Saluki

Picked up some ENPH on the dip to keep my position at 1%. It has run up to almost 120 and back down to double digits several times, so hopefully it will do it again and I can trim on the way up and repeat as necessary.

JOE got a direct hit from a category 5 a few years ago and it only got something like $5mm of damage if I recall. Milton went left to right from Tampa, which is pretty far south, so I'd be surprised if it got any damage this time around. As for Alico, if it weren't for the hurricane, they'd have to come up with some other excuse for why they can never make money.

Because I'm a masochist, and because I'm always looking for evidence that the trading curse has been broken, I looked at what happened to a company that I put in the "too hard" pile. According to Yahoo, it's up 200% in the past 6 months Somewhere, in a time long forgotten, I'm convinced one of my ancestors did something to get on the sh1t list of the village witch back in the old country, and this trading curse is working it's dark magic long after the offense has been forgotten.

Congrats! I'll pick up a copy. Too late for the book, but maybe for a follow up edition, I was always curious to find information on one that Alice Schroeder mentioned, but that did not make it into her book: Mid Continent Tab Company, which made those index cards for IBM machines, and he compounded at 30% a year on it. I haven't seen it mentioned in any book.

Picked up a few shares of NTDOY and put a limit order in for some more if it goes below $13.

Madoff was another one with related party transactions and nepotism. If you read Markopolos' memo that he submitted to the SEC, which you can find online or in his book, it's pretty obvious that Madoff was either committing fraud (which is what Markopolos thought) or that he was making money but lying about how he was doing it (which is what some of his customers thought). Some of his customers thought that he was front running orders using his brokerage. But it's pretty clear that the strategy he told the SEC he was using was impossible because his size would've required more than 100% of the volume on that exchange and the other people who trade their didn't know him. Funny story but I met Markopolos once, and while I do have a low opinion of a lot of the people I met at the SEC, Harry is pretty hard to take seriously if you see him in person. I'll be kind and say that he looked, well, eccentric. His hair wasn't combed, he wore a polka dot tie and was wearing pants with cargo pockets that obviously had a lot of stuff in them. So combine their incompetence with his colorful appearance and the fact that he alleging a fraud against someone who was not only a competitor, which cast doubt on his motive, but who was also the former chairman of Nasdaq. The SEC has a lot of lawyers and accountants, but not finance people or quants. It was only about a decade or so ago that they allowed their registrants to use portfolio margining. And that was only after they lobbied Congress and threatened to move their trading to London or Singapore or Tokyo. So I see why they didn't get it, but just because you're incompetent and not corrupt, doesn't mean that you're doing a good job. Good luck with the activism, I hope it works out.

If they are unwilling to disclose there might be much more cockroaches in there. Think about WeWork and Adam Neuman when it all came out, or SBF and FTX. You don't find out everything until it's too late. Enron was another one with a lot of related party transactions. I periodically check in on a company that is cheap but with terrible management. There was an employee wrongful firing lawsuit that has allegations that are not in 10K and very disturbing. Hiring the brother of an insider to build the new factory (which sux and has lots of production problems), a CFO who was barred from serving in such a role at a public company who is there and making all the decisions with an empty suit who has the official title and doesn't ask any questions. Toxic behavior at the office. A special class of preferred stock issued that seems to be for the benefit of the CEO. and then a proxy fight. And now the CFO just resigned and they are investigating their financial statements for the last 3 years. There are plenty of REITs out there, why spend time on this when you see red flags?

By the time last week's hurricane made it to the Carolina's it was only a category one hurricane, but it still wreaked havoc and there are still people without power and internet down there. The hours of rainfall before the hurricane hit were soaked up by the ground and by the time the actual hurricane hit, there was massive flooding. When hurricane Andrew devastated Florida, it changed a lot of thigs for people down there. Now every new build house I see is concrete and rebar, not 2x4s and wood. The people in the Carolinas are experiencing some of the same rookie mistakes that Floridians used to make. Most of them don't have backup generators, and if they need supplies, they need gas and the gas pumps (or credit card machines) don't work with electricity and internet. In red states, they weirdly look down on renewables, regardless of the value proposition because it has become something that is viewed through the lens of political dogma. However, these prepper types, or even normal people, who think you need a truck gun, but don't think you need a backup generator, may be changing how they do things after being without electricity and drinkable water for more than a week. I have two 1% positions in my portfolio that I've been thinking about in terms of people reacting to this scenario. Enphase makes solar panels, and you can get a power wall backup. Politics aside, people are going to want solar. The people with backup generators ran out of fuel after a day and they still had to find a gas station that was open to supply it with fuel. With solar, even if the power lines are down, you are still okay and the battery backup will keep you going at night. Anterix licenses their bandwidth for use in private LTE for utilities. Combined with IoT sensors, when a line breaks, it can get an alert and turn the power off before the wire hits the ground. They are profitable, but have been slow to get utilities signed on. This might be a catalyst that speeds up adoption. I've owned this for four years though, and it's not done a lot in that time, so my patience is wearing thin. I'm sure there are companies that do stuff like flood control and may get new business, but I have no idea who those are.

This is interesting because if you look at the payoff for something using the Kelly criterion, something below a full kelly bet isn't as profitable. But once you go beyond a full kelly bet, your returns start to decline. But with a half Kelly bet, your return is less, but you won't be wiped out. When you over bet, not only is your return lower than a right sized bet, but your odds of being wiped out go up a lot. Rather than realize that he got lucky winning the lottery and taking some chips off the table, he just kept doubling down until math caught up with him. https://youtu.be/qfX35o7v6XY?si=mgYxVPIngvqD2MY-

I've been buying a little every day of some of my very small positions to get them to 1%. I don't want to take big bites until I sell off a couple of things that I went overweight on (I overbought OXY and hope to sell the higher cost shares in a month and get the tax loss and still maintain the position. I also overbought GOOG on the selloff and plan to trim it whenever it gets over 20% of my portfolio, which I should've done before the big drop). Very small positions: CROX, NEP, EPD, VET, PM, and lately RTO and VRRM.

Well if by "30%", you mean that if the index averages 10%, then you get 13%, that's plausible. But if you mean the nominal percentage plus a nominal 30% (40% yoy), then I call BS. Also, unless you can have them trade for you, you won't get there by copying. 13fs come out every quarter, and some investors like Burry churn a lot so you won't get much info from their reports. Some people like Jim Simons at Renaissance or other algorithmic traders may be making hundreds of trades a second, so it's not something you can do without millions in equipment and an army of quants. Second if your personality doesn't match the strategy, you won't be able to do it. Buffett can hold a stock for decades. If you can't, then you will lose patience and sell or "tweak" it a little to improve it and it will destroy the results. Third, in huge disruptions where a lot of money is made or lost you will get killed because you can clone their strategy, but you can't clone their conviction and if you don't understand why they bought, then you won't know if you should sell. Seeing what others that you respect are buying or selling is a good filter if you want to do look further into something. But would you let your doctor operate on you without asking what you have, where they are cutting you open, and why they are doing surgery? Isn't that what completely copying someone is?

If you look at the BABA post you can see that I sold out right before it popped. Ditto for TV. The ancient curse on my portfolio strikes again. Luckily, it's magic works powerfully only in the short term but fades away in the long term. When I bought Coupang it went down 50% before the curse wore off. Scorpio Tankers was down 80% at one point.

Been trimming some STNG.

This is what bothered me about him even before he imploded. People like this usually end up really rich or in jail, with not a lot of them in the middle. I think he's one of the few who ended up in both ends of the tail distribution, so kudos to him for that. Russian roulette has a positive expected value too, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to play it, no matter the expected value is. And it's morally repugnant to get other people to play it on your behalf while you profit off the results without suffering any of the harm that you are causing others to endure.

This is a scenario that I did not foresee. It's pretty common for clean tankers to switch to dirty at the end of their useful life, but it's usually one way because the costs to switch back to clean are so high. https://gcaptain.com/trafigura-to-convert-more-supertankers-if-oil-market-woes-linger/ It appears that only trading houses, like Trafigura, that own their own fleets are willing to accept the costs to switch because of down time, prep costs and risk of contamination. But if you can switch from carrying people in a taxi to a school bus, that will drive down the costs that taxis can charge. https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/shipping/071224-dirty-to-clean-switch-caps-high-lr2-tanker-freight-rates-as-supply-widens#:~:text=Moving clean products on VLCCs,helps minimize the cleanup costs.