oddballstocks

Just received a tender offer in the mail. Looks like they're trying to acquire 3.5-4% of the company again, so another big float reduction if this goes through. Reading through the offer, they've purchased slightly over 200k shares this past year and this will be another nice chunk. This has been an extremely boring holding, but the company keeps doing the right things.

A topic near and dear... I have WFH for 10+ years in various roles. As a consultant to a health care company, doing investment research, and starting a software company. During this time I've had access to an office when I needed. For maybe 2-ish years (not continuous) I've worked out of an office. I'm an extrovert, very extroverted, but I love working from home. What I find in an office is I can talk all day and accomplish nothing. But I feel great because I was just talking. At home I can be focused, get work done, then get on the phone and talk. I'm on the phone all the time and it scratches the same itch as talking in person. I also have small kids (from 10 to 3), but since I've done this their entire life they know the drill. I have a home office and if the office door is closed it means "do not bother and please be quiet." If the door is open they can come in and share things with me. When the kids are in school it's extremely quiet, but even now it's not bad. This is really no different than summer when they're home all the time. I love that there's no commute. It's also nice to be able to take a bike ride or go swimming at lunch. There are days when I'm just in a funk and I'll go do something menial to think about my problems. In an office the only option for this was to take a walk, which I did often, but sometimes you can't due to weather. As for meetings in-person. There are dozens of co-working spaces near me and they all have the ability to rent conference rooms by the hour. That's not an issue. I think it's heavily job type, heavy personality (self-motivated). Here's something anecdotal. Some companies already run like this but they don't know it. When I consulted in health care it was a 15k person company. They had multiple locations and teams were split geographically. Every meeting was at your desk, you called in and used screen sharing. Over the years I was there the office emptied out because people realized there is no functional difference of being in a cube or being at home. Management realized this too and kept hiring without expanding their office space. When I left years ago I remember something like 55% of the company was at home, I'm sure it's more now.

Another story, have a friend who is a lawyer whose father passed unexpectedly. There was no will, a partial divorce, girlfriend, kids etc. I want to say the estate is still open five or six years later and my buddy said this is just a constant drag on his time. He's been in and out of court trying to clean things up, but there are so many catch-22 situations that take months to resolve, it's just a big mess. It's not even a sizable estate, his father owned a single commercial building and had little in the way of assets. Since it was his own father and he has the expertise to do this there are no billable hours, just mental anguish and time taken from other things he could be doing.

Local print shop can usually make something like that cheap and quick. Some slightly larger local print shops will do design work too. I'd just call around and see what the turnaround time is. They're usually relatively cheap, even a giant plastic sign is only about $500.

Guess we know Tilson's alt on here... gambling away the Agora advance.. What if we already beat Tilson's numbers? Can I get $1m for doing more than 8.5% a year over the same period? Whitney er...jeffsreng..shoot me a DM and I can give you my address on where to send the check. Thanks!!

You would think! But our telemedicine business could not have been given a bigger boost than this...a perfect storm...and we will be the first telemedicine business to market with a Covid-19 assessment module this week. Clinics will be overwhelmed...hospital emergency wards will be overwhelmed...social distancing is forcing people to use telemedicine...remote patients need telemedicine...and we are scalable into millions of visits for assessment and prescription delivery, whereas heavy infrastructure hospitals and clinics cannot handle the volume. I'm not happy about benefiting from a crisis, but this will allow goevisit.com to survive and thrive, providing an essential service during this pandemic. Cheers! Maybe you should connect with the OP and use their digital marketing to boost the telemedicine revenue and visibility by 60%. I agree, telemedicine is a sweet spot. For most things you can provide effective care over the wire, saving substantially. The circumstances are unfortunate, but glad to hear you are seeing a big boost!

I've been watching this, IB won't let me buy puts because it's an MLP in an IRA, but anyways. I think this is 100% a timing issue. If corona hits the parabola stage here in April/May then I can see a 20% decline in visitors. Even Trump fans in Ohio (I'm from there as well, family still lives there and would self identify) has said "if this becomes like Italy or China we aren't going anywhere." At the same time they believe it's mostly made up or overblown, and that Trump could lick it and not get sick, but I digress... There's a second aspect to the timing. The population that visits these parks is much slower to get the news and acknowledge it. This is a significant holiday for them in most cases. If places in the US cancel group gatherings in April/May that could trickle through until June/July etc. I also agree that there is a significant portion of the visitors that are so clueless they'd still try to crowd the place even if it was declared a hazmat site, the "I don't care, it won't happen to me" crowd is strong at these places. I'm saying this not to be mean, but as someone who visits these parks on an annual basis. Someone pukes in the middle of the line? People just shuffle a little around it, no big deal etc. Puke on a car? Throw some water on it and sit down.. On the other hand if this hits us here sooner rather than later and summer months are fine then I think it's a buy as well. It's 100% timing. If they weren't so levered I'd say it's a buy, but the leverage cuts both ways.

My guess is more due to the recent financials floating around.

The slightly higher rate is norm. Know someone who's bank does this, I think it's a $400 flat closing fee. Bumps the rate 1/8th of a percent. Said he earns his fees back in 6mo. More of a commentary on the US consumer over anything else that they'd rather save a little upfront and pay a little more for 20-30 years.

We live in a society that praises lying (Trump, Musk) and doing whatever it takes to win. Truth is dead... There are many on here who would rather win (stock appreciation) no matter the cost than have principles. And in a society that exalts money above all else the incentives sort of speak for themselves.

Interesting dilemma! My suggestion would be to pull the stock out of the IRA into a certificate, or just a normal brokerage. Replace it with cash to satisfy the US Gov. From there you have some room to work. Next step is to sell directly to the French broker. Brokers do negotiated transactions all the time. You might take a bit of a haircut, but so what. They will be buying the shares from you, then just tendering directly on their own account. For them it's an easy way to make a spread. You can try to work with them directly, or work with a desk in the US who has relationships. I have talked to Fidelity traders in the past who phoned up brokers in Switzerland while I was on the phone to make trades. I know you don't want to go with Fidelity, but you need a more full service broker who can a) speak french and b) has those connections. I don't think you can have an IB trader make trades over the phone. They aren't built for that. If you're able to get certificates (which is highly unlikely) then you can negotiate directly with the company. Although I think you'll have more success working with the clearing broker. I'd go all out nuclear on this one. Look up employees who work in the back office at Gilbert Dupont and start to contact them directly. Say you have this problem and you need help, who do you talk to? People will help you out and get you directed to someone who can get this done. You just have to be persistent and ask everyone. I think the full service broker in the US is probably your best bet, but there is a price. Might be a few hundred euro to transact and tender, but that's a lot cheaper than spending months trying to get someone deep in a cube farm to handle the situation as a one-off.

I hate to say it, but my gut is that the SEC just rolls with this proposed rule. Reason being... I had a long conversation with a former regulator a few years ago, he worked in the pink/otc area. He said 90% was fraud and scammy companies (which we all know), and in the 10% there could be value. His boss held the view that ALL pink sheet companies were junk, and if a company was respectable they should just uplist. If they didn't uplist it just proved they were a scam. He was on a mission to eliminate the pink sheet stocks, that was the source of most of their regulatory problems, in their view. Fast forward, changes keep rolling forward. It's hard to trade most of these as-is, and now the SEC wants to make it harder. They will be successful. The irony of this is while they make public companies with some information hard to trade they are encouraging people to invest in private companies in venture rounds. In many ways it makes no sense to be public anymore. What's the point? You can raise capital easily as a private company, and being public brings no additional benefit.

I worked with someone to do this years ago. Mined the archives from 2003 forward. Looked at it very differently. Looked at the number of responses and subsequent return over trailing periods. Looked at people who posted specific investment threads. Result was more responses the worse the returns. There were some stellar ideas with zero to one comment. And the people posting those would post multiple ideas. Some solid gold from a few people. The problem was they never received any feedback, and thus their incentive to post disappeared. Nice work!

We have an umbrella with Erie Insurance. It's cheap, maybe $150/yr for $1m? If you're worried about personal asset liability I'd look into placing your house into a trust, or some corporate vehicle. There are lawyers who specialize in this sort of a thing. The downside is if you're looking to finance it you lose a lot of options. But if it's paid off this might be worth considering. Of course there's another argument. If you're so worried about some loss scenario and spending tens of thousands to break apart your estate then maybe it's worth off loading the car accident risk by hiring a company to drive you around and let them assume the risk. Or maybe purchase a tank or armored vehicle. Back to the subject... when I spoke to our agent he said the one benefit of the umbrella combined with homeowners and auto is that the lawyers covered by the umbrella are available for all home/auto situations. So in a way it's $150/yr to enhance our coverage. For us the umbrella makes sense because we have four boys, we have a pool, and we love to throw big parties (50-100 people) regularly combining all three things. And at those parties there are often 30+ kids all running going nuts. The risk factor of someone getting injured accidentally is high. I'm always worried and keep an eye out. The good thing is with today's helicopter parents I think the risk is lower. Some parents barely leave their kid's side.

Sometimes you need to buy a share and call the CFO. Seems like a pain doesn't it? It is, but where information is hard to get it's extremely valuable. It's very hard to have an informational edge on Pfizer, but to have one on Thermwood Corporation you just need to spend a few cents for a share and call the CFO. Bump. Can it be argued that the people buying these type of stocks all go through the trouble of getting their financials that there isn't as much edge as you think there is? I find it hard to believe people just buy companies being completely in the dark about their numbers. I think there is this notion, especially on here that "everyone is doing it, the edge is gone." I've looked at shareholder lists for micro caps. Out of the thousands of shareholders for a given company maybe 100-150 are micro cap value investors. So the "smart money" is maybe 15% of the shareholder base. I don't know the odds, but if you were playing a game where you knew more than 85% of the participants wouldn't that seem like some sort of an edge? I'll also be the first to admit. In today's market you want to avoid microcaps. Purchase the tech stars of the world, the Tesla's, then sit back and count your cash. Work isn't rewarded in the market anymore and value doesn't work either.