Saluki

I sold a very small position I had in ISSC. It's up like 45% in the past 2 days, but I bought early so I got out at +23% for a few months. Not bad work if you can get it. Still interesting, but too much mental bandwidth and some larger positions are cheap now.

At these prices, I've been buying more Nintendo and Coupang again. Feels like I'm missing something because it's so cheap. Sold VG puts too (longer dated). Paypal still hasn't rebounded, but that means buying back more shares at cheaper prices and the bounce will be bigger. I like Crox (but I have enough) and I don't know if I would add it to best 2026 at $90 (vs $75 where I was drooling). My 2026 List (at these prices) Nintendo Coupang Paypal Watchlist JOE Fairfax (buybacks) MSCI (insider buying) STNG (trading sardine) CROX Kraken Robotics (depending on Anduril contracts)

I picked up a few shares of CPNG and sold 3 puts.

We watched the first 3 episodes of Landman and it was pretty good, except for all the impromptu speeches. We just finished season 1 of Your Friends and Neighbors, and Palm Royale. Both were very good!

The pitch for BItcoin is "digital" gold. Which I don't believe, but to each his own. By virtue of being first it's the most recognized and commonly held. However, you can't do anything with Bitcoin except sell it. The code isn't "Turing Complete" so you can't do much with it, but since it's so bare bones, it's also very hard to hack. But it's a FOMO trade and has the opposite of economies of scale. With Ethereum, you can write things when you put it on the block chain. You can write "Hi Mom" or you can write a few lines of code in Solidity when you put it on the Blockchain. SInce you can insert pieces of code, it enables smart contracts. And since new Crytpo ideas might not get enough traction to be viable, the way they pitch it is that their stuff runs on the Ethereum network. Like they are renting space. So all those new crypto ideas make Ethereum even more entrenched because it is forcing other users of lesser cryptos to use Ethereum.

Adding slowly to Copart and Venture Global. A few shares a day.

I was looking at that yesterday, lol. Nice timing by the guy in legal who sold at $233 and $160 and bought back at $63. Looking at the 13Fs when they came out a couple of weeks ago, I'm surprised at how many "famous" investors owned this, and that a few bought in the quarter right before the price got cut in half. Might be worth a look again. I see their Clover device around a lot and the Core processing for banks is invisible but important and they are the biggest one out there providing that service for banks and credit unions, so despite the accounting shenanigans, it has a great moat.

WOW, this sucks

I think the point about nanocaps is that they probably won't stay nanocaps. Some are not great businesses and will eventually go private, go bankrupt or delist because their big idea didn't plan out, and others will now have access to the capital markets to periodically issue new shares to fund their growth. About 5 years ago Kraken Robotics was $0.25 a share and it's now $4. If the demand for seadrones wasn't a thing, they may still be less than a dollar and deserve that price. But the ability to sell shares to fund their expansion (or in other cases to do rollups, offer stock based compensation to talent etc.) works out. I find that with the nanocap stuff there is a lot of stuff that is "cool tech but no profits" such as HydroGraph or a certain plastics recycling company that a YouTuber promotes constantly. Add to the problem that many Canadian nano caps are paying people, like said YouTuber to promote their stock and they are not disclosing it. If you make a first cut and don't look at companies that aren't profitable, you will exclude 70% of the stuff out there, then you can spend your time looking at the more promising stuff. Even with $100mm limit you can find some winners eventually like TAYD or IPI which were doubles in a year. If you go smaller, like TBTC it's harder to find good information out there so the deal should be more attractive to make up for the lack of good intelligence and the liquidity.

Paulson made so much on that trade that they wrote a whole book about him. How has he done since? Kyle Bass is also known for that call, and his other doomsday bets on Japan and a few others never panned out afterwards. I was a lawyer with a lot of tech clients when the dot com bust happened, and at a financial regulator during the great financial crisis, so I'm always wary of the next big one. Many crappy dotcoms and weak financial instutions got plowed under in prior crises, but the internet and banking are still here. I think we just have to pick the likely survivors and not fall into the mania and try to keep playing more hands because you want every dollar the table is offering.

Bought a couple of VG calls. It keeps going down, but hopefully the volatility will work in my favor when it reverses.

I don't think so because user generated content (YouTube) has been around a long time, and it's a different viewership model. Moreover, the "scale economies shared" is a catchy term but the practice has been around a long time. Ford with the Model T's is the most well known example, but Rockefeller used it way before. In the Antitrust class I took in law school, the Standard Oil case is one of the early ones. When trying to refute the monopoly presumption, they showed that Rockefeller lowered prices and drove out his competition, but he kept prices low (and sometimes dropped them lower). So is this scale economies shared, or did he not have pricing power, and therefore didn't have monopoly power? Very few companies, like Costco, can maintain it for a long time. "Enshitification" seems to creep into a lot of businesses over time. Amazon experimented with one day delivery in my area, and now I routinely get 3 day delivery. And it's seldom the cheapest option, but it's convenient. Ditto with paying for Netflix vs Hulu with ads. Now you pay for Netflix and it has ads too.

Kraken is a Canadian company and they have some operations in the UK, Denmark and Germany. BOSC is an Israeli company that should benefit for Israel rebuilding it's military after the Gaza fighting, and they might benefit from a shift away from US defense cos, but it's so small that it's hard to figure out where it's going. There are several drone companies outside the US (one in Australia that I can't remember the name) that are all trying to get in on the action, but anything with "drone" in the name is usually overpriced. Price aside, if you are thinking about flying drones (vs sea), I always thought rather than focusing on the drones (which are relatively cheap), someone is going to make lots of money on the countermeasures like jamming. The only one in that space I know off hand is Drone Shield, but it's very expensive. There might be others out there, and the countermeasures have to keep evolving, so it has potential to be a long runway. There is a separate post on Drones and Drone adjacent companies like Taylor Devices on here.

I've never found big defense contractors to have attractive valuations because they are obvious. I've had good luck with people supplying bigger contractors, like TAYD (double), Optex (+50%), and Kraken (multibagger). I only currently own the last one. I'm down about 30% on ISSC, but I think it's undervalued and it was beaten down because of lower margin from taking over a Honeywell subsidiary that supplies the military, but management had told people all along that would happen, so the market it weird. There's a nanocap, BOSC, that I had a small position in that looked interesting too. But I've been trimming non-core positions lately and positioning myself for turbulence. I think Anduril is interesting but overhyped. I did see talk about people buying it before it's public if the SEC permits tokenization and people like Robinhood get in on it for their customers. But that's a weird outcome since the IPO rules are there to protect retail customers, they shouldn't be optional.

Just a quick update. I did complete the process to transfer my Merrill ROTH and IRA to Robinhood, so about $300k for a $9k (3% bonus). It's not on the website when you search, but they offer it to certain people at random and it has to be done by November 19th. I'm assuming they don't offer it to more than a certain amount of people at a time because they don't have the capital to pay out 3% of funds all at once since they make it back slowly in trading fees and interest. It's not on the website, but I see the offer when I look on my account, so check your account. I will not be able to get my government TSP fund over in time. I had to pay off my TSP loan before they allow a transfer, and there is a delay between when you pay it off and the account shows it's okay to transfer. after that, you can't transfer it directly to Robinhood. (RH isn't set up for that). So I would have to transfer to Merrill or Schwab, and it would take some time to process (and it involves paperwork with actual paper). Then from Merrill or Schwab I would have to transfer it to RH, which would take a few more days. If I had started the process earlier, I might have made the deadline, but it's not going to happen. I'll still transfer it out because I think the SP500 is frothy and I've been doing well at 3, 5 and 7 year periods (but not this year) at out performing the index. I've decided to transfer it to Schwab. I have most of my money in Merrill, but if something goes wrong, like Lehman etc., Although I have SIPC, it's only for $600k, and it would take time to get your money back. So having most of my Non-retirement funds in Merrill and my TSP Funds in Schwab, will diversify the risk of something bad happening to any one institution. Another reason for Schwab is the tickers available. There is one ticker I own in Merrill that is not in Schwab or Robinhood (POWWP), but that's the exception, not the rule. There are a couple of microcaps like TBTC that Schwab has that ML or RH don't. And several others that I researched but didn't pull the trigger are available on Schwab but not Merrill, so being able to buy Kraken in my retirement account would've been a great feature if Merrill had it (they didn't before but have it now).

Sold out of the FRPH in my retirement account and bought some Fairfax. Got assigned some shares on Friday for puts on Venture Global and I am holding on to them for now.

Sold some CPNG puts and picked up a few shares with the proceeds. By tomorrow some of the VG puts I sold will expire and I will have a few hundred more shares of that one too, which I'm okay with at these prices. Sold 1170 shares on Oct 1 at $14.55 so getting to buy them back at $8 (put price) or $7.70 market price doesn't feel like a tragedy

I trimmed some IBKR and POWW to free up some cash. Still like IBKR long term, but valuation is a little high, and POWW is still cheap, but it was a 50 cent dollar that probably won't grow past a dollar and it became a 60 cent dollar in a month, so what the heck.

I got a small fill in TBTC. It's very liquid and I usually have a resting low ball bid for $1-2k and I'll get a fill once a month or so. The execution on Schwab (which is the only place I can trade it) is terrible and I often see fills below my bid price, but it's a very small position so I'm not going to cry about it. Bought a few more shares of CROX. My average price is about $82, so if I buy a little more than I actually want (at ~$80), I can sell my higher basis shares after 30 days and harvest the tax loss without triggering the wash sale rule. (I overbought a little JOE recently, so I might sell that off too after the pop following earnings announcement, still deciding).

Small add to VG, I've been selling short term puts on a few things which are volatile, but cheap, and pay a nice premium like CROX, PYPL and VG. Occasionally I get assigned some. I got put 100 shares of VG (I'll keep it). I have a couple of CPNG $31 puts expiring next week that are right at the exercise price, so I may be picking up those too. Not a big deal. I sold some of the early (higher cost) CPNG shares I bought at the end of last year to capture a tax loss and offset some gains, so if I can sell puts a few times, then when I get assigned eventually, it will be like I bought them back at the price I sold them.

Okay, I just found the November 19, 3% on Transfer offer. You can't see it in the IRA FAQ or other sections if you go in from the "open an account tab." But if you go in from the "Transfer" tab, I see the Nov 19 offer, so I'll start trying to get the process going.

You are correct. It looks like the 3% match for rollovers was a one time thing and it expired last year. Oh well. https://www.cnbc.com/select/robinhood-offers-match-ira-transfers-401k-rollovers/#:~:text=Gold subscribers can get 3,only be a 1% match.

I have a nice size chunk of my money in the TSP (federal equivalent of 401k). It's very low cost but has few options (SP Index, short term bonds, long term bonds). And the SP500 feels frothy now. I noticed that Robinhood has offered a 3% bonus for IRA rollovers if you have RH Gold. So I'm thinking that if I pay off my TSP Loan which is at 4% (-$22k), and transfer, say $1mm to my broker (RH doesn't have a way to xfer from TSP), then from my broker to RH, I should get $30k for that money. A one time 3% boost doesn't sound bad since it's not taxable, and there are no strings except keeping it at RH for 3 years. With new money in my IRA that ISN'T in the SP500 anymore, I can have more control and can sell some (hopefully temporary) losers in my taxable account before the end of the year, and buy them in my IRA which will let me lower my taxes and increase my retirement savings. For instance, I'm up on JOE as a whole, but I do have some lots that were above todays price, but without a xfer, I have no cash sitting around my retirement account. Any wholes in this strategy? Also how is the execution? I only have a small taxable account with Robinhood that I use because the margin rates are much better than Merrill or Schwab, but I noticed that use payment for order flow. Schwab does too, and I only found out recently when I noticed that a small cap stock that I have resting bids in were executed lower than my bid price but I didn't get a fill. Is RH decent for fills? What about keeping track of my contributions before the transfer, to know my cost basis? Any thoughts/

Thanks. I probably shouldn't do mental accounting like this, but one way I think about it is that if sell a couple of puts for a dollar or two on something like this that has expirations very often, then it keeps lowering the cost for when I do get assigned. So if it's $85, and I sell out of the money puts for $1 every week or so, then if I get away with it 15x before I'm assigned at $85, then my effective price is $70. And I can keep selling and keep lowering my effective cost. If the price keeps dropping, to say $80, If I hold it for 30 days, then I can sell the $85 shares, and get a lower basis without invoking the wash sale trade rules. But I'd only do it for something I want to own more off. (I wish Nintendo had options!) I did a video on this particular trade on my Underdog Investing Youtube channel today. But I also have done the treade for other volatile ones that I'd like to build a position in like Paypal, CPNG and IBKR. It doesn't work some like JOE that just trades sideways without big moves, since the premium for the puts is not great unless you go really far out in time.

Picked up a couple shares of FFH in my retirement account. Sold a few $80 CROX puts expiring on 10/31. With a $4 premium, my breakeven on those is $76, even if I get assigned