compoundinglife

Was parking some money in the MLNX merger arb. Sold yesterday and putting some to work yesterday and today.

Interesting. Worked in that building but left in at the end 2019. Had no idea he was there.

Buying DD

Schwab was down for a bit too. App was getting an error on login. Seems to be working now.

The supply and demand mismatch on Tacomas is insane. I have 2005 Tacoma Pre-Runner, stick shift, 83K miles. I bought it used for ~16K in 2010. I thought it was expensive back then and was upset the Toyota dealership would not negotiate with me on price. I could sell it for 13K-15K in my area now if I wanted to. If I paid for a high end detail job I could probably sell it for what I paid.

Can you elaborate on this or point me to the original post of Ericopoly? I'm trying to figure out a way to hedge the gain on bank stocks. Dealing with (maybe not hedging per se though) the gain on bank stocks (specifically BAC) is exactly the problem Ericopoly was trying to solve. In order to avoid a large capital gains tax bill, but still take money out of your portfolio with this strategy, you first must make sure you have a Portfolio Margin account (as opposed to the standard Reg-T margin account). My understanding is that Portfolio Margin will look at different offsetting positions when determining whether or not to make a margin call. For example, if you buy at-the-money puts that cover your bank stock, any decline in the stock should be more or less offset by the gain in the puts. Portfolio margin will give you credit for the gain in the puts, while Reg-T will not. Once you have your appreciated stock protected with puts, you can remove cash from the account by borrowing on margin. Hopefully, the puts expire worthless and you get a tax write-off. Rinse and repeat by buying more puts. If the puts appreciate in value due to a steep decline, sell them and reduce your margin borrowing. If the stock continues to appreciate, your margin borrowing ability grows. Removing cash from the account by borrowing on margin -- is that only applicable to the portfolio margin account? can't you simply do it with the reg-T account? Sure you can borrow cash on margin from a reg-T account. But reg-T does not take hedging into account when calculating your margin equity so you either borrow much less or increase your risk of getting called. In theory with portfolio margin and a hedged position you could set it up so that massive drop in the stock price does not change your margin requirements. I say in theory because I never used portfolio margin so I don't know the little details.

I highly doubt there is a hedge fund scraping the site to pump into their algos but I guess anything is possible. What you are seeing is a fact of life on the Internet. Most traffic is not humans. The site could be updated/configured to filter out the bot traffic when calculating thread views. Paywall is not the answer, the internet and this website is more useful with bots than without them. Some reports indicate that bots account for around 50% of web traffic. There are good bots and bad bots. Bots make our search work well, they make things like the Way Back Machine possible so you can see what sites used to look like years ago ( https://archive.org/web/ ), they do research on how the internet changes. Search engines do more than just index the data on the site. They regularly probe sites for availability, content changes, response time, security issues and more. They use this all this data in their search ranking. There are many many more search engines than yahoo and google. I have written a bot in the past to scan the investment-ideas section of the site. I did it for shits and giggles to do some statistical analysis on the posts. I have only run it against the site once. But as long you do it slow and politely to not cause problems it is not a big deal.

Thanks! This appears to be exactly what I am looking for. It seems from their intraday API you get a time series and just pull the latest one for a realtime or near realtime quote. Its JSON so that is great. I also found opensource client libraries available. Thanks Oddballstocks.

Thanks Gokou3, I remember this from the original spreadsheet that Old School Value used to release. I am not using Excel so it does not help me at the moment. But will keep in my notes for future reference. I am looking for real time or delayed quotes in either the Python or Java programming languages. In the past I had used publicly available libraries/apis but they all seem broken now since Yahoo and Google finance are stopping their services. I can write my own code to screen scrape fairly easily but that tends to be brittle so was looking for something a little more stable.

Thanks rukawa. I was hoping to avoid screen scraping but it looks like that might be my only choice. It was nice when I could I just use the yahoo or google finance APIs available in for various programming languages.

I went to knock the dust off of some of my code for screening and analyzing companies. I used to use the free yahoo and google finance APIs to get 20 minute delayed quotes. It appears as though both of though APIs have shut down. All I want is a simple 20 minute delayed quote for a ticker. I have looked at quandal and the yahoo csv download that is still available. These are great for EOD data but not if I want to get a somewhat current quote. Does anyone know of anything still available without a subscription?

I don't know how it works for institutional investors or hedge funds but I have gotten as high as a 40% rate lending shares on my Schwab account. Always made me wonder what Schawb was charging the borrowers. Majority of time it has been in the single digit percentages. I know that in IB you can setup your account for lending and split the interest with them 50/50. I don't believe Schawb discloses what percentage of the total take they are giving you.

Looks like this would be a good strategy for some ETFs too? Harder to do with ETFs IMO since you are looking at discount to NAV vs a set price. An ETF could really represent or track anything. Some of them employ leverage, some of them use futures. I saw that VIG was down 18% and the market was down 6% and based on the top holdings of VIG it seemed it should be highly correlated and was out of whack so I rolled the dice. But hard to have a set price at which I would buy VIG because I would need to know the value of the underlying.

Had a limit order on VIG when it was down 18%, didn't make it in before the circuit breaker though >:( Actually just heard back from my broker, got VIG around 57.75. :) [/quote Also added to AAPL at 93. Swapped by HUB.A for more HUB.B.

Had a limit order on VIG when it was down 18%, didn't make it in before the circuit breaker though >:( Actually just heard back from my broker, got VIG around 57.75. :)

Had a limit order on VIG when it was down 18%, didn't make it in before the circuit breaker though >:(

I have always been surprised by the number of O'Rielly (and previously Shucks) stores in Seattle but the more I think about it, it makes sense. I have not needed an auto parts store for a long time but if I think back to when I was keeping my older vehicles on the road earlier in life it makes sense. Every time I have gone to an auto parts store I needed something quickly and I always go to whatever is closest to my house. I am most concerned that the part is available now to fix my vehicle so I can get back on the road. I am not going to nickel and dime, wasting a few hours in the process. The only time I would go to another store is if the part is not in stock. I don't if the same goes for independent repair shops or not. I feel like most of the independents I have gone to deal with NAPA which tends to be more focused on repair shops, although they do sell retail as well. I know NAPA does delivery and net terms, do Orielly and AZ do that as well?

I have an account that can only hold etfs, mutual funds and bonds. Looked at GREK But the liquidity is low and its heavily tilted to financials. What other etfs are folks looking at? I am going to try and track down some CEFs today with exposure to Greece.

Results are in. I passed Level 1. :D Thanks for the info, advice and support on this thread.

Nice job folks! Thanks for putting the spreadsheet together Glenn. Should we start a new contest for 2015?

I remember going to Fudruckers in Florida in the late 80s or early 90s and the food was pretty good. I was surprised to see them in an airport recently (maybe Boston?) and the food was sub par. I saw another one (I think it was in downtown SF) and could tell just by looking inside that it was not nearly the same quality it was years ago. With regards to the meat locker inside the place, I can see how that would turn off some people. I really liked the idea. Now at days I am sure all their meat comes of a Cisco truck. As far as fast food burgers go... In Seattle we have Redmill (http://www.redmillburgers.com/) which is pretty damn good although a tad pricey for fast food. We also have Dick's (http://www.ddir.com/) which is great especially considering the price and the fact that they are open till 2am. Zippy's is also pretty good ( http://zippysgiantburgers.com/ ). For more nationwide chains I have to go with In and Out as #1. Five guys is good, I like their fries better and they also offer a lettuce wrap burger. But there is something about the In and Out burger that gives it an edge over Five Guys IMO. The best burgers I find overall though are at local resturaunts with a focus on fresh and high quality ingredients. But because of the price range its not fair to compare them to the fast food joints.

Searching for "prenup alternatives" seems to point to Domestic Asset Protection Trusts.

My prediction for 2015, wait for it.... SHLD thread will break 1000 pages.

I read the response as the friendly "Get off my lawn!" comment :) No worries from me.

+1 This forum is starting to turn into AskReddit, where people ask (non-investing related) questions that everyone feels they have an answer to (no matter what their age). Then everyone responds, the thread explodes, and then all the interesting investing related stuff gets drowned out. If people are really interested in these types of generic, everyone-has-a-response questions, check out AskReddit instead of here. Here are some threads to get you started: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/search?q=biggest+regret&sort=top&restrict_sr=on Here's all the top AskReddit questions of the last week. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/top/?sort=top&t=week Have a blast! And watch the time fly by... And now, let's move on to talking about investing ideas! Please! Harrumph! This is the "general discussion" part of the forum, no one is forcing anyone to read threads in this section.