Not hard to figure out what happened here. Ownership and private equity pushed this thing to IPO too quickly so they could get some liquidity and cash out. $62 at offering to 56 cents today means, if there’s any justice in the market, heads should role in the c-suite.

This comes a couple of years after the sitting CEO fired 1,000 employees over Zoom.

For all the warts, anecdotally speaking, my wife and I used Better in early 2021 to refinance our mortgage. The process was quicker and easier than any of the alternative mortgage companies we investigated and got quotes from during that time.

I think this is a good company/good product, and at this price, I will invest as soon as leadership is turned over.

First time I’ve put our full portfolio on paper. My and my wife’s 401k have security features that prevent them from linking to Commonstock or other third party financial apps, so this is the first time I’m seeing it laid out in total.

I’ve counted our emergency savings in here as well just for information’s sake. We continue to be #long America, and #long the S&P via VINIX.

I suppose our investing style is part Jack Bogle and part Peter Lynch. We believe in riding the rising tide of the market and prioritizing low fee funds. We also like to invest in companies we know, understand, and want to see succeed.

We intend to stay 95%+ in stocks for the foreseeable future (this excludes our emergency cash) as we hope to invest for 2063 instead of 2023.

I’m currently reading Griftopia by Matt Taibbi, and while I don’t totally agree with everything in it, I think it’s useful to read an account of the 2008 financial crash as it was happening in real time. Taibbi is a great writer, and the book itself is very interesting and engaging.

Through the first couple of chapters, Taibbi explains how the mortgage bubble was created and lays it mostly at the feet of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.

The validity of that aside, there are a couple of quotes in the book from Greenspan during the dot com bubble that I think are somewhat applicable today. That is not to say I think a crash is imminent or a bubble exists in the market right now, but his language is eerily similar to me, a layman, with the language around artificial intelligence in 2023.

“When we look back at the 1990s, from the perspective of say 2010, the nature of the forces currently in train will have presumably become clearer. We may conceivably conclude from that vantage point that, at the turn of the millennium, the American economy was experiencing a once-in-a-century acceleration of innovation, which propelled forward productivity … at a pace not seen in generations, if ever.

Alternatively, that 2010 retrospective might well conclude that a good deal of what we are currently experiencing was just one of the many euphoric speculative bubbles that have dotted human history.”

There is certainly an artificial intelligence boom today. To suggest otherwise would be asinine. Just as the dot com bubble changed our world forever in positive ways, AI will as well. Amazon, PayPal, EBay, and a whole host of other companies came out as winners in the early aughts. But imagine pitching those stocks in 2008-2009 during 10% unemployment, or while 5 million homeowners were facing foreclosure.

There’s an old saying you don’t know you’re in a bubble until it pops. In my unsophisticated view, there are too many financial pundits speaking in absolutes about artificial intelligence when very few actually understand it. Of those who understand it, even fewer of them can predict which companies will be long term winners and losers. And even if those predictions come true, the market may correct itself anyway because of a totally uncorrelated crisis. Apple was down 50% from December 2007 to September of 2008. The same is true for Amazon and a whole host of stalwarts.

I am not in the business of telling people what to do with their money. There are folks on this platform far more intelligent and knowledgeable than me in every conceivable financial topic.

I’m not suggesting people sell everything or buy, buy, buy.

My only piece of advice is to be mindful of who you take advice from and how their opinions and actions might be influenced by their emotions and the general exuberance of a technology they don’t understand in any meaningful way other than to say “this changes everything.” AI absolutely changes everything - but the follow up questions should be: in which direction? For who? When? Will it matter if people are unemployed? Will it matter if they can’t make their mortgage payments?

New technologies rise and fall. Human nature largely stays the same.

I consider myself a non-competitive person. I think there is room in the market for all participants to do relatively well. The market, as a whole, compounds over time. (100% of my 401k is in Vanguard ETFs because I know this to be true.) We can all be winners with enough patience.

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My individual stock/equity investing most often falls in one of three categories (the more it overlaps, the better off I am):

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Beating the market is not a motivation for me. Maybe because I am skeptical of my (or any specific person’s) ability to do it over a long range of time.

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I see my investments as political donations. You give money to a candidate whose platform you believe in and want to see succeed.

To me, investing is no different. I don’t want to take profit in companies that have a mission antithetical to my personal beliefs, goals, values, culture, etc.

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I’d rather my dollar garner a moderate (but consistent) return in a company I respect than chase market beating returns in a company I despise or don’t understand.

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What do you think? How do you invest?

I’m reading The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham for the first time.

I thought this section was timeless:

We lack space here to discuss in detail the pros and cons of market forecasting. A great deal of brain power goes into this field, and undoubtedly some people can make money by being good stock-market analysts. But it is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts. For who will buy when the general public, at a given signal, rushes to sell out at a profit? If you, the reader, expect to get rich over the years by following some system or leadership in market forecasting, you must be expecting to try to do what countless others are aiming at, and to be able to do it better than your numerous competitors in the market. There is no basis either in logic or in experience for assuming that any typical or average investor can anticipate market movements more successfully than the general public, of which he is himself a part.

There is one aspect of the "timing" philosophy which seems to have escaped everyone's notice. Timing is of great psychological importance to the speculator because he wants to make his proft in a hurry. The idea of waiting a year before his stock moves up is repugnant to him. But a waiting period, as such, is of no consequence to the investor. What advantage is there to him in having his money uninvested until he receives some (presumably) trust worthy signal that the time has come to buy? He enjoys an advantage only if by waiting he succeeds in buying later at a sufficiently lower price to offset his loss of dividend income.

Anyone got any experience investing in boat manufacturers? One of the rare industries where 12 month revenue can exceed market cap.

Going to own a mistake I made.

Over the past month I had been pouring money in to $DBDQQ. I know the company well, their technicians work with me in my day job. I know what they do and how they operate.

Diebold filed for bankruptcy in May and was delisted from the NYSE as a result. The stock dropped down as low as .01, but bounced to around .07 when I started buying. At this price, obviously, it didn’t take a lot of cash to buy a ton of shares. I felt good about my investment because I knew the company and knew that while bankruptcy can be a sign of a company going under, it was not the case for Diebold. They did not lay off a single employee and did not miss one day of work or break a single equipment/service contract. They simply had awful debt that needed to be restructured. I was happy to buy shares knowing it would re-list with the NYSE at some future date - and I assumed I would be a large benefactor when that happened.

WRONG.

Diebold announced their restructuring and re-emergence from bankruptcy last week. They had met all required regulatory requirements and would relist on the NYSE on August 14th. Great news! But not for me!

I missed in the release that all OTC stock would not be honored. That’s my fault, no doubt about it, but I am still very confused about how that process is kosher. I understand the risk of buying OTC equities. It makes total sense that you could put money into a company that can (and probably will) go to zero. What I don’t understand, or what I don’t think is right, is that a company can release a PR statement bragging about how it has done everything right and is relisting it’s stock, just to eat up $37M in its former stock, leaving the shareholder at zero.

So, I was right! I invested in a company in which the market had beaten down but the fundamentals were better than what was on the surface. And I still lost it all!

This cannot last forever.

U.S. credit card debt increased by $45 billion from Q1 2023 to Q2 2023 leading to a new all-time high.

Nearly 50% of cardholders carry debt from month-to-month, up from 39% in 2021.

Rising figure shows a strong consumer economy and lower reliance on cash.

I did not know until yesterday that Congress changed the rules on 529 accounts, allowing the funds to be rolled over into a Roth IRA for the beneficiary if the funds are not used for college.

Huge deal. (I’m about eat some capital gains taxes on my UTMA accounts.)

Opened a position in $KR yesterday, but wanted to do more digging on the grocery industry as a whole. The theory being to get more defensive as I expect a recession/contraction/correction, whatever you want to call it, might be coming soon. (I’ve also been reading The Snowball, the great biography about Warren Buffett, so I’ve convinced myself I’m a tried and true Graham value investor.)

Ingles stood out to me in my research. For those of you who don’t live in the midsouth, Ingles is a grocery retailer that operates roughly 200 locations in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, etc. Anecdotally, as opposed to the larger grocery chains, Kroger, Walmart, Publix, etc., Ingles has seemingly focused on being the primary grocery store for low to moderate income folks, while also providing a smaller/localized feel.

This is a straight grocery play, whereas Kroger and the larger chains also derive a ton of income from pharmacy/clinic operations, Ingles has none of those operations. They sell groceries and gas.

YTD down 4.74%. The stock peaked at $101 late last year and has dropped ever since - it currently sits at $83. I think the market is missing something here, likely as folks move their allocations out of “defensive” positions in order to chase the latest bull market. I think this provides a good buying opportunity for the patient investor.

We’re looking at a trailing 12 month PE of 6.45. TTM EPS of 13.05.

Even if you factor in a 20% margin of safety and assume no future earnings growth, most intrinsic value calculations spit out a price somewhere in the $97-$110 range.

Revenue has been consistent for the past two years exiting the pandemic. Costs are rising a bit as the company has $600M in long term debt (a large portion of which is variable rate), but as rates plateau, these costs should plateau as well.

The company has $250M in cash on hand and owns roughly $1.5B in real estate assets.

The company has huge institutional and insider ownership, virtually no hedge against it, making it a relatively stable play for the foreseeable future.