Saluki

Sold some frph, Tayd and oxy. The ancient curse will probably make me regret it, but market feels weird right now so I don't mind building up a little Cash.

That's an interesting question. The gun companies make a LOT simpler equipment than drone companies, but they are oligopolies by virtue of industry dynamics and reputation, not barriers to entry. Consider how long they have been around: Beretta (1500s), S&W (1800s), Rossi (1800s), Sig (1800s), Ruger (1940s) and Glock (1960s). On something that your life depends on, you probably won't take the low bidder, but if you have a lot of them in your collection you can probably go with newcomers or weird cool looking toys for the shooting range, like Keltec. From what I've seen, the people supplying larger defense contracts tend to be like auto parts suppliers, but with better margins. Auto making is a low margin business, so if they outsource part of that, it's to someone willing to take less margin or is specialized and very efficient. There is one maker, for instance which makes a lot of car seats for several manufacturers. If you have a fat government contract it seems to make sense to buy from someone you have been buying from a long time, since the cost savings on a small part of the thing you make is not worth the risk if they have problems delivering on time, or there is a defect and it jeopordizes your contract. I don't know about their other suppliers, but the sea batteries for Anduril's drones are made by Kraken. There is no patent protection, just better manafacturing of a difficult to make item, which is why people pay up for it. Besides the moat, I think it's worth it to put some thought into who else you can sell your stuff to. ISSC makes heads up displays for military jets, but that could be used for commercial jets. Optex makes stuff for Bradley fighting vehicles and Howitzers. Is there an alternate use for that? I don't know. Kraken batteries are used by other sub makers (offshore drilling equipment), so if things don't go with Anduril, it won't be a home run, but won't be a zero either.

Bought a little POWW to study it after the reorg and price drop. Bought a little NVO and some some puts while I study it too.

Besides Navy ships, there is very little demand for US built ships, other than ones that operate within the parameters of the Jones Act (US port to US port). The Koreans, and now the Chinese, have a huge cost advantage when it comes to labor, and their governments will often finance at extreme favorable terms because there is so much labor involved. Kind of like how the US government subsidizes our car industry. Ironically, offshore wind installation ships could have been a bright spot for US shipbuilding, but the current administration killed that. If I were to think about a defense company that is not viewed as a defense company, take a look at Smith and Wesson. They and Glock (which is private), lost out on an $800mm pistol contract to Sig Sauer's P320. After dozens of incidents of the gun going off in a holster and injuring police officers, and now killing an Air Force sergeant who placed it on the desk while in a holster and it shot him, there is a non-zero chance that the Pentagon might cancel the contract and two of the finalists, Smith and Glock, might get another crack at it. Anduril is not public (yet), but they have a contract for lots of sea drones that will be built in the US, so you can wait for it to go public or think about drone adjacent companies that supply parts to them (Kraken for batteries), or other companies. Optex makes optics for Bradley Vehiciles and Howitzers, Virtra makes shooting simulators, ISSC makes heads up displays for military planes, Taylor Devices makes landing gear for Predator Drones etc. (I have small positions in all of these, as a basket of defense stocks).

Bought a few shares of EPD on the dip. Got a fill on a nanocap that I put in a resting limit order for a couple of weeks ago. I won't mention the name because it's been a few months and I still can't get the position up to $10k. Sold a couple of long dated puts on NVO.

It's shocking how desperate they are and how willing they are to waste money. A GS 14 is the top salary you can get as a non-supervisor. So they are offering me the top salary, a $50k signing bonus, allowing me to get paid AND keep collecting my pension. Am I qualified for that role? No. I literally don't know what the statute that they enforce is called. I am not a litigator, so if you sent me to Court for hearings, I wouldn't know which side of the court my side sits on. A first year law graduate who worked as an intern doing in immigration would be more qualified than me for this role. And also...fcuk fascism!

I received this disturbing email in inbox: ------------------------------------- Dear Colleague, You served the United States of America with distinction and honor. Now, your country calls upon you to serve once more. Due to the prior administration's disastrous immigration policies, the men and women of ICE now face unprecedented challenges. Your experience and unwavering commitment are critically needed to support our frontline Law Enforcement colleagues in helping to secure our communities and uphold our laws. We are issuing an urgent call to former federal Attorneys to join OPERATION RETURN TO MISSION (“RTM”), where you can serve in your current location. By returning to ICE, you are providing an honorable, indispensable service to our nation. The Trump Administration is fully committed to supporting the dedicated law enforcement, attorneys, and professionals who secure our borders, shield our communities, and protect our national security and public safety. This is a pivotal moment in our country's history, and your experience and expertise are vitally needed. On Independence Day 2025, President Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill (“OBBB”), giving ICE the funding to once again defend the homeland and uphold the rule of law. As a result, we are significantly growing our ICE team -- starting with bringing back our retired colleagues. RTM is being offered to retired employees who departed federal service in good standing. If you qualify for RTM, you may be eligible for: A signing bonus (recruitment incentive) of up to $50,000 may be paid as follows: A signing bonus of $10,000 upon returning to service; An additional $10,000 signing bonus upon returning to service if your completed application is submitted by August 6, 2025; and A $10,000 bonus paid annually on your service anniversary for up to three years. A “dual compensation waiver” (salary offset waiver) which will allow you to continue to collect your new ICE salary while also retaining any existing federal benefits including pension payments. If you are ready to RETURN TO MISSION, please submit your application at the following links. Attorney, GS-14 - USAJOBS - Job Announcement Attorney, GS-14 (FPL 15) DC Only - USAJOBS - Job Announcement For more information and FAQs, please visit: https://www.ice.gov/return. On behalf of a grateful nation, we proudly call upon you to RETURN TO MISSION and claim your vital role among the courageous men and women of ICE. If you have questions regarding the announcements, please send them to [email protected]. Sincerely, Madison D. Sheahan Deputy Director U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

The company I was looking at, which I didn't buy, is up about 10x in a month. The trading curse strikes again I don't think not buying it was a mistake though. If you go through the list of Nasdaq companies, you will filter out half of them if you just limit yourself to companies that actually make a profit. There are countless companies with cool tech and no sales. If I had bought a few shares in each, the result would be worse than if I passed on All of them. All the other graphene companies are unprofitable, so even with cool tech, the company I was looking at could only do better than those if they actually find commercial users willing to buy their product. Assuming this company makes it cheaper and purer, there are still not a lot of people outside of universities who are willing to pay for it since it's still in the "what cool things can we do with it" phase. And the CEO seems to be at a conference or podcast every week, but that helps the stock price, not the sales.

I was impressed with the life of Appellate Judge David Tatel's biography. Normally the lives of non Supreme Court Judges are not something that people would read, aside from Judge Judy, so I'm glad I decided to listen to this on audiobook during my walks. He was a Judge on the DC Circuit, where 4 of the 9 current supreme court justices were picked from. If Bush v Gore had been decided differently, he might have been the first blind Supreme Court Justice (though he wants to be known as a judge who happens to be blind, not a blind judge). But 8 years later he was too old to be considered in the running. https://amzn.to/4meMiqr Besides working at the top firms and being involved in civil rights, desegregation, and disability rights since the LBJ administration, his personal story is fascinating. Despite slowly going blind from retinitis pigmentosa, he developed tactics to hide the fact for as long as he could. As his sight faded his ego preferred for him to be thought of as aloof or even rude for not shaking someone's hand when they extended it, than to be thought of as blind. It wasn't until the end of his career that he began to use a cane and later a guide dog and interact with the world with her help. In appellate panels, judges are randomly assigned to cases and seated according to seniority, so his clerk would put a treat on the chair that he was supposed to sit in so the dog would know to stop there. The court system is a mess now, especially the supreme court, and has become so politicized that it is not recognizable. It was refreshing to hear about how process and deliberations to ensure that he was being absolutely fair and following the law even if it didn't match his personal beliefs. On one controversial case he was writing the majority opinion and exchanged drafts back and forth 16 times with the dissenting judge because he wanted to be sure that he fully understood the other side and was responsive to all their arguments. Because he must follow Supreme Court precedent as they strip back civil rights and, even if he disagrees, he made a choice. He retired rather than to keep working, where his work would be enforcing and upholding rulings that he disagreed with and fought his entire life against. Wow! Highly recommend.

In addition to the ones I previously mentioned here, SWBI is beaten down to the point where it's yielding over 6% again. The big capex spend is behind them and management said they are committed to maintaining or growing the dividend, so if you don't mind the ups and downs, seems okay. I have a small position in DK. Not yielding 6% anymore since the price ran up, but it's pulled back in the past couple of weeks so it may be worth keeping an eye on.

Yesterday I got assigned 500 shares of VG from $15 puts that I sold, and I sold 300 of them today for a small profit (plus the premium). Seems like a decent risk/reward at this price, but I don't want to trade on margin right now. Sold some SWBI ATM puts for 2027 for $1.60. At that price, if I get exercised, it would be at what they were trading at in 2012. Sold a small position that I had in SFL for about 10% profit plus dividends. It's still cheap enough that it's paying a 10% dividend, but with a couple of offshore ships that are still waiting for contracts, I think it may get a dividend cut if they stay idle any longer. And it generally trades between $10-14 so it's a trading sardine that I can come back to.

Like everything else, it depends on who you are and what you want to accomplish. "How do you feel about Ibuprofen?" is the same as asking about your trading strategy. If you have a headache, Ibuprofen is a good idea. If you have a virus, it's useless. Since I left my job in January, my use of margin has gone from about 10% (the most I was comfortable because I'm risk averse), to zero and portion of my 401k is in short term treasuries (for ballast) instead of any stocks at all. I know someone here who has only 3 stocks and is okay with that. I think if you are young and have decades to make up a loss, you can get as risky as you want. But if you have the ball and there is nothing between you and the goal post, then you don't have to do anything heroic. Just don't fcuk it up. For me that means diversification. Currently I have about 15% GOOG, 15% BRK, 15% FRFHF and 12% JOE, 5% NTDOY, KRKNF and CPNG. My biggest positions are my older positions, and I probably would trim if any of them got over 20%. And my strategy is that the biggest positions aren't the biggest possible winners (with a chance of zero), but the ones where I would lose the least. That is, the best moats, or the biggest discount to current value, the least volatile etc. For me, the smaller 1% positions keep me studying and learning and occasionally have nice runs, but don't hurt if I am wrong about them.

Several puts I sold on VG were assigned to me over the weekend. The EU announced it would buy $750mm of LNG from the US and VG announced that it had $15bln in financing secured to expand it's buildout, so VG popped this morning. If that news had come out on Friday instead of today, those puts would be zero. I don't want to use margin now, so I'll sleep on it and decide if I want to sell or hold on. Part of my thinking is clouded by the fact that I sold a few puts on PM too and they will expire soon, and are currently below the price I sold the puts, which would mean more margin is going to be used if they get assigned to me.

Trimmed a few shares of TAYD and DK which had run up a bit. No particular reason other than I'm trying to use zero margin now and be more risk averse and I had to cut something from my smaller positions.

I thought about adding to MSCI too, but I don't have any dry powder right now. Sold some short term puts on PM and if they get exercised in a few weeks, then I'll probably keep 100 shares for the coffee can portfolio and sell the rest of them.

That's hilarious! I took a tennis class for gym credit in college, so I'm no expert, but even I can see that they took it easy on him. In BJJ if you are dealing with someone new and take it easy on them, we say you "let them work," so they aren't discouraged and will come back. If this were BJJ, his wife would pat him on the back and tell him "wow, you did really good out there." If you are dealing with someone experienced, it's okay to "give them your business card" and go 100%. Ackman never got to see that guy's business card, which is a shame.

Haha, I was just looking at VG this morning! They signed another 20 year contract, so the fears that people won't do business with them based on the allegations in the lawsuit seem to be a nothing burger. And they announced expansion of capacity in one of their projects, which was probably behind the rally a few days ago. I nibbled on a little EPD. I had it as a 1% position and other things have moved up, so I'd like to build it up to 1 or 2% position over time to keep in my fixed income bucket along with a couple of other names like POWWP and SFL and keep them as a 5% ballast.

Bought a few shares of SWBI and RGR, which have been beaten up lately. I've posted about SWBI several times, but RGR has no debt, a bunch of cash (~25% of market cap) on the balance sheet, and is also in that part of the gun industry that has an R&D budget and can make better margin on new models vs the smaller new entrants all competing on AR15 and Glock clones because the patents expired. Very small starter for now but I don't know if I'll go bigger yet because gun sales are down industry wide, but SWBI and RGR seem to be "the leper with the most fingers" in that industry.

I was very impressed by this autobiography of Robert Caro. I had heard about him but didn't know much about him. He's been talked about a lot on podcasts recently since the release of the documentary about him "Turn Every Page." His depth of research is legendary and "turn every page" is not far from the truth. He moved to the hill country in Texas while writing the book on Lyndon Johnson to get a feel for what it was like living in that part of the country and to be considered a local so that people who lived there when LBJ did would open up to him. He uncovered things about LBJ (and Robert Moses) that would otherwise be lost to time and which contradicts a lot of the published work. "People die, but papers don't" and his persistence over years poring over old documents uncovered things no one would have the patience for. He's only written a handful of books in his 60 year career, but won 2 Pulitzer Prizes. His first book on Robert Moses took years to finish and the $2500 advance wasn't enough to live on so his wife sold their home so that he could continue working on it. It's hard to make a living as a writer. L Ron Hubbard wrote more than 250 terrible sci-fi books before he discovered that starting a cult is where the real money is. There is less money in history books than Sci-fi and if you only write one volume every 6 or 7 years, it's hard to keep a roof over your head. He admits he wrote this biography partly because he's in his 80s and he may die before completing "volume 5, so far of my 3 volume biography on LBJ." He thought he would do his biography afterwards, but wanted to commit some things about his own history and work process to paper. I don't have the patience to read thousands of pages on LBJ, but I might tackle it on audiobook, which is the version of this that I consumed. He narrated it himself, and his thick Bronx accent, humor and care for his writing subjects really comes through in the descriptions, not only of his research but his writing. He mentions several older people commenting on his writing about the electrification program in rural areas and how their parents or grandparents tried to explain how hard it was back then, but they never really got it until reading his descriptions in the book. He describes going to an old woman's house in the hill country and looking at the buckets and harness used to bring water from the well and not really understanding until he picked it up himself and saw how heavy it was with water, and they thought about hauling 40 gallons a day for hours. https://amzn.to/4lQIWK5 I probably won't read the LBJ or Moses books on paper, but I definitely will get the audio versions for my next several long plane trips. Highly recommend this book, particularly the audio version, narrated by Caro himself.

Trimmed a little STNG after it popped 10% today. Trimmed a little FRPH which I lost faith in but thought it was too cheap to sell.

Got a small fill, about $1k on a resting bid order I had on POWWP. I have larger resting bids at lower prices, but it's an okay price. Bought a couple of shares of FICO to encourage me to keep studying it and decide if it's worth a real position.

Is anyone familiar with this company? https://alpaca.markets/ According to LinkedIn, they have 123 US Employees and 39 Canadian, so I figured it's worth a shot asking here. I saw a job posting for them, but I'm not familiar with them. They appear to do API based trading like Interactive, along with Crypto, like Coinbase, and payment for orderflow like Robinhood. Does anyone use this who can chime in on the plusses or minuses of the platform, or if you know of people there and can comment on the culture etc. Cheers.

I saw HIMS as like Teladoc, but smaller. The price was always too high. I had very small positions in LFMD and TalkMD (I started posts for them on COBF) while I studied up on them. Much smaller and cheaper. I sold them for a small profit and moved on. Part of it is that I am more risk averse now that I left my job and the other part is that is that with the potential crackdown on GLP1 compounds, it will take a lot of the wind out of the sales for HIMS. LFMD is psych stuff, so it's unaffected, but has military contracts, which makes it a question mark going forward. FWIW, getting to see a Dr right away and paying a couple of hundred dollars for it is probably worth it even for people who do have health insurance. I had to wait months to get a sleep study done. I can imagine for weight loss, ED or hair loss, its embarrassing and having to go to your regular doctor first, then wait for a referral with a specialist and dealing with insurance companies is unpleasant, so if you can log in and see someone virtually (or just answer a questionaire, if that's how it works) and get your prescription in a few hours, it seems like they solved a problem that people are more than willing to pay for.

The market feels weird. Besides oil not budging after the US bombed Iran, afterwards the Iranians threatened to shut down the Gulf of Hormuz, and my oil tanker stocks didn't budge either. Normally, like when the Houthi attacks were going on, rerouting ships will cause a shortage and spike day rates. Everything is weird now.

After visiting Riga, I saw this movie, that all the locals were talking about, on the airplane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) Very well done animation and story telling, especially since there are no words in the movie.