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On Awful Deals and France
I wrote about the Groupon IPO the day before the company listed the stock LINK. I play in most IPOs and Secondaries. I got the prospective for the GRPN deal, looked it over and concluded it was a junk deal. I got an allotment of shares in the IPO and sold them 15 seconds after the shares opened for trading. I'm one of the very few who has made a buck on the long side of this dog.
Morgan Stanley brought this deal to the street. I think MS did a terrible job of due diligence. If a guy like me who is sitting on the outside of the deal could figure that GRPN was a loser, then you can be damn sure the folks wearing the white spats at MS new it was crap as well.
The article I wrote back in November likened the GRPN IPO to a deal that I had worked on years before. I was tasked with arranging the funding for a fat rendering plant in Mexico. My description:
The plan called for trainloads of cow guts to arrive at the new factory every day. The trains would come from all over Mexico and suffer delays. The thought of train cars filled with guts sitting on some side rail for a week or two put a taint on the deal.
The lawyers tried to dress up the documents. The words “Cow guts” were deleted and the word “Offal was” inserted.
The deal quickly got nicknamed the Offal Deal. From there, some smart guy renamed it again as the Awful Deal. That name stuck.
MS has brought us another Awful Deal, basically MS sold Offal to the public. My closing thoughts on the night before the GRPN deal:
For the folks at MS this was their awful deal. It might prove to be the same for investors.
Awful Offal
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Worried about Italy? Worry about France!
The Euro is in the crapper again this morning. The Italian elections are hanging over the FX markets. Italy is a looming problem, but the real issue is what is going on in France. It seems that the French citizens have turned against their new leader, Francois Hollande, in a rather spectacular way.
Italy is a critical part of the EU pie, but France is make-or-break.
What will happen in France when the weather turns warm and and young people faced with 25% youth unemployment and no prospects for a job hit the streets? Trouble.
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Try eating it during sex.
Before you know it, you'll be orgasming at the lunch counter.
Bruce said "Taint."
Long USDCHF is prolly the way to go on this one, Bruce. It could be a big winner.
:D
Big winner? How big Orly? Maybe, I don't see this as a good trade.
There are no safe havens left. We are going to wake up one morning looking for a safe place to hide. When that happens the EURCHF will push back to 1.2000.
If you want to play the dollar from the long side, I would play it against the EUR or maybe the Pound, But the CHF? Wrong way to play.
It ain't like ain't been wrong before! Just keep it high and tight. 1.03, back to former support, is a distinct possibility. Then, who knows?
Thanks for everything, Bruce. I am glad you have steel skin and don't let these naysayers get under it. You're the best!
:D
I do wish you well, as always.
For me, the CHF is a cross to trade against the EUR. Not a straight dollar trade.
I haven't had a EURCHF trade on for two years now. All the fun got taken out of the market. What's the high-low? Less than 5%. Tough to make a buck out of that move.
For an offal-eating Republican you're a good sport ...
... BTW, it was public worker retirements and pension funds that got sucked into that Groupon deal ...
I think a small percentage of the float went to the widows and orphans. This was pass the trash from the get-go. I think most of the losses are on the street and with day traders. It was offal awful.
I don't do- or want to do ... anything. Mr. Entropy does the heavy lifting. Right now, Mr. Entropy is getting 'medieval' on your ignorant asses and you aren't even aware of it ...
You don't wanna know Mr. Entropy, he just doesn't give a fuck.
Cars don't pay for themselves by way of their use, nor do they pay for the fuel or the roads. Cars are destructive, wasteful toys, nothing more.
Because cars don't pay for themselves, the related costs must be met by borrowing which is why the world is burdened with hundreds of trillion$ of unpayable dollar debt.
But Dummkopf Krasting blames the debt on retirements for the elderly. This is peak oil denial and pointless foolishness as Mr Entropy doesn't give a rat's ass about Krasting's pathetic opinions or his 'lifestyle' or even his life or his family or anyone else's for that matter.
Pay by way of use: drive a taxi, farm tractor, a delivery truck, an emergency vehicle. The rest is the product of advertising and ignorance. Bonus, none of the above are absolutely necessary, either. The human race has done quite nicely without tractors and fire trucks for thousands of years.
Mr. Entropy. I'm gonna steal that, by the way.
Thanks for the clarification.
:D
Bruce -
Don't feed the troll dude. Steve is the worst on here. He wants to deprive you of your beemer.
I have asked him before but he never specifies: just what is his hang-up about cars?
Oh, and he's hardly the worst on here...sometimes he makes really good sense. I just don't get the car thing.
I never like to speak to other's motives, but I think Steve is in the Kunstler Kamp - that is suburbia (vehicles & roads), fueled by cheap oil, grossly missallocated our precious "oil" and now that we're running out of the cheap stuff, the sunk investment in suburbia will only get worse, until the motoring america is no more.
Not that I'm defending that view, just expressing it.
http://www.kunstler.com/index.php
Suburbs represent flight from tyrannical nanny government. Statist control freaks are against what enables people to establish and enjoy suburbs: Any sort of privately owned individually controlled vehicle and energy source for it would be vilified. They'd find an excuse. "climate change" for example. They hate freedom itself. Others' freedom in any case.