pref goes up common languishes in uncertainty Option 4: Govt puts f&f in run off, gets paid with principal & interest, pays off pref with div (buys back all pref) and rest accrues to common. Govt lets private companies underwrite guarantee. Companies like brk, aig, ..etc start setting up shop and competes for biz. pros: pref gets paid fully cons: limited upside to common, milks the run off. How do we deal with existing f&f employees, patents, infrastructure once runoff is complete? there could be lots of opposition from this stakeholder. I think 3 & 4 are likely options. disclaimer: long pref. I would agree with this line of thinking. The preferreds have preference in any sort of liquidation/transformation event, but given that the company is probably worth either zero or bucketfuls to the stockholders (depending on the legal outcome), the fact that the preferreds have a bounded upper payout and the common does not may make the bet better, probabilistically. It sounds like this isn't a big holding for Ackman, and is probably best compared to his purchase of GGP in bankruptcy that had a chance for a very high potential payout (that just happened to occur, in that case), and probably a very real risk of being worthless.

People would still have to buy "autonomous vehicles" insurance. The demand side of equation would change (go up) as more and more elderly who otherwise are not driving, would start using AV's. With the aging population that is living longer, you would see a massive demand for both cars and insurance.

this link would be useful https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=minimumDeposits&p=act

I really see some sinister forces at play 1) Take the case of lobbying by NRA to freeze minimum wage for fast food workers. The minimum wage for tipped workers, $2.13 an hour, hasn’t changed in 22 years. The low wage earners will start become a burden to society. Their children won't get good education, healthcare etc. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy 2) The systematic collapse of defined benefit plan across the board has shifted the financial/healthcare burden from companies to individuals. The corp reaped the benefits and top 1% own corp disproportionately. Middle class got hollowed out. 3) The corporations/PE etc lobbied successfully to reduce corp tax rates with all loopholes built-in. this benefits the top 1-10% at expense of middle class I can go on and on. I think this is the beginning and things will get much worse. I'll be surprised if we didn't get a social revolution in next 20 years.

In addition to the above mentioned arguments for bull market, we've the following 1) Capacity utilization is very low, reducing the threat of inflation 2) Commodity prices are not in bull market territory 3) Unemployment is high, labor force participation is low: no threat of higher wages 4) Emerging market economies are not in high gear, so any growth in US will not cause bubbles over there 5) Looking at valuations, see http://www.yardeni.com/pub/valucb.pdf Look at all the charts like P/E, Tobin Q (Figure 17), market cap vs GDP, you would not say we are in bubble territory 6) Anecdotal evidence: so many people were left out in the recent run up, they are pissed off and want to make some $$. They are going to enter the market in droves. 7) Ray Dalio calls this "beautiful deleveraging", where we dont have run away inflation or deflation. I think that the bull market is getting started. All this flies in the face of Watsa's CPI derivative bet. What gives?

What was more interesting was Putin's comment about American exceptionalism.

Really easy. Go long (buy & hold) on all direxion 3X ETF's. You can go long on both bull 3x and Bear 3x, and lose money really fast. I admire the IQ of the guy who invented these products. How much trust would you have to place on the incompetency of the market participants? Take a look at FAZ, ERY... No not at all. A short seller normally cherry picks a few stocks or commodities and not an entire portfolio. There is a reason that there are not a plethora of short sellers around because it is bloody hard, and getting harder. From financial history, the worst looking stocks in a bear market usually perform fantastic when the bull starts to take the lead. Conversely, some of the best looking stocks in a bull market turn at the first sign of a bear approaching. Maybe not publicly here, but try to construct a portfolio that does 10% worse than your current portfolio (difference of 5% alpha and 5% minus alpha). I venture that over a 12 month period that on occasion your minus alpha portfolio performs better than your alpha portfolio just to spite you. No data to prove a hunch, but the minus alpha portfolio is attempting to go "non-correlation" which is tough these days versus 20 years ago. Cheers JEast