Red Lion

Excellent this is just what I was hoping for. Will start reading reports today.

Dealraker, spek, and others, do you have a recommendation for insurance brokers as a buy around current prices? Or just great businesses to read annual reports or conference call transcripts to learn more about the business? This thread has convinced me to start researching the sector.

It seems like this time around (compared to GFC) a lot of the mom and pop home builders and contractors completely exited the market after GFC. This is anecdotal, and maybe just because I’m living in California which has got to be one of the worst markets to build, but it costs ~$1 million to build (not including land) a nice 2,000-2,500 square foot custom house in California, but you can buy a decent looking brand new home in one of these cookie cutter subdivisions for close to half the price. Given the demographics and housing shortage, and the seeming inability for small contractors to even come close to competing price, and the existing affordability crisis, it just seems hard to see the home builders performing poorly over let’s say the next 10 years. I would consider investing here, but I’m looking at putting most of my liquidity into a cash real estate purchase that I plan to remodel, and hopefully cash out refinance in a year or two when rates are lower. Probably not the highest returning option, but I want to sleep well at night and ditch the current neighbors in the cookie cutter subdivision I currently live in.

e.g. Having a network of criminals across Europe and the americas with USD or EUR bank accounts or physical currency stockpiles does not offer the same utility as tens of thousands of wallets that can transact digitally. I totally agree with your previous comments that the USD is the world's crime reserve currency, there's certainly more crime and terror and oil and houses and everything else that transact in USD vs. BTC or EUR or AUS, etc. It's funny because I think we have similar views on this, I'm certainly all in favor of civil liberties, smaller government, and more freedom in general. I just have two issues with investing in BTC (and I would be a lot richer if I didn't, notwithstanding the 80% drawdown): 1) I don't know how to value this, and don't see why this won't this get displaced by new technology or a new speculative whim (tulips/watches/NFTs/whatever). 2) I see a big risk of government regulation/crackdown that may or may not make crypto less attractive as an investment/speculative vehicle. I think maybe I'm just being paranoid and this fear is overblown, I think if the government is going to crack down on crypto it's going to happen soon as our legislation in the US tends to be reactionary in nature. Best of luck to you with your position, I certainly won't bet against you.

I’ve mentioned this before but you act like terrorist and drug cartels have some centralized slush fund with billions of dollars when the reality is that these organizations control thousands of people with tens or hundreds of thousands of small accounts. No doubt our government has the technology to monitor account, but certainly not the capacity to throw a wide enough net.

Well Ellison just plead guilty to manipulating the price of FTT which would tend to show that, yes, large players are manipulating the price.

Swapped ALCO for JOE to harvest my short term loss.

Bought back BAM @ $27 but kept the BN I purchased earlier this week when I swapped out BAM @ $31.xx. The rare short term trade for me.

GOOGL. Needed to harvest my META tax loss and felt like GOOGL was a good place for this money to sit at least until the 30 day wash sale period runs.

Sold META (I needed the tax loss) and bought GOOGL with the proceeds.

January 20 $85 GOOGL puts

Added to BX

BAM at $31.85.

BN. Sold all of my BAM and added 1.3X the number of shares to BN. After the wash sales run I will look to adding BAM back inside a retirement account particularly if I can get it at a better valuation.

Even more BX since my $85 puts were assigned.

Wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment.

More BX.

I should have called this current environment as it arrives just as I finished stepping from the young labor boat into the relatively old investor/employer boat.

I would think the goal here is maybe to use the bk court to reduce the punitive damages award. Even in California the appeals courts typically reduce punitives to no more than 3x the actual damages. I don’t think he violated any criminal laws unless there was some type of bk fraud, which seems unlikely. Still I agree with the original sentiment that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

I think you could almost certainly accomplish this by selling overpriced illiquid options in your ROTH IRA and buying them in the 401k. Maybe cash secured puts. But I am also pretty sure this is tax fraud and could get you in huge trouble if you got caught. If you are trading between a 401k and a Roth with a 90% chance the Roth wins then I suspect that would not pass the smell test at the IRS if you happened to draw the short straw.

I agree that done right they're terrific businesses. This is why about 1.5 years ago I decided to swallow my pride and put these stocks into a basket, I think overall I'll definitely make a good return, but I like diversifying between the different players here. Currently long BAM/APO/KKR/BX/ARES. BX is half the size of the first 3 because it's traded at such a premium valuation all along. ARES is less than half the size of BX for the same reason, premium valuation. A basket of APO/KKR/BAM/BX seems like a really good bet at this point, at least that's where about 20% of my liquid net worth is invested right now which is my biggest position.

Sold some more BX $85 PUTS expiring 12/9 for $1.90.

Nice timing. I was a little to cute on this one and sold $85 puts yesterday, didn't buy this morning because I expected to be assigned on these, now it's looking like they might expire worthless. I think BX is good value at this point, it's already a relatively large position for me but I'd really like to double my position in the $70s which seems quite likely if this bear rally withers on the vine.

From my law school days I seem to remember that punitive damages are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, so I highly doubt he's going to ever get past this unless the verdicts get overturned on appeal. https://www.reuters.com/legal/alex-jones-must-pay-473-million-punitive-damages-sandy-hook-defamation-case-2022-11-10/

I agree with you that there won't. be much reputational damage which is why I wrote $85 BX puts expiring tomorrow. Buying the entire business for 20X FRE and getting the rest for free seems like a great deal to me for the leading franchise. This also looks like a pretty great income investment since you're getting about 4.5% (90% payout on 5% FRE earnings yield) just out of the FRE plus the variable DE component.