Author Archives: Kasper Gutman
Why would you want to own Sony’s Entertainment division?
Sony’s top-grossing movies: http://www.the-numbers.com/market/distributor/Sony-Pictures If you take out the three Spider-Man movies, Sony Pictures looks lackluster and I think they already milked as much as they could out of the franchise. What hit is going to replace it? And I haven’t looked at the music business, but that’s definitely in worse shape. Sony hasn’t had […]
Tesla: The price is so far from equilibrium that it’s time to put on an out of the money put trade
Today I bought Jan 2014 $40 puts on TSLA for $2.35. I put about 1% of capital behind the trade. For various reasons you can find online, I think the fundamental case is really strong. It’s just that the market has hit an extreme. This is like Netflix at $200. A crash is more likely […]
More about the man who partnered up with IFT
Andy Beal is a smart guy. Here’s his Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Beal Beal started his own bank and bought up distressed assets, usually at the bottom of the business cycle. He’s made a lot of money doing so. WTF is a numbers theorist? Apparently Beal is a really good poker player, too. Unfortunately for him he […]
What is Imperial Holdings (IFT) worth? Free one-month cruise to the Bermuda Triangle for 636 of Imperial’s insureds!!!!!!!!!
May 2 was a great day for us. Imperial announced that it secured a 15-year $300 million line of credit from Andy Beal. (I owe you a drink, Andy!) The stock went up 40% that day. Today at $6.08 per share–a $129 million market cap–the stock is still tremendously mispriced. I’m going to explain this […]
James Dinan of York Capital on Charlie Rose: In risk arbitrage, there’s no real information advantage anymore… today it’s much more of a judgment game…
Video Good to hear investors talk about the good old days and clearly identify where they had a competitive advantage. James Dinan had a guy at the SEC reference room who would fax over filings a day before most people had access to them. Today that informational edge is gone thanks to EDGAR. “Today, quite […]
Monetary Origins of the Poker Bubble
Fascinating article on the Texas Hold ‘Em craze: http://mises.org/daily/6361/Monetary-Origins-of-the-Poker-Bubble It’s really cool to watch how humans get interested in fads and then watch all the interest disappear. That the poker bubble occurred during the housing bubble makes me think that human folly tends to happen all at once, when animal spirits are high. Where are […]
George Soros to fund managers: grow a pair
Soros was out on Bloomberg TV saying that fund managers and their investors are too volatility-averse to deliver good performance. “Outperforming the market with low volatility on a consistent basis is an impossibility,” Soros said. “I outperformed the market for 30-odd years, but not with low volatility.” This is coming from a guy who told […]
NovaCopper (ticker: NCQ): Looks awful
I’m admittedly not too knowledgable about the history of NovaGold, and I have been researching NovaCopper for about 20 minutes so I could be wrong on some things in this post. NovaCopper was spun out of NovaGold in April 2012. The stock has dropped by half since then, and for what appears to be good […]
Jim Chanos Interview on Reuters: I always laugh when people say, “China is going to have a stimulus program.” I always tell them they’ve been stimulating for five years.
“In 2012, we think total new debt incurred is somewhere between 30 to 40% of GDP.” “In China, the GDP comes from production, not from final sales. So if a builder puts up a condo, it counts as GDP. It doesn’t have to be sold. Back in 2009, China was probably putting up about 10 […]
Telecoms have a major problem now: Facebook over-the-top phone service
Facebook just announced its over-the-top phone service for iOS users. Over-the-top phone services are nothing new. Skype has been around for years and Pinger made a little headway on mobile devices. A Facebook OTT service, though, is in a league of its own. Instead of calling a user name (which can be cumbersome to remember), […]
IFT Q3 2012 Earnings. A premium funding facility appears to be nearly in place.
UPDATE 1/16/2013 The main risk to my bull thesis on IFT is that the company may be forced to do a secondary offering at the current discount to tangible book value. After reading the 8-K, this risk appears to be off the table: “Income (loss) was driven by a ($17.5 million) aggregate decline in the […]
Digital Garage (ticker: 4819): Own Twitter for free
This is a report we published on September 4, 2012. In the four months since then, Digital Garage stock has increased 50%. http://static.squarespace.com/static/508adb26e4b06993f6ab5cfb/t/50e4a667e4b0a05702b8902a/1357162087563/DG.pdf To my knowledge, IFT is the only stock that approaches Digital Garage’s degree of mispricing.
Imperial Holdings (ticker: IFT): The Schadenfreude Trade
We have been following this situation since early 2012 when the stock was 50% cheaper. Never have the risks been so low and the upside so certain. This opportunity exists because insiders who possess positive material non-public information are restricted from buying the stock because Imperial is not current in its financial filings. Other insiders, […]
Shorted HLF puts this morning
I think the stock will recover after the company responds to Bill Ackman’s short thesis on January 10. This is a trade, not an investment.
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