Saluki

Sometimes those are a good clue, especially if other insiders are buying too. Sometimes people are just optimists about their own company, so you can use it as a filter, but still have to go through your regular process of investigating a good investment. There are a lot of false positives by optimistic insiders if you use that datapoint. For instance, Nerdy (NRDY) had an insider buy $13mm of stock recently and Anterix (ATEX) had an insider buy $4mm of stock. No positive news was forthcoming and the stocks went down a lot or nowhere, respectively.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/eu-naval-mission-greek-flagged-ship-sounion-fire-since-august-23-after-houthi-2024-08-26/ Greek oil tanker in Suez on fire after houthi strike.

Still adding a little GOOG each day and when I get close to my past high water mark where I was comfortable with the position sizing, I will start trimming when it goes above that. Just got approved for options for options and I bought a few calls on ATEX, to dip my toes in. I have a 1.5% equity position, and I don't want to put more cash into it, but it seems to overreact to good news, so I think this is a way to get some exposure and participate in the pipeline which keeps getting bigger, even though signed contracts are not happening as quickly as I'd like. Trimmed a little STNG and TAYD.

I bought MSCI on the dip, and KRKNF which worked out well, but not looking to add at these prices. Added OXY in the past few days.

I heard that Jose "Pepe" Mujica has cancer. He's quite the character. Unlike populist leftist presidents like Lula in Brazil who talk a good game while taking millions in bribes, this guy walked the walk, He lived in little farm house and gave most of his salary away. He didn't want a presidential jet, opting instead to use the funds for medivac helicopters to help the rural people get emergency access to the hospitals in the city. Foregoing the Presidential motorcade and driving to the office is VW Beetle, and getting rid of bodyguards for his 3 legged dog, Manuela, it seemed like an affectation for show. But he really was who he said he was. After his term in the presidency ended, he was elected to congress and still commuted everyday with his 3 legged dog. When she died, he retired from politics.

Added another 10% to my OXY position. I'm a little overweight on it now, but will probably start trimming higher priced shares after 30 days to reduce my cost basis and offset some gains from other sales for taxes.

We started watching Kleo on Netflix, very good so far. It's like Killing Eve. She was an East German assassin and was betrayed and sent to prison right before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. She was freed as a political prisoner and sets out tracking down her former colleagues and killing them. Dark humor and action.

I stumbled on this one, Red Cat Holdings which has 3X its stock price in a year. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/red-cat-holdings-reports-financial-203000988.html And this is why it's hard to invest in a hot industry. Cash way down, receivables way up and the stock goes parabolic because of the revenue increase.

I've been buying a little GOOGL for the past several days and I plan to keep doing that and overweight it and sell when the market hysteria about the court decision fades away. Bought a bigger slice of OXY this morning. I think if I take a few big bites here it will work out well and I can either keep it or just sell the same amount of shares over $60 and offset some of my winners for tax purposes. I hate doing it with margin, but I don't plan on being overweight in it for more than a month, which I have to hold it for to prevent the wash sale rules from kicking in.

Trimmed 10% of my TAYD shares at $50. I'll probably keep my early shares at $20 and see what happens, but while the aerospace segment (drone landing gear) is growing a lot, I was wrong about the structural (earthquake proof building devices), so I don't want to succumb to thesis drift. Will probably sell down to a 1% position and wait. I had a small amount of Arch Resources (less than $1k) that I bought to remind me to do more research on some coal companies. I sold it on the 6% pop this morning after news came out that they are merging with Consol. Still have a couple of small positions in a couple of other coal companies while I study them and decide if I want to buy more or sell and move on. Sold about 25% of my TV position. I bought more a month ago so that I could sell my higher cost shares and keep the same position. It's down another 20% since then I may do the same move next month, or maybe just sell the whole thing. The new leftist president in Mexico hasn't taken office yet, and I don't know if she will be better or worse than the previous leftist.

Might be neither. Just a wild guess but Crownrock sold $1.7 bln of OXY stock that received to an underwriting syndicate. They may be negotiating with him or others for a block trade, and since he has some material non-public information about the transaction (i.e. the price) he might not buy more on the open market until he or someone else consummates the deal. Edited to add: It might be strategic too. If you want to buy a big block and your buying drives up thestock when it hits the news 3 days after purchase, you might hold off on the smaller purchases in the market so you don't drive up the price of the big block that you are trying to buy. I've been buying here too. Or maybe he owns enough already? Who knows? Better to buy on fundamentals than game theory.

Well, his take is that just because people are going to die, you don't have to be one of them. For instance, Hawaii is not Florida, It was formed from volcanic eruptions, and a lot of the coastline is sharp volcanic rock. He was on a beach that had a manmade barrier which protected swimmers the waves and families waded in there with their kids. He wanted to swim next to it, and asked the lifeguard. It turns out that in Hawaii more tourists means more deaths because a certain amount of them will die. More lifeguards won't reduce those deaths because they die in ways that won't be helped by a lifeguard. They swim (or get carried out) and they can't swim directly back to the beach because the current is too strong. So they swim sideways (which is the right idea in Florida) and because the waves are much bigger, often get carried by a wave and smacked into the sharp volcanic rocks and start bleeding, which attracts the sharks to finish them off, if the impact didn't. So maybe in investing, you have to be sure of the paradigm and not apply the wrong rule, which is the right rule somewhere else. Low P/E's tend to be great investments, but not in cyclical commodities at the peak of the cycle. Those are investible when they P/E is high (because earnings are at a trough). An old industrial company with no debt isn't the same as a new tech company with no debt. The tech company might be disrupted by a competitor working in his garage, but the industrial company might be taken down by something like asbestos or forever chemicals litigation. Diversification might reduce your return in addition to your volatility, but it also might prevent the tight coupling that causes major accidents like 3 mile island. Like the supply chain disruptions in Covid, you have to have some slack in the system which is inefficient, but another way to look at it, is that the slack is a shock absorber.

If he's doing the 2 and 20 fee structure, he's getting $7.5mm from the 2% plus whatever he makes on the positive returns. I remember a guy who invested a lot of new fund managers when they set out on their own, saying that he wanted to see a lot of skin in the game. So if the new guy had managed to save up, say only $1mm from his time at another fund, he wanted the manager to take out a mortgage on his house and put that into the fund also, so that he would be "all in" and not take any risks with the investors money that would be likely to blow up and leave the manager in a position that he would lose his house and his wife would leave him and his kids wouldn't go to college. If Kuppy has all his money in the fund and he's investing carelessly, that's scary. But if it's just bravado and exaggeration, then it may be just part of his marketing schtick. Who knows?

Part of the reason that I've been working so much on the emotional side of investing, is that the math isn't difficult, it's the other side that is. Peter Lynch said that if you can 8+8 and come up with a number that is close to 16, then you have the brains to be a stock investor, but you need the stomach. It comes naturally for some people, but other people have to work on it. I met up with a friend for drinks when I was visiting NY a while back, who worked at a Wall Street bank. He was in charge of a department and casually mentioned over dinner that his bosses were giving him a hard time because they were down $12 million that month. He yelled at them they should be thanking him, because if they hadn't done what they did, the bank would be down $50 million, so please GTFO his floor so they could get back to work. I remember being so stressed out at my first legal job because I sent out a bunch of documents to be copied for a discovery request, and I forgot to tell the printer that they had to be bates stamped (i.e. each page had a separate sequential number). When it came back, the order was useless and I had cost them about $50k. I thought I would be fired or at least made to pay for it, and I didn't sleep for days. That was a long time ago. I'm down about $40k on my Google position in the past couple of weeks and I didn't even care. So I'm getting better at not being bothered by the losses, but paradoxically I'm not happy with the gains. I'm trying to train myself to be focused on the process, because the outcome isn't in my control. It takes reprogramming to view losses with curiosity, not anxiety.

I try to stay away from the commoditized low-margin businesses. What can an activist do for a business like that? Load it up with debt to buy back shares? Spin off non-core holdings? Trim the fat in an already low margin business? There are easier ways to make money.

If you start from first principles, shorting is a terrible idea. The market goes up, on average 10% a year, so you have to be making +10% a year on average just to overcome the first hurdle. You also have to add borrowing costs. Then if it has a dividend, the cost is even higher. Hurdle number two. If you have 10 equal weight positions in your long portfolio, the underperforming ones become a smaller part of your portfolio and fade away. As a bad short doesn't work out, it becomes a larger part of your portfolio. So you are forced by math to double down on your losers. Unlike going long, where your downside is limited to your portfolio size, you can lose more than your investment if it goes wrong for you. Most professional fund managers can't outperform the indices, even when swimming with the flow. You are betting that even though the market is very efficient in one direction, that it's somehow so inefficient in the other direction that you can overcome all the prior hurdles. And you not only have to be right about it, you have to be right about it and hope that the market agrees with you before you run out of money. A ticking time bomb.

They have no revenue. It's a story stock. "if you build it, they will come." I don't know IF they will get customers to justify the $8bln market cap. But 45% pop in one day is a good time to cash your chips and go home. Of course, if it keeps going up, your wife will blame you, not the stock. True story, the first option that I ever bought was on a company that made seats for various car companies. I can't remember the name. The very next day they got a buyout offer and the options were worth 40% more. I should have sold there, but having worked in M&A I thought a rival bidder might come along and I still had 6 months left on the option. It expired worthless and I haven't traded an option in over 15 years since then

A little OXY and GOOGL

If you think air taxis will be a thing, check out Amprius. It's down 82% over the past year. It has no debt, Airbus is an investor, and their tech is well suited for this use case (i.e. it's more expensive but much more energy density than convention lithium batteries). It's not profitable and I don't have a position in it, but IF air taxis with batteries instead of engines becomes a thing, this will probably make you rich. I don't know what advantage a VTOL will have over a helicopter, but if Afghanistan isn't too dangerous for the Marines, but VTOLs are, I won't be flying in one.

Yes. But I would think that position would make me more attractive as a board candidate, for another company, down the road than the road than my current position.

I don't like to mention my day job, but I work in government and it pays well, but I'm dissatisfied with it. I'd really like to be on the board of a public company or two one day. Possibly when I retire. I noticed a job posting on LinkedIn recently at a large financial institution where a couple of my former co-workers are now. One of them is Head of [Something regulatory] and he mentioned they were looking for a Director of [Something Regulatory]. The position would report to him. The company is over $100bln market cap. The pay is good, but the top of the salary range is less than 20% more than I make now. And this company has done layoffs before, but in government, my job is very secure and I have great co-workers. Other than my old co-worker, I don't know anyone there or how the workplace is. I enjoy travelling and have plenty of vacation time due to my length of service, but that would obviously be less in the private sector. So if you factor fewer paid vacation/sick days in, the pay isn't more. The title sounds impressive, but I am not ego driven, so that wouldn't be the motivating factor for me. It just seems to me that having that title at an international financial institution might make it more likely to transition to being on a board vs a bureaucrat. My question is: if you are on the board of a public company, or know someone who is, how did that happen for you? If you were in my shoes, would you consider this move (about the same pay, they have laid off people in the past, probably much more work because they have been in trouble recently, but with a title that might open doors).

Very small adds to FRPH, ENVX, ATEX and AOS. I'd like to pay down my margin but I can't resist a sale. Trimmed a little STNG and ENPH.

There are two companies vying for the AirTaxi business with VTOL (Aircraft/Plane Hybrids) that use electric batteries. Stellantis owns over 10% of Archer and keeps buying more, and the competitor is JOBY. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ACHR/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/JOBY/ It sounded like a silly idea to put billions into, and I thought I might be mistaken, but then I saw the Cathy Woods of Ark is a big investor in ACHR, and then I realized my first instinct was probably correct. Batteries are less energy dense than hydrocarbons, which limits their range. Going from Manhattan to LaGuardia by air taxi and bypassing traffic sounds like an interesting use case, but can't you already do that with a helicopter? And if you have to go to a small regional airport, instead of using a helipad, doesn't than defeat the purpose of a Taxi? I'm sure there is traffic from your midtown office to the smaller airport too. Also, the military has been trying to get the VTOL to work for decades and more marines have been killed by the VTOLs than by the Houthis. If you kill serviceman it looks bad on the news, but when you start killing your customers, it's an unusual business model unless you are in the tobacco industry. Too hard pile for me.

For some of the longer fiction books, audiobooks are great. Save your eyes for accounting books. The books usually have more character development and things that don't make the cut in the movie. One of my favorite scenes from Bonfire, which isn't in the movie, is when his kid asks what he does at work. His shrew wife condescendingly says words to the effect of "do you remember when we cut the big cake at your birthday party? Well Daddy cuts other people's cakes for them, and they let him keep the crumbs." And he thinks to himself, "yes, and those crumbs are made of gold."

If you have seen the drama with the woman who almost won India's first gold medal in wrestling in the Olympics, but was disqualified when she didn't make the weight cutoff for the finals, check out Dangal on Netflix. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5074352/ The father is a wrestler who had no sons, so he trains his daughters and they eventually become well decorated wrestlers. One of them won gold in the Commonwealth games. The woman in the Olympics is his niece, who he also trained.