Gregmal

Must be nice having that free call option on oil...

Has anyone given thought to the possibility that Mudrick was/is actually short AMC? Bought the shares directly as a hedge/buy in and then in classic hedge fund style sold it off profitably to put the trade back on and thought the publicity around their move and statement would facilitate a drop? There seems(speculating here) to be more going on than the surface implies. 20% short interest isnt really "that" big unless its concentrated. I was looking at the Friday calls today, and really wanted to speculate but with AMC at $39 I was like "nah, $3 for a $50 call expiring Friday is nuts"....and passed....Oh well. As always, the only way to make money on these types of things, consistently and in a reasonably risk adjusted way, is generally to short very near dated OTM puts.

LOL yea maybe tone deaf a little. Figure at least on sites like this, amongst investors there s a higher standard for "everyday guy". Lets say you have just a mil. $2500 into something you're genuinely interested in. If that forces you into a crash course education on that type of investment...I'd say its entirely worth it even assuming you lose every penny. Knowledge is powerful when investing. Or so Ive found at least. Tricking yourself into buying that knowledge while also having an investment to go along with it is a cool little way Ive been able to significantly expand my comfort zone.

Well said. I try to look at 200-300 investments a week. If I dont own it, I won't be able to follow it. Frankly, the cost, assuming one even loses money(I've found more often than not you end up making money/breaking even, even if you had no idea what you're buying just cuz the market is bonkers) pays for itself when you incorporate the research and knowledge you've acquired through ownership. Between the filings, internet sleuthing, occasionally chatting with analysts, other shareholders or NEOs, looking at peers...you're likely getting more value for less than it would cost to outsource the work to a subscription service or hiring analysts. Of course I am assuming you are sizing starter positions appropriately...IE 25 bps or less...which for the average person is like $5-10k....which again, if you buy it, look into it, and dont like it....what maybe it went down 30%....like I said, a few grand which is easily worth the knowledge acquired in the process, which also compounds, the more stuff you look at, and makes you a better investor.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3702381-whitney-tilson-calls-short-term-top-on-amc-gamestop-other-reddit-stocks LOL. Tilson calls the top...and then the stock proceeds to go up another 50%+...Tilson being Tilson. Even without his blown up hedge fund, he continues to represent the industry well!

Oh yea, the hypocrisy is crazy but nothing new. Its hard not to at first get mad at it because it makes no sense and will ultimately lead to a worse situation than we have now. Then you think about it, and slightly more than half the country supports this utter nonsense which is even more amusing. But I think Kuppy hit the nail on the head when he says "my job is to examine the world and figure out how to profit off human stupidity. "...Which is how Ive tried to go about these things. Green energy and climate initiatives have NEVER made money(unless you bet against them). But they always become popular fire pits for other peoples money when we have a Democrat in office. The shitbag fee gatherers now see a tidal wave of money pouring into ESG, and as the blog post linked says, they see an opportunity for marketing and increasing AUM(and subsequently their fees)...they have no concern over performance, which will undoubtedly be terrible...and little concern for the money of others they are using. This is why institutional money is really the dumb money. These retards dump stocks because they get kicked from an index. They refuse to own sub $5 stocks. The sell spin offs because of genius logic like "its too small to move the needle" or it "doesnt fit into the portfolio"...They refuse to buy things that have hair or are "out of favor" and then dive in when its much higher.....but we've seen repeatedly this sort of theme play out and its a tremendous opportunity for the investor who is not bound by this bullshit or actually needs to make money with their investment dollars rather making money off the dollars they invest. Ill leave you with this: https://apnews.com/article/e098bc76b19743e7a1587b8681e4b6b3 Total fuckin retards many of these people and institutions are.....best way to deal with it is to leave your emotional baggage at the door and just profit off the stupidity of others. People can make it a red issue or a blue issue but Ive generally found that I like green better.

https://adventuresincapitalism.com/2021/06/02/esg-energy-stops-growing/ The retards are creating a time bomb. This is so fascinating to watch and I reached similar conclusion as the above pondering this quite a bit over the weekend. Particularly the XOM vote implications. I know @SharperDingaan has touched on some of the ways to play it. Who else is playing this? Like some other themes, there's really not much that can realistically stop this from playing out. I'm hardly an energy expert so right now my exposure is largely through XOP, XLE both shares and LEAPS and well as some SLB options. What stops this? As is the case a lot of times, the key risk is selecting the wrong investment vehicle. But energy/oil more or less has to go higher over the next few years, at least until 2024.

The institutions are the dumb money. Thats always been the case, they've just really showcased it the past 5 years or so.

I think Alico is great risk/reward. Gone nowhere for a decade. New management has done a solid job over the past few years. Its got a good enough(not great by any means) operating business with inflation protection via the Trop contract. And its nearing(if it hasn't already gotten there) a tipping point where HBU for most of land is sales to developers. One of your faves BAC I think is also reasonably priced and soundly positioned. Berkshire is good enough if you cant find anything else. APTS I really like but its a jungle of a mess navigating that one and enough to scare off most. FRP Holdings is a monster thats well managed and under leveraged. Good MF and the mother of all royalty assets. Its potentially got 1/4 of its EV in hidden assets as well. Kind of a no brainer(still even after run up) IMO. MSGE/S are both in excellent shape and cheap. S is safer E is more upside potential I am a horrible energy analyst but thats been beaten to hell and sentiment sucks so I just own XLE there but if one knows what they are doing there I think its fertile ground for hunting. CLF/MSB too long a story but CLF is outstandingly managed and now kind of in oligopoly territory after consolidation and MSB is purely a royalty company who gets checks from CLF as they own the best positioned IO mine in the US.

Select RE, Energy/commodities, and banks. Interestingly enough, many of these were cheap on absolute terms(and some still are), destined to do well regardless, and trade at discounts to NAV. Oh how glorious it is owning reasonably priced, well managed assets that trade at a discount going into an inflationary environment. Some are scared, I say, bring it!

One day we are going to thank all these ESG retards for ultimately creating a massive energy crisis. Wouldnt be shocked to see $200 a barrel in the next half decade. As if massive inflation wasn't bad enough, they want to shut down all the drilling sites, pipelines, and pull funding for any sort of growth initiative. Guess who's going to bear the brunt of this?

The Sphere is your real ? with MSGE, otherwise its a really simple/easy/no brainer investment at the current valuation. But throw in the ambiguity with the Sphere economics(so in brief, I cant give you a good answer relating to your question on splits), massive construction costs being incurred/to be incurred over next 2 years, and Dolan forging ahead with London....and well its much less no brainery but still something I find quite attractive. The Sphere is basically Mars as far as comps go. No one has really done anything like it before, so you cant comp it. But MSGS is your sweet spot if you just want something easy. Discounted sports team and while E takes the rents from S, S ultimately has the more direct benefit of pricing power on tickets. That said, both are kind of high multiple hard asset type investments. Sports teams just dont trade at anything reasonably derived from a P/E or P/S. But inflation protected they are.

I am not unconvinced that the end of a big cycle is near. Rates cant really go much lower, the fanboys around big tech are now value investors thinking AMZN is a no brainer after a 3000x run, and that PTON is worth $100B...energy is hated and has been for almost a decade now, commodities were beaten to death for a nearly similar stretch, housing was dormant for a decade following GFC(now things go up 10-20% in a year and the novices are screaming BUBBLE! much like broader stock market in 2013)...banks are massively under owned. If I ask myself what allows the current long term trend and popular shit to continue producing returns, I dont really have an answer other than maybe rates stay around here longer than a couple years...but even then, I think they underwhelm. But it seems apparent to me that the table is set for a new chapter in the boom and bust cycle story of the stock market. As I mentioned recently somewhere else, I think yin/yang or equal and opposite reaction type stuff happens often with the market...which if anything, would imply a very long, and brutal downturn cycle for the stuff thats been fawned over for the past decade.

Agree on phone carriers. I finally had to ditch my iPhone 5. Sprint and TMUS merged and as of Jan 2022 are shutting down old networks which means my beloved iPhone 5 won't work anymore. I absolutely detest the big retard sized phones, so by default had only one option, which was the iPhone 12 mini. Tough pill to swallow going from a phone I loved to one I still dont like and paying $750 vs $80 for it. But what am I gonna do? Well, anyway, the new phone has all these dumb features that I dont want or need, but one of them is unsolicitedly springing old pictures on me...attached below, inflation reminders indeed. Last March 22(2020) I got an 8.5 lb lobster. Dont know if I was celebrating the fact that I'd be more than tripling my net worth over the next 12 months or simply eating well in anticipation of the end of civilization as we knew it....but anyhow, now? That 8.5 pound monster which cost $64 in March 2020 is now $193, ON SALE! That said, you can still navigate prices at grocery stores but it is definitely more expensive and I agree with Castanza, its not like "oh shit, 4% increase!"...its generally 20-30% and in some cases much more. A 12 pack of Coke is now $7.99...WTF? Also attached was the menu at the Tex-Mex place I was eating at while reading the posts about restaurant price increases....everyone knows they can bump prices, whether its by necessity or not, its happening. If people are willing to pay it, I doubt they come back down for a while.

Sports teams, Concerts, Theme parks. Guess what happened to Knicks and Rangers ticket prices from 2007-2011? Peak to trough for pretty much everyone else? Yea, they went wayyyy up. Good to have a massive waitlist of largely price insensitive customers. Six Flags prices during that time frame also increased a good bit.

If one didnt rely on The NY Times or Wapo, Occam's razor would have lead to the most logical conclusion.... Get me a world map. Put a pin on where these type of virus research institutes are located Get a second world map. Put a pin where the first virus cases were reported. Draw a circle around the 100 mile radius. Overlap them now. Conclusion? Meanwhile some actually thought it came from a dirty food festival? If that were the case we'd have new pandemics every 6 months. Especially when NYC does their food truck festivals...Sometimes common sense is not the hard part, its finding the right lens to look through. Many people suffered from politically inspired bias.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9629563/Chinese-scientists-created-COVID-19-lab-tried-cover-tracks-new-study-claims.html Hopefully more and more continues to bleed out. Remember all the whistleblowers in China in Jan/Feb who just went away? Remember the Chinese scientist chick who came over here around this time last year saying it was a coverup and the media scrubbed her and she just went away? Or the reports of an internal memo going around the Wuhan Institute mandating a complete security and procedural overhaul last February? Almost the same as new security features at a bank after a robbery? But when the government and media collude together to hide things from people, one has to accept that the truth is, very likely we will never get the full or true story. But all signs point to a massive government coverup here. Both with respect to China, and also most likely the US being complicit; after all they happened to be funding this lab. The behavior in the beginning was very telling. The US politicians held an emergency meeting a couple weeks into January, a mere 2 weeks after the first cases were reported in China? The lockdowns in China after like 3 weeks? We'd previously seen random outbreaks like Ebola and some others and never was the response like this one. Tell tale behavior of people who know more than they're letting on. Meanwhile, the average fool goes to The NY Times and says "thats the truth, they're credible!"...and it goes away just like the powers that be want. A reminder to all to always think for yourselves. There's a saying when investing that the more certainty/data one needs to invest, the higher the price they pay and the lower the subsequent returns. Great investors connect a few facts with a bunch of speculation and circumstantial data and arrive in the correct place. Obviously not everyone has this skill, but self awareness makes it somewhat easier. You had everything you needed here 3-4 months into this "pandemic".

I dont think its advisable to short puts on a long duration basis. The crux is to pinch off some of the obscene IV which if done correctly can generate ridiculous annualized returns. I generally dont look to go more than at most 3 months out. But typically you're looking for weekly or monthly in terms of duration. You just want to play the volatility, not hang around for the investment to work or not work. Best example was shorting the GME Apr $20 puts when the stock was at $350 in late January/February. Stock collapsed to like $50 in a few weeks and puts went from being worth $5+ to less than $1.50. It is once in a 5 year stretch or so type of situation where you can get that type of juice, but its quite common to get enough to make the trade worthwhile on many of the high short interest names. I used to do it all the time with stuff like DDS, RICK, FIZZ. I have no positions in SRG and no intention to initiate one so I am not recommending anything, but if you look even at the June 18 $15 puts you can effectively create a 1% monthly yield and you're only getting put the stock if it falls 10%+ in a couple weeks. Stock goes down, you keep rolling down. With share price decline IV should spike, giving you more premium. If I was an SRG enthusiast I would be all over a strategy like this.

Everyone and everything is telling you there is inflation. After years of the Fed trying to create it, its been done. It may be temporary, it may not be..I dont know. But the really simple question is, if you can make investments today that do well, in some cases REALLY WELL, with or without inflation, why wouldnt you? Perhaps I'm being naive, but this seems like an easy situation to navigate.

Eh 2-3 year "winters" to accumulate while out of favor to sell at 5-10x higher prices when its in favor seem like a reasonable IRR...not that this is what I am forecasting, but if you remain bullish on this thats probably what you want to see.

Isnt it amazing how people literally eat themselves to death and then when it comes time to pay(literally) for it, politicians want to hold other people accountable for it? Its truly amazing and never going to get to the root of the problems. Even at my 4 year olds t ball games, its incredible to me how many of these fat pig parents are just camped out in a folding chair, chowing on snacks the entire time. Do people not have any respect for themselves? America, the land of waning accountability.

Thats probably a decent setup to short some puts then. Real estate rarely blows up overnight, but just gradually erodes over time as far as public entities are concerned. If there's high short interest there's always juice on the puts. I dont know if I'd want to go long this, as I still feel like its a terrible risk/reward and one of those things(like PTON) that even if it works out, it was dumb and if you do it enough will get your head handed to you, but cleaning up on OTM put sales might be attractive.

Eh I posted this in a private chat on the subject so its somewhat edited to remove detail but basically... A good friend of mine grew up with (well known allocator)...(allocators name) has even said on numerous occasions the key to building (his firm) and ultimately being a successful feeder/allocator is basically just kissing ass. Hob knobbing. Throwing events that popular people go to. I dont think performance is anywhere near the top of the list for many of these guys. They basically just need to avoid someone who blows up in a big way but is otherwise boring and vanilla and won't make them look bad. Most dont seem to understand the absurdity of the system, particularly someone like Wyatt who seems focused on the only thing that should matter which is performance. Adam is probably better off just doing his own thing and not kissing the ring. He obviously doesnt need these guys, let alone putting up with their arrogant, entitled, I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine nonsense that comes with taking their money. It's awesome seeing someone like him, who lacks the typical establishment "polish" kicking ass and taking names.

Didnt see his rant, what was it? I do an incredibly poor job of following Twitter, mainly because I dont have an account nor a desire to get one. This guy has quietly been money for a while though. Glad he's getting his day(assuming he wants it).

Hamilton Thorne