Fabulous Friday – Our AliBaba Play Pays off Big!
by phil - September 19th, 2014 7:26 am
We're already up over 100% on Alibaba.
How, you may wonder? Well, two ways: Back in October of 2007, before Alibaba IPO'd in China, I was touting the company when it had an $8Bn valuation ($1.10 per share – pre-split). I was the first and only analyst in the US to point out the benefits of Yahoo's investment back then and our Members who play the Asian markets were able to take advantage of that and today should be the culmination of the white whale of investing – the 20-bagger as Alibaba is expected to IPO in the US at $160Bn just 7 years later.
YHOO, on the other hand, took the long and winding road but it should finally be getting to our $50 target and that's another 100% gain on the stock – though a very small consolation to those who didn't pick up AliBaba directly. Fortunately, at Philstockworld, we know how to BE THE HOUSE – Not the Gambler and, back in June, when the rumors of the AliBaba IPO began we came up with a way for our Members to make 400% playing YHOO into the AliBaba IPO.
From our Live Member Chat Room:
Submitted on 2014/06/30 at 12:03 pmYHOO/Albo – Why not just buy YHOO? YHOO is $35Bn and owns 22% of AliB while SFTBY is $91Bn and owns 33% of AliB, so you get a lot more bang for your buck with YHOO, whose forward p/e is only 19, than SFTBY, whose forward p/e is about 17 – so not all that significant. Of course, more significantly is the potential impact of (guessing) $50Bn worth of AliB on a $35Bn company!
So we don't even have to go crazy if we want to play the "YHOO is undervalued" game. The Jan $38/45 bull call spread is $1.60 on the $8 spread with 400% upside if YHOO gains 28%. I think that's worth $800 for 5 shares in the $25KP
Even Though GM Lied and Said They Paid Us Back, They Say They’ll Need More Time to Pay Us Back
by ilene - September 16th, 2010 8:06 pm
Even Though GM Lied and Said They Paid Us Back, They Say They’ll Need More Time to Pay Us Back
Courtesy of Jr. Deputy Accountant
Wait a second… didn’t GM already claim to pay us back in slick commercials earlier this year or am I completely confused? If I’m not, GM said they paid us back but left out that A) they were using government money to do so and B) only paid back the part that was actually "loaned" and didn’t include the full $49.5 billion extended to GM should they need it. They argue that not needing it and instead using that money to pay back the government shows the company is in good shape but I argue that it only shows that our government is the worst loan sharking operation in history. It’s like taking out a payday loan to pay off the interest on the last payday loan except in the case of GM they get a way better interest rate than the 400% Western Union would charge for a few extra bucks til payday.
General Motors’ new CEO, Dan Akerson, confirmed Thursday that the government — taxpayers, that is — won’t get back all the money put up to save GM from ruin in the car company’s initial public stock offering, expected as soon as mid-November.
[I]t’ll take a couple of years, at least, for the taxpayers to get back the remaining $43 billion in bail-out money the government invested to save GM from going out of business. It won’t all get paid back in the government’s initial sale of its GM shares later this year, he said, but over time investors will be willing to pay more for the shares and the goverment [sic] can get higher prices as it continues selling its 60.8% ownership of GM.
Treasury gets back the remaining $43 billion of bailout money. GM must be consistently profitable for investors to pay such prices, he acknowledged.
Great bargain for the American taxpayer if you ask me. Just let Bernanke and the HFT robots lube up for some $GM and we might actually see a few pennies back on every dollar.
What a joke.
Can GM Really Call That an “Initial” Public Offering?
by ilene - August 17th, 2010 8:20 pm
Can GM Really Call That an "Initial" Public Offering?
Courtesy of Jr. Deputy Accountant
Initial would imply they didn’t embarrass themselves by getting kicked off the exchange the first time around.
General Motors Co has completed the paperwork for an initial public offering, and timing of its filing with the U.S. securities regulators rests with the board of the top U.S. automaker, sources familiar with the process said on Monday.
The initial prospectus, expected to be for $100 million, is likely to be filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, two people said, asking not to be named because the preparations for the IPO are private.
Meanwhile, GM will tell you they have paid back the government in full but that’s not exactly true. They’ve paid back the $6.7 billion they were actually loaned but the total $49.5 billion extended to GM to help it through bankruptcy is still outstanding. A large chunk of that (the part they DON’T mention in the "we paid you back!" commercials) consists of the government’s equity in GM, so GM can turn around and say they paid back the bailout loan and technically be correct. Tricky ain’t it?
It gets worse when you realize they used government money to pay back the government.
As it turns out, the Obama administration put $13.4 billion of the aid money as "working capital" in an escrow account when the company was in bankruptcy. The company is using this escrow money—government money—to pay back the government loan.
GM claims that the fact that it is even using the escrow money to pay back the loan instead of using it all to shore itself up shows that it is on the road to recovery. That actually would be a positive development—although hardly one worth hyping in ads and columns—if it were not for a further plot twist.
Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Ann Arbor-based Center for Automotive Research, points out that the company has applied to the Department of Energy for $10 billion in low (5 percent) interest loan to retool its plants to meet the government’s tougher new CAFÉ (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards. However, giving GM more taxpayer money on top of the existing bailout would have been a political disaster for the Obama administration and a PR debacle for the company. Paying back the
2010 Tech Debutantes Cool Off – Time For a Look
by Chart School - May 11th, 2010 4:46 pm
2010 Tech Debutantes Cool Off – Time For a Look
Courtesy of Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker
A handful of young, vivacious tech stocks made their debuts this year, but I pretty much kept my hands to myself upon their arrival.
You couldn’t buy any of these smoke shows when they IPO’d earlier this year, they were pricing above the range and opening at huge premiums. Now that the market’s pulled back, I’m doing some homework.
I haven’t yet formed an investment opinion on these names, I’m only now throwing them up on my radar.
Meru Networks ($MERU) - Founded in 2002, Meru is about helping small and midsized businesses with their internet connection needs. According to 24/7 Wall Street, it "was hot at the IPO (for as much as a 30% gain in the first day and headed south since. The networking solutions company came public at $15.00 and is now down 7.8% at $13.83." (source: 24/7 Wall Street)
Calix Networks ($CALX) - "Jefferies & Co. analyst George Notter launched with a Buy rating $16 target. ‘Calix is a direct way to play the broadband stimulus plan,’ he writes. ‘We expect Calix to begin recognizing revenues from this spending in late 2010, with the bulk of the benefit hitting the top-line in 2011 and 2012.’" (source: Barron’s)
SS&C Software ($SSNC) - A well-established maker of software for institutional investment managers (funds, trading firms, banks etc). Ridiculous 49% profit margins, some debt. Jeffries, Raymond James, JPMorgan and Credit Suisse all initiated it with buys on May 10th, Wells Fargo started it at an Equal Weight. (source: Street Insider)
Alpha & Omega Semiconductors ($AOSL) - Power and battery efficiency is so hot right now as all these mobile computing devices are energy drainers. This one does power management chips. "Alpha & Omega Semiconductor, a leading supplier of power management chips for laptops, flat panel displays and a variety of consumer electronic devices." (source: Seeking Alpha)
There were one or two other tech IPOs that came out this year but these are the ones I’m trying to learn more about.
Here’s a quick look at how they’ve fared since descending the staircase into the ballroom:
Vintage Wine Turns Sour for Financiers
by ilene - February 5th, 2010 1:57 pm
Vintage Wine Turns Sour for Financiers
By Alex Daley and Doug Hornig, Casey Research
When the folks at a private equity firm gather at the holiday party refreshment table to talk about “vintage,” they aren’t commenting on the Château Pétrus.
The world of private equity financing doesn’t have high visibility, but it is big business behind the scenes. Unlike venture capital outfits – which provide startup money to very early-stage companies – those who play this game grab existing private companies, often through leveraged buyouts (LBOs). Each year’s investments are referred to as vintages, with some being more highly drinkable than others.
Now, some of the recent vintages look like they’ll turn out to be little more than vinegar.
Private equity investing has never been for the faint of heart. But investors continue to engage in it, because the payoff can be substantial. And for the first few years of the new millennium, it was a go-go place to be. With so much easy money sloshing around, the number of PE deals exploded, totaling over half a trillion dollars at the manic peak in ’07.
Then came the crash:
It’s important to remember that credit was not a single bubble. It was a bubble machine. It created the housing bubble, which fueled the personal debt bubble (which in turn popped the housing bubble, but that’s another story). The mortgage market gave birth to a whole new range of derivatives, things like collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), and the rest of the acronyms we’ve all become familiar with, even if we don’t quite understand what they do. (Don’t be embarrassed, neither did the financial geniuses who swapped them like baseball cards.)
Frantic trading in these newly printed scraps of paper created its own bubble, manufacturing an incredible amount of seeming liquidity in a very compressed time frame. We know the ultimate consequences to the balance sheets of our banks, and our government, by now. But there was more to it than that. The capital these transactions threw off had to go somewhere, and suddenly well-capitalized investors were pouring their…