Multi-strategy investor and founder of
@InsideArbitrage
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Book Launch Today: The Event-Driven Edge in Investing
Last year I met a friend for lunch in Silicon Valley. After working at Google for several years he decided to retire and was checking things off his bucket list. One of the items on his list was going to the Berkshire
Very excited to announce that my first book
"The Event-Driven Edge in Investing: Six Special Situation Strategies to Outperform the Market"
is now available on Amazon and Target to pre-order before the May 21, 2024 release date.
When it comes to insider buying and selling, the insiders of Carvana have impeccable timing. $CVNA
They were selling hand over fist when the stock was trading well above $300 in 2021 and turned around and were buyers when the stock dropped into the $20s in mid-2022 and once
A 17.3% spread on the Capri - Tapestry merger is the strangest thing I have seen in the arb world in a while.
Is the FTC concerned that consumers might suddenly have to start paying more for their Jimmy Choos or heaven forbid that Versace $1,175 travel cup? $CPRI $TPR
Announcing the first acquisition by Inside Arbitrage!!!
I am super excited to announce the very first acquisition by Inside Arbitrage. A few months ago the brilliant value investor
@SajKarsan
decided to part ways with his project Conference Call Transcripts (CCT), and guess
"The amount of raw materials in one long-range battery electric vehicle could instead be used to make 6 plug-in hybrid electric vehicles or 90 hybrid electric vehicles."
$TM $TSLA
I just got back from the annual pilgrimage to Omaha, Nebraska also known as the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting. The event, which was attended by more than 40,000 investors, was a celebration of capitalism, a celebration of generosity and more importantly a
The energy guys are back at it again.
I was reviewing insider purchases last night for our daily event-driven monitor article and noticed purchases from three different energy insiders.
1/n
Story about the biggest investment mistake I made, where I gave up gains of over 22,000% and 6 other behavioral errors that can have a significant impact on your investing outcomes. 1/n
With several large retailers reporting earnings last week and this week, a tale of two retailers has emerged. I decided to do a thread of two groups, one where gross margins are increasing and forecasts are optimistic and a second group with declining gross margins. 1/n
Buffett's comments about $OXY in the Berkshire Hathaway letter that came out today:
"At yearend, Berkshire owned 27.8% of Occidental Petroleum’s common shares and also owned warrants that, for more than five years, give us the option to materially increase our ownership at a
The massive energy deals we have seen in recent months including:
Chevron's $CVX $60 billion acquisition of Hess $HES
Exxon's $XOM $64.5 billion acquisition of Pioneer Natural Resources $PXD
Diamondback Energy's $FANG $26 billion acquisition of Endeavor Energy Resources
24/
In Buffett's 2013 letter, he beautifully describes this kind of fundamental thinking using 2 non-stock investing examples from his own life -- a farm in Omaha and an apartment complex in New York.
Link:
Pics:
After writing about the merger arbitrage and insider trading strategies every week for over seven years, I am very excited to launch a new premium product on today:
Powerful stuff $CPRI $TPR (emphasis mine):
"In Plaintiff’s alternate universe, after the transaction closes, consumers shopping for a Michael Kors handbag priced at $295 will have to pay at least $383.50 because Tapestry will be able to jack up prices by as much as 30%, and
The President of the closed end funds Royce Value Trust $RVT and Royce Micro-Cap Trust $RMT bought shares yesterday. I looked them up and both are trading at double digit discounts to NAV.
I've spoken to three big law antitrust defense attorneys over the past few weeks with respect to $JBLU / $SAVE case. Each has experience litigating against the DOJ, and two have worked on major airline M&A. In case helpful.... (1/21)
As Rich Howe of
@stockspinoffss
has pointed out before, it pays to pay attention to insider buying in beaten down spinoffs. Two insiders of the new Warner Bros. Discovery just filed insider purchases after hours today. $WBD
This man is a HERO‼️ Francis Zuber ‘s headcam shows him rescuing a snowboarder who was buried head down in deep powder at Mt. Baker, Washington! Luckily, he spotted him as he almost passed him.
#skiing
#snowboarding
Starting to see some interesting insider purchases come through.
Three insiders of Douglas Elliman including the CFO and COO filed insider purchases after hours today. $DOUG
It took over 13 years to get to 6,999.
The last thousand took a little more than six months.
Obviously
@jessefelder
made a huge difference in getting me to 8,000 followers.
Not sure if my content is resonating or this is just how it is with Twitter
We don't often see insider buying in Nike $NKE and so it was surprising to see a director pick up $1.26 million worth of stock at an average price of $96.13 according to a form 4 filed last night.
The insider buying stock is Bob Swan, the ex-CEO of Intel who joined Nike's board
Both
@BluthCapital
and
@puppyeh1
had this $GETY situation right.
I just called the Boston-based Trillium Asset Management and they have not made an offer for $GETY
@AsifSuria
@InsideArbitrage
Thank LinkedIn profile has been commenting links to his PR releases on unrelated posts. Also been pumping $GETY buyout rumors 4 mos ago.
Looks like Twitter is going to lose its soul and finally get monetized in private hands. Congratulations to all arbs who stayed long through this process. $TWTR
This is fascinating. $IBKR customers are net short the market selling out of the money call options and Robinhood customers are on the other side of that trade? Things are going to get very interesting in the next few days.
"Our customers are traditionally always long the market. A week ago, it has changed," says
@IBKR
's Thomas Peterffy. "It has never happened in our history that our customers as a whole were net short the market, but as of yesterday, that is the case. "
@CNBC
Was out bowling yesterday and was reminded of that bowling company that went public through a SPAC combination. Just pulled it up and $BOWL is up 46% this year. One of the few SPACs that actually went on to do ok.
We don't often see insider buying at Berkshire Hathaway but it was interesting to see a long serving director buy shares according to a filing today: $BRK.A $BRK.B
It was interesting to see that for the full month of October, 7 out of the top 10 insider sales were all from the technology sector. In contrast, the purchases were distributed across 6 different sectors. For September, half of the top 10 sales were from the technology sector.
@UpslopeCapital
@hmeisler
I just finished computing this for our Insider Weekends article. The sell/buy ratio jumped to an unusually high 219.
The jump was primarily because insider buying was muted at just $3.5 million during the holiday shortened weekend.
Sales were $765 million and sell than usual.
Today we added a new feature to InsideArbitrage where you can see which of the 268 funds we are tracking have a position in a specific company like $ATVI or $ONEM from our symbol metrics page.
Starting to see additional insider buying in tech and tech adjacent stocks.
Director of Crowdstrike, Roxanne Austin, picked up $3.37 million worth of stock according to a filing yesterday.
So did a Director of Silicon Valley Bank.
$CRWD $SIVB
Merger Monday coming in hot this morning.
Five new all cash mergers announced including two multi-billion dollar deals:
$SOVO $VRTV $TRHC $FRGI and $SQNS
Another insider purchase that stood out from the more than 50 companies I looked at last night was lithium and bromine producer Ablemarle $ALB
The CEO and the General Counsel bought shares.
Revenue grew triple digits in each of the last three quarters. Forward P/E 8.45.
It is fascinating to watch
@tobi
, the CEO of
@Shopify
, continue to buy shares of
@coinbase
through a 10b5-1 plan even as other insiders including the CEO, the CFO, etc. continue selling shares.
All the "P" icons on this chart are his purchases.
$COIN $SHOP
What is the bear case for Crocs $CROX? The stock keeps going down, appears incredibly cheap (forward P/E below 6) and three different insiders including the CFO purchased shares this month. No position but wondering if I am missing something.
Drill, baby, drill!
Frederik Wilhelm Mohn a Director of oil and gas drilling company Transocean (RIG), purchased 2 million shares at an average price of $5.23 totaling $10.46 million.
These shares were purchased indirectly via Perestroika Ltd.
I don't think I have seen anything like what is happening to Silicon Valley Bank since the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
If this report is true, then it feels like a bank run has already started. $SIVB
There is a company called American Homes 4 Rent $AMH that did exactly this and at around the same time as well.
Was founded by the founder of Public Storage $PSA
Wrote about it in 2018:
Buffett made this comment in 2012, but why? The answer is simple, not well understood and relevant today. Single family homes were selling well below replacement cost.
Why is replacement cost so important to real asset (real estate, infrastructure) investing? Let's explore👇
I am very excited to launch a new service that I have been working on for the last several months with my friend Shailesh.
The service which will start on October 2nd, is focused on income-oriented investors and is priced very low with the first three months free through the
Very excited to announce that my first book
"The Event-Driven Edge in Investing: Six Special Situation Strategies to Outperform the Market"
is now available on Amazon and Target to pre-order before the May 21, 2024 release date.
Interesting crop of insider purchases today. Bumble's CEO
@WhitWolfeHerd
purchased $21 million worth of shares in the IPO. Normally we see insiders sell shares, not buy them: $BMBL
Rogers $ROG down nearly 40% after hours after Dupont $DD terminates merger on account of regulatory issues. Has anyone had success sticking around in failed deals or purchasing them post failure?
Motivated by the Twitter deal, we did a few threads introducing the merger arbitrage strategy and some of the nuances of the strategy. $TWTR
We then expanded to other event-driven strategies we cover on Inside Arbitrage.
This is a thread that puts it all together. 👇1/n
Yesterday we did a primer on merger arbitrage as a strategy using the Twitter and Activision deals as examples. Today we are going to dive into the various types of deals and how arbitraguers can capture "spreads" on these deals. $TWTR $ATVI A 🧵👇1/n
With HSR expiring and regulatory risk off the table, $BMY's acquisition of Mirati Therapeutics $MRTX is a 78 cent bet on a potential $12 payout sometime in the next seven years.
Wrote this in our October 2023 mid-month update:
Didn't realize
@morganhousel
had joined Markel's board. He purchased a small number of shares of $MKL according to a recent form 4 filing.
Thomas Gayner and another director also purchased shares.
I don't understand half of what jam_croissant says in this threads but intelligent people I follow on Twitter love what he is doing. I hope to learn enough one day to decipher the true meaning of his tweets. Until then I enjoy how clever his twitter handle is considering his name
1/ Maybe, I need to say less things... Maybe I AM Gary, reflexively helping to pin markets through this otherwise structurally perilous window. 🤔 The market will be higher again tomorrow. $2 Trillion + Moar fiscal stimulus will be announced. The market will cheer this & rally.
When did the home security company $ADT get into solar?
Noticed a couple of insider purchases of $ADT last night, including one by the EVP of Solar
A total of 7 different insiders have purchased shares recently:
Great must read thread. "In just the last 12 weeks, during Q3, startups raised more cash than startups did during the entire 1999-2000 dotcom boom and bust. The total was nearly $160 billion, double last year’s Q3 and more than any full-year amount ever before 2018."
1/ Releasing a redacted Lux quarterly letter to LPs.
Some strong views of
-a catalog of an excess of excesses
-what catalysts cause the current market frenzy to end
(preview: LP indigestion)
-what we are advising our Lux family companies
-much more…
We don't often see insider purchases at Charles Schwab. The CEO of $SCHW Walter Berringer just filed a $2.5 million purchase. His last purchase was way back in December 2018 at average prices below $40.
Omaha Private Jets we tracked flew to and from the HQ's near the following Regional Banks:
$PACW
$WAL
$FRC
$ZION
$KEY
$FITB
$VHN
$HBAN
$UMBF
$ALLY
$PNFP
$EWBC
$RF
$MTB
$ASB
$SF
$MOFG
$NTRS
$BMO
Note - don't know which banks are in Nola; Fort Wayne, IN; Denver; Milwaukee; Vegas
Got a chance to appear on YouTube live with
@Greenbackd
and
@farnamjake1
last week and the Value: After Hours podcast is out today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.
I don't focus much on micro cap companies but tracking insider transactions unearths some of the strangest companies.
A lender to cannabis companies with a 20% dividend yield? $AFCG
Insiders at regional banks significantly stepped up their purchases last Friday and Monday.
On Monday we reported on insider purchases at 40 companies that met our criteria in our daily Event Driven Monitor.
16 of those companies were regional banks not counting $SOFI
This seemed like a no brainer trade and a lot of arbs were in it but the risk of being stuck short a meme stock like $AMC was not appealing to me.
The rules of the game have changed so much the last three years.
An unusual insider purchase filed after hours today. Dr. Gregory Bailey, who serves on the Board of Directors of Biohaven Pharmaceutical $BHVN acquired 38,000 shares for $5.62 million.
@jessefelder
Really appreciate the shoutout Jesse. It took me several weeks to get the last 100 followers to 6,999 and now I have 200 more in a matter of minutes.
We're excited to announce
@Adyen
as
@PayPal
's first Fastlane distribution partner! This expanded partnership combines PayPal’s brand, trust, and global scale with Adyen's customer base and relationships with enterprises to help make PayPal available everywhere customers shop.
Six different insiders including the CEO and CFO of Columbia Banking System $COLB purchased shares recently.
This is the Pacific Northwest based bank that acquired Bank of Commerce in 2021 and then merged with Umpqua Bank last year.
Dividend yield is approaching 7%.
It was an absolute delight recording this
@InvMattPodcast
podcast with
@conkers3
Peter Higgins is a well informed warm host that immediately put me at ease and the whole hour felt like a conversation with an old friend.
The Continental Resources $CLR deal by founder Harold Hamm finally came through. The acquisition price of $74.28 is higher than his initial $70 per share offer. I wrote the following in a Marketplace Roundup for Seeking Alpha in June.
"Even a quick department-store visit, online search, skim of a fashion magazine, scroll on social media, browse of a fashion resale website, stroll through a mall, or scan of restaurant patrons shatters the image of such a narrow and artificial market."
$CPRI $TPR
Exhibit A: