opihiman2

Unfortunately when there is a lot of blood in the streets almost everyone is dead. I frame it that way - politics determines the price here, so it makes sense if things don’t make sense. I had a costly mistake in this sector(now almost a decade ago) that stays with me to this day. You can get 99/100 things right with these and still just get blasted. Way to many moving parts and things out of the control of management/company. The toll collectors sounded like a solid idea as well, but often the capital structures just made them too much of a pain. I fuckin hate energy. Drill, baby, drill, should be explained to the shareholder as kill, baby, kill. Cuz thats what happens with your capital. That, and the cyclical nature of many, almost guarantee repurchases or dividends are done peak cycle...not appealing. Exactly. Drill baby drill no matter what is what will kill the industry. This board should sticky the Sandridge Energy thread as the poster child of how these non-sense multi year value analysis can end up, especially in the energy sector. B&M retail and energy are two sectors value investors should just avoid from now on.

WTI crude traded down to $28 today. Wow.

I feel like oil will be in a long sideways bear market. You have to trade it. But, if oil heads into the $20's, I'm a buyer. I've posted about it in the past around 2015 when oil tanked to $30/bbl, and I think everyone on here said the best way to get exposure to oil prices is via the majors and mid streams. Is that still the consensus? All the oil futures based ETF's have sucked ass in getting direct exposure to oil prices.

You guys are gonna get fucked: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-oil-prices/saudi-arabia-slashes-april-crude-oil-prices-after-opecs-supply-pact-collapsed-idUSKBN20U0Y4 Sorry for the bad news. My prediction is there's going to be a decade long bear market for oil. Shale will consolidate, many producers will get wiped off the planet with the majors taking over assets, and it will keep a permanent lid on prices. edit: holy shit, I'm now hearing predictions that WTI is likely to go sub $20/bbl in a few months. LOL! Time to go short, even now!

This board seems to be a glutton for punishment when it comes to energy / oil investments. I thought people here would have learned their lesson by now with Sanridge Energy. Oil has and will be in a multi-year bear market. Until the shale producers get completely wiped out, there's going to be a ton more pain. I've talked to and read a lot of stories from oil/gas workers in the patch, and everyone is saying it's absolutely brutal out there. Oil is heading to the 30's. NG is being given away for free. And they are still pumping the oil out of the ground like there is no tomorrow. The industry has a dumb habit of drilling and producing at all costs. It's like the snake that eats its own tail.

Does anyone have returns over the past several years on Praetorian Capital? I'm starting to see Kupperman pop up on a lot of finance channels like Real Vision.

The new book is great, and it's illuminating. Sad to see how much errors there are in this thread about RenTech. 1) Medallion hasn't been publicly available for a LONG TIME. Their institutional funds are and have very public performance data. However, the institutional fund performance #'s are nothing to write home about. 2) Medallion is limited to around $10B, I think. They disburse all gains above and beyond to stakeholders. Even at this size, their performance #'s are unreal. 3) Buffett doesn't even come close to Medallion #'s. He wishes he could. Even if he were trading with a small AUM, I HIGHLY doubt young Buffett would come close to Medallion Fund #'s 4) Medallion isn't really stat arb. Not even close. They did do some stat arb before, but not with equities. They were pretty good in commodities and debt investments. But, what really ramped up their #'s since late 90's was pattern recognition software. They hired two guys from IBM from their speech recognition division who finally was able to get Medallion a significant edge in equities. As a side note, one of the guys is a far right conservative who likely helped Trump win the election. 5) They use leverage but not LTCM levels of leverage. They can scale in and out of leverage fairly easily. 6) Jim Simons gets way too much credit for the success of Medallion. His main contribution was probably the idea of using quantitative models for trading and team gathering. 7) They are definitely not fundamental investor types. At least not since the early 90's.

Yeah, read the past page, dick head.

I'm looking to go long! But, whatever, keep crying over the Fed hikes.

Wooo hooo!!! WTI near $40 a bbl! Who wants to bet we see near $30 by next year?

Ah, much thanks.! I haven't really spent time on that part of the forum. I'll peruse the thread.

+1 Nicely said.

+1! I was a bear when Jeff Rubin was predicting and writing about $200/barrel oil. People told me I was wrong then. Today, I'm watching people pour out of oil, and it has done nothing except to get me titillated and excited. If you think oil will be permanently at $40 or less per barrel, you are out of your mind. Cheers! Heading back to $40 per bbl! I was definitely an oil bull when prices were below $30 / bbl a few years ago. Too bad there's no good way for me to trade that other than buying actual oil future contracts, and I really don't know much about commodities trading to get into that. I looked at USO, USL, and OIL, and they all pretty much suck in tracking the actual commodity. Anyone know of a good way to get into the actual commodity without having to keep buying long dated futures contracts? By the way, Bethany Mclean came out with an awesome book on the U.S. shale revolution being largely driven by ZIRP and Fed policies of the past 15 years. I remember back on CBOF, people were looking at O&G shale / fracking companies, and I thought it was absurd that no one on here thought about the biggest glaring issue: if these companies can't make money at $100 usd / bbl, how the hell are they going to make money when oil prices revert back to mean, which is exactly what happened, and exactly where we're at today. I highly recommend her new book. I pretty much agreed with everything she said, and I believe if interest rates normalize above 5%, U.S. shale oil production will decline big time.

Glad that the Fed is staying the course. Time to take the pain. Get those rates up there and normalize yields. Back in the late 90's, you could get Treasuries for 7% yields. I remember my savings account had 5% yields. Not everything revolves around equities. In fact, if you bought bonds in the late 70's and rolled over duration yoy, you would have returned something like 15000% to 2009. Anyways, I'm all in cash / cash eq. Going long bonds soon. My thesis is when we get another recession and corporate bonds start blowing up, the Fed will revisit ZIRP. T-bills will go ballistic again.

Haha, gawd, how times have changed. Whitney Tilson and crew were freaking losers. Even Tilson finally gave up the ghost. They basically fleeced their investors with insane expense ratios and barely returned jack squat. Tilson has even finally relented and admitted that his investing performance has gotten worse over the years. Really makes me wonder why people are going with active managers. Smart beta funds with macroeconomic timing is all you need.

The biggest problem I've had with this board over the years is the lack of obvious but simple critical thinking that would have avoided disasters like all the nat/oil gas plays, SHLD, etc. Basically, I think a lot of folks on this site miss the forest for the trees. The focus is on the granular, bottom up approach where instead one should step back and look at things from a top down perspective first. I have numerous examples of this over the years from folks on this site.

Yeah, I believe Fed will break things again as usual. My god, the Fed chairmen have been really clueless since Volker. Although Bernanke did well with saving the economy and financial markets, he has missed the housing bubble and said some really crazy things in the past such as U.S. having a savings glut problem. These guys live in ivory towers. The new guy is just as bad. He is saying there's no heightened financial risks even at a time when nearly every asset is overvalued and risk premium pricing is insanely mispricing risk. Italian bonds were cut above junk and just yielding 4% or something like that. Insane. My current macro thesis is based on what we seen with near end QEx. Every time QE1,2,3 was about to end, markets almost plummeted into near bear market territories. We'll see how it goes, but I think when 10 yr hits 4%, watch out below.

Thanks John! Yes, that is the correct answer. One of our largest partners who made up over 30% of the Canadian fund pulled out shortly after we invested in PDH...I was also sorry to hear he passed away from a form of cancer a few months later. But that hurt our liquidity when things started to go south with PDH. After struggling to reduce the position size and rebalance the fund, we realized we were doing a disservice to our Canadian partners...especially with our size and operating costs. So we liquidated the Canadian fund, distributed the assets and made four of our partners who had invested in the last few years 100% whole with our own money. All of the partners walked away with 100% of their original capital or far better...which makes us proud! We chose to close the fund and so we felt that was the right thing to do. With the U.S. fund, we actually were able to rebalance the fund as we had maintained liquidity and didn't have a large partner redeem like the Canadian fund. With capital put in by Prem and our existing partners, excellent results on our non-PDH assets for the last 3 years (averaged about 29% annualized), we were able to stay about even as we faced PDH's challenges...essentially we lost about $5M in PDH value and made about $6M in non-PDH value over the last 3 years. The U.S. fund is not going to be closed, operates at less than a 30 basis point expense ratio, and it's actually in excellent shape with PDH making up about 12% of assets and the rest non-PDH, liquid, mid-large cap equities. We believe the fund is trading presently at about 55% of intrinsic value and are more than happily accepting new partners! So, yes we threw in the towel with the Canadian fund (which was one-tenth the size of the U.S. fund), but have no plans to throw in the towel with the U.S. fund or PDH. And this message board isn't going anywhere either! Cheers! Much thanks for the response, Sanjeev. Good to hear you guys are still at it in the U.S. Maybe I'll end up being a partner in the U.S. in a few years. In the meantime, I'll peruse the PDH thread to see what has been going on there.

Ah, thanks for that. No, I didn't read about the closing of MPIC there. I think it was in the SHLD thread that Parsad responded to someone saying they closed up shop due to under performance for many years. Sad to hear. I really had high hopes, but it's not surprising. The past 10 years have been devastating to many value investors and even hedge fund legends. I wonder though about the old folks on here. It seems that over the years, many of them have kind of fallen off the way side. Makes me wonder whether they threw in the towel as well.

I just read a post on here, and I think Sanjeev said they closed up the MPIC fund and returned all capital. In some cases, making their recent clients whole. Is that true? What happened? Several years ago, I almost invested with MPIC. Sanj is a good guy, though. He has a lot of integrity. Also, I've been reading the board on and off over the years, and man, it's been a pretty eye opening ride. So many wrong calls on here over the past several years, it makes me wonder who else on here has thrown in the towel and just gone with a cheap index ETF. I've been investing in the index over the past 5 years, and that was probably a good bet considering the alternatives. But, recently I went all cash equivalents. I feel we're in the last inning of this market cycle, and I don't want to try and pick up nickels in front of the steam roller coming in. Some of the bigger names I can think of that has just under performed terribly in the past several years : Einhorn, Ackman, Paulson, Tilson, Berkowitz, Lampert, Chou. What other names out there has been underperforming badly?

JP Morgan also has odds at 50/50 by then as well. My thoughts, if the Feds stay the current interest rate path, we'll see a recession by 2020.

Really good interview. One of the bests, and an absolute legend.

It worked for him. He didn't need the Clinton voters. But, at this point, we all know Clinton definitely needed the Bernie and Johnson voters. She could have also used some Trump ones too. Having your supporters generally act like assholes online to any other dissenting voice is just going to cause them to say FUCK YOU, and vote accordingly.

Instead of reaching out to people who were on the fence about Hillary, a lot of Hillary supporters online were lambasting, mocking, deriding anyone for not voting for her. Calling them racists, misogynists, hell, even JACKASSES. Even Bernie supporters were shown this same kind of treatment. I find it ironic that people like OP here would never expect that pushing people away, as opposed to reaching out to them with compassion and intelligence, could ever cause people to sway their votes away.

I despise Clinton so much. Her winning would send the message that if you lie, cheat, manipulate, and let your spouse cheat and walk all over you, you can become the POTUS. Trump all the way.