backtothebeach

Problem with ADSK is valuation with low growth, and the recent internal accounting investigation casting doubt on management. Maybe a nothingburger, maybe more bad news to follow. Grossly overpaid management probably, have you looked at SBC? I had stupidly sold some $250 puts on this one, figuring they are solid with an entrenched product, without looking closely at the company (when will I ever learn???). Just closed them out first thing this morning, cutting losses. Maybe this will mark the bottom, lol.

That's kind of in my wheelhouse. There is no objectively or statistically better deal, otherwise it would be arbitraged away in a liquid option chain like TSLA's, especially right before earnings. One can be subjectively better than the other, though, depending on your expectation of TSLA's stock price and your risk tolerance. Let's say you decide to risk (gamble) $4000 on the expectation that TSLA will fall after next week's earnings. You could buy 2 contracts of the 175 put, or 5 contracts of the 157.50 put. Below are P/L graphs of both positions, at expiration April 26, and on April 24, at the open after earnings (with unchanged IV, which may only be realistic for the first minutes of April 24, probably IV will drop and the options worth a bit less than modeled). You can see that if TSLA either surges or drops a lot, the 157.50 put is superior (max loss is capped at $4000, but max profit is much higher due to more contracts). However you have to be right about a large downmove. The 175 put is "safer" between 150 and 175, and has, as you noted, a higher breakeven - at the cost of each dollar invested not making as much should TSLA drop like a rock to $120.

Fair enough. Too bad there is no "ignore thread" feature.

Parsad deleted an Israel/Gaza thread after October 7th. However he takes part in this one, so maybe he thinks differently now. IMO this stuff is just too divisive, nobody will change anyone's mind, and is going to be 99% not investment related. There should be an Oil & Gas thread, and if Middle East discussions creep in from time to time that's ok, but every dedicated political thread is one too many IMO.

I suggest this thread be deleted. We've done well without a dedicated Middle East thread for the last 6 months.

Congrats! I did not do anything...felt too stressful.

What happened?

>500,000,000 shares authorized, 10,879,905 shares issued and outstanding Hmm, could there be some reflexivity here? Can they place the other 489M shares at market price?

Fascinating. Net assets of 52.6M, current market cap 644M. An easy 10x. People probably don't even know what they are buying, paying for 1000% future growth upfront. As of December 31, 2023: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1843974/000139834424005739/fp0087134-2_ncsr.htm Net Asset Value Per Share Net assets applicable to Common Shareholders $ 52,623,533 Common Shares of beneficial interest outstanding, at $0.00001 par value; 500,000,000 shares authorized, 10,879,905 shares issued and outstanding 10,879,905 Net Asset Value Per Share applicable to Common Shareholders $ 4.84

Good points about taxes and dividends. I am not an expert on taxes, but if exercising the options does not trigger a tax event, this kind of leverage could be at least a good tool to pull investments forward two years during the accumulating phase of ones life. Particularly if you think you have identified an outstanding bargain, e.g., Berkshire trading below book value in 2020.

The most prudent approach is to make the leverage uncallable. If you own 1000 shares of a stock, and want to control, for example, 1100 shares, you could sell 100 shares and buy 2 option contracts of the longest expiration and lowest strike price possible from the proceeds, for even money. That way you don't have margin loan and have zero risk of a margin call. The implied interest rate for BRKB deep ITM LEAPs currently is around 6%, not too different from any other cost of leverage. (Probably a bit high for the expected return of Berkshire at the moment). Jim (mungofitch) on the old Fool boards did a lot of great work on this. Eplanation of implied interest rate: http://www.datahelper.com/mi/search.phtml?nofool=youBet&mid=34391366 http://www.datahelper.com/mi/search.phtml?nofool=youBet&mid=31996045 One nuance: During a steep drop in stock price, you might be able to lock in some gained time value by rolling the strike price further down, as explained here: http://www.datahelper.com/mi/search.phtml?nofool=youBet&mid=31899968 Another nuance: If the stock goes absolutely nowhere, or down, or up less than 6% p.a., you would have to roll those options forward (a few more years out), in order to maintain the leverage. This may require fresh funds, suitable strike prices may not always be available, or implied interest rates could be even higher.

Enjoyed the puns in the top posts of this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1bc9vz8/what_is_badly_named_and_what_is_a_better_name_for/

Any ideas for a creative option play on Google? I am thinking, it is unlikely for Google to tank precipitously (famous last words), but it could slowly grind lower, while everybody beats up on it, similar to what happened to META two years ago. On the other hand, if one of the founders steps in this could pop 20%. May be a synthetic long using short OTM puts, and long OTM calls.

Interview with Perplexity’s founder and CEO: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/invest-like-the-best-with-patrick-oshaughnessy/id1154105909

Bought SGOV for the first time today with some excess cash. With a buy limit at the Ask, I got filled at the mid-point. Nice surprise, I wonder if that is normal, since SGOV does not fluctuate at all during the day.

The Japanese trading house investment is truly a masterpiece. Purchasing high, durable dividend yields, with hedged currency, using almost free money. After a 30 year sideways market, right before take off. Stunning.

I think it depends on the exchange. On IB odd lot orders for FFH:CA don’t show up in the NBBO, and often get filled at favorable prices between the bid-ask (and I remember one time when a buy order was filled below the bid). With orders for FRFHF every single share is shown in the NBBO. I often use hidden orders on US exchanges, even though I’m not exactly sure how they work. Does Interactive Brokers match them internally, or do they catch other hidden/limit orders at the exchange? Not advertising your intention to buy/sell openly seems to be an advantage sometimes.

BOXX, SGOV and BIL have pretty much identical performance (dividend adjusted charts below). I'd be nervous about unexpected risks if I had a lot of money in BOXX. The tax aspect, if it holds, makes BOXX superior if you live in a tax advantaged jurisdiction. I wonder if, when buying SGOV on the first of the month and selling it on the last, the gains would be treated as capital gains or dividends with withholding tax.

This thread was started in August 2021 with the title “The TOP is coming”. In retrospect that was actually a great call, the market topped out in November 2021. Then, close to a market bottom, I think in May 2022, Parsad renamed it to “Is The Bottom Almost There?” The market bottomed in May, but made another even lower bottom in September 2022. Still, I think another good call. Not sure when exactly it was changed to the current title “ Have We Hit The Top? “, but it was way before a new all-time high, IIRC with the S&P around 4200, so in retrospect a very premature call. Just goes to show how difficult these calls are… and how difficult it is to be confidently bullish after a bear market, even when all the bullish trends are all in place. E.g. the index above it’s 200 DMA, etc.. I think after the GFC it was similar, it took a long time for people to regain confidence.

Thanks guys, will check them out!

Apple's podcast app is really starting to piss me off. Every couple of weeks it just reverts its settings to default. The skip back/foward time changes, and above all it reverts to continuous playback. Any recommendations for a better podcast app? What are you guys using?

A lot of excellent points above! To the original question, one aspect not mentioned yet, is that buying a large position in Berkshire for the long-term basically meant admitting that you are not that great, and that Warren Buffett has a better shot at compounding your money. Even though it is Warren Buffett ... there is some humility in this. --- Here is a neat tool for comparing Berkshire with SPY (dividend adjusted). You can drag the left edge of the slider that says '200 days' to the left to see any time period: https://stockcharts.com/freecharts/perf.php?SPY,BRK/B.

Sold excess FRFHF that I bought during the Muddy Waters dip.

Q: who are the investors that participated in perplexity ai's first funding round A: (by perplexity, removed footnotes) Perplexity AI's initial funding round included investors such as New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Databricks Ventures, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Pieter Abbeel (AIX Ventures), Yann LeCun (Meta), Andrej Karpathy (OpenAI), Ashish Vaswani (Transformer), Amjad Masad (Replit), Clem Delangue (HuggingFace), and Oriol Vinyals (DeepMind). These investors were involved during the seed stage and the Series A funding round before the company gained significant recognition and value.

In the last few days I have heard perplexity.ai being mentioned in various podcasts, and now here on the board in the Google thread. The name sucks IMO, but this could catch on. Maybe they find a catchy name for their engine that could become a verb... Private company for now. From Wikipedia: "Perplexity was founded in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski.[7] Aravind Srinivas previously worked at OpenAI and now serves as Perplexity's CEO.[8] "Perplexity has raised $73.6 million in a Series B funding round, led by notable investors including Nvidia and Jeff Bezos. This investment, part of the total $100 million raised so far, has contributed to the company's current valuation of $520 million.[15][16][2][17][18] The investors so far include New Enterprise Associates, Nvidia, Databricks, Bessemer Venture Partners, Jeff Bezos, Susan Wojcicki, Jeff Dean, Yann LeCun, Andrej Karpathy and others.[19][20][8][21][18] Despite this high valuation, Perplexity has fewer than 40 employees.[19] It has garnered about 10 million monthly users.[22]