Kraven

You can try, but I fight dirty. Pull hair, poke eyes, groin stuff. Whatever I gotta do.

There is good advice here. Houses are money pits. Expect the unexpected with a house. Understand that there will almost always be something wrong that needs to be fixed. Make sure you have funds available to do what needs to be done. I heard at one point that you should assume about 1-2% of your cost a year in upkeep, repairs, etc. I have no idea if that is accurate or not, but over the longer term it's probably as good as anything. The advice to learn a little home maintenance is good, but if you're like many of us and that is beyond you then make sure you find a good electrician, plumber, handyman, etc. You don't want to be scrambling to find someone when you need a plumber quick, for example.

A couple of thoughts. First, in terms of the forum being a place where new and/or younger members can speak openly and be encouraged to do so, I would think that it is. I don't believe that anyone is discouraged from doing so. Think of it this way. The forum is in some sense a virtual gathering place. Imagine you have some people sitting around a room talking. Some conversations might be serious, some might be just bullshitting, but there is a rhythm to it all. The door opens and 2 people enter. The first walks up the group, introduces himself, sits down and says "this conversation is interesting. I had a thought on this, what do you guys think of this?" The second person walks into the room and immediately starts making a nuisance of himself. He doesn't know anyone there, but immediately interrupts the conversation by saying "no, no, no, what the fuck are you guys talking about? I have never heard such a stupid thing. Here is what you mean to say." Which approach would be received in a better way? Second, in terms of people staking out territories or thinking their better than people, especially as it might relate to older posters, that is life. It's up to each person to establish himself and make his way in the world. To some extent with some grey hair comes some internal strengths and abilities to hold firm in certain situations. No one is better than anyone else. Once you think that you're dead in the water. Respect gets earned and I think members are willing to respect those who are deserving of it. In all of this, please don't take this to mean that I am saying you are doing these things. I'm responding generally not specific to your or anyone else.

Billion Dollar Lessons by Carroll and Mui was decent.

It is a holiday for the rest of us.

6. References to Buffett and Munger as "Warren" and "Charlie". 7. As support for a statement using a Buffett or Munger platitude and considering that to be the end of discussion. For example, when discussing a business that is having a difficult time saying "As Warren says, 'Turnarounds rarely turn' ".

5. New posters who arrive on the board like a bat out of hell. It's like all of these thoughts and comments have been bottled up just waiting to be unleashed on the board. They will add a thought to almost any subject. Sometimes they like to try and establish their position on the board by almost immediately taking contrary views and being argumentative. They remind me very much of Neal Cassady. They are "mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time."

In the spirit of the holidays, I think more important than returns are things I would like to see not appear on this board in the coming year. In no particular order and by no means an exclusive list: 1. "LOL", especially when it's just written into the middle of a sentence. 2. Emotions written out like there is a script. Things like "sigh" and the variation on that "*sigh*". Also, related to this would be something like "smacks forehead" after repeating something. 3. Contrasts made by saying "I'm looking at you [insert name of person or thing]". 4. Abbreviations of words that one has to be have been texting since they were 10 years old to understand. I am sure I will come up with others.

Completely agree. The man's words need to be read without forcing Zweig's views on top of them.

Hrm... The Colecovision came out in 1982 and Kraven was thirteen at the time... Something doesn't quite make sense here! :D Joking aside, but Bar Mitzvahs not, I sometimes wonder if we need to do an, ahem, heredity poll here some time. You know, just for curiousity's sake... First, I am not sure what doesn't make sense. Perhaps you should read it again. Second, what the hell do you mean by a heredity poll? I do not like where you are going with this. Explain yourself.

Pretty much every study on the matter disagrees with your hypothesis. Net net investing still very much works. I agree many net nets are hideous companies with poor management, but the strategy still works. Simple strategies based on valuation almost always outperform the broad market over time, even if they are widely know and followed. yeah but you still need to find a basket. Gl with that. Unless you want to go through the pink sheets. But then you really want to find a catalyst. I mean sure in bear markets you can find 10, but why would you if you can buy companies with a moat for a PE of like 7 or 8. Id much rather have those. Just seems with all the opportunities out there, why the hell bother with this outdated strategy. You had great returns when markets were less efficient then they are now. But I searched in the US for net nets, and I could find like 2 good ones. But that would only be a v small portion of your holdings then. I supose it could work in like Japan now. And it probably worked in Korea like 8-9 years ago. Yeah but a much better strategy is to have a watch list of like 100+ good to great companies. And then buy the ones you like when they get really cheap. I would rather put 100% of my stock portfolio in that when everything is cheap, then in some v mediocre company trading at 20% assets. If i can buy a growth story with a PE of 7 or 8 I will make more on that, and it seems less risky. This post is great. You are absolutely right. Net nets are no good. Don't even bother looking at them. I don't even think there has been one since the 1950s or something. Even if there has it's probably some crappy company that doesn't even have a moat or any kind of competitive advantage whatsoever. What kind of compounding machine is that? Stay away.

I thought most interesting is that he learned everything he knows from Tim Sykes, the man who got started trading with his Bar Mitzvah money. All I got with mine was a Colecovision and some games and a new stereo with dual cassettes so I could dub tapes all I want. State of the art stuff.

A new Lynn Tilton Christmas card.

Some interesting points but he was fawning like a 12 year old girl over Justin Bieber.

This post is perfect. It's 100% correct, yet my guess is about 99.9% of board members will dismiss it. So many people want to collect stocks to fill an art gallery. Step over here and admire this KO or BRK or WFC hanging on the wall. The purpose of investing is to make money. That's it. If you love it and enjoy it (and I do) that's a bonus. But at the end of the day it's all about making money. If you can do so by technical analysis or predicting the future, more power to you. It's not about being pure. As the kids used to say back in the day, it's all about the Benjamins.

Wow, that is . . . really weird. I imagine he thought he was being quite witty and amusing by penning that, but it just comes out very strange and amazingly unfunny.

Has anybody been able to find anything useful on Sears Re's float? Thanks. I googled and found this: http://www.rickackerman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Porter-Stansberry-Report-on-Sears-Holding-Corp.pdf I haven't read it yet, so I don't know if it's a joke or serious research: Edit: the article is very well written; one of the best that I've read about SHLD. The author is bullish on SHLD, so bears won't agree with much of what is said. JCP is also mentioned… I read that a while back. It has some serious flaws and demonstrates a complete lack of understanding about what is possible in securitization. A party cannot form a special purpose vehicle, dump their best assets in it and claim the assets are ringfenced. Doesn't work that way.

I'm not a tax guy. I believe though it's the difference between cash and accrual basis. For a cash based payer I would think that it truly needs to be worthless to be realized as such. So something like a bankruptcy might mean that it's worthless prior to maturity. Agreed on asking a tax attorney. I would think this is a straightforward question. Might be worth a few bucks to get an answer. A good accountant could probably take care of it too.

That's probably a good suggestion as well except I don't know how to contact the equity derivatives desk at investment banks. I think this might be the same path that 'Indirect' has more recently put me on to, but I'm not sure. I don't know a lot of the ropes that you guys do. I am sure if you asked there are any number of people on the board who could put you in touch with someone or at least give you some names and numbers.

See, I may be overly paranoid but I've been worrying about the optics of something like that. Perhaps I make an arrangement with a buddy that whenever he needs a tax loss (and I don't), I have him bid above market for one of my worthless assets (a deliberate loss for him). This allows me to sell the asset at little tax hit to me, and allows him to take a big useful tax loss. Between us, if this goes on for years and years, we can cheat the taxes a bit -- he uses my low tax bracket when convenient, and vice versa. It could be abused as a tax-bracket arbitrage thing. So I just figured it would be best to avoid that kind of thing if at all possible, simply because I don't want to do anything that might be annoying (and potentially costly) to defend against accusations. Of course. You don't want to do anything that is or could be viewed as flouting the tax code. I am not talking about that at all. My point is that if this is truly worthless then someone buying it for a penny is paying a penny more than it's worth just to take it off your hands. Either there is value here or there isn't. If not, then someone getting it for a penny is getting a good deal. At the end of the day, I think that if you put a market order out there someone will probably bite.

The last BAC trade I made was on November 7th. So the wash sale period is indeed up soon. I may have needlessly freaked out simply because the bid on the Feb $11 strike put is already "no bid". And the one that I own, the Jan $12 was already at 2 cents and perhaps a very short ride to "no bid" as well. But even if no bid, perhaps it will execute at some tiny price with a "market" order? Is it ever the case that a market order doesn't fill? Surely Nassim Taleb would like a chunk of BAC puts for a fraction of a penny? I think you're probably overly stressed out about it, although in fairness I haven't had to do this exact thing before so I can't assure you it will be done. That being said, I can't see why it wouldn't. Looks like you will be free from the wash sale restrictions by early next week. So once you are just put an ask out there for a market order. Give it a little time and see if it hits. To me, if it doesn't hit in a day or 2, then I'd start looking at other things. See if you can get someone to buy it from you for a penny or something. Maybe a friend or a parent, someone outside of your house. I have to believe someone on this board would arrange to take it from you. If not, I think I mentioned in another post that you can try calling a few equity derivatives desks and see if they'll take it for a penny. Someone here can probably give you a few contacts and maybe even some names. Finally, and this is a longer shot assuming you can't do any of the things above, you may be able to just "discard" it. I don't know if this still works, but essentially just have your broker throw it away basically as worthless. So remove you as owner, the equivalent of throwing something into the trash. I once was involved in a situation where someone owned a worthless security. Different from this it actually had some remote obligations, but was truly worthless. They couldn't sell it and couldn't even pay someone to take it. They ended up literally throwing it away basically. They were removed as the record owner and no one was the owner. In that case I was never quite sure how that worked since someone was supposed to be on the hook for certain things, but they were able to get it done. I don't know if a retail brokerage would do this though, although I guess you could ask, but I have to believe you can at the very least transfer it to someone for a penny. Good luck.

I'm not positive, but I think if you just give it away you don't have a loss per se. Think of it in the context of a donation. If the position was donated the claimed amount would be the current worth. I don't think that gets you a loss. It somehow has to be realized. I haven't read this thread in enough detail to know if the answer is somewhere in here, but I think Eric said he can't sell for wash sale reasons. I don't think it can be declared worthless until the contract is up since theoretically there could be value unless there was a bankruptcy or something like that. I don't know when the wash sale limitation would be up. If by 12/31, then it can just be thrown out into the market at whatever someone will pay for it and a loss will be taken or it could be sold to a friend or something for a penny.

Contact the equity derivatives desk at a few IBs. Tell them you'll sell them the position for a penny. You might get a bite on that. Or ask a friend to take them for a penny. You get your loss and they get a free option.

A lot of frivolous and light reading here. I just read the new Stephen King, Doctor Sleep. It's a sequel to The Shining. I've waited 30+ years to find out what happened to Danny Torrance. Redrum!

Thanks for posting. Very haunting. Very sad in many ways how a once great city like that has disintegrated. If they want to raise some money they should start marketing themselves to Hollywood. It could provide the set for post-apocalyptic movies. The producers wouldn't have to change a thing.