NoCalledStrikes

In U.S., donation of appreciated stock is also subject to ST/LT distinction If you donate stocks you have owned less than one year, they will be considered short-term capital gain property. ... If you donate them, you will avoid this tax; however, your deduction will be limited to the lesser of their fair market value and the amount you paid for them. If you cross the LT time period, your deduction will be based on fair market value.

Other than if I expect ahead of time that the investment will be ST and I put in my IRA, I don’t have any suggestions. The best way to optimize for taxes is to just buy quality stocks with a long runway. But if like me, you still buy the occasional 60 cent dollar then when it reaches 90 cents, you gotta sell, pay your taxes and move on. That’s just the rules of buying cigar butts because they may not have a second puff left in them while you wait for the earth to complete its orbit around the sun.

Nice year for Francis Chou and Stonetrust! https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobwolinsky/2021/04/29/francis-chou-wants-to-build-the-next-berkshire-hathaway/?sh=70d7f08a7894

Thank you for the update, I am eager to learn all the new features. Staying too long on old software leads to never ending problems. (Being first to upgrade also creates problems too). So far every time I've played around a little I could figure out a new option that meets my needs. For example to get more density of information on a page like the old forum, I discovered the condensed view option on the Activity Page to get more idea of where the most new info resides without having to scroll the screen so much.

Fidelity trades it, but with a $50 fee. Merrilledge trades it for no commission.

The Annual Meeting of Shareholders of Daily Journal Corporation (the “Company”) will be held virtually on February 24, 2021 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we will not have an audience at the meeting. Instead, Yahoo will stream the event worldwide. You should visit their website at www.YahooFinance.com on the day of the meeting. Another important change is that our shareholders should send their questions to Julia LaRoche, a journalist at Yahoo Finance, who will then submit questions to the Board. Please send questions by February 15, 2021 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time to the following email address: DailyJournalQuestions@YahooFinance.com. Given time constraints, we unfortunately anticipate that not all questions will be asked and answered at the Annual Meeting.

Two choices, both are good. 1) Do what Jurgis proposed. It is sound advice. 401k's are excluded from Roth IRA partial conversion calculations and allows you to backdoor IRA post-tax contributions and easily convert them into Roths for no additional tax. This is a BIG benefit if used wisely. Do not do partial roth conversions with comingled traditional IRA funds or you will literally be keeping paperwork on the pre-tax/post-tax values and updating on your taxes annually for the rest of your life. 2) Bite the bullet and convert the 401k with the post-tax dollars in it into a Roth IRA before the earnings on its post-tax contributions get any bigger or your tax rates go up. Once the 401k is converted to a Roth, that account is irrelevant to future partial Roth conversions. Good luck!

I opened an account at Merrill edge 6 years ago back when the free trades were uncommon. I like illiquid stocks and getting hit with a full commission charge when your limit order gets hit with a single share bid was aggravating. Unfortunately about three years ago Merrill started making life difficult for purchasing what they call penny stocks (this includes LICT at 17k per share). As a result, I’ve moved a fair bit of money out, but haven’t closed the account as IB wouldn’t accept my OTC stocks. Execution wise, I seem to get the best price improvement from Fidelity, Merrill edge is hit or miss, and TD Ameritrade is the worst. Overall, Fidelity is my recommendation for ease of use and execution, but they don’t like dark stocks. IB is my favorite for international. Ultimately, I suggest keeping multiple accounts because you never know which stocks will be available from which brokers in advance. But yeah, if you just buy large caps, go with Fidelity.

TPL will definitely be hurt by current prices and it is really difficult to predict the future oil price, but I'm still optimistic about future prices because we are going to need oil for a really long time and of course there will be more green energy etc. - so prices should go down - but oil will be more scarce over a decade and will have a price of $60 or higher with quite some swings. Oil prices have risen from $40 in 2016 to $55 in 2019 and TPL grew a tremendous rates; 79% CAGR for FCF (2016-2019) and 42% CAGR for EBITDA (2014-2019). Besides that, TPL owns 900,000 surface acres in Texas. Texas is growing bigger and bigger in population and while these probably aren't the places you want to live, there is more place needed for businesses for example, or water utilities, infrastructure, electricity etc. So more people want to use TPL's land. Also a problem Texas is facing is water shortage and let TPL just be the one who can help solve these problems. So I see quite some upside in their water business alone. Even if oil prices will stay this low they should be able to grow with double digits. Love to hear if people totally or in some part disagree with me. This land is barren. It can barely support jack rabbits. You might run one head of cattle per 15 acre. Even if you found a business seeking a square mile of unoccupied land in the middle of nowhere, the buyer would have a hundred parcels to choose from.

8. (but should be 1.) Overbuilding of pipelines during recent boom based on expectations of continued growth. Without not just a resumption of activity but new oil and gas growth, pipelines from shale basins or to export terminals will eventually be re-contracted at lower rates when existing minimum volume commitments get renegotiated over the next years. Pipeline rates will be going down.

These are absolutely valid criticisms and are why I pass on 29 out of 30 MLPs. I would not advocate a long-term holding in any MLP for governance reasons, but my two primary exceptions are for short to mid-term purchases in either a brand new MLP after its inevitable post-IPO selloff or after a meaningful distribution cut. Brand new MLPs usually have a pretty clear ramp of dropdowns lined up for the first few years and are still at minimum IDRs. When new, they also often use a subordinated shares structure for GP units to secure the distribution to non-GP shareholders during the subordination period. PennTex midstream partners was an example of this. The other case is after a distribution cut large enough to ensure the new rate is secure for several years. Distribution cuts which don't secure a high coverage ratio going forward are not buys. MLP's lack of liquidity makes for occasional opportunities, but in neither scenario, do I recommend overstaying your welcome.

Nice summary Castanza! Producing Soda Ash from mining trona is cost advantaged over synthetic production and Ciner sits on a massive reserve in Wyoming. Soda ash is used in a wide variety of applications from pollution control to flat glass manufacturing. Demand is always going up as the world's population grows and develops with the only exception being (drumroll) ... a global recession. Covid was not in my playbook when I wrote up my report and its impact has hurt glass manufacturing and caused inventory surpluses to develop and for the first time in forever, prevented CINR from selling its full production. However, this will eventually clear over time as mining trona is a cheaper process for creating Soda Ash than it is by creating soda ash through energy intensive synthetic processes. (Synthetic production can offer some compensating location advantages). The bigger issue is management capability. Management's communication is poor and given its Turkish ownership (Turkey has large trona deposits) it is prone to intrigue and tea leaf reading. The company is undergoing a Wyoming plant expansion which should be successful given its recent expansion history in Turkey, but management has not been clear about the expansion status, and the company is shifting its U.S. exports from a consortium to using the parent company's Turkish parent. In theory, the transition should be successful as globally Ciner Corp is the leader, but it is not clear which producers will get the most sales to high margin U.S. clients on the East Coast, the Ciner Corp's (the parent) Turkish production or CINR LP's Wyoming production. Freight is a significant factor in pricing, so while Wyoming production is cheaper to produce than synthetic, that advantage goes away once loaded on a boat and shipped half way around the world. Since Turkey's trona is produced close to a port and is competitive across the Atlantic Ocean (but not Pacific) with U.S. production shipped by rail to the U.S. East coast, the sales could go either way. Its a valid question as to which operation gets first crack at the sales. I am currently out of the stock as my confidence that management can execute has gone from reasonably certain with some doubts to "new negative surprises more likely than not". I am awaiting the next Q for progress details.

They have a nice asset in Wyoming, which is cost-advantaged relative to synthetic production, and cost-advantaged relative to other trona miners. However, I don't trust management. Didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out they inflating annual production through deca rehydration, and eventually production would drop off significantly. The manner in which they disclosed this made them appear either dishonest or incompetent. Happy to chat more about this one on a dedicated thread for CINR. Read the same VIC pitch and I'm in too. Lets start one :) This entity still has 50% IDR’s. Automatic pass for me. While IDR's are horrible if you are owning the units for the long-term, if you are owning for a reversion to mean play, they are quite useful in motivating greedy owners. I wrote up CINR last year, https://nocalledstrikes.com/2019/09/23/get-paid-to-wait-with-ciner-resources/ pre-covid. I no longer own it as the management risk of cross-dealing disadvantaging US operations increases greatly in a down soda ash market which I figured could only happen in a global recession which we now have. I also have increasing management concerns on their ability to execute on the expansion project and the takeover of U.S. exports from the domestic export consortium. That said, a distribution reinstatement (easily doable if they halted/delayed the expansion) would generate a nice pop.

After doing four acquisitions in 12 months, you'd kind of hope that at a minimum, they'd have "record" gross profits. And what do you know, they also have a new "record" share count: Treasury stock, 95,396 shares, at cost, at June 30, 2020 and 72,934 shares, at cost, at June 30, 2019