ERICOPOLY

Well, I put my socks on one at a time too. Two years ago I sold all my BAC above $17 in our Roth IRA accounts. I held on in my taxable account because I couldn't bring myself to share 1/3 of the gains with people who didn't put up any of the capital at risk. During that time, I borrowed $1m against it to buy 1/3 of my home in Montecito, and spent a good deal on top of that. You know, it's easy to spend $500k when you aren't working and you have a $2m mortgage. Especially when your friends have a lot of money too. After paying for our new house (I'll get to that in a minute), most of what is left in that account will settle the tax bill. So the stock doing what it is, we're renting out the Montecito house and moving to a lower-burn-rate jurisdiction. So a few weeks ago we paid cash for a house in Granite Bay (near Sacramento) -- no mortgage this time. It is 5 acres, 4,200 sqft, good public schools, and yet costs 1/3 as much as the other one. Well, it's easy to save money when you are leaving Montecito. At one point in early 2014, our Roth IRAs were jointly worth $10m. Then a month later $9m. At that point I decided to move it over to Sanjeev/Alnesh and Mohnish to manage. Then a year later, back to $10m. Now, probably worth about $7.5m or so... maybe $8m. I dunno. Market does what it does. So the plan is to now try to earn a living and minimize what we withdraw from those IRAs. It's difficult to feel like a loser with roughly $9m or $10m in assets, but somehow I do a bit. Maybe it's because I feel like that that makes me a loser. It's going to take a bit of time to mentally reboot. Once the kids finish school we can "retire" back to the Montecito house if the Roth IRAs do alright going forward. What a mess moving is. And to top things off, I injured myself again -- had the MRI done on my left elbow this time... got the results back today -- only 20% of my "ulnar collateral ligament" is still attached. I'm told not to carry anything heavier than a cup of coffee for 3 months. Great... and moving in 2 months? When it rains, it pours.

Section 102 of Internal Revenue Code is "gifts and inheritances". Lot's of companies retain earnings instead of paying them out -- Apple for example. Or Microsoft. They had huge piles accumulated long before their dividend policy.

changing the topic a bit away from GM... Ferrari has a lot of money to spend on safety. Maserati. BMW. Porsche. Mercedes. Lexus. Etc... None of them achieved Tesla's safety ratings on the first try. Or the second try... Or third... Or fourth... Etc... Maybe they never will. Did the money make Tesla safer? I'd argue not, because they were financially not as well off as the others when the Model S was under development.

I disagree. The market cap could be the same if they eliminated the EV part and somehow still cranked out this kind of performance and safety in it's cars. Their margins would be much higher without the superchargers and other investments that are EV specific. Just look at what VW paid for Porsche on annual sales volume of roughly 140,000 cars at the time.

That's a bit like comparing a Ford Escort to a Porsche 911. Certainly right that the VOLT is not sexy. Nobody cares that a Porche 911 is not electric -- it's just really fun to drive. That's what the Model S is, except it just happens to be electric. Then there is that safety thing -- nobody has made a safer car than Tesla, the ones with the least experience building cars. GM has a bad safety record -- they've made vehicles that literally self-ignite if you leave them idling. How is it that for decades they just keep turning out mediocre crash test results, and then Tesla beats them on the first try?

The Bolt goes 200 miles on one charge. So you can get, realistically, on day trips get about 80 miles out of town in a Bolt. That's when you start worrying about needing the rest of the juice to get home, with a buffer. Compared to a Tesla where you travel 140 miles out of town and then stop for 20 minutes at a supercharger to get back to 80% full. That gives you enough juice to then travel a similar radius around that supercharger, then a quick charge at the end of the trip to top up before heading 140 miles back home again. The Bolt is extremely range limited unless the entire point of your day trip was to wait around for hours charging the car.

A Tesla is probably not an effective suicide vehicle, for that matter. It is probably one of the safest cars made in a collision with a solid wall (as was the case here), and you certainly can't kill yourself with carbon monoxide in the garage unless you have a BBQ in the back seat or something. GM is probably cringing at the fact that a person has selected one of their cars (a Chevy Tahoe) as a sure fire way to end their life in. No pun intended (I noticed the pun when I previewed my post).

Unrelated completely to the man himself... but his car burst into flames and it wasn't a Tesla. Well, actually they didn't even bother to say what type of car it was. But that it burst into flames "almost immediately" -- Tesla's don't do that. There would have been a second major story running in the news about how a Tesla had caught fire, if it were in fact a Tesla.

Maybe not? Vicente Fox: "I'm not going to pay for that f***ing wall. He should pay for it," http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/25/politics/vicente-fox-donald-trump-wall/index.html

Trump is a developer. That wall with Mexico is going to take a lot of bricks -- good for Berkshire.

He has to be at this point to protect help protect his equity interests. One way to interpret this is that Pabrai doesn't see recovery in the equity and he's moving onto a more senior portion of the capital structure. But he was already at his max for the position. Throwing more money into it would exceed the max.

No, I just put in a market order at the open and drove the stock up. Not enough liquidity out there. I had buy orders in 10 cent increments all the way to $11.90. I'd almost have the order filled and then the next buy would get tripped as the next 10 cent increment arrived.

But we're only like 3 cents away from the $10 handle. So tempting to wait just a bit more isn't it? Dang, can't stop watching the stock today.

Well, the "sell everything" guy was correct, but he'll probably miss the "buy everything" call.

The fallout has been bad enough since Mike Mayo went bullish. Poor guy can't catch a break. I hope you have enough liquidity to push it higher.

Your talk is only angering the market gods. I will have to sacrifice a chicken but we're down to only two remaining.

Crash positions everyone!

I don't buy that explanation because people can sell whatever they hold and trade into the financial stocks. If they wanted to... that is.

It will be interesting to see this year's severe adverse scenario results with the negative interest rates thrown in.

Tons, but all hedged at $15 strike. The short story is that I picked the strategy of going on margin with married puts instead of owning the warrants. That was back in 2013 when BAC was $12 and the warrants were $5.65. Once the stock rose, I rolled to the higher strike $15 puts. So, I don't think I've lost any money since then, but neither have I made any (excepting some income from selling out of the money calls). Sure felt good for a while though. My strategy avoided the massive losses incurred by the warrants during this time frame -- as I said beforehand, the options had the flexibility to roll to higher strike puts. The warrants lacked that key feature. That's why I'm break-even instead of down 40% in the warrants.

Down 1/3 of the way to $10 in the few hours that I slept. $11.59. Hmm... maybe we're being too optimistic. $9? EDIT: Already at $11.32 in the opening minutes!

Sure, over the next two days. But how about after that? Two days later: $11.91 after hours... do I hear the $10 handle coming?

Actually, same question about MBI. Looking back 5 years, which (if any) of the stocks that he talked about with Consuela Mack have turned out to really be heavily below intrinsic value at the time. I think AIG potentially. But there seem to be an awful lot of misses. I'm really quite interested in which of these investors really is making money from below IV investing versus great trading.

I'd also ask him about BAC's value in early 2011 (when he paid $14 or $15). I'd ask him if he was right about his IV estimate back then... knowing what he knows now.

The newspapers remain fairly calm. Waiting for this scene to unfold and I don't think we're close: Of course, speculation.