aws

If you're thinking of a strategy like that then you definitely do not want to have the options expire in the same tax year as your gain. If they hit then the profit is taxed in the same year as well, so you didn't really accomplish anything. If you buy January 2022 options on the other hand, then you have the option of selling them on 12/31/21 and taking the loss this year if they will expire worthless, or holding them until next year if they are in the money.

Up 100% yesterday and now up almost 100% off the low of the day. I guess I don't want to think about how wild this might have gotten if they hadn't sold shares today. Hanging on to the few short $73 calls I have, but definitely not interested in making this any larger of a position.

I tried to be too clever and shorted a few OTM June calls before the big move from $44-70. I don't hate the position as even at the peak it's less than 1% exposure so I should be able to ride it out, but I hate losing 500% in an hour. At this point AMC is above the peak market cap GME had back at 500, not even considering the extra debt. And with the options so crazy expensive it's hard to imagine a big gamma squeeze higher. Even OTM calls two weeks out cost like 40% of the stock price, so it's not like people can buy hundreds of them.

I haven't seen any discussion on this board about Opportunity Zone funds, which seem like they should be a very valuable option for US taxpayers to defer capital gains. Here is a link with a decent explanation of how it works for the uninitiated: https://taxfoundation.org/opportunity-zones-what-we-know-and-what-we-dont/ Basically when you have a capital gain of any kind you can defer that gain if you reinvest just the profit in an Opportunity Zone fund. In many ways it's much better than 1031 exchanges which are very popular with real estate investors as you don't need to roll the entire investment over to avoid taxes, but just the profit. It's also good for all types of capital gains, even short-term gains which are taxed at ordinary rates (often over 50% tax rate for people in high tax states). You have 180 days after the gain to make the investment, which for gains late in the year means you can even wait until the following year to make an investment and pull down your prior year taxable income, kind of like a super charged IRA contribution. I've done enough research to know that a good opportunity zone fund would be a no brainer investment in my situation this year, but I don't have any leads on a fund that is actually any good. Does anyone on the board have any direct experience with these investments or recommendations of fund managers?

I like the idea and I’ve taken a decent sized position in the post ER dip this week. Experiencing firsthand how difficult it is recently to buy housing at fair value, the prospect of buying a pro-rata share of some at way below fair value is appealing. It’s fun to think that with 11,143 residential units and about 50mm shares outstanding, that for every 4,500 shares you buy (about $42,500 cost) you own the pro-rata equivalent of 1 residential unit, plus about 800 sq/ft of other properties. I may not have been able to buy a new house for myself yet, but I’ve bought some additional look-through properties at least. The biggest hurdle was getting over my hatred of the preferreds. Constantly issuing shares at 90 cents on the dollar net proceeds to fund redemptions at 100 cents, while paying a 6% coupon, is distasteful. But if that is what opens the opportunity to buy common stock at a fraction of fair value, and to avoid diluting the common while it is below fair value, then it is a necessary evil. If the average holding period for the preferreds is about 10 years, then that comes out to about 7.5% cost between issuance fees and the coupon. I’m hoping between NOI and appreciation that the 7.5% hurdle is met and that at least is a not a net economic drain on common shareholders while outstanding. The dream is they can get the common up to the upper ends of the ranges discussed here, and that common stock could be issued at fair value to redeem the preferreds. You would first have to get through the warrants which would issue about 25mm shares for 500mm. So if you thought the common might be worth $2b today with 50mm shares outstanding ($40 a share), that would bring it to 2.5b/75mm = 33.33/sh. Then just issue another 50 million shares around 30 bucks and be done. My look-through unit count would decrease, but I’d gladly trade the leverage in today’s common stock for the almost locked in gains from common stock issuance way above today’s price.

Excellent, I snagged shares in a few of them this morning when they were selling off hard premarket. Seems like you can't go too far wrong buying in the 9.70s unless you sleep through a redemption window. Should be perfect for me since I am holding a lot of cash right now which is only mine for a year, and trying to get a little yield on it while I can.

It looks like with the selloff this week that some SPACs will be a nice place to park some excess cash. I see many are selling off into the 9.70-9.80 range, and will conceivably go much further if the selloff gets worse even though it should have little impact on the value to a redeemer. I had a couple more questions to make sure I understand what I'm getting into with the strategy of post deal announcement SPACs trading under $10: 1. Are redemption deadlines always before votes on the merger? That is, do you get your money back automatically before the vote happens, in case the vote fails and your money could be locked up longer? 2. What's the worst case scenario if you buy a SPAC below $10 with the intention to redeem, assuming you are never able to sell at a profit before then? Is it something like your money is locked up for two years and there are potentially a few pennies per share of expenses so you get back a little less than $10 face value? There's never any chance of a major loss (beyond opportunity cost), right? So for RACA for example, is the worst case scenario that somehow the merger is called off and instead of being able to redeem in mid 2021 you have to wait until possibly the SPAC expires in July 2022?

WCS prices are up about 800% as well, so it makes sense, but definitely a crazy turnaround. Obviously I wish I gambled and bought some more shares, even as late as November when we still had the overhang of the convertible debt, but I still have my original shares which are well in the money now. Bought mostly two years ago around C$0.55, and nice to see them finally have a good move up.

“The directors are in agreement that if something were to happen to me tonight, it would be Greg who’d take over tomorrow morning,” Buffett said. He praised Abel and Vice Chairman Ajit Jain, who runs all of Berkshire’s insurance operations. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/when-warren-buffett-eventually-steps-down-as-berkshire-hathaway-ceo-greg-abel-will-succeed-him.html

The cash difference is explained by the $4b liability for treasury bills they bought in March and paid for in April, otherwise you'd be counting the cash and the bills.

You have to select the specific color, which is not the easiest to find. The men's color is 044 and the women's is 483. I was in the market for a new pair soon so I picked up one for myself and my SO.

Perhaps I should have made it clearer, but I was specifically just talking about a discussion from the previous pages about a big increase in A share volume recently, not about the total A share equivalent repurchase. It was possible that Buffett was preferring to buyback A shares, even at a bigger premium, for some reason and that resulted in the higher volume of that class recently. I'm sure the overall buyback numbers you quoted are correct.

The Berkshire 10-Q is out, which shows repurchases of 4606 A shares during the quarter, and the share count dropped by another 400 or so between 3/31 and the date of the filing. So call it about 5000 A shares repurchased between 1/1 - 4/22. A much larger repurchase program than in years past, but not an exceptionally high amount of A shares to result in the much increased volume of that class, so that mystery is still outstanding. For a somewhat striking comparison, I've been reading old annual reports again recently, and I noticed in 1975 they repurchased 6,647 A shares for a total price of $432,055 during the year. Today that amount of money can get you just over 1 share, or looked at another way they spent 1.52 billion on the just 4606 A shares they repurchased in Q1. Good thing he did at least some of the buyback back then.

While I agree that we are far from the speculative excess of the housing bubble, I do still wonder how long things can stay this hot. If the price gains have been driven by cash rich city dwellers moving to the suburbs, and by record low mortgage rates for buyers with good credit, then it seems like over time more and more people will be priced entirely out of the market. I'm assuming the banks aren't going to be loosening underwriting standards too dramatically, so how is the family with the national median income of 80k going to be able to buy a house? Are we going to need to see another giant homebuyer tax credit, or expansions of low-income housing projects? If other countries like Canada have markets that are so much higher than even the US, how does anyone afford to live there if they aren't millionaires?

Oh, interesting. Thanks, I'll definitely have to look more into this then as I saw quite a few post deal SPACs with the warrants separated trading under $10. At this point trying to play for pops only didn't seem too attractive with the SPAC market so oversaturated, but finding deals returning 1-2% in a couple months is.