compoundinglife
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Posts posted by compoundinglife
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FWIW I got a pretty good rate at the Bond Place Hotel, 93 a night:
No idea if its a dump or not though :) Looks ok on the web site.
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Does anyone have any good short ideas?
1. Amazon
2. High Yield (Junk)
3. JGBs
4. HLF (Just Kidding!)
4. NFLX
5. Direxion 3X ETFs trending near 52 week highs
I have alway been interested in buying long dated puts on ETFs that suffer from decay. Have read about this strategy WRT USO ( http://beta.fool.com/sumzeroresearch/2012/01/24/going-short-uso/1189/ ). If I remember correctly a lot of the good short candidates in this space have high borrowing fees.
What are the gotchas to watch out for when shorting ETFs that suffer from decay?
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I agree that Splunk's valuation seems very high and a lot of the points about potential competition and business model seem valid. However the bearish stuff I read about splunk is generally full of errors and other indications that the authors don't understand the space or the company.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/900021-new-competition-challenges-splunk
"Just today, Lending Club hired Oracle for its ERP software when it could've hired Splunk." What?
http://www.marketfolly.com/2012/10/zack-buckley-shorts-splunk-value.html
"The company monitor's web traffic". Not exactly.
When they first IPO'ed I read another article that said they did mobile analytics.
Like I said it seems way overvalued. But don't blindly follow someone into this short because it seems like the vocal bears don't really have this in their circle of competence from what I have seen.
Zack Buckley also lists SAP and EMC as competitors to Splunk. It has been a little while since I have been involved in product selection for log aggregation/analysis. But I have never seen either of these companies come up in this space and even after looking through their website could not find an offering that competes with Splunk (anyone know what he is talking about). Companies like Oracle/SAP generally sell solutions that require lots of custom tweaking and setup, where as Splunk's product is intended to be setup and configured by your average IT guy.
Also Splunk does have a hosted solution for cloud based applications. I have no idea how the product is doing. But that was another thing ZB highlighted was lack of a SAAS offering, which may not have been released when he presented the idea.
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What is the hypothetical goal (i.e. double your stake?) and hypothetical time frame? If I had to pick only one leveraged play it would be BAC class A warrants. The dividend reduction and longish expiration offers more safety than LEAPs while still offering good upside. If things go well you could see a 3-5 X return. Some of the other warrants look interesting (HIG, FFBC for example). But I have not been following them enough to say that I would or would not take a serious position. I own a tiny amount of FFBCW.
Leveraged positions in LUK and BRK are interesting but the features you get with the BAC warrants offer much more of a buffer in the event of any catastrophic market events IMO. My stated opinion is based on the requirement of picking only one leveraged postition.
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I'm gonna have to disagree with Buffett on this one.
"According to Buffett, “Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with a 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing."
I'm not disagreeing that the 130 IQ can't beat the 160, but I wouldn't say that an IQ of 130 is "ordinary." Doesn't that put someone in the top 2-3% of intelligence?
The quote I remember reading or hearing from WEB regarding IQ and intelligence is something like "If you have a 160 IQ sell 30 points to someone else because the extra 30 wont help you and will probably hurt you".
I don't think Buffett is implying that we should all wish for 100 IQ. I think his point is that someone with an IQ of 100 can get decent returns because you have sufficient intelligence, at that point you just need the ability to be rational and grasp the $1 for 50 cent concept. So a 100 IQ investor that "gets" value investing could outperform a 160 IQ investor who knows/thinks he is smarter than everyone else. The later might do really well for a while but might end up blowing up a la LTCM. Of course there is no research to back this up, but I tend to agree with him.
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Hi all, this is my first outing to the annual meeting, and I was hoping for some advice/pointers. I pretty much want to know everything that's worth knowing--so don't hold back!
Some questions I particularly wouldn't mind info on:
1) I'd love to get my Security Analysis autographed by Buffett/Munger, but I doubt there's anyway to get that to happen given the number of people. Is it pretty much just a pipe dream?
2) How soon do you get there and get into the seats?
3) Is there a corner of berkshire meet-up? Or is it so hectic with all the events that everyone just wonders around?
4) What's yellow berker, and is that worth going to (it seems like the answer is yes)?
Thanks!
#1 Highly unlikely IMO. The closest I have gotten to WEB was watching him play bridge at the mall for a few minutes. They used to have an international meetup for people with international passports to meet them, but they have stopped doing that.
#2 I went in 09 and 10, showed up around 6:30am to get in line and got decent seats. For those two years it seemed like there were plenty of seats available. But maybe someone who went last year can comment.
#3 No idea. If there is I would like to know.
#4 No idea.
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Happy Anniversary!!! Would you like give updates about the board now and the future of it?
Oh, it will continue as long as I'm alive! I love hanging out with you guys, and I have a blast being able to communicate with so many people. It will continue to evolve at a sloth-like pace, as it has for the last 11 years. I want to maintain a sense of community, so we'll get larger slowly. The boards will continue to be monitored as they have been.
I'm still looking at the best ways to make the site mobile. The cheaper and free ways of setting up a site for mobile browsers doesn't work as well with the Simple Machines software and layout. I think it's going to be costly, so it may be a little longer before we do that. I'll let you guys know of any other updates as they happen, if any. Cheers!
Out of curiosity have you looked at: http://tapatalk.com/activate_tapatalk.php
They have SMF plugin which appears to be free, then users buy the client app from the app store.
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Gotta love these article titles. Insuring a ~100M issue that will be used to finance land including a future Nebraska Furniture Mart location.
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A couple of short articles I found:
http://www.wib.org/publications__resources/article_library/2000-02/jun02_tr-pref2.html
http://www.davidevanson.com/pages/stories.php?ID(Stories)=144&RECORD_KEY(Stories)=ID
If you register for a free JSTOR account you can access this article "Debt-Equity Hybrid Securities" from The Journal of Accounting Research, or potentially find it at your local public or academic library:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2491409?uid=3739552&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101594198931
When I am looking for stuff like this that may be in Journals I will usually use Google Scholar and then try to track down the articles from a Library. For example: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=trust+preferred+securities&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C48&as_sdtp=
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BTW if you have never seen this video its entertaining as well.
"Carl Icahn caught on video at Caroline's Comedy Club in Manhattan talking about the Texaco/Getty Oil Lawsuit."
That's pretty damn funny...you really have to wait for the punch line, because he sounds exactly like he did on CNBC for the first few minutes. Cheers!
I probably should have mentioned that parts of the video including the punch line is NSFW, so use headphones!
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BTW if you have never seen this video its entertaining as well.
"Carl Icahn caught on video at Caroline's Comedy Club in Manhattan talking about the Texaco/Getty Oil Lawsuit."
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Wow they held commercials for a while.
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In all honesty I want to start the next twitter or instagram or the next great web startup and become Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett rolled into one.
Lemme know if anybody has ideas. Seriously.
+1, there is a lot of dreaming here and minimal ideas.
Ha, I was not being sarcastic, I was 400% serious. I think that for these web startup type firms, the idea is not really that important, many of the ideas already exist....all about putting something really good together IMO.
One common factor I have noticed among alot of the successful web start ups (successful does not always mean profitable in this context ) is the founders and key players have unrivalled passion about what they are doing. So while the idea itself does not have to be revolutionary, sincere passion and belief in the idea is IMO.
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Yesterday the spin-off of Liberty from Starz was completed. Now, what to do with Starz? Anyone has ideas?
For what I can see, Starz has a $406 million TTM operating income. Its market capitalization right now is $1,670 million. Starz is trading at 4.11 x operating income. Furthermore, Starz has approximately $400 million available under its stock repurchase program. It seems pretty cheap to me!
My only concern is I could not find how much debt Starz assumed in the transaction. Anyone can help?
Thank you,
giofranchi
1.1B w/450M available http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/14/starz-trading-idUSL2N0AJE2720130114
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I will repost the response I gave in the SHLD thread:
In the BB video I watched I think that is the point he is trying to make valuation wise. However SPG is a REIT that is earning a positive return and able to pay out its earnings to shareholders so its not an apples to apples comparison. So I don't object with the idea that it is possible but I felt like the way BB presented it in the video, he tried to make it sound as simple as the market just needs to realize that SHLD is like SPG and its not that simple. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to get it there.When you look at the project in St. Paul and some of the other stuff going on it seems like the RE group at SHLD might be slowly making the transformation to operating more like a SPG. If they did a decent job then we might start to see the multiple that BB speaks of.
The way I look at SHLD is that you don't need to know a mans weight to know he is fat, its obvious. I don't know the exact future value of SHLD to know its cheap, I just know that it is much greater than what I can buy it for today.
So in 5-10 years if things play out well you could see a bunch of things come together in a lollapalooza type affect between monetizing real estate (not necessarily liquidating), leveraging the KCD brands, retail turn around or housing recovery, progress in the online business and the chance for ESL to actually have some CF coming in the door that he can use for investments. I don't think its that far of a stretch.
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If you consolidate all of his/his family's holdings, he owns a total of 542,098 shares or about $9.1m worth of CHK. If you're looking for insider holdings, look up the company in edgar and then click on insider transactions. Once you've clicked on the record of the officer/director you're interested in, you'll be able to see the most recent form 4 which details a transaction and lists total holdings. The most recent addition of shares was not a direct purchase, it was an award from CHK.
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/895126/000089512612000336/xslF345X03/edgardoc.xml
Thanks for the clarification.
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anyone know why he doesn't own any CHK? he's on the board.
He does not own any in the fund but he does own it. Pretty sure its 200,000 shares at around 25 a share.
ahh, makes sense then. Thanks man! :)
Here are the filings, ballpark of 27 per share
http://insidercow.com/forms/2011079/0000895126-11-000206.xml
http://insidercow.com/forms/2011109/0000895126-11-000281.xml
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anyone know why he doesn't own any CHK? he's on the board.
He does not own any in the fund but he does own it. Pretty sure its 200,000 shares at around 25 a share.
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You can look into this as well: https://www.torproject.org/
If you do not have a completely clean computing/browsing environment and keep it that way then tor is of little help. It attempts to anonymize you at the network layer, but if your browser is still barfing up cookies its very easy for sites to identify and track you while using tor. It is also painfully slow or at least it was the first time I tried it out.
I take that back, it looks like the tor project now provides some browser plugins to help reduce the exposure to cookies etc... in addition to providing the network layer anonymizing. https://www.torproject.org/torbutton/index.html.en
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You can look into this as well: https://www.torproject.org/
If you do not have a completely clean computing/browsing environment and keep it that way then tor is of little help. It attempts to anonymize you at the network layer, but if your browser is still barfing up cookies its very easy for sites to identify and track you while using tor. It is also painfully slow or at least it was the first time I tried it out.
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In a high unemployment environment, do you really think this administration will go hard against the MLM industry, which is made up of self-employed lower-middle class constituents for the most part, to benefit a hedge fund manager's short position?
The vast majority of people who have been involved with Herbalife have lost money. The company claims that anyone who loses money is really a customer (not a distributor), but the truth is there are millions of failed distributors.
They lose money because they did not execute on the distribution...an actual effort has to be made on the system package material provided to new distributors.
A similar argument could be made that some universities are ponzi schemes...students pay fees to attend the university and receive their degree. What if the student has paid fees for four years, fails some of their courses and does not receive a degree? Should the educational institution be categorized as a "ponzi scheme" because the student lost money?
Ironically, what about failed hedge fund managers...should their businesses be deemed ponzi schemes? As they charge 2&20 fees on other people's money, run aground, and then close their funds after realizing they will be a long ways from receiving another incentive fee. But they are at the top of the pyramid and run away with all of the fees they've generated over the years.
I like Ackman some of the time, but his hypocrisy stinks big time on this one...that Target fund was one of the stupidest things any hedge fund manager has done in some time and his investors lost a bundle. Cheers!
I don't disagree with most of what you are saying but if there is any truth in Ackman's research then executing on distribution with HLF is near impossible because people who need to make their hurdle to get paid from people below them sell product on the market at a massive discount. So you are basically recruiting new people at the bottom to execute on a strategy that requires them to sell product for more then what the market is charging.
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While I realize that not all MLM's are created equal, after a quick look at VLine, it's hard to take away the success that HLF has had. I know some who do MLM ( not HLF ), and some are very successful and others not as much. I think it's a stretch to consider HLF a total fraud and worth zero. If the products are good/great like some other MLM's products, then it's worth something. I wonder if this will prove disappointing for Ackman. I have A LOT of time for both Ackman and Loeb. If I had to put money on this one, I think i'd have to put my chips on Loeb. ;)
I have a friend whose wife has been successful with pampered chef, as Ackman mentioned in the preso there are other MLMs with compensation structures that allow hard workers at the bottom to make money and work their way up. At least the way its portrayed in Ackman's preso it is near impossible to accomplish this with HLF.
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From CES:
it's running the full codebase, so you can dock and use it as a computer too. Pretty interesting, although as has been commented elsewhere, all those edge swipes are a bit tough on the UI front (good luck playing games with swipes!).
Interesting. Perhaps Canonical will actually make some money one of these days. Seems like a tough market for them get into considering all the major players already have some app store ecosystem. Although I could see app developers getting excited about a truly open platform.
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FWIW, I manage an account for a close family member that is much larger than my pa and I manage it quite differently WRT to concentration. For example at the end of the year BAC was %30 of my port vs %9 of the other port. A couple of reasons for that, one I did not start managing it till BAC had risen to around $9 for the common , I never know when this person might need to pull out capital even though they say they wont, something unexpected could happen with BAC and I also feel in general its not responsible as a stewart of this persons money to go very large on the best idea. I know that WEB had at points %40 of his partners assets in one position, but I remind myself constantly that I am not him nor will I ever be therefor I need to be more conservative when it comes to OP money. Hell Munger almost blew up managing other peoples money.
On the other hand I am 35 with decent earning power and time on my side and I generally feel I am unemotional in comparison to the herd so I am more aggressive with my own money.
Question for the pros like Sanjeev. Does managing someone else's account fall into building a track record or do you feel it has to be in the form of a partnership or fund to really count for a track record?
Seeking Alpha Article on Munger
in General Discussion
Posted
I read the kindle edition last year, great book. Lots of interesting stuff, some things that come to mind are the details of real estate development phase and the period in his early thirties were he hit a bottom that could have easily ruined someone with less perseverance.