Saluki

With a new baby I don't have much time for paper books but I still try to listen to audiobooks when I drive or walk the dog. Since I was looking at exchanges lately (CME, CBOE, MIAX, OTCM) this new book was timely and I really enjoyed it. I finished it in 2 days. It's about the CME's purchase or CBOT and how ICE tried to step in and buy it out from under them. CME eventually bought them and NYMEX and became the dominant futures exchange in the US. It's well written and really informative. I have a background in this stuff, but it's pretty hard to explain some of the esoteric stuff to people not involved in it. This does a good job of that. It also goes over some stuff that I wasn't aware of like the origin of ICE. It started as a competitor to Enron by some enterprising traders and they kept evolving to go where the money is. (Now they own NYSE and some other stuff). The behind the scenes Game of Thrones manuevering is very interesting. There are FOUR books with the title "Zero Sum Game" on Amazon, this is the one I'm referring to: https://amzn.to/4biPBtK Highly recommend!

The "my kid could paint that" crowd have a point in that would be harder to have the skill level to forge a Rembrandt than a Picasso. If you doubt it, think about the Bill Gross story. They had a Picasso that was being fought over (along with everything else) in the divorce. A coin toss decided his artist wife could keep it. When he said he would take it off the wall and send it to her she said not to bother. She already took the real one to her new place and painted a fake one herself and left it on the wall years ago and he never noticed the difference.

I don't know if real estate is a great use case. In my city there is a 1.5% transfer tax on real estate, and agents get their 6%, so the title stuff is the labor intensive side, but the other costs aren't going anywhere. I think restricted funds (hedge funds, private equity) where the wallet is approved and bypasses the bespoke human stuff is where it makes sense, kind of. But giving me a token for part of a Picasso starts to remind me of NFT nonsense.

No one is talking about NFTs anymore and Crypto is still mentioned, but not as much since the new thing to hype to retail investors is AI. I always remain skeptical of fads, whether it's cannabis stocks or offshore wind. Two of the areas of Crytpo that are still getting mentioned are perpetuals and Tokenization because the new SEC chairman and CFTC chairman seem a lot more friendly towards it than Gary Gensler. It's hard to tell what's real and what's hype because almost all of these companies are not listed and like OpenAI, you won't see the real numbers until they try to go public. I did notice that the largest tokenization company went public via a SPAC. So N=1 but it's the biggest player and the numbers were interesting to say the least. They lose money but are profitable on gross basis. They need more business to get to profitability on a net basis. What's even more interesting is that tokenization revenues were down 1% year over year. The less sexy, cookie-cutter back office operations grew 200% YOY though. So if the big dog is not growing, what are second bananas doing? BUIDL, by Blackrock was responsible for more than half of their AUM. If you take their other $2 billion in AUM and divide it by the 625 assets they claim to have tokenized, it's not a huge amount per customer. Does anyone know of stocks (not hedge funds or private equity) that tokenized their stocks? If so, why would anyone buy it that way? If you use your broker, you have $600k in SIPC in the US. if you buy a token and self custody it in your wallet, then you don't have SIPC protection and if you lose your password then: not your keys, not your cash. Has anyone here ever bought or sold anything that is tokenized?

I've underperformed this year too. A some of my midsize positions (NTDOY, META and CPNG) got cut down by a lot, and a few others that did well last year are just trading sideways or down a little. It happens. You can't outperform in the long run and the short run.

I've owned A. Midsize position in Fairfax India for a few years and recently bought A starter position in Constellation. Dino Polska is kind of interesting . Kind of like early Walmart. Probably deserves its own topic post. I looked at it a while back but I hate retail. And that's retail in a developing country that is next to country at war

I hate to say it, but I think a lot of the good career people have left or were forced out, and it's a rubber stamp operation now. The prior Chairman, Pham, fired or suspended a lot of enforcement people who she had a grudge against. The current chairman is undoing a lot of prior crypto enforcement cases and giving industry whatever they want. Rather than 5 Commissioners from both parties, there is only one, Selig, and he isn't an industry veteran like Gensler, who ran Goldman's asian offices. He's a guy, 10 years out of law school, who was not very high up at the SEC but was more pro crypto than Quintenz (Commodity Ken Doll), and didn't have a beef with the Winkelvii. I left before this administration took office because it sucked the last time Trump got elected and 1) I didn't want to spend the next four years undoing what I did the prior four years, 2) I had a feeling this time would be worse, and 3) the pro-fascist anti-immigrant stuff is too much for me. I have family members who have been tortured or killed for opposing dictators in Latam, and I'm not going to be a part of it here. I could've stayed, gotten close to the action and left to work for one of the new grifters, but I don't want to get rich that way.

https://share.google/lLA1kAKXRiewU3Jfi They are already doing it. I think the harder part is clearing. Some of these new entrants, I think there are something like 19 of them in the pipeline I'll still have to find that clearing House to agree gre to clear the trades.

OTCM pays a special dividend every year too (I have a starter position). It's not quite an exchange, but fills a niche between the pink sheets and the exchanges. There is not much they can use capital for so every year they pay a variable special dividend in addition to regular dividend that you see in the stock quote. CME Is a great company but until last year I was not allowed to own it because I worked for their regulator. At this price it's starting to look interesting again. It's a weird time because all these BS companies are filing to become prediction markets are registering as DCMs which is the same category as CME. So if sports betting is declared a legal and those losers have a license they might try to compete with CME or whenever a new products come around. I don't think their legacy business is in danger at all.

SPGI is spinning off CarFax. One share of the spinco for each share of SPGI. It's coming in few days. FIRY is waiting to find out if someone is appealing the judgment on a lawsuit that is a verdict several times it's marketcap. Will find out in about a month. POWW is repurchasing shares. The CEO had recently tried to sell the company to the employees through the ESOP but changed his mind, so the buybacks might be aggressive to accomplish the same thing.

small nibbles to Tencent Music and Badger Meters. Slowly building a position. I bought a few hundred dollars of Kraken Robotics by accident. I saw that the ticker had a quote on Robinhood, but sometimes they will show a price and won't let you trade it. So I clicked to see if it would trade or just kick me out. It worked. I have my original shares on Schwab (which charges me a fee for each trade because it's Canadian listed) and eventually Merrill started allowing me to trade it. Robinhood is my smallest account, but it also has the lowest margin, so I may buy more if the price keeps dropping.

I had a lawschool classmate who was top of the class and he told me that he didn't talk until he was 4 also. He said he understood everything, even when his parents were discussing why he wasn't talking. He just wasn't talking. I have ADHD and wasn't diagnosed until my 40s, and if I'm honest, I might have some of the 'tism though I've never been tested. You're on here so your obviously smart and it runs in smart families. Ferraris have powerful but finicky engines. On my mother's side I have two family members who were supreme court justices in Latin American countries. I also have a cousin who doesn't make eye contact, doesn't talk much, but has published more scientific papers than I have read. I'd rather be in a family that has that trait (good and bad) than one with people who go to watch UFC fights on the White House lawn and can't figure out 20% tip on a restaurant bill without a calculator. Four is very young. Too early to tell. I just had a baby, and I know that being older (55) increases the odds of stuff like that. I do worry about it. But it's not something that I will be able to know, and I don't want it to interfere with the process of raising him. The fact that you're worrying about it shows your a present and concerned parent. So I think he'll be okay either way.

He is right about the premise, but maybe not about the conclusion. Okay, the stock market is overpriced. So put your money somewhere else. Where? Gold and Silver are at all time highs. Buy a house? That's expensive everywhere. Park it in bonds? Those yields are really low. If you really believe the market is overpriced, and that's a big if, you could add up all your long positions and short S&P index futures in the same amount. That way, you avoided the "buy VTSX and Chill" strategy, and if your stocks crash along with the market, you will still do okay if they don't crash as much as the market. It's the equivalent of that old joke about the two guys who see a bear in the woods and one guy says "run". The punchline is that "I can't outrun the bear, but I can outrun you."

One of my favorite parts of Married With Children was Al Bundy's blue collar wisdom. For example, at his 18th birthday at the strip club when Bud gave his roll of money to the first woman he saw and was bored the rest of the night, he told his dad "this place sucks if you have you money." and Al replied "son, everyplace sucks if you have no money." I was thinking of a couple of others. "No one can do you your pushups for you." - My Soccer Coach in High School. And when I used to kickbox my coach was fond of saying "If you're gonna punch somebody once, go ahead and punch them twice." What are some of your favorites?

This came up in another post, but deserves it's own post. Why CME Is Really Suing the CFTC Over Perps Anyone have any comments or questions about it? Feel free to chime in and if helpful, I'll answer legal questions from the perspective of a derivatives lawyer here's my take: Perps ARE swaps, not futures. The CME wants them regulated as swaps because they are set up to trade (and clear) futures AND swaps and the newcomer exchanges, like Kalshi, are set up for futures only, so classifying them as swaps would cut down the pool of potential competitors The CFTC called them futures because of regulatory capture (Trump Jr is a paid "advisor" to Kalshi and Polymarket) and to keep out defi protocols like Hyperliquid. swaps can be traded off-exchange or on-exchange, but futures must be on-exchange. so by calling them futures, you make protocols like Hyperliquid illegal in the US. The license Kalshi has lets them do futures too, not just prediction markets Most exchanges don't trade 24/7 which is one of the reasons why some of them see Perps as a threat. Perps are easier to understand than options, so market heavyweights think it will suck retail order flow into these products

sold some January puts on Venture Global at $10 and bought some calls at $12.50.

I have a midsize position and sold the shares in my retirement account. The taxable shares are a tougher decision because some of them will hit the 1 year mark (and lower capital gains) in a couple of months.

I have a small starter position in this. Bought a little early but I almost never bottom tick anything. If there is anyone who isn't going to vibe code software, it's underpaid municipal employees in cities that you never heard of.

Taylor Devices is coming down again. It's in the $50s from a recent high in the $90s based on multiple compression. They make landing gear for Reaper and Predator drones. No debt and a lot of cash. I think the concern is the future of warfare. Swarms of cheap, crappy drones seem to do an okay job at assymetrical warfare. Is it worth paying 50-100x more for a drone with a much bigger payload if you are targeting soldiers and tanks, and not battleships?

I get Valueline free through my library. If you like the binders, go ahead and subscribe. I'm getting lazier now, but I used to have a redweld and manilla folders when researching a stock and as part of that process I would print out a Valueline page for the stock and write my notes on the back for the thesis (to prevent thesis drift). Since you only have one sheet of paper, it makes you synthesize your thoughts clearly and briefly. (So for Crox it would've been a few bullet points (much higher margin than competitors, brand recognition, 5-6x FCF, buying back shares, growing overseas, and temporarily trading down because of horrible bolt-on acquisition). I used to pay for SeekingAlpha but cancelled it. I liked that they had articles (even if a few years old) on some oddball stocks that it was hard to find info on, like Taylor Devices. At the $99 intro price it was worth it, but I didn't think it was worth $250 to renew. In economics i would be known as an inframarginal consumer. COBF is more useful, IMHO, because people aren't commenting on 5 year old articles of small stocks on Seeking Alpha, but I can post about it here and get crowdsourced intel that isn't stale.

A month ago I sold $10k of CPNG for the tax loss harvesting. I bought about $15k back today. I may buy some options too since the decision on the penalty for the data breach is coming soon. I'll probably sell another 10-20k after 30 days to tax loss harvest some more and rinse/repeat until the end of the year. Buying a few shares a day of some small new positions that I am studying. I'll sell them all if I change my mind, but at least have some shares so that I don't miss it if it runs up parabolically. OTCM, TME, BMI and UBER if anyone is interested.

Anecdotally, I worked with a guy who, about 20 years ago, was the chief economist at one of the largest oil companies. He said that their internal think tank would run scenarios that way more complicated and implausible than Rand or the Pentagon would do, because they wanted to be prepared for anything. When I asked for an example, he said they tried to figure out what would happen (in terms of their business operations) if a war broke out between the US and Canada over water rights involving the great lakes and the border shifted With Trump threatening to annex Greenland and Canada and the aquifer in the middle of US getting more depleted every year it doesn't seem so far fetched anymore.

Picked up a few shares of UBER while I keep studying it. May just nibble a little a day unless I find something I don't like. So far nothing bad. It's not too cheap now, but I think the operating leverage kicks in and it will do really well. Seems like it would be hard to disrupt them at this point in food delivery or driving. If Lyft is a distant second, what would it take for a third one to get any traction? The only legit contender (in Europe) is Bolt. And they don't seem to want to come to the US and Lyft doesn't want to go to Europe, so they are both fighting for share against UBER, which is now dominant and not running the business at a loss to get to scale anymore. They sowed, and now it's time to reap.

Added a couple of shares of Fairfax. Some NTDOY in my retirement account. Small adds to a few new positions that I am slowly building. OTCM, ASHXF, BMI, TME.

I have resting bids on a very small cap illiquid company, Progressive Planet at different prices. It's going down so I got a few shares filled yesterday. It's annoying because I can't buy it with Robinhood (where margin is lowest) or my Merrill Account (where they don't charge fees), because they don't list it. Schwab does but charges $6.95 a trade on them. So if I can, I'd rather buy Nintendo, Kraken or Fairfax on Merrill with no fees. But Schwab carries Progressive Planet and the other two don't. Normally it's not an issue, but on some very small stuff, like TBTC, sometimes I'll get a partial fill and still get charged the $6.95. If I get a fill for a few thousand dollars fine, but on the illiquid stuff if I get partial fill for $100 and get hit with the commission, it's infuriating. I got a fill of POWWP on Merrill once of ONE share . Luckily Merrill doesn't charge fees.