I don’t think that investors should panic over Ruger’s drop in EBITDA and distributor orders. Going forward, I see the company gaining market share as its continues to release new products (which it has done so in the past). Volumes and profitability should recover and grow.
That being said, a huge contraction in the gun market or intense competition can hurt Ruger shareholders. I have no special insight into what will happen to the overall gun market.
Ruger is seeing weak demand for its products and is slowing down production in response.
The press release and quarterly financial statements can be found on the company’s website (PDF). The 10-Q is on EDGAR.
These companies do not seem compelling to me as investments (long or short). However, I feel like these companies are somewhat misunderstood because some analysts don’t understand the industry. Continue reading
Liberty recently completed the distribution of 2 class C non-voting shares (ticker symbol LMCK) for each LMCA or LMCB share. Now Liberty intends on completing its spinoff of Liberty Broadband (LBRDA/B/K). Each shareholder of LBRDA/B/K will be slated to receive rights (LBRKR) to purchase shares of LBRDK. Liberty Broadband’s S-1 was filed on July 25.
To summarize: I think that both the parent and the spinoff will be attractive stocks. I plan on owning both. It could make sense to be overweight Liberty Broadband.
Both parts will essentially consist of high quality businesses with high growth (Sirius XM and Charter). I don’t believe that this spinoff will result in a special situation where one piece will contain significantly better assets than the other piece. I think that it is a better idea to own both rather than just Liberty Broadband. Because there will be a lot of leverage underlying the companies, it is probably a good idea to diversify.
So far I have shorted the common shares of more than 80 stocks this year. On common shares, I have been profitable overall despite a rising market. Unfortunately, losses on put options (mainly YONG) have more than wiped out the gains on my common stock shorts.
I think that I’ve gotten fairly good at spotting bad stocks. My CAPS account is a reflection of that. (*CAPS does not consider the mechanics of borrowing shares. It’s unrealistic.) Unfortunately, I’ve been losing money on put options this year. Part of this may be because I mainly short small cap stocks which are too illiquid to buy put options on. As well, many of my shorts are volatile so the put options would be neither cheap or attractive.
See below for commentary on certain positions. Keep in mind that due to the sheer number of positions, my research on short positions is typically very shallow.
In many areas of life, the sharpest people in a given field often won’t explain the tricks of the trade to the general public. Sometimes it’s the case that the publicly-available information on a subject is second-rate. Take Warren Buffett for example. His derivatives deals are brilliant because he is getting paid to borrow money. Of course, he does not fully explain his deals because he doesn’t want others copying his trades. In shareholder letters, he does not explain how his counterparties were inappropriately modeling equity-equity correlations. He only discussed the trades on a superficial level because GAAP accounting of the derivatives were causing people to misunderstand Berkshire’s intrinsic value. Buffett likely avoids explaining Berkshire’s credit default contracts for similar reasons.
I think that the word “subprime” has an undeserved reputation. The US subprime housing crisis was a very unusual situation caused by extreme levels of loan fraud and loans designed to blow up (e.g. ARM, negative amortization mortgages, etc.). These excesses do not exist in other areas of subprime lending. During the housing bubble, lenders did not verify income and allowed unemployed individuals to buy millions of dollars of housing. In the current auto market, the lenders actually check that the information given to them is correct. According to CACC’s training website, 75% of loan applications are initially rejected due to problems with the loan application (e.g. a utility bill to verify residence is too old). The subprime lenders tend to perform the most loan compliance work (out of necessity) while prime lenders have fewer stipulations, looser loan compliance, and less onerous paperwork.
Here is Pretium’s press release. Silver Standard seems to be in a strong financing position given that the company has around $671M in current assets (versus $333M in total liabilities), a producing mine, and a book value of $837M. Instead of investing this capital in producing assets, the company is selling a mining asset (part of its stake in Pretium) for cash. In my opinion, Silver Standard is not making a mistake.
*Disclosure: I am short Pretium common shares and will be holding onto my position. I don’t follow Silver Standard and have no interest in it.
Contango Ore is a company that should be releasing news but isn’t. The reason to own it is if you think that it has a promising deposit that has very good chances of turning into a mine. In that scenario, the logical next steps for CORE are:
The lack of news makes me very antsy. Something may not be right, e.g. the company has had difficulty selling the deposit or raising capital because the deposit is a dud.
In my opinion, Credit Acceptance has excellent execution across all areas of its operations:
Very few companies do all four of these things well.
Glenn Chan's Random Notes on Investing 