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 […]

http://www.thestreetsweeper.org/mobile/undersurveillance.html

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), […]

A friend of mine recently told me that some very qualified scientists told him that EXAS’s diagnostic test doesn’t work. The entire value of the company relies on the test working. FYI my friend works for a billionaire who has a venture investment in cancer diagnostic tests. I could not get much more information from […]

I didn’t see this on any English news sources, so I’m posting here. The news came out 20 minutes ago. http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Ftouch.metro.pr%2Feconomia%2Fmoody-s-baja-la-clasificacion-del-credito-de-puerto-rico%2FpGXllm%21gzEPi4Dfujitw%2F One misstep and the bonds are junk. (My opinion is that they are already junk.)

Last week it was announced that Garmin would replace R. R. Donnelly in the S&P 500. R. R. Donnelly is a printing company with flat revenues over three years. Some might say it is going to be obsolete eventually. I can’t tell which company is more irrelevant: Garmin or R. R. Donnelly? When your main […]

After calling a director of Puerto Rico’s public pension funds, I spoke with an officer of a local (publicly traded) bank. This banker described himself as an optimist by nature, but seeing the economic data on Puerto Rico made him very pessimist about the future. He said: “The real-time data that I’m seeing shows that […]

Life is easier for the person who understands reflexivity. In the case of Puerto Rico, very simply: the Commonwealth will default if the rating agencies downgrade its debt. It will not default if the rating agencies don’t downgrade its debt. Fundamentally, Puerto Rico is screwed. There’s no logical plan in place to ever pay off […]

In a previous post I mentioned that SNDK was very likely a good short investment. This was based entirely off of my qualitative judgment of the business and certain cultural trends among mobile device users. It has been a profitable trade in short order. This weekend I went through the SNDK 10-K. SanDisk makes flash […]

I just discovered a wonderful service called Trello. Before Trello, I used Dropbox to organize files and share them with people in the cloud. Using the cloud to store documents and using streaming services for media such as music has gotten me thinking: Why would you want to be in the flash storage business? If […]

Last week I was caught in Lower Manhattan without electricity, heat or running water. I could not flush the toilet for five days. Right now the market appears to me to be very similar to my toilet last week. To my knowledge here are the biggest pieces excrement currently in the market: PEI: Wow. This […]

One of the most significant events in the InterOil saga was the recent announcement that the company will give 100% of its production above 4Tcf to the Papua New Guinea government. I take this as an admission that no energy major was interested in partnering with InterOil because of the dubious value of its resources. […]

See our pedestrian article in Forbes here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/08/02/world-of-warcraft-guild-wars-2-and-vivendi-activisions-achilles-heel/ Our more comprehensive writeup follows: We don’t often get the chance to bet against a company on the cusp of experiencing new major competitive challenges. When we do get the chance, most investors know about the threat and position themselves for it. We feel very lucky to identify […]

Bronte Capital published a great analysis on j2 Global here. John Hempton found no evidence of fraud—JCOM is just using cash from operations to roll up competitors in the electronic fax business and then raising prices. But my issue with this is that the goodwill created during the acquisitions can hardly be called goodwill at […]

SoundExchange is a “performance rights organization” that collects royalties from service providers like Spotify, Pandora and Sirius Satellite Radio–and then distributes the royalties to artists. Here is a video explaining how the process works. SoundExchange retains very little of its earnings, distributing virtually all of its income to artists, so it is effectively a mutual […]