lnofeisone

Shorting UNG calls.

Overall, considering they had nothing last year and now they are at the front of the pack is impressive. It's substantially better than Deepseek (33%) and a little bit ahead of the other models. However, that's all in the vacuum and theoretical. It still remains to be seen how it will perform in the wild.

CNC

Perplexity doesn't have a model. You are likely benchmarking it against something under the hood of Perplexity and you can adjust to go with GPT-4o, Claude, etc. Mistral, by design, uses small models and focuses on text. The downside here is that it doesn't keep up with GPT on complex tasks, and it's not good for coding, math, or reasoning. They are coming out with Pixtral but you can already see costs starting to go up with that. Realistically, the clients I have, always get jazzed about Mistral but when you put things in production and benchmark, Mistral tends to underperform. I do agree with you that US start ups are spending like drunken sailors. Revenue is coming in but the constant need to update and retrain really eats away any revenue that comes in.

I was part of the fund that invested in the latest (F) round.

Full disclosure - I have Andrul shares. Anduril is a great product company in the mold of SpaceX and they are great at marketing. While they purport themselves as product builders trying to build ahead of what the military wants, it's primarily exaggerations. They shape and hustle with the generals/admirals like the rest of the military complex industry. They solicit pilots to be funded by the Gov't. They differ because they try to drive to fixed-priced contracts instead of the huge time and materials that the likes of LMT like.

Sold my NEP puts and buying NEP long.

Inference is where the rubber meets the road but it's a volume game. I wouldn't be surprised if inference is going to be the new browser for big tech to bring people into their ecosystem.

You can run it for $4k but you can't train it for that amount. Only the inference side of the business is impacted which is roughly 10% of the hardware usage for most large organizations today. It'll shift more over time but right now training is what eats up the $s.

Bought a basket of office REITs with focus on areas that have strong RTO mandates for gov and non-gov workers.

Completely unrelated but I absolutely love this sentence.

There is a lot here and it depends on if one is a corporation or a person. For a corporation, recognize revenue in low-tax jurisdictions and recognize expenses in high-tax jurisdictions. For individuals, there are states that don't tax capital gains (FL, TN, and a few others). This one is often utilized when people move for jobs (or you can be more inventive if you so choose). You can sell in your current state or in your future state and you can pick based on the capital gains tax. There is also a variety of trading schemes that can be tuned similarly. For example, buying a stock that will go before ex-div and holding it for 60 days with a corresponding short. Day after ex-div, the stock will trade down by the dividend amount, and you can sell it, getting an ST loss to offset your LT gains, and the dividend will be qualified.

Sure. No argument there. Usually, when these strategies are employed, it's part of a broader tax strategy with the idea of maximizing: permanent reduction of current tax liability, tax arbitrage, and tax deferral. Doing just one of these is generally suboptimal.

Say you have $100 ST gain on a $100 investment (total $200) AND you make over $518,900. Would you rather pay your ST rate of 37% ($37) or $6 (3% fee) + 0 (cap gain if your income next year falls to 0) --> say you have y to y volatile income $6 (3% fee) + 15% (LT cap gain rate)--> say you are single with income under $518,900 $6 (3% fee) + 20% (LT cap gain rate)--> say you are single and over $518,900 Again, this is packed with assumptions, but there are people for whom this makes sense.

It's reasonable for this space. You can generate savings well in excess of the fee but a lot of assumptions have to align. Like I said, I wouldn't pay for someone to do it. Most investors who know how to short equities and know how to select tax lots with their brokers can do this strategy themselves.

I don't have a point of view on Gotham, but I have worked on this issue for the IRS. At best, this tax deferral strategy can give you access to funds now. You'll pay the tax once you unwind the entire portfolio. So it may make sense in some cases (say you are on the verge of retiring and will shift to lower tax bracket in few years but need funds now). 1.85% is a relatively reasonable fee. PGIM charges 3%. Personally, I wouldn't pay for this because you can do it yourself.

I opportunistically short UNG. Usually my set up is simple. Nat gas needs to be in backwardation, run up 30-40% from the lows (first short tranche) or 100% from the lows (second short tranche), and UNG needs to start rolling its contracts (which they started yesterday). I hold the short for about a week (sometimes longer if it runs away) because that's roughly how long it takes for UNG to sell its front-month and reload on future months. If all 3 things are true, I have a good betting average on these shorts. Incidentally, this trade worked out faster than I thought so I closed most of the position.

Shorted some UNG calls.

I have 10 mo old and a 3 yo. 1) Take as much time as you can afford. 15 months is amazing. My firm allowed 16 weeks. I took full 16. Both times. 2) Hire help. The first few weeks/months are insane. You will be continuously overloaded by a mixture of learning new things, anxiety, and fear of screwing up constantly fueled by the lack of sleep. We offloaded most of the laundry, cooking, and cleaning and still were busy. 3) Events, daycare, etc., get booked very fast. Put yourself on the waiting lists. Our daycare waitlist was 1.5 years long. If you are in the US: 1) Your work may offer a bunch of plans. HSA, Childcare FSA. Optimize that. 2) 529. Make sure you do it through your state so that you can get state benefits and then you can move to Vanguard for lower fees. You can also convert some of your 529 to Roth after 15 years. After that, enjoy the ride.

Yep, but no shares and options carried insanely rich premium.

This is what I think as well. While SLG and VNO popped, the likes of PGRE and JBGS didn't get much love. The environment for both of these markets (NY and DC, and i know PGRE has a bunch of stuff in SF) is improving with workers being mandated to go back to work. This push is becoming very real and I'm trying to discern how meaningful this will be for the valuation of these names and more importantly, how fast.

Do you have names you are looking at or picked up in April of 2023? @Gregmal - I only pulled this up because some of the organizations in the DC area I know are starting to look for additional space. Some because they let their leases lapse after the pandemic, and some just happen to outgrow existing space and just have too many people with the RTO mandate. I think the investment case here would likely be geography-specific, though I'm debating if it's worth picking up a bunch of names or something broad like Boston properties.

I couldn't find a topic, so here it goes: Office is probably the second most hated asset class behind O&G. Many companies are now pushing for a return to office (RTO). JPM is already there. Amazon is now going to RTO 5, and Bloomberg is at RTO 4. Concurrently, local governments support office rejuvenation (as most downtown areas tend to have offices). Then we have the DOGE...is it time to start picking up a basket of office names in the strongest markets (NYC, Boston, DC, SF)? I think in 2+ years, we'll see the results of this remote work reversal. I don't think we'll go to pre-covid levels but more than today and that could have meaningful impact on some of these REITs. What does the board think?

Yep. You are just a sole proprietor. Even if you sell your old stuff, you can claim a higher cost basis (just have the receipts handy), and you'll pay no tax.

This is a misconception. Just file Schedule C and you can take the loss. You don't need to set up an LLC or do anything fancy.