cashisking

Sell long dated in the money puts (on companies you expect to increase in value) and calls (on etfs and companies expected to decrease in value). Use that to buy long dated warrants - ones where the implicit cost of borrowing is low. Look for warrants that just start to trade - some experience a spin off effect and get dumped. Post reorg warrants are the sweet spot IMO - all the benefits of post reorg valuation, fresh start accounting etc for the underlying company, and the holders are usually former retail equity holders and debt holders (neither are too interested in holding the warrants that represent pennies on the dollar of their original capital)... For selling naked puts and calls you are going to need margin. In canada we have TFSA account types (similar to Roth IRA in US) and Questrade has a feature that allows you to use your tfsa assets as collateral for your margin account at no cost. So there is no cash cost for borrowing the margin needed to hold short option positions if you set it up that way. I guess buying CEFs at a discount to NAV is a form of borrowing. You get the discount at no cost and its non recourse to you. The discount can multiply if the CEF holds assets that themselves are discounted (I'm thinking of a bond CEF at a discount and the underlying bonds are trading at a discount to par for some technical reason).

There is $171M (~$9.6 per share) of tax assets and a public vehicle. I'm not sure if all of those DTAs are useful or that they all survive the transaction, but my guess is thats why the buyers are interested in MAR

it looks like the breakdown of cline ownership among the various marret vehicles was wrong in the writeup - but corrected in the comments... Can you see the other comments? I can only see 2 comments (not a member)

"Multiple sources close to the talks say Mobilicity’s creditors backed Rogers’ bid even though Telus had offered $547 million" WOW http://business.financialpost.com/fp-tech-desk/how-rogers-blindsided-telus-by-acquiring-mobilicity

Great summary. Where did you get the relative split of Cline bonds among funds and Marret direct ownership? I look at cline as an out the money call option on met coal. I believe Marret said that there is enough cash in Cline to carry at least another year of expenses. FWIW, these assets supported $600M market cap in early 2011

FWIW I am based in Ontario, Canada and had a friend recently go through a refi with one of the big banks. The rep asked what the home was worth and subtly let him know that he can come up with a mortgage based on that value via "hitting" the automated appraisal system provided by CMHC (emili). From what I understand, mortgage brokers have become very good at manipulating the inputs to come up with the needed appraisal value. No physical appraisal needed... This was for a modest condo with 20% down. It seems underwriting standards in Canada and US are quite different...

Does anyone know if MidAmerican is inside one of the BRK insurance subs? I recall that BNSF was place in one of the insurance subsidiaries for tax purposes. Thanks in advance

Thanks for the post. I have poked around LVLT financials and have attempted to read through the thread on this board, but I cannot get around the lack of positive FCF and the huge debt load. Albeit the recent trend of improvement in cash operating margin and reduction in FCF losses is a positive, I am still hesitant to engage in a situation where external forces outside of operations could ruin the story... BUT I should temper my ignorance and read through whatever is available, so if you can point me toward something particularly helpful in understanding the story I would be grateful. Thanks

Could it be thats what Charlie Ergen is up to? Hes got the satelites, was bidding for spectrum (terrestar), got the brand (Blockbuster), and also picked up streaming technology http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/echostar-acquires-company-move-networks-69216 they already make boxes... He just needs some content.

Does anyone actually know what tax rate is to be paid when repatriating cash back to US? Its probably complicated (depending on operational details), but is there a convenient range i can use to plug in valuation? What discount do you guys apply? TIA

I am certainly no expert and just dabbling here, but I would think from the entire "system" point of view that etfs are convenient retail products that create demand for commodity derivatives and in some cases actual physical. The marketing machine ramps up and is aided by recent positive returns. Creators of etfs (asset managers) get product fees that offset losses from some of the traditional sources of fees. To this point - I think profitability of the good old money market fund is now a big negative and is a pain in the ass for the manager - "How do i get rid of these mmf folks without losing their mutual fund assets?". And of course the broker hoards of these asset managers need to be employed and a new hot product brings the fees. The big banks benefit from the m&a fees... Everyone feeds. Check out the franchise Sprott built.

I found this from Alphaville to be very interesting. It goes on to explain how commodity etf growth is a function of the need to offload commodity exposure by the large financials. Sort of like creation of CDOs was driven by the need to offload housing exposure and desire to short the whole thing by opportunistic hf managers. Of course the retail public ends up holding the bag yet again... ETFs have been a useful tool to allow banks to move risk off balance sheet. When a bank takes on risk through lending to or financing a big commodity player, say for an acquisition, there is a need to hedge potentially huge commodity exposure — so as sell to lock in the commodity price, and you couldn’t sell that volume easily into the terminal market; although you could transfer a large amount of exposure to investors through an ETF more easily. The only way this used to be done is by the bank taking proprietary risk, but they now have other risk issues and aren’t prepared to carry that sort of exposure. Using ETFs becomes a mutuality of interest, with everyone moving to launch products to investors – retail and institutional – so that they can carry the risk instead. It’s all about de-risking your book. And you saw it in the dot com bust when investment banks pushed dotcoms, but offloaded the risk to investors. When the NASDAQ crashed the investors carried the bulk of the exposure.It all has similarities to the Abacus CDO. If you want to short the market you have to create the demand, like Paulson did. If you are an institutional advisor you can do that by hyping the commodity. The rest can be found here http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2011/05/11/565941/if-we-build-it-they-will-come/

I think the fact that skype is based overseas had something to do with it. Isnt a significant portion of MSFT cash outside of US (and hence cant be efficiently paid out)?