Gregmal

I think theres a lot working against her and those funds right now. But I also get a kick out of the stupidity out there. Value investor (insert name) returns -20 or -30% for a year and everyones like "oh but he's bound to turn it around"...Cathy does -20% after crushing it for half a decade and "thats the end of her" and "she's finished".....quite amusing.

I would pretty liberally say this is almost always true. In a growing and civilized society, the relevance ring as I call it is always expanding. I always point to the NYC suburb halo effect. Areas the were boondocks 2-3 decades ago are now multi million dollar mansion lined suburbs. Areas that were 20 minutes outside of those areas are now upper middle class enclaves. I dont see how this doesnt apply across the board, in the majority of RE based asset classes. Look at Orlando over time. Spare space in an OK or better location is basically just next generation's uncovered land play.

I consider myself an employee of the family. Both my wife and I at this point realize that everything revolves around the kids. Theyre the number 1 in our lives. Everything we do is for them. Which includes earning to ensure their future prosperity and quality of life. The notion that an unfortunate event(death), entitles a freeloading 3rd party to some windfall, at our expense, is ludicrous.

Yea IDK, but having grown up around the ilk, Westchester and Bergen County were kind of always regarded as the places people who made lots of money working in NYC went to raise families if they valued having a yard, a good school system, and a place where your kids could congregate safely in the town center/parks. And this was back when NYC was safe LOL

Yea no you do make a good point there. My brother does a lot fo that stuff currently. Was at Stony Brook and now at Penn with their genetics team. Nothing but respect there. Many of his friends are the ones doing a lot of the covid research thats been making news. There was one recently about possible links to snake venom which was neat. The academic end I'm talking about the English and History professors making investment banker base salaries....Those estates IMO should be taxed higher than the estates of farmers who worked 5ams to 8pms for 60 years. The latter still not making any money but simply leaving a huge piece of valuable land at a low basis that their kids could not afford on market to market resets.

Its just another scam to screw the aspiring middle- upper middle class people. If your family already paid taxes on it, why does the government deserve anymore? Personally I think the estate tax should be 80% on any income earned as a result of being a "public servant" or government employee. Same for working at a public school/university. Do these tenured teachers really earn the $200k a year plus benefits? How much of it comes at the expense of those outrageous tuitions and bogus student loan programs? For the rest, anything over maybe $25M or $50M I think is a reasonable threshold. But $3.5M or whatever theyre proposing right now? What a crock.

I dont really have an opinion on Cathy other than kudos to her for making a name and so far a killing doing something different. Otherwise, I'd point out that she had a $4,000 price target, pre-split, when Tesla was trading at $200 and all the TeslaQ geniuses said fraud and had 0 targets...So she has already been right as split adjusted TSLA remarkably touched her targets...and she certainly has more credibility than the ones who were bearish because of their Excel sheets. Maybe they can show us where they called 5-10 baggers but most cant. And otherwise what good is all their "research" if it just results in massive losses? Disclosure, I am currently short Tesla and a few ARK funds.

~15 years.

Yea I think you've got the right idea. My entire investing life there have been people saying stocks are expensive and theres been people claiming they cant find anything to buy. Never in my life have I not been able to find something worth buying. Just gotta look and too many people are lazy or just too cheap to be well suited for stocks. Last month there were repeated concerns about "the top" and you had people selling stuff like MSGE and CLPR at straight dumb valuations LOL. You need those people to make a market I guess. But as far as "the top", and what it means?....top, schmop...yawn.

Also shorted some BRG Jan $10 puts for 65c. Not really an endorsement of the company AT ALL, but just a logic trade backed by what seems like a fat compensation check for taking stock at a price the may warrant another activist takeout offer or two....

Your timeline seems perfect for some PSTH. I also agree on selling OTM puts.

Haha we meet again. I had some Dec but just started the March 5s as well. Got 80 last week. 100 yesterday. 100 more today. Tangentially, the AIV spinoff was now 3 Qs ago. They still dont even have their website fully updated, no IR efforts, and not even a simple investor deck.....why would that be? The evidence continues to point to this being a deliberate act...ask oneself, if I had to make a spin off as ugly and unattractive as possible, what would I do? Answer? Pretty much everything they did and are continuing to do. Would be something if they even duped loud mouth Litt and his attention seeking antics into sticking with plain vanilla AIRC at the expense of where all the value was hidden.... Forgot to mention as well...best part of the calls here? No dividend on this one, and a good possibility of buybacks.

More AIV calls

Oh yea..the read has been spot on and the short term puts have worked, but part of me wishes we'd have one or two bad trading days so this can fully puke. Nasdaqs been up solidly this week and PTONs still down $7 a share. Would probably be down double if the market wasn't so strong. As such I think its also currently a suitable short term market hedge.

People rely on that?

PTON $95 puts expiring 9/10

I'd say it depends. First, the cool thing about investing, is you only need to get rich once. If you get rich and then blow it, you're an idiot. But outside of that...give me any person in the world and 10 of their top holdings and I can usually tell you right away whether they are competent or not. You can look at any number of things. Logic used in a thesis. Diversity of the portfolio composition. Quality of holdings. Look at Einhorn right now...GRBK...ok ive liked this one for half a decade, then...Chemours, Tech resources, danimer, Gopro, Brighthouse...like WTF are these? Paulson as well. Just loaded with crap. They reek of "I'm the smartest guy in the room"...Whereas look at some of the others, not just Buffett, but Ackman, Tepper, Loeb. Maybe not every pick, but Intel, AAPL, Google, PCG...maybe I dont personally like all those, but I can easily see that, ok these guys are buying quality names. Even here though, the thing is, maybe you dont need names that ring bells, but thats where you go to a track record. And when the track record is total dog shit....hmmm. Everyone is wrong once in a while its just part of the game. But you can over time look at people's stuff and take a combination of the things they invest in, what their returns have been, and how have peers done, and get an idea. And Paulson and Einhorn have straight up sucked for way too long to get a pass. I'd bring it back to Ackman. Even his "shit" investments. HLF made all the sense in the world. He was right. He just judged the catalyst wrong and sized it too aggressively. VRX too. Great thing until it got too much attention and then Congress shed light on a. bad industry and really since then, no one has made money in Pharma. Philador was big for sure, but that wasn't really what brought it down. The buy drug/raise prices model worked until it didnt. Same thing with Buffett, IBM, ok he tried something, didnt work, moved on. Tesco too. But the companies were solid and the idea just didnt work. Far cry from going off the board and coming up with duds consistently.

For sure. But most are at least semi decent investors. There s a few, like Einhorn and Paulson(I'll leave out some of the COBF favs to avoid controversy) who are just downright terrible investors.

Just closed on this recently. Ironically enough, more anecdotal evidence for the @BG2008 NY revival thesis...the seller was a PGRE exec who got called back to the office in Manhattan, starting in September. Fun times.

Paulson doesnt get as much credit as he deserves. Dude is a salesman. His investments since the GFC have been downright awful. Terrible doesnt even cover it. And what does he do? Laughs behind the scenes as he opens new "Paulson ultra advantage" and "Paulson super leverage credit opportunity fund IV" and all that shit. I wouldnt listen to a thing he has to say. He's been saying the same thing about gold since the GFC.

I wouldnt let John Paulson manage the rounded up change from my daily Dunkin Donuts orders.

Flipped the 105s which now pull the basis there and cover the majority of the outlay on the 100s. Basically a free play now.

Definitely turns your world upside down.

IB did implement a modest margin increase earlier in August. The 11th IIRC. Widespread rather than security specific.

Maybe, but there's more to it IMO. For every person on margin, there's tons of people with cash. I regularly run into folks who have like 20%+ cash or cash like equivalents. Additionally, whats the average Joe really able to margin? 2:1? Generally smaller sums. For every one of those theres an institution who can access significantly more in terms of % leverage and actual dollar volume. Its not irrelevant, just one data point that may or may not be helpful in a grand equation. I'd say you need to do way more than just look at this on a chart to get anything valuable out of it.