I like your investment process, what would it take to invest 10-15k CAD in your fund? Do you accept contributions that low?
hey bod, we are subject to the same hedge fund restrictions the SEC has set for accredited investors – >$1mm assets or income >$200k USD. We’ve set the investment minimum at $250K for now but it’s possible that might change, it depends on how successful we are raising money next month when we officially launch the fund. We have about $20mm now, mostly in deal-specific investments, but haven’t really tried to raise money yet.
Nice thread to start off the new year.
Pretty decent article on AGYS on SeekingAlpha this morning. I don’t personally know Shaun but he seems to have gotten most of the opportunity here. The road map for AGYS is fix / grow / sell and they just moved into the grow phase IMO.
^Short squeeze?
rofl, medbox… “seems legit”
Zero revenue, nothing on the balance sheet, reverse merger from 2011. tons of pumpy press releases. probably a complete fraud… $600mm market cap. AWWWW YEAH!
i would have to dig into it, but it appears that there is literally nothing here. what is truly shocking about this stock is that at least $50mm of capital decided today this was a good home… wtfffff people.
gotta love the stock market we are in these days. save these examples gentlemen and use them to dissuade anyone who later tells you the market is efficient. there are many stocks just like this right now, although this is the worst i have seen, +650% in a few days LOL!
this is why i think the market is totally overheated, you do not see garbage like this floating to the top in 2009 / 2010 type of environments but it is happening daily or weekly in late 2013 / 2014. the retards are driving the bus.
^This doesn’t really refute market efficiency. I mean if you’re looking at these little corners of the market where most EMT assumptions break down, then it follows that EMT wouldn’t hold, and even EMT theorists would agree that these corners are inefficient.
I think it would be difficult and expensive to short Medbox, but perhaps one way to play it would be to jump on the momo train and hope you can sell it to another guy.
There are probably 50-100 stocks in the market like this right now. Although that is only about 1-2% of US investable stocks, I doubt you could suggest this is some dusty corner of the market. It is tens of billions of market cap collectively.
I haven’t checked the borrow. They are usually not that difficult to short and have 10-15% annual borrow rates usually. The only question is timing. The premise is laughable – our stock is valued at $600mm because we have zero revenue and may have some orders in the future, pending favorable legislative outcome, but those orders are contingent. Meanwhile, we irresponsibly went on CNBC and pumped the stock even though we have literally nothing of substance to talk about. By the way, we are also a reverse merger with sketchy auditors.
I am probably going to take a dump later tonight and likely every day for the rest of my life. Does that mean I should be valued in line with a fertilizer peer group on the potential that I may have – potentially, based on contingencies! – some orders for this crap if I try to sell it to a fertilizer company? Why don’t you just give me your money and we can light it on fire instead.
The reason you know it’s a pump and dump is because they could just shut their cornholes and not say anything until the orders are firmly in hand with no contingencies. What would it kill them to wait a few months to make a more substantive announcement? *crickets*
EMT theorists agree that EMT has lots of holes in it because deep down they know it is wrong. If EMT came out and said, the S&P500 is very hard to beat quarter to quarter and that is our theory, I would agree. But that’s not what EMT says, it says: “The market is efficient except for a laundry list of growing exceptions where it is not efficient, and we have no explanation for these exceptions even though the only clear explanation is that the market is not efficient, but we can’t admit that because our tenure is based on the opposite.”
I disagree, most EMT theorists are heavily convinced its true, and people have tried to write academic proofs refuting it, and they quickly realize where they go wrong (you have to break its assumptions to disprove it). I personally think the EMT is essentially correct, and if not correct, far closer to being true than false, as with anything, there are areas in which it will break down due to its assumptions not being valid, but many of those cases are a smaller component of the market.
The real central thrust of the EMT is basically - a typical mutual fund, essentially a professional investor with years of experience and deep research teams is not going to do better than blindly throwing darts. In any other field, this outcome would be surprisng (Could a regular guy beat a tennis pro? Could a regular guy run faster than an elite sprinter?), which is why it is significant.
It cannot be correct because it is circular. The EMT is based on trailing price data, and price data is a function of corporate results. Once any new fundamental data hits the screen, it is immediately in the price with a high degree of accuracy. Good investing necessarily requires anticipating what is going to screen well before that happens. For that reason alone EMT cannot truly measure market efficiency because it is always backward looking at simple price data and earnings data, or other simple, commodity valuation metrics.
No kidding it’s hard to outperform once the price is already up. So the EMT answer is, “You couldn’t have known that ex-ante.” That is false in many cases. The reality is many stocks are invisible to the market until they begin to screen well, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to know ex-ante. In the stock market, the one-eyed man is king.
The mutual fund argument is also bunk because they face many arbitrary restrictions on what kind of investments they make and also have the incentive to bloat their asset base, which makes it hard to outperform.
The other thing that EMT cannot address is that the best ideas have non-linear optionality. The studies that would be the most informative to run cannot be run because the datasets are not large and linear in a quantitative sense – how do you run a study that measures returns of several qualitative events taking place at once in a series of stocks? Good ideas either have multiple quantitative factors going for them, or more usually, many difficult to identify qualitative factors. The EMT studies I have seen have a few very commodity factors being studied at once.
So to “break the assumption” of EMT requires buying into the paradigm that the EMT people set out with – it’s a paradigm that is unnecessarily limited, and, IMO, is not that relevant. The paradigm is very limited in scope specifically so that it becomes self-fulfilling.
I had coffee once for two hours with the best stock picker in history based on a 15 year track record of long / short US equities. His statement was, “There are certain recurring patterns of inefficiency. If you can’t see the patterns, then it truly is a random walk.” I am sure that is true.
Put it this way – EMT would say, “Some fund managers outperform by buying fringe stocks that most mutual fund managers cannot buy.”
So the EMT interpretation is that these fringe stocks must not be actionable, that some how this is an aberration.
For the people buying these “fringe” stocks, the opposite belief takes hold – the mutual fund business is a broken model.
Same data, different conclusion. Some people have made really fantastic fortunes doing this, I know a few in the nine figures. If that is efficiency, please sign me up.
Oh great, the CEO is a criminal as well:
http://sirf-online.org/2013/09/30/tinkerer-lawyer-hustler-lies-one-mans-path-to-a-dope-fortune/
I read his name, Vincent Mehdizadeh and my first thought was, “Probably a convincted felon… or will be.” These pumps are surprisingly predictable, you really can tell in under 1 minute for a lot of these. Definitely within 10 minutes.
I’ll save you the trouble here and can say that while MDBX has gotten way ahead of itself on some promotional releases, you can’t short it because it’s basically all held by insiders. There’s no borrow from what I can tell. Look elsewhere…
I looked into last night, it won’t be a short until they liquidate a substantial part of their holdings by selling to retards (which would make it shortable) but the stock might be way down by then.
This market feels like 1999, you have stocks going up 5-10x on nothing substantial with no revenue, no assets, etc. Market has lost its damn mind.
plus its also on the OTC that whole arena is shady
So who are the insiders selling to to raise the price?
This MDBX has a billion dollar market cap. A billion freaking dollars.
Probably know nothing day traders
I think it was higher than that, I saw a share count of 14.9mm, not sure if that is right because I didn’t look further. But at $90, that was a $1.3B market cap… for a company with literally nothing on its financials. Impressive.