Red Lion

Also initiated a decent sized position in FB at $252.64/252.75 after hours.

Just started a decent sized new position in PYPL after-hours at 129.60

Started a new position in OWL. There are some warrants on this one I'm sniffing around as well.

Thank you! Wish it had still been sitting at $102 when I had a bunch of dry powder land in my account 2 days later..

Agreed regarding the reputational damage to the stock. I got lucky because I had a starter position going into the short report and ended up buying a large position at under $6 US and ended with around a 50% gain in a few months exiting just over $10. I've been watching the share price tread water since then and think the long term upside could be huge if they're able to scale up this business model, it seems like a logical takeout candidate for an alt asset manager if the strategy can be proven. I have some personal experience with litigation finance, and there are a lot of shady small operators in this space financing personal injury cases, etc. Burford seems to finance serious blue chip litigation by comparison, has more ties in the United States, and is starting to play with third party capital for a pretty huge carried interest %. So if they really can keep pulling 30% IRR on these non correlated litigation financings then this seems like a really good place to be over the medium to long term. Covid definitely has delayed a lot of litigation, but my understanding is that BUR will likely be able to recover higher total fees based on its funding agreements the longer a financing remains in place.

Started a position in BUR at $9. I had a previous roundtrip trade with this in the aftermath of the Muddy Waters short report where I exited at $10.20 and have been following the company since then, and feel like this is a good time to start buying in.

Added to BX today.

Bought back ATVI April 57.50 puts I wrote in late December.

Beer on me, I should have sold more. I should have just let my $60 PUTS get assigned in December, oh well.

More APO

Sold 1/28/22 $85 ATVI put for $2.50

Pacific Gas and Electric

It's about damn time. It's been almost impossible to run a small business these last two years, and for what, everyone is going to catch the damn thing eventually. It's funny that in my personal circle the doctors and medical professionals seem to be the least worried about covid, while the teachers say to "believe in science" and sanitize their grocery bags.

I think APO is attractive at this price. Pro forma for the Athene acquisition, it is trading at less than 15x multiple of 2022 distributable earnings, which is downright cheap compared to BX, BAM, or KKR. APO has a great PE business, and is definitely leading the pack in the pension risk transfer / annuity business that all of the alternative asset managers are trying to get into now. I understand that a lot of these earnings are pro forma spread related earnings, and the market certainly values FRE higher, but to me this is a great quality company that is trading at a 25-30% discount to the market, closer to 35-50% discount to its peers in the alternative asset management space, and has laid out what I believe is a persuasive case for 15-20% growth in distributable earnings. The stock is trading at $74, and expects to do $5.50 in distributable earnings in 22. I feel that a $110 price target is reasonable based on a 20x multiple, and there should be 15%+ earnings growth over the next several years, so I think this can do well.

Bought BRK.B and APO in one of my taxable accounts. Both are now full position sizes for me based on cost basis.

Sold APTS April $15 PUTS. I'm already short the $15 calls and long $10 calls with the same expiration. I had thought about buying back the $15 calls for a loss and rewriting $17.50, but decided to take this approach instead to take advantage of time value decay. Put the proceeds from new options premiums into a few more shares of APO.

I basically decided to jump the gun and do it for him, at least that was my theory. Increased my Berkshire stake by almost 10% this way, I'm tempted to hedge the full position and plow it all back into Berkshire shares, but I'm a short selling neophyte and have seen a lot of positions blow up (e.g. the never ending Einhorn train wreck or Bill Ackman with Herbalife). I thought this would be a good way to test the waters without hopefully incurring any huge losses. This is a strategy I've frequently thought about using with my heavily overweight BAM position, short the subs and stay long the asset manager, but haven't pulled the trigger yet.

I sold short AAPL and reinvested the proceeds into BRK.B. On a look through basis I'm still long AAPL through BRK.B, but sold short about 40% of the look through AAPL stake.

Recycled proceeds from SAM and SFTBY into BRKB and harvested a small short term loss. Several of you have convinced that there are better ways to play the SAM game through options, and it's certainly not screamingly cheap at these prices, although I do believe in the long term future of this business and they seem to earn better ROIC up until this most recent hard seltzer fiasco. SFTBY I continue to want some exposure to, and this may be very poor timing. Also added a few more shares of APO after rolling my 1/20/23 APO puts to a higher strike price for a credit.

I've been looking for opportunities to do some year end tax loss activity, and I'm fortunate not to have many good candidates. Anyway, I just repeated this process again by buying back my 1/20/23 $65 PUTs I'm short on margin, and sold $70 PUTS with the same expiration for a $2.25 credit. This should give me some short term losses for 2021 and increases my likelihood of picking up APO shares which I'm OK with. I'm reinvesting the credit spread into a few APO shares anyway.

Added to my APO, which is very close to a max position allocation for me.

@boilermaker75 I think I should probably let these ATVI options get assigned as I wouldn't mind starting to pickup some shares at under $60. But I'm playing with the strategy here, and decided to roll over the options again to a lower strike. I wanted to stay in a net credit position, so I sold the February 18 expiry $57.50 ATVI PUTS and bought back my 12/31/21 $60 PUTS for a $0.35 credit. My concern with this type of strategy is that I'm opening myself up to an inability to keep rolling these options for a net credit if the stock keeps dropping since I'm locked up until mid February on this. On the other hand, if I end up getting assigned I'll end up owning ATVI at $56.42 which would be just fine for me. If the February puts end up expiring worthless I'm not earning a great IRR here, but since this is on margin and no interest is charged until assigned, I'm not sure that matters all that much. I'm curious, for tax purposes, I'm assuming I could deduct all of the short term losses I've suffered by rolling over the PUTs in 2021, and then would be taxed as a short term gain if/when the PUT expires worthless or I buy it back at a discount?

Thanks for posting this. Moving some money out of a CD to grab my 10k now.

I've been playing with rolling these losing ATVI put options per boilermaker75, just closed out my 11/26 $61.50 options for a loss and wrote 12/31/21 $60 options. So if these options are assigned my total price ends up coming to $59.27, if they expire worthless then I end up with a $0.73 profit for a 6 week hold for an initial $6,350 margin commitment. I obviously would be happier if my initial foray into these short term options had been wildly profitable on an IRR basis, but this is good experience catching a falling knife, and I plan to keep playing it out to its conclusion to see if I can learn something. If the price keeps dropping I will try to continue rolling my options lower and longer duration to stay in a net debit position.

Bought some more BRK.B