Gregmal

Number of SPACs launched 2016-20 2017-62 2018-63 2019-86 2020-335 and counting Whats more, is that these are all competing for the same thing. Of which there is finite supply, and over time, less and less quality as more deals get consummated. Nevertheless the incentives still force sponsors to push deals through, essentially compounding the level of crappiness. It seems virtually impossible for this thing to not collapse upon itself. We already have every hallmark of a mania, from euphoria to fraud. No revenue companies, no concept companies, companies who have only existed for a few years. Robust retail demand. Incentive for everyone. This is the next big short. IMO we're currently in late 2006.

Issuing convertible notes to buy Bitcoin LOL. Frankly, outside of laughing, I am speechless. WTF is going on?

Just my quick look, but Vertiv just did a secondary where even more PE blew out of the name. DraftKing is at best structurally challenged, and Clarivate I do agree is interesting. This speaks nothing of the valuations on any of these(insane), nor the fact they just consummated PE and sponsor negotiated deals at valuations 50%+ lower than current market values, most carry tons of debt, and in general, still have lots of overhang in terms of PE and warrants. I think the diversification is a plus on the short side. I've gotten smacked around enough in my career shorting individual names. I wish they could make something like this for every theme I wanted to short. I also think that as they rebalance quarterly there will be an unintended benefit that theyre going to be buying high on the in favor RH names.

I do also agree on foreign listed stocks. I just dont own a lot of that stuff so its a less of a focus for me.

Its a new ETF, just came out a couple months ago, but I believe the rebalance is quarterly. I intend to keep an eye on it but have the utmost faith that these guys will do their best to keep the hottest, highest flying pieces of shit in here.

Margin rates are the only reason I use IBKR. If you own blue chippy, IE stable, high quality large caps, there's no other place I'd keep them, and margin them. For everything else, there's better options.

I believe the above is one of the most attractive current short plays in the market today. It offers you a basket(look at the holdings) of utter dog shit. All highly inflated SPAC deals, post deal...the stuff nightmares are made of. Not only is it pre-basketized for you, but its currently the most efficient way to short the underlying names from a cost and borrow availability perspective. Simple write up, for a simple idea. If anyone currently has any better ideas for shorting what is currently the most obvious bubble in the market, feel free to chime in. Ticker just hit 52 week high today at $28.14. ~10% borrow cost. Disclosure, yes, I shorted this today and reserve the right to transact here on either side, at any time. Feel free to join me and drive up the borrow cost...

From one of my headline feeds..... Oppenheimer analysts ups CRSP price target to $155 from $105, maintains OUTPERFORM rating. Current share price? $159... LOL We should put all the analysts together in a room with all the scientists and academics and see what comes out....

LOL I have the AYR.A shares...but they're at IB, which has its own issues at the moment...who'd have thought I really did need to have a half dozen brokerage accounts....

The best part about IB is if you call in to their "trade desk", you'll probably get the order in right as the internet login gets fixed.....in about an hour!

Any news for GEOS to trade up 30% since that day of forced selling? Only news I saw was the $6 to ~$8 move which in a round about way screamed, "ALWAYS TAKE ADVANTAGE OF FORCED SELLERS!"... I've trimmed position down again to about half; I think the rest I'll layer out of in the 8s. I would not be surprised to see a sale of the company though. The buyback was actually intentionally, or unintentionally, brilliantly timed as well.

Perhaps now, perhaps in 6 months, perhaps in a year or two we can revisit. When it comes to being in the market, the only thing that matters is putting yourself in position to being on the side of the trade that makes money. If folks were too distracted, or filled with fear, or grief stricken to invest, thats ok. As I always say, we all answer to our own P&L's. Perhaps down the line, when one is back in the office, or with their colleagues, bosses, patients, clients or whoever they answer to, they can take some time on their allotted lunch break to come back here and lecture me on trading family members for dollars....at which time I'll probably be at home, happily, with the wife and kids...mid 30s and all. Time is money. Who's really trading family for dollars? Whats spending the next 2 two decades doing a 9-5 worth? 80% of your kids lives as kids? Tisk, tisk.

Almost daily occurrence lately, trimmed more CRSP, BEAM, also a little RPTX and ESRT...still waiting for the bubble to burst.

Yupp... $30B turns to $35B which gets upsized to $40, maybe even eventually $45B and then shares open ~$60B, maybe higher. Still kicking myself for not getting this at ~25B. Cant win em all I guess.

Goldman to Florida!

I'm not slandering him but holy shit Sanjeev, how many times do we need to give people a break for making the same mistakes? I certainly dont mince words about guys like Einhorn who do it. I am sure he's a great guy. Why do you keep doing something that isn't working? Isn't it a travesty to have wasted what has literally been one of the most ridiculous periods of market prosperity in modern history!?! Where all you had to do was not be "that guy" FOR THE ENTIRE STRETCH! I made a point of distinguishing this from Sardar, who is just all around an awful person. Thats not Prem. But I still think its inexcusable to not adapt as a manager. Thats ultimately their entire job! How many shareholders would have preferred to have taken a 50% drawdown in 08 and then just rode the wave rather than continuously being plagued by this need to be the smartest guy in the market by timing the next temporary drawdown? Which honestly, we've had a bunch of those over the last decade and when they've happened, FRFH still has somehow managed to avoid reaping the benefit of them. Its not about blasting a good man, its about being accountable as a manager and learning from your mistakes. I've tried so many times to get myself to like this stock/company and briefly owned it I think in either 2013 or 14. But every time I try, I come back to the same thing, and that is very simply, that whatever you are trying to accomplish here, you can do elsewhere without the management risk.

Yup, I brought this up in the spring, and it was widely determined by the experts here not to be relevant to anything even though cycle threshold is 10000% relevant to everything regarding spread/severity of this "cold". Or that the vast majority of positives in the US would have been negatives in other countries.....

^ well said. The man keeps playing everyone. Its an ego fest at this point. Its not deliberately a fuck you like at Biglari, but the overall lack of concern for shareholders is very much the same. If Prem Watsa wasnt once regarded as the "Warren Buffett of Canada", no one would give a shit about this name. In fact, thats pretty much the investment case at this point...one day Prem will right the ship....good luck

Am going through the book and starting my usual Sunday game planning for the week ahead. Figured I'd list some of the SPAC holdings here to 1) see if anyone else has thoughts on these, 2) help others interested get a handle on some names, and 3) give examples of some of the things discussed earlier in the thread. ACEVU, ACICU, CGROU, CFACU, CFIIU, ETACU, FUSEU, SRACU, FSRVU, FTIVU, LATNU, FRXU, LSAQ, SPNVU, CAPAU, IGACU, PTICU, SRSAU, OACBU Now take for instance one I didnt even see had a nice jump....CGROU....This was marketed as a marijuana focused SPAC led by the former CEO of Canopy Growth....and it's popping on rumor that its looking to merge with an Israeli Lidar startup.....I doubt anyone will complain, but that's just kind of how things are going in this space right now. Stable Road, SRACU I've sold a bunch of, but this one too, was supposed to be cannabis focused...not surprisingly it debuted during the cannabis phase 1 bubble....now looking to merge with a space travel company. In the current market, $10-10.2 is now kind of becoming $10.15-10.4. People are catching on. We're also seeing several, such as CFIIU and RBACU finding deals a couple months out of the gate, which is not only unusual, but also kind of brings in the possibility of not having to wait the typical 12-15 months for announcement. Its certainly a unique situation, probably not for everyone although if you really understand it, it should be given how asymmetric and low risk it is, and regarding how long it last...who knows. What people dont seem to understand is that their is literally unlimited institutional demand for these, even prior to the mania. Tell an institution with a conservative focus staring down 0-1% rates that they can park cash with a 2-5% potential short tern return and a guarantee return of principal and they're doing it all day. The biggest hurdle typically when it comes to launching these is finding the required number of shareholders, which IIRC is 300. Generally you'll have 80-90% of the offering taken down by a few institutions/hedgies. Now that Robinhood likes these, there's no telling how many and how long you'll continue seeing these brought to market.

This is the case for me, yes. i.e. I will only use margin if I can be sure that the price won't drop significantly causing a margin call. Now the thing that should provide a floor to the price ($10), is the redemption promise. Doing some due diligence, there is one thing that concerns me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_acquisition_company says: "Recent SPACs incorporated provisions that prevent public shareholders, acting alone or in concert, from exercising redemption rights in excess of 20% shareholding" Looking at one example recent IPO (Duddell Street Acquisition Corp): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1823466/000095010320021018/dp139545_424b4.htm says: "our ... articles of association provide that a public shareholder, together with ... any other person with whom such shareholder is acting as a “group” (as defined under Section 13 of the Exchange Act), will be restricted from redeeming its shares with respect to more than an aggregate of 20% of the shares sold in this offering" Isn't this a risk? Because let's say the company announces its merger, but the market doesn't like it and the share price fails to rise very much or at all, then could the company try to claim that you are in a "group", refuse the redemption, resulting in the price dropping well below $10? I dont really think that's something most need to be concerned with. I've never seen one go below $10 on a deal announcement, including ones only a couple months away from expiration. The subject you are referring to is largely meant to prevent a more recent phenomenon where you get people kind of colluding together at the last minute trying to get better terms, more warrants, etc. Even in these instances, by the time it gets to this type of situation, you've already had plenty of time to cash out in public markets. The landscape here does evolve, but usually its minimal. For instance things actually did start slowing down a but at the beginning of this year. They stopped during covid. I remember having an IPO suspended due to market conditions. And then things went bananas. Usually it just takes some tinkering. The most common way I have seen them do this over the years is adjustments on the warrants. Standard deal gives you 1/3 of a warrant. Ackmans deal is 1/9. I've seen others where things get a little slow offer 1/2 a warrant. So pay attention obviously, but dont overcomplicate it. Especially if your objective is simply to use the pre deal shell as a superior alternative to cash. If you're trading post deal, just remember to stay near the exit for when the music stops.

Every investment/speculation is a wager on where the puck is going. If it doesnt get there, it doesnt matter whether it was Sears, or Fairfax, or Bitcoin. If you want certainty, you'll pay significantly more than you needed to, just ask the folks who finally came to the conclusions that Amazon was a real investment a year or two ago.... End of the day, if you look for something that is event or catalyst driven, or possessing a multi year momentum runway...you target stuff like this. If you put lets say 1% of your assets in it, fundamentally, the worst case scenario is that you lose 1%...who gives a flying fuck? Whereas more often than not, and on the upside, you can make many multiples. $1,000 in BTC in 2016 is $20k today. $1000 in Fairfax in 2016 in $750. $1000 in Sears is worth $0. $1000 in Berkshire is worth $1,700. Who was investing? The words/adjectives people ascribe to "their style" of investing, ie, value, momentum, arbitrage, who gives a shit, its a means to and end, which is making money. Thats all that counts. Its even easier when you look at the $1000 in BTC that you could easily have peeled off significant "returns of capital" along the way and plowed that into more conventional investments. If you had $1000 in BTC in 2016 and today have $5000 in BTC, and $1000 positions in BRK, SPY, AAPL with proceeds from along the way....bubble bursts, BTC goes to 0...who cares? Still ahead of the game. And yea, BTC got to $20k in 2017 with retailers buying $100 at a clip and institutions basically barred from the asset class, or mocking it...Dimon, Buffett, etc. Now? We're just getting started and we're at $20k.

The answers to Lynch's theoretic query can be summed up in as little as 3 words and as many as one sentence. 3 words: supply and demand. bonus word: catalyst One sentence: take everything people apply to gold, and it applies to BTC but put on steroids, with one notation; replace the physical brick and mortar aspect with a digital one.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-05/crispr-gene-editing-shows-promise-in-blood-disease-study-updates

My guess is that when that happens it will look like some of the posts/posters on end of page 94/ start of page 95 of this thread....and that will mark another bottom. I always enjoy seeing the "I told you so's". They usually end up being a contrarian indicator.

Haha yea. I mean if thats the thought process just short 4-5 shares of TSLA for every 100 shares of BRK/b you buy on your own and not deal with Prem's antics.