ubuy2wron

Goodwood are pretty credible value guys from all I have seen.

I sold my stock and then legged into a bull spread with the Feb 2010 60 and 65 options with a cost of 2.00 net.

A short article on seeking alpha re El Nino the article in itself is of little interest but the links it provides gives some interesting data. http://seekingalpha.com/article/160298-chart-of-the-week-peak-hurricane-season-is-here

This is an interesting problem with practical applications. If you use the investment banks as a proxy for the doors then you would clearly improve your returns by selling one investment bank and purchasing another after the goat Lehman Bros or Bear Sterns is revealed. Also it is humorous to consider that as value managers we actively select invest in the doors that have had goats revealed frequently behind because we understand that the true odds of a goat being revealed on subsequent openings is dependent on the total number of goats in game. Unless of course there is some sort of contigent probablility at work. In the real world it does seem that a door that has revealed a goat in the past does seem to have higher chance of revealing a goat in the future.

Does GAS-t accurately track the price of the gas index over long periods of time? I seem to recall that some other ETFs have suffered substantially from volatility and have failed to track their index. My advice is spend at least 48 hours investigating the intracacies of any etf commodity play particularly the levered etf,s. The smart hedgies just short both sides of the the bull and bear commodity etf's and eat the speculators capital, the contango which is very steep right now is another factor which can quickly eat up your returns these things generaly are poison to the ill informed. That said I am also very interested in gas plays and I am interested in anyones ideas out there. T. Boone is right ,Nat gas should be a major transportation fuel in N.A. It makes way more sense than gasohol. Just mandating truckers convert to Nat Gas would do wonders for balance of trade.

My personal asset allocation approx. 40% cash its gone up in the last 6 weeks 10% FFH 5% RSI.un 15% a little of this and that 10% ORH 15% YLO.un 5% VLN The only thing that is appreciating right now are commodities and securities in the real world stuff is getting cheaper so the return on cash is not as bleak as one may think and yes I am waiting for some more fat pitches.

I think if you gobble up 2.5M shares on a nibble by nibble basis, and then sell it in one big block, it shows you having zero net activity in this report.

It will close in 2010 but it will be anounced this month. ORH traded $1.00 higher in the after mkt on friday and 2500 of the 2010 bull spreads 60 65 were put on Thursday and Friday.Of course this is just speculation on my part :)

I sold some long term 350 leaps today against a long term deep in the money call position. I also purchased some ORH with the proceeds of the sale. I feel particularly smart today which usualy means I am about to lose some money.

Sorry I should have indicated this was for ORH. Someone just bet 67,500 that ORH would be trading north of $60.00 by November.

Someone just put on a large bull spread for 1500 contracts NOV expiry 60-65. Some one knows sumpin or thinks they know sumpin.

Warren is converting a's to B's and then donating the B's to the Gates foundation which then sells them. I have not thought this through but at some time control of Berkshire has to come into play

I agree on every point except it is not an isurance company and a mutual find it is an insurance company and a hedge fund without the 2/20 vig. I look at anything less than BV with this co. as a gift

I do not own this name however the Harlequin business stand alone value is probably greater than the whole company mkt cap now which means Mr Mkt. is putting a negative value on their newpaper assets right now. The newspapaer business is brutal , a cyclical down turn on top of a secular downtrend not a pretty place to be. I suspect that FP will disappear this will help some. I wonder when some large city daillies make the decision to stop publishing a paper edition and go entirely electronic.

Some one with very thick fingers was trading FFH options this morning I was legging into a bull spread on a leap and sold some calls this AM 15.00 above where they should have been filled, once in a while the trading muses smile upon you. Its possible this all some sophisticated attempt at capturing some preceived option mis-pricing but from what I can see it looks like a bunch of bear spreads were put on. I still think however that the law suit against the hedgies could be a very valuable wild card. If it is a big conspiracy as suspected by some then one participant could cave but buy a bunch of options before doing so and screw all the other players and perhaps escape prosecution and liability.

The culture matters. I have flown West Jet recently and it is now my first choice I actually would pay more (not much more) to fly them in the future if you put a gun to my head and said you have to buy an airline my first response would be pull the trigger however if you said I will shoot your dog I would probably pick West Jet thinking long term I will loose less. I actually think Aeroplan which is the affinity program spun off from Air Canada an interesting proposition I think of it in the same bucket as Warrens investment in the Savings stamps company if Air Canada remains solvent it is worth owning but I am not sure of Air Canadas solvency.

The US economy is about to get decidedly better for the simple fact that the two most important parts of the economy housing and the auto industry are not going to get worse. The production of new autos and new homes are currently at post WW2 lows if consummers are not purchasing homes and cars the US has no economy as pretty much everything else other than agricuture is imported. I am in the Bernanke camp in that depressions are caused by policy errors (central governments stepping on the brakes instead of the gas in periods economic contraction) while the debt levels the US treasury is incurring take your breath away they are no larger than those incurred in WW2 which eventualy ended the great depression. I see the history books labeling this as the great recession and yes it will sear itself on peoples psyche and change behaviour but it should result in investment opportunities that are frankly perfect for Buffet followers.

The potential damages on this action may be substantialy larger than anyone can imagine. American juries have a reputation of making VERY large awards if they feel one parties actions have been particularly egregious. If the rats start turning on each other it could get interesting you could even see a situation were one hedgie starts aggressively buying FFH and then offering to cut a deal . I will sing like a canary in exchange for immunity.

Parsad, the Main and Hastings area of Vancouver has been in decline a little longer than 20 to 30 years. More like 50 plus years that being said it is a travesty that conditions like that exist in the midst of such ample plenty. As Patrick so aptly described the "War on Drugs" was lost before it was started. Drug addiction is the source of a huge portion of petty crime in our fair city some estimates put it as high as 70-80%. Drug addicts are breaking into houses shopping, lifting etc.Their suppliers are shooting each other and innocent bystanders in market controll struggles and the funds eventualy find themselves back into the prime heroin sources which is Afghanistan and Pakistan and fund the terrorist activities which send Canadian boys home in body bags. Heroin and other illegal drugs would cost as much as aspirin if they were legally available with a prescription. It has also been said that most of the the hetero sexual aids transmission is occuring because of prostitution being the favorite means of employment for female addicts. It seems to me by legalizing drugs and strictly controlling there access we 1 reduce crime by a huge margin 2 stop the most important source of funding for terrorists 3 dramatically reduce the incidence Aids in the population, I certainly could come up with a much more extensive list. The downside is that a small additional percentage of individuals MAY become addicted if the stigma of illegality were removed. Given that the majority of negative consequences for the addicted evolve form its illegality as opposed to the addiction itself I for one would support the trade off.

Ok then who has been swimming naked! AIG clearly forgot their bathing suit when it came to underwriting the risks on CDS's they had a reputation however for being pretty sensible to their traditional underwriting.

\\Ben some of the Cdn. banks are lending with pretty close to zero down however I am unclear as to how much of the risk they are retaining. Genworth just did an IPO yesterday in Canada it was priced at the bottom of their indicated range and it was almost entirely a secondary offering. Genworth is the private mortgage insurer in Canada. I have not looked into this, the greensheet indicated that Genworth had zero finanical leverage however I am unsure how many dollars of mortgages they are guaranteeing and what would happen to their equity if we had a serious real estate set back. The one difference on mortgages in Canada is you can not just walk away you have to declare bancruptcy in Canada before you can walk away from the liability on an upside down mortgage.

Crip and Sharper, you both have hit the nail squarely on the head. His only chance at redeeming his soul is to sing like a canary however his life expectancy in jail will be very short if he does.

Captured regulators and SEC investigations. Does anyone doubt that a segement of the hedge fund industry were playing a very profitable little game. Take on a largish short position and then turn over a file of concocted evidence to the SEC re their targets. Jim Chanos appears to have an almost god like reputation amongst some because of his call on Enron which he then fed to Bethany Maclean which made her reputation. The smart guys figured out however that you did not have to be right on your thesis, in the post Enron era you just had to call out the hounds and you made a bunch of dough. I think this is really what should be investigated. In the end fear is a much more powerfull emotion than greed and it is more likely to generate a knee jerk reaction in the mkt place which a manipulative trader can profit from.