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What are you short?


Graham Osborn

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Nice AGN short Graham.

 

+++++++++1

 

And thanks for your very thoughtful feedback on my shorts. I figured CAT/DE were the shorts most in line with your sensibilities.

 

I totally take your point on the idea that some of these (MNKD in particular, also VRX) are priced with incredibly high volatility. I've been playing a bit with the idea that in some cases, option pricing lags underlying reality.  Like for some of these E&P companies, bankruptcy in <6 months seems like a very high probability, and even if the implied volatility is very, very high, it's still not high enough to fully reflect just how horrible their situation is. Or, for example, the VRX $5 Oct 16 puts are selling for about 50 cents - they'll give a near 10 to 1 return if VRX goes bankrupt. If VRX has a 20% chance of going bankrupt in the next six months, then the option is mispriced.  Or BTU seems totally screwed, but the $3 Jan 2017 puts are at about $2 - I'd say BTU has more than a 66% chance of going bankrupt by then. Curious to hear your thoughts.

 

Also, this is the wrong forum for this, but as a Burry head, have you checked out CYH? One of his under-commented on holdings in the new 13F. Interesting upcoming spinoff and I particularly like LEAPS options with spinoff catalysts....(like many Burry holdings, more of a mean reveresion than a "good" company, but CYH is highly levered, (like 19 bil enterprise value, with 17 bil debt) and unloading 1.2 billion of debt into their spinoff, if at least some of that unloaded debt becomes equity value (from somewhat reduced interest payments if nothing else) then there's some nice potential.  Trading at  about 18 right now but it was at 60 at the beginning of last year.

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Here's a ballsy candidate, what about one of Warren Buffett's picks - General Electric ($31.23)? Personally, I never short (let alone a WEB stock), but the valuation of GE is getting more than silly. In the last 5 years, the GE share price has went up over 55% despite the fact that free cash flow has consistently been in decline and is now down 40% in that period. Revenue is down, margins are down, EBITDA is down. I know a lot of this has to do with the forced sale of GE Capital and spinning off of Synchrony (which bizarrely the market seems to like, despite it being a decent business) - but why should the market increase the price of a shrinking business that is in a challenging sector. I think the one-off bump as a result of the sale and spin-off masked what was a very bad year for the underlying GE business in 2015 and with oil set to stay low, how will the market react when free cash flow turns negative for 2016?

 

Another interesting one that you could go long and short on is Biglari Holdings ($361) and Shake Shack ($36). Shake Shack has 1.6/1.7x the valuation of Biglari Holdings despite having 1/4 of the revenue. Sure, Shack Shake is down quite a bit already as it looks like growth as stalled, but I would argue the closing of the valuation gap still has come nowhere near to where it should be. I know Biglari's company is utterly despised, but it is certainly undervalued even after the Biglari poison pill is taken into account.

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Nice AGN short Graham.

 

I bought some farther OTMs today.  While I don't want to repeat the mistake I made with VRX of sitting around like a dodo waiting for a big rally, the volatility on the OTMs on a day like today gets real tricky.  If anyone has rules on how long to wait after a sharp drop before buying OTMs I would appreciate the education..

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Nice AGN short Graham.

 

+++++++++1

 

And thanks for your very thoughtful feedback on my shorts. I figured CAT/DE were the shorts most in line with your sensibilities.

 

I totally take your point on the idea that some of these (MNKD in particular, also VRX) are priced with incredibly high volatility. I've been playing a bit with the idea that in some cases, option pricing lags underlying reality.  Like for some of these E&P companies, bankruptcy in <6 months seems like a very high probability, and even if the implied volatility is very, very high, it's still not high enough to fully reflect just how horrible their situation is. Or, for example, the VRX $5 Oct 16 puts are selling for about 50 cents - they'll give a near 10 to 1 return if VRX goes bankrupt. If VRX has a 20% chance of going bankrupt in the next six months, then the option is mispriced.  Or BTU seems totally screwed, but the $3 Jan 2017 puts are at about $2 - I'd say BTU has more than a 66% chance of going bankrupt by then. Curious to hear your thoughts.

 

Also, this is the wrong forum for this, but as a Burry head, have you checked out CYH? One of his under-commented on holdings in the new 13F. Interesting upcoming spinoff and I particularly like LEAPS options with spinoff catalysts....(like many Burry holdings, more of a mean reveresion than a "good" company, but CYH is highly levered, (like 19 bil enterprise value, with 17 bil debt) and unloading 1.2 billion of debt into their spinoff, if at least some of that unloaded debt becomes equity value (from somewhat reduced interest payments if nothing else) then there's some nice potential.  Trading at  about 18 right now but it was at 60 at the beginning of last year.

 

Hi Picasso, I guess my rule of thumb has been if I am buying far OTM I don't like paying more than 10% of the strike regardless of the volatility.  My second rule is if I am buying far OTM I want to buy at least 1.5 years out.  Bearish as I may be, I must remember that the market's capacity for denial will often exceed my expectations.  My third rule is to wait for bearish price action (a black cross at least) to enter a large position.  I have made many mistakes this year and these rules are largely the product of them.

 

As to CYH, I started another thread to discuss Burry's last 13F more and I hope to delve more deeply.  But I have to say CYH's debt load (along with that of some of the other picks) unnerved me.  You could look at AGN and say the same thing - 5-8 years ago this would have been an incredible stock to buy because leverage was "hot." I get the feeling that Burry's picks tend to get disclosed around the time he is selling them.  He didn't used to be like that - I don't think he would have felt comfortable with that much debt.  But my theory is he read a lot of Soros after starting Scion and really bought into the idea of a secular trend as the way to get rich.  And being a physician himself he would have been unlikely to miss the healthcare bubble/ Obamacare as a secular trend.  That said, for CYH specifically it does look technically like he made a recent entry.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Time for a Friday afternoon rant by a tired short.  Since we're mostly discussing weddings and global warming rather than investing, I assume the average COBAFer hasn't been buying much recently.  Being down with a mild case of walking pneumonia for part of the week I took the opportunity to reread The Big Short.  I think the reason is to remind myself how emotionally draining it is to maintain a short position, particularly if that short involves (1) time premia (2) a thesis on credit markets that is too complex to be fully.  I'll leave out the 3rd and most painful - investors - since I am lucky enough not to have those yet, unless you count my Dad who loaned me a bit last month.

 

Between Jan 1 and Mar 1, I allocated about 30% of the portfolio to put positions on leveraged US companies.  My general preferences were (1) the company should be once which should be disproportionately harmed by a dislocation of the investment grade market as the "nuclear cloud" from shale producers/ Valeant/ Allergan and other serial acquirers produced generalized malaise (2) the common should have taken a 50%++ hit in the last crisis for reasons not specifically related to the MBS/ CDO markets.  I went in with the idea that technicals were less important since I was buying long-dated options, and I wasn't all that strong a hand at options-wasting scenarios.  Consequently, I bought a number of positions with 2017 expiries and pretty bearish strikes.  Later, during the rally (funny how that goes), I actually went back to the last 2 bear markets and looked at the time between the 200-day peaking and the 200-day crossing below the 50-day.  I'd done this before, but in previous runs I'd used the 1-day averages.  This time I used the 1-week averages, and the pattern generated was far more consistent/ useful.  Unfortunately it also implied my trade was stupid - in the past 2 recessions the indices peaked around year-end and the WMA death cross (daily moving average doesn't mean much, but weekly moving average corresponds to the steepest component of the index plunge) comes around election time.  4 months is not much of a margin of safety.

 

Between Mar 1 and Apr 1 I allocated another 30% according to the new thesis, which meant buying 2018 options, some on the companies I already selected and some on new ones.  Of course, given the magnitude of the rally, the market values of these have mostly declined as well, but the declines concern me less since time and volatility are one my side.  Of course, over the same period the first 30% of the portfolio has dropped drastically in value.  Nor do I have any liquidity from the first 30% since now would be the worst possible time to sell those options.

 

Between Apr 1 and the present I allocated the remaining 30% or so to 2018 puts on 2 securities - AGN and GRA.  I've discussed the theses elsewhere, but I should mention the reasons why AGN is now by far my largest short position:

 

..As many of us expected, the PFE/ AGN merger blew up.  I figured what would happen was the TEVA deal would blow up and that would nuke the PFE/ AGN deal.  I'd thought less about the possibility the latter might happen first.  When I saw the headline I felt immediately sick because which I did have a decent sized ATM 2018 short position it was not at all well positioned for what I thought would be a VRX-like fall.  However, the market treated it like a couple arbs just jumped out (big drop but not huge).  So since then I've been building out a large position in the 100-150 range (I won't say exactly where but it probably doesn't matter).  I should explain why.  First, I see the PFE/ AGN blowup as a historically analogous rollup event to the WCOM/ S blowup which arrested WCOM's appetite and unraveled the whole Raggedy Ann - serial acquirers have to keep acquiring because the accounting and financing benefits of being a serial acquirer are derived from the acquisition process itself.  Second, I see the TEVA "cash rescue" as less likely than even bears believe.  TEVA has secured bridge financing but has no credible plan to raise 22B in long-term financing for a deal that could well produce a downgrade on TEVA's remaining debt.  Remember, my macro view says the stock/ debt market rally of the last few months will fail right around the time TEVA is planning to do the raise.  Hell, Dell is paying like 10% to buy EMC.  What's TEVA gonna do, pay 15% on 22B (3.3B) with all of its 4.8B in FCF?  “Oh, we’ll use Actavis to pay it off.” Ha!  Brent S isn't selling the business out of the goodness of his heart.  He knows it's a sleepy-growth-piece-of-crap with accounting/ price-hike inflated numbers the same way Valeant's was.  Back when I was analyzing things last year I actually went through the growth projections for each of AGN’s big aquirees and did an SOP growth rate calc - nothing close to what the last few 10Ks’ patchwork numbers would imply.  That thing will be only “make money” after multiple restructurings and write-downs to rescue it from the netherworld of businesses run like Warburg Pincus.  And of course, all that is ignoring that the regulators have to approve another deal by their least-favorite customer - Allergan - while TEVA has to convince them it won't have to ratchet up its generic pricing power after the acquisition to pay off that huge pile of debt - even though failing to do so would make the acquisition a stupid business decision.  Oh yeah, and has anyone noticed AGN is still selling at 7.5 EV/ Rev - not a problem divestiture will fix - with no larger prospects for engineered growth?  Oh yeah, and has anyone noticed how the price tends to inflect with Valeant even though they have nothing in common?  I could go on, but I think you get the picture ;)..

 

So here I am, feeling reasonably good about things but totally out of cash.  So that's my main focus right now rather than investing.  Hope to run into some of you in Omaha!

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Today's Hussman:

 

In 1954, John Kenneth Galbraith offered a similar narrative of the top-formation leading up to the 1929 crash:

 

“The temporary breaks in the market which preceded the crash were a serious trial for those who had declined fantasy. Early in 1928, in June, in December, and in February and March of 1929 it seemed that the end had come. On various of these occasions the Times happily reported the return to reality. And then the market took flight again. Only a durable sense of doom could survive such discouragement. The time was coming when the optimists would reap a rich harvest of discredit. But it has long since been forgotten that for many months those who resisted reassurance were similarly, if less permanently, discredited.”

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Today's Hussman:

 

In 1954, John Kenneth Galbraith offered a similar narrative of the top-formation leading up to the 1929 crash:

 

“The temporary breaks in the market which preceded the crash were a serious trial for those who had declined fantasy. Early in 1928, in June, in December, and in February and March of 1929 it seemed that the end had come. On various of these occasions the Times happily reported the return to reality. And then the market took flight again. Only a durable sense of doom could survive such discouragement. The time was coming when the optimists would reap a rich harvest of discredit. But it has long since been forgotten that for many months those who resisted reassurance were similarly, if less permanently, discredited.”

 

1) Is December 1928 that far off from October 1929?  (This is an inappropriate analogy btw - 1929 ~ 2000.)

 

2) Do individual stocks exhibit the same phase as the averages?  Do sectors exhibit the same phase as the averages?  Is it even possible to recognize a stock/ sector/ index bear market from a chart except with a multi-year retrospectoscope?  Have investors, historically, continued to buy each dip from the top until near the bottom?

 

3) Consider the pros and cons of a long/ short portfolio of stocks vs a long/ short portfolio of LEAPS in 1928.  Then repeat for 1927 and 1926.  How could certain bad outcomes have been avoided?  Which were unavoidable?

 

4) What is your portfolio and why?  Do you have a long or short bias?  What is your cash position?  What is your bond position?  How likely do you think it is that your portfolio with be >15% up vs >15% down in 2 years.  If you are not confident in your view, what are you going to do about it?

 

Good luck,

Graham

 

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Today's Hussman:

 

In 1954, John Kenneth Galbraith offered a similar narrative of the top-formation leading up to the 1929 crash:

 

“The temporary breaks in the market which preceded the crash were a serious trial for those who had declined fantasy. Early in 1928, in June, in December, and in February and March of 1929 it seemed that the end had come. On various of these occasions the Times happily reported the return to reality. And then the market took flight again. Only a durable sense of doom could survive such discouragement. The time was coming when the optimists would reap a rich harvest of discredit. But it has long since been forgotten that for many months those who resisted reassurance were similarly, if less permanently, discredited.”

 

1) Is December 1928 that far off from October 1929?  (This is an inappropriate analogy btw - 1929 ~ 2000.)

 

2) Do individual stocks exhibit the same phase as the averages?  Do sectors exhibit the same phase as the averages?  Is it even possible to recognize a stock/ sector/ index bear market from a chart except with a multi-year retrospectoscope?  Have investors, historically, continued to buy each dip from the top until near the bottom?

 

3) Consider the pros and cons of a long/ short portfolio of stocks vs a long/ short portfolio of LEAPS in 1928.  Then repeat for 1927 and 1926.  How could certain bad outcomes have been avoided?  Which were unavoidable?

 

4) What is your portfolio and why?  Do you have a long or short bias?  What is your cash position?  What is your bond position?  How likely do you think it is that your portfolio with be >15% up vs >15% down in 2 years.  If you are not confident in your view, what are you going to do about it?

 

Good luck,

Graham

 

1) Is December 1928 that far off from October 1929?  (This is an inappropriate analogy btw - 1929 ~ 2000.)

 

I think the point is that there were multiple episodes where bears would have been discouraged.

 

The timeline of events is as below which would ignore many more intermediate sized fluctuations:

 

1) DJ starts  year ~200

2) Rallied to 220 before falling back to 200 mid-year (bears start feeling vindicated)

3) Stocks rally from 200 to 300 by November (bears crushed)

4) Stocks crater by 13% in a matter of days (bears feel vindicated)

5) Stocks recover and hit new highs of 325 in February 1929 (bears crushed)

6) Multiple up/down fluctuations of 5-7% between February and May where stocks again end at 325 (multiple feelings of up/down for bears)

7) From May lows of ~300, stocks rally to 380 by end of August (bears crushed)

8) Stocks crater 50% in two months ending in mid-November (bears vindicated)

9) Stocks rally 50% through April 1930 ending near 300 (bears crushed).

10) Successive ups/downs followed, but DJ was generally in a downtrend from 300 to June 1932 where it ended near 50. (bears vindicated)

 

I think the point is that even though the bears were eventually right, there were many very painful episodes to have bet against the market even if you believed the fundamentals didn't support valuations.

 

 

2) Do individual stocks exhibit the same phase as the averages?  Do sectors exhibit the same phase as the averages?  Is it even possible to recognize a stock/ sector/ index bear market from a chart except with a multi-year retrospectoscope?  Have investors, historically, continued to buy each dip from the top until near the bottom?

Stocks do not perform the same as the index as can be seen from last year where most stocks ended the year well off their highs, but a few stocks held up the whole market. Ultimately, you likely either want to be short the index itself and possibly high beta, high leveraged cyclicals. I think there's a point where investors stop buying dips which is where you see 5-10% declines in a single day because of a lack of investor courage. That's probably a good time to be buying.

 

3) Consider the pros and cons of a long/ short portfolio of stocks vs a long/ short portfolio of LEAPS in 1928.  Then repeat for 1927 and 1926.  How could certain bad outcomes have been avoided?  Which were unavoidable?

 

If you shorted stocks, you probably did quite well if you were able to manage the ups/downs during that period (i.e. not overextending yourself with leverage). If you had been short options, there was the possibility of doing significantly better if you were able to actively manage the position and manage the risk (reduce the leverage as indexes fell, increase the leverage as they recovered).

 

4) What is your portfolio and why?  Do you have a long or short bias?  What is your cash position?  What is your bond position?  How likely do you think it is that your portfolio with be >15% up vs >15% down in 2 years.  If you are not confident in your view, what are you going to do about it?

 

Heavy in EM, commodities, and Europe. Admittedly, these will do terrible in the event of a global recession/deflationary environment/market crash but I do believe that valuation is the #1 most important factor in investing and these things are cheap where as what I'm shorting is relatively expensive. It also helps that outside of my low P/B portfolio I mostly own companies with conservative balance sheets who might be able to ultimately benefit from a tough environment via consolidation.

 

I own almost nothing in the U.S. and am currently short the Russell small cap index, SPY LEAP puts, and some high beta individual names (like NFLX and TSLA).

 

I have been trying to manage the risk of this position to better be able to last through the vicissitudes. When markets cratered in August I sold my puts at a large profit and replaced with a much less leveraged position in being short SPY shares. As markets came back into November/December I repurchased those shares at a loss (but much less of a loss than holding onto the options) and replaced them with being long puts again to increase my short leverage. When markets cratered in January/February I sold those puts at large gains and replaced with being short the SPY shares and puts that were further out of the money while keeping some profits off the table. As markets have risen again, I have rolled out of all my of SPY share shorts and added LEAP puts again at higher strikes than were on in August/September and have added higher beta share shorts like the Russell small cap index, TSLA, and NFLX.

 

Having booked profits from the last two round trips means that I'm about neutral on my entire short position as my realized gains almost totally offset my current realized/unrealized losses from the most recent rally. I'd point out that my gains would have greatly exceeded the losses had I not been increasing the size of my short position during the most recent rally as well (and if TSLA hadn't rallied 35-40% as I was building my short position in it). I am now significantly more short at higher strike prices in higher beta indices than I was rolling into August with about a neutral profit/loss to show for it.

 

The hope is to use these smaller fluctuations to my advantage as opposed to being discouraged by them, but I can definitely see what he meant by saying it takes an "durable sense of doom." I've been fortunate in my time of rolling out of puts so far, but I can see how you could be whipsawed if you were a little more greedy than I was.

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Just throwing this out there - what's the point of buying LEAPS on an index?  I get maybe if it's an ETF you might expect greater movement than the underlying basket for structural reasons, but when I think of LEAPS I think of an underlying you expect to go to infinity (long) or zero (short).  I guess that seems necessary to me to provide an adequate MOS to offset wasting.  As we know, a widely diversified application of LEAPS is likely to be a losing trade on average.

 

Cheers from the Berkshire meeting!

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I guess that seems necessary to me to provide an adequate MOS to offset wasting.  As we know, a widely diversified application of LEAPS is likely to be a losing trade on average.

 

If you believe this, does this mean that you're constantly short LEAPS straddles on a bunch of indices?  (I believe excluding friction, a widely diversified application of LEAPS--long or short--will be break-even on average.)

 

 

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I bought 1/100th of a put option on VRX @ $9 w/ a strike price of $33 expiring on 1/20/2017. Friendly bet with a friend & fellow annual meeting groupie.

Must be nice having access to bespoke options

 

I've never heard of a bar bet being labeled a bespoke option before, lol. Maybe Dan can get some bespoke reinsurance from you for a share of the liability. :P

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I guess that seems necessary to me to provide an adequate MOS to offset wasting.  As we know, a widely diversified application of LEAPS is likely to be a losing trade on average.

 

If you believe this, does this mean that you're constantly short LEAPS straddles on a bunch of indices?  (I believe excluding friction, a widely diversified application of LEAPS--long or short--will be break-even on average.)

 

Well, the short answer is no I've never gone short vega.  I think it boils down to what "average" is taken to mean, and how it relates to the outcome experienced by the individual investor.  Obviously with zero volatility a diversified put-call balanced LEAPS portfolio will go to zero if held to maturity.  As you increase volatility you would reach some point where you would breakeven for the portfolio, and increasing further you should earn a profit at maturity.  The volatility/ P&L curve would be inverted for the short-vega strategy.  The finite duration of LEAPS implies a different definition of average from that for a non-wasting underlying.  So I don't think there can be a generalized conclusion unless you are using some sort of ascetic DCA strategy over a period of decades.  So to revise my original comment, "I don't know whether a diversified put-call balanced LEAPS portfolio - long or short - will be profitable or not on average."

 

That's why I think, having made many mistakes in this area, that LEAPS are best restricted to situations where the investor has an incredibly asymmetric fundamental view on the underlying and a set of catalysts well within the expiry.  This is the Greenblatt philosophy which contrasts starkly with what most professional option traders do.  These traders include the sellers of OTM options based on the law of averages.  As a value investor I prefer infrequent, large profits over frequent, small profits.  The nature of the seller is that since the profits of each trade are small he has limited motivation to delve deeply into a given underlying.  With MMs it's even worse.  This creates an inefficiency which the value investor can exploit by allowing very few eggs into his basket.

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That's why I think, having made many mistakes in this area, that LEAPS are best restricted to situations where the investor has an incredibly asymmetric fundamental view on the underlying and a set of catalysts well within the expiry.  This is the Greenblatt philosophy which contrasts starkly with what most professional option traders do.  These traders include the sellers of OTM options based on the law of averages.  As a value investor I prefer infrequent, large profits over frequent, small profits.  The nature of the seller is that since the profits of each trade are small he has limited motivation to delve deeply into a given underlying.  With MMs it's even worse.  This creates an inefficiency which the value investor can exploit by allowing very few eggs into his basket.

 

Thanks for the detailed answer.  This is what I do too, except that I pretty well only do bullish bets these days, because it seems very hard to win large amounts with puts.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just noticed the collectibles market over the last couple of week.

 

I know its not stocks but give me a minute.

 

I like to collect basketball cards, and a couple of comics.  Everything I have bought in 2013 & 2014 has already at least doubled and even in some cases tripled (realized prices).  I'm not talking about Jordan's rookie or the very 1st Superman but this shit has gone bonkers the last two years.  I wish my stocks had returns like this the last couple of years. 

 

Needless to say, I am selling the shit out of everything.  I don't know if its a easy money thing or a bubble but I'll step to the side.

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CONeal, I would think it has to do with Marvel comics releasing movies every year.

 

What basketball cards you own are doubling?

 

None of the comics have even a hint of those main caracters coming out.  Guess it could be the anticipation of a movie being announced.

 

Certain cards in the 86-87 Fleer set. 

 

Guess I just got accustomed to things always going down.  But I kinda wish there was a way to short these types of things bc it seems like alot of excess money is going into these areas based on speculation.

 

 

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Just noticed the collectibles market over the last couple of week.

 

I know its not stocks but give me a minute.

 

I like to collect basketball cards, and a couple of comics.  Everything I have bought in 2013 & 2014 has already at least doubled and even in some cases tripled (realized prices).  I'm not talking about Jordan's rookie or the very 1st Superman but this shit has gone bonkers the last two years.  I wish my stocks had returns like this the last couple of years. 

 

Needless to say, I am selling the shit out of everything.  I don't know if its a easy money thing or a bubble but I'll step to the side.

Thanks for the heads up.

 

Where do you get market prices for these sorts of things? I have a few comics and tons of basketball cards I would love to turn into capital :)

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