Gregmal

After "investing" for nearly half a decade here, I made this decision to start trading today. Sold half my common at 2.60 to buy FNMAS at $11.45. Already paying off and frankly given the volatility here over the years, I'm kind of pissed at myself for not being more active with it. I know plenty of people who have already round tripped this thing several times over, meanwhile even if you had a nice entry, buy and hold has not yielded all that much.

Trimmed 25% of ENDP position started last Friday

Little more DDS. The longer it takes to get the 10Q out the bigger the potential infinity squeeze.

I actually did swing half of my common into preferred this morning. More of a risk management move, but I agree with Bove.

The stocks didn't move much headed into this because they plans are adulterated garbage. They say nothing new or binding, and continue to leave this an ambiguous mess where everyone can read the material and form whatever conclusion continues to suite their purpose...

Its the only way. 3 guys. Average income in US in something like $70K a year. Each are miraculously thrifty and save like there is no tomorrow. Each save $20,000 a year. Guy 1 is a pussy and just puts it in a savings account yielding 0.1%. After 20 years he has ~$425K and as a result, has to continue slaving away because he can't afford to retire. Guy 2 is also a pussy, but a little more adventurous. He buys bonds yielding ~2.5%. After 20 years he has ~$550k and shares the same fate as guy 1. Guy 3 is a savvy investor and aware that cash is trash and bonds are the equivalent of picking up pennies in front of a freight train. He invests in quality companies and averages 10% a year. After 20 years he has ~$1.4M, is retired, spends half his time in Florida, and owns the business that employs guys 1 and 2.... Owning quality assets(even on margin) has time and again been a wise decision. Keep it simple. Figure out how to value businesses, and let time take care of itself. They should teach this is high school rather than home ec and wood shop...

Bought some FIZZ $40 calls...If anyone is due for a bounce, its them. If not, the calls act as a stop loss.

Paired down some CVS at $63. ~18% total return in about 6 months... still think its got some upside, but looking to raise some cash. Just another example of a super obvious, not going anywhere/will be around forever, blue chip with an above average yield and single digit pe....right there for the taking.. but yea, the markets overvalued...

Taking DDS for a ride @59

Why is the stock down 15% today? Been on the go today operating from my phone but all I saw was the special dividend and continued plummeting of Iron Ore. Company did ~300M Ebitda at 2015 low prices.... despite the drop from $120-$80 we're still nearly double those levels. Maybe I'm missing something though. Who knows?

CLF

Depends on price point. Under 500K is moving nicely, probably in the 0-5% range with added supply from a few Ryan Homes projects coming online. Over 500K and especially 600K, is no man's land. Taxes are just way too high. Commercial is very, very area dependent. Some ghost towns, some newer developments seeing nice activity and demand.

Greg, To me, you've got this wrong. Why do you think that Mr. Jain & Mr. Abel are paid by Berkshire USD 18 M each annually [as far as we know, so far]? I mean : USD 18 M each for "delegation, bordering to abdication" [ref. Mr. Munger]? To me, it simply does not work that way anymore at Berkshire [and hasn't for a long time]. Yes, cyclicals are cyclicals, but then cyclicals aren't really all alike. I mean, there are stand-one-cyclicals, and then there are cyclicals-under-an-umbrella [, perhaps under the Berkshire-umbrella], and their operating conditions with regard to access to capital during a full cycle aren't nowhere near similar. Indeed I'll admit there is some hyperbole there to make my point. Everyone is terrified but they still find it OK to buy BRK...why? I think because they(hopefully) understand the business well enough to be comfortable owning it in a drawdown, and have seen how that story plays out before. BRK isn't the only security that's ownable, and I think a lot of the dilemma for most is a combination of fear and just not knowing enough to own a business without certainty. I remember when I first started out, reading a book, I think it may have been Minding Mr. Market or something like that, where the example Im shooting for came up. Essentially stating that investors often leave much by the way of returns, on the table because they rather be sure before doing anything. And that there is a very inverse relationship between certain types of certainty, and the types of returns one achieves. Another example of this is Cornwall Capitals play of Capital One during the subprime crisis in (I think) 2003 or so. Todays scenario is no where near as uncertain, but I constantly run into people who act that way which baffles me. Ive definitely seen reason to get more cautious the past year or so, and definitely want to be weary over the next 18 months. But "global growth" and "recession" fears to me have been for a long time, and continue to be poor reasons to earn 0-2% annually on your money... But yes John, in regards to your specific point, I think Berkshire is A-OK with Jain and Abel and if anything, am of the personal opinion that they will do better AFTER Mr. Buffett passes the torch.

Priced in? It depends, like I said, housing a year ago was definitely priced in, and then it didn't happen and some things utterly exploded. But then there's the issue of "what if there actually is a recession?" and I think that comes down to valuation, and where things are in the cycle. There are two cycles. The economic one, and then the market cycle for any individual or group of equities. We may be in inning 7 or 8, sure. I agree if we are talking about economic expansion. But some equities have been well ahead of that or even permanently penalized because of past events. So I think there are a lot of companies, BAC, WFC, GM, etc's of the world, that arent terribly far off in terms of valuation, from where their cyclical bottom may be. Im probably in the camp of Marks philosophically. Where are we generally speaking is quite easy to assess rather then "when exactly" it will all start/end. Political risk though I 100% agree with. Donny losing his mind a little more could be bad, Certain Lefties getting in next year could be catastrophic, so one needs to stay nimble. But if things don't go haywire, and we just get a regular old run of the mil recession, I dont see much to be scared of investing in certain names. Are 20-30% pullbacks possible? Sure. Is that a big deal if your are ready for it? Not in my book. The part that is really exciting? If lets say BAC has 30% downside until the next bottom, and Im there with bags of cash to throw at it, how big a position can I get, and how much upside then do I have going forward if now we're talking about being in the 1st or 2nd inning of a new cycle and these once hated companies are now proven, durable, and market leaders?

I also think being a macro guy is poisonous because your beliefs at the top trickle down and influence your ability to analyze at the bottom. If Im a guy looking bottom up, I do my analysis and have the various scenario skews and then assess probability and risk/reward. But Ive noticed that most macro guys can't do the same. Instead, they'll take their macro views, and then taint the fundamental analysis of individual companies, with those macro conclusions. The danger is, when you're wrong on macro, then that will likely translate to you being wrong on everything else. Again, look at Paulson, Einhorn, Bass, etc. These guys arent just wrong, they can't even hit the broad side of a barn and their returns arent just bad, they're f**** terrible. Whereas with individual investment companies, I can get the company analysis right and not even care about macro, and still make money.

This is actually something I wonder a bit about. My current thinking is that this is more likely to be a temporary situation than not, the reason being that normally when you have a shortage of something but a lot of demand for it, yes its price can go up like crazy at first but then over time the high price attracts new supply and that brings the price back down to earth. I don’t see why something similar cannot happen to things like, say, quality businesses via increased/improved entrepreneurship over time. That being said, it may take quite a long time for this type of “cycle” to fully play out. Today’s Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast was pretty interesting: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-02/why-one-of-the-oldest-investing-strategies-has-been-doing-terribly?srnd=premium The guest (Chris Meredith, Co-CIO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management) talks about some similarities he sees in the business/investment environment today and the 1920s. In each era, he notes, seemingly expensive growth stocks hugely outperformed other stocks, and not because there was a stupid bubble but because the growth companies (GM, Sears, etc in the 1920s; FANGs and co. today) actually lived up to the market’s lofty expectations. He then notes that value investing started to make a comeback sometime around 1940-50 as other businesses gradually caught up with those industry leaders in terms of technology, and that we may be heading in that direction today. I think this somewhat relates to what was discussed above re: how the lofty valuations of great companies — even if they are fully justified — can gradually deflate over time as the supply of such companies increases through things like imitation, technology diffusion, and the invention of better alternatives by new entrants. Yea, I kind of see some parallels and I think regulation could ultimately be what causes the valuations to readjust. But on the other side, GOOG, AAPL, FB, etc I don't see as outrageously expensive. The Saas stuff is ridiculous. Much of biotech is hugely at odds with what is implied by big Pharma valuations. There s a lot of stuff all around that doesn't make a ton of sense in relation to other stuff. But one area where I think it is harder to overcome this is because of the massive increase in wealth inequality(in other words, control of the resources) it's harder for ... "normally when you have a shortage of something but a lot of demand for it, yes its price can go up like crazy at first but then over time the high price attracts new supply and that brings the price back down to earth"... to occur. Yes the roaring 20's saw similar wealth gaps, but todays environment I think makes it difficult for competition beyond a certain level. To the extent we have some of the big tech monopolies, that at the same time have tentacles stretching into many other business areas, I see that stifling the success of new entrants. Unless you're a Silicon Valley type which most of us are not. That said, I have and continue to see plenty of areas to make money for the normal investor. I am hardly a macro guy, and frankly wouldn't consider myself smart enough to justify spending time in that arena either. Ive seen so many people who clearly are intelligent enough to play there, still be so friggin hilariously wrong with their macro reads and predictions, that it makes me question why anyone bothers when they can just spend time studying the over 10,000 publicly available individual companies and make easy money that way. And by easy money I dont mean get rich quick, but kind of just being a singles and doubles hitter with a .400 OBP vs being Kyle Bass or John Paulson and hitting .150 with a few grand slams...

Cheap money and lack of quality assets is a recipe for....significantly greater appreciation and duration of "cycles" than anyone can predict. Look at the Canadian housing market, specifically in areas like BC where Asians with unlimited wealth keep on rocking and rolling. Even Buffett has said something along the lines of, if the rate on the 30 year remains 2%, stocks are very undervalued. Its supply and demand. There really arent THAT many quality asset options out there and money printing has just allowed the people with assets to need to place more of it somewhere. Another thing I'd point out that is truly amazing to me is the unemployment rate. We're at 4% and considered full employment, EVEN WITH Amazon destroying retail, 90% of mom and pop businesses 6 feet under, outsourcing abundant, and automation gearing up as well. I would have expected things to be much worse.

I always come back to the same things, kind of touched on above. Much of the market is already pricing in scenarios much more severe than just a run of the mill recession. Its not like autos, housing, energy, banking, etc, etc are trading at 52 week highs and 25x PEs...I mean look at what we just saw with some housing stocks. I recall about 9-12 months ago chatting here with some about companies like NVR, and LGIH...how they were priced for death and if death didn't occur it was impossible not to see massive rallies here. And NVR is up like 70% and LGIH basically doubled and guess what? They're still trading at pretty modest valuations...Nothing says the same isn't possible for many in the above mentioned sectors. Is it really all the farfetched to see BAC at $40+ or WFC at $65 next year? But further contradictory, if indeed all believe the slowdown is here, why does nearly everyone on this board own BRK which has a massive composition of cyclical businesses? What cuz Warrens got $120B of cash? At 90 some odd years old, you're essentially making a bet that a recession and massive plunge will occur in such rapid order that a guy statistically on his deathbed not only has the time to deploy all that capital, but to see the investments through... I don't know about that. I think all would be well suited to step back off the ledge.

Pretty funny stuff from some unique characters that Im sure many here have bumped into from time to time. Ones batshit crazy but brilliant and the other is an all around scammer. Ill let each make their determination as to which I'm talking about. If you've met them you already know... https://nypost.com/2019/08/30/investor-who-was-once-fbi-informant-files-25m-defamation-lawsuit-against-rival/

Entered the abyss. Bought a little TEVA and ENDP. Looking at a basket approach as it seems everyone thinks this is the end of all of them. Very small spec position.

Ive actually long believed the opinion put in play by some ex Obama fella yesterday or the day before...That Trump/China is the real collusion story. That Trump's given them a deal under the table and is now just timing the shit out of it so he has momentum going into the elections. If this were the case you'd see a trade deal announcement finalized in either Q4 or early Q1 so you have the economic data showing blowout figures in July, August, September, October.

Just snagged some more GRIF at 34.9, cuz why not

Have been buying & selling over the last 2-3 weeks. Typically 20-30% of the position. When VIX dropped to 15-17 I was buying and selling those same contracts each time it went to 20+. Entire position has basically been paid for in profits at this point and I purchased more today. VIX hasn't dropped in the target range like I've been waiting for on prior buys, but 2 observations give me an ominous feeling: 1) A handful of the last few days have ended slightly positive or flat for the S&P/Dow and my puts positions still rose in value slightly (crazy!) 2) NYSE Composite failed to break through it's 200 DMA today and turned negative again. Not a huge TA expert, but that seems to tell me that a major composite failed to break out on positive headlines (supposedly softer trade stance from Trump/China) and the market isn't buying it and is hedging instead (a bid under puts despite rising market). Maybe I'm just to more risk-seeking now that it's house money, but it doesn't sit right with me so I purchased more puts today. Yea, Im getting the same gut feeling. Everything of late seems like a bull trap. Cyclicals just don't move on up days and then get flattened on down days. Everything gets faded. Many names within an earshot of or at 52 week lows. Even non correlated assets are getting sold off. My top performer this month is basically a triple net REIT.... Seems like I was wrong this time around. Closed the extra positions but continue to hold the core hedge. We'll see. It seems every time something recovers(be it the economic news, stock market, or whatever) Donny thinks he's got money in the bank to go wage war on someone...

Trimmed about 10% of my BX. Dont know what's wrong with this stock but it won't go down...

added a bit to HTL on the dip under $1