Thursday, June 4, 2009

site news and GM


sorry. i've been busy lately. which i guess is a good thing. but hopefully i'm back to writing.
lots has happened in the 6 weeks since i've written. maybe it's a modern day lazarus but no one ever talks about what happened to lazarus after he was resurrected. i'm pretty sure he died a second time. point being, GM died. here's my next prediction - it will reorganize and wait for it, wait for it... yes, it will die again. in 2020, there will be no GM.
so as i predicted on march 6, GM did in fact die. so now the natural question is, well, did i profit from this prediction? sadly, the answer is no.
i knew it would go bk, but the problem is timing. just like i know that newspapers will all go bk too. the NYT is worth almost a $1 billion in equity (another $1 billion in debt). clearly, NYT will be worth $0. smart money would short this thing. problem is 2-fold. first one is timing - it may be swift like GM, or it may take years and there's an opportunity cost to investing in something that may not pay off for a while. second major issue is i'm pretty gun shy in my personal portfolio. i play around, but generally, i'm super risk adverse especially when trying to trade in places that the government is interested in fooling with (as in, where did all the money from the original GM bailouts go? - so maddening. these people are stealing our money).
anyway, i'll make money off of my biggest conviction trades in the future. in the book stumbling on happiness i learned the things people are most sad about are the things they never tried, rather than the things they tried but failed at. so, next time, i'm investing. i'm not shorting NYT yet because i think it will be a while before it falters, but if you have 10 year capital, it makes sense to short both NYT and TWC.

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