I’m too risk averse to buy crypto. My tech bro mates lost a paper fortune last week and weren’t able to handle it 
It’s not a loss until you close out your position.
When the inflation hits and interest rates are 8 per cent is the time to sell and buy a house for tuppence halfpenny.
2 Likes
The speed of inflation in important things must be a worry though? It’s absolutely mental.
Second hand work vans are selling for more than people paid for them new two years ago.
Is that partially a Brexit thing?
I’d say it is… Huge increase in building materials also… Builders providers only holding a price for a week now… I’d say that is a temporary issue though rather than a more long term problem
They won’t let them cut trees here either which isn’t helping
Mixture apparently of brexit, covid ,Suez and rampant profiteering.
It’s not just building supplies though, it’s food (though still historically unbelievably cheap), petrol, land, work vans, you name it.
It’s not going to be that short term, predictions of further increases continuing for at least next 12 months. Stock steel prices at all time high. It’s going to be a very painful 12 months for all involved.
1 Like
Is lumber a new bitcoin?
It is not as cool to talk about
Just for The All Right Jacks
It’s only 3x lads. Meh.
I’ve 4 planks of wood in the shed, cost me €15, must be worth €50 now so. I might sell em back
I’ll buy them off you.
Timber only goes up.
1 Like
A few lads on reddit have turned wall street upside down
Long read on AMC here:
The famous George Soros quote is “When I see a bubble forming, I rush in to buy, adding fuel to the fire.” If you watched the stock of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. go up 116% last week, on not much news, you might rationally think “boy I wish I had a ton of AMC stock to sell to all these crazy people.” But you don’t have a ton of AMC stock. You could short some AMC stock — borrow it, sell it into the bubble and buy it back later — but that is even crazier: The stock might continue to go up, probably will really, and you’ll get blown up on your short.
So the trade might be to buy some AMC stock, at the current crazy price, wait five minutes until the price is even crazier, and then resell it to someone else. This is, roughly, called “momentum trading,” and it has obvious risks. The stock might go down before you sell it, is the main risk. But there are other, more technical inconveniences. If you want to buy a lot of AMC stock, it will take you some time. Not that much time — in the last 10 days, AMC has traded an average of about $6.4 billion worth of stock each day — but some time. Also if you buy a lot of AMC stock, you’ll probably push the price up, making your stock more expensive. This may not be a big problem (again, AMC trades billions of dollars a day), and it might even be good for you (“adding fuel to the fire”), but it increases your risk. If sentiment turns against the stock while you’re accumulating it and bidding up the price, you will lose more money.
What you want is to (1) buy a bunch of stock (2) all at once (3) without moving the price much (4) while still adding fuel to the fire. If for instance you could buy a bunch of stock from the company outside of regular trading hours, and if you could pay a smallish premium over the previous closing price (momentum!), and if the company could then put out a press release saying that your money “will be used for the pursuit of value creating acquisitions” and “will allow us to be aggressive” and that “it is time for AMC to go on the offense again,” then the stock will probably go up some more when regular trading opens, and you can sell your stock for a quick profit.
This is … none of this is investing advice, it does not entirely make sense, it has obvious problems. The stock might go down, is still the main problem. It might go down because it’s incredibly volatile in general, but also, normally companies’ stock prices go down when they announce that they’re selling a bunch of stock. Also, when you resell all the stock, you might normally expect your selling to push the stock down. But we are not living in normal times, AMC is not a normal stock, and Mudrick Capital Management LP got this trade right:
Even before Reddit day traders pushed AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc.’s stock up 1,400% this year, Jason Mudrick had been telling the company it should take advantage of the wild rally by selling stock to stay in business.
Now Mudrick has helped AMC do just that, effectively bankrolling one of the company’s biggest equity sales by purchasing $230 million of shares – and then promptly dumping them in the open market for a tidy profit. Meanwhile, his firm was telling clients it was selling because AMC was massively overvalued. AMC jumped 18% in post-market trading. …
Raising cash through an equity sale to a single holder is relatively rare in U.S. markets. Having the holder flip the stock right after buying it is almost unheard of – usually the buyer is an existing stakeholder trying to send a message of stability to the market. Mudrick’s role in the AMC sale bears a passing resemblance to underwriters in a public offering who purchase shares with the specific intent of reselling them to investors.
The involvement of Mudrick “has been pivotal to the survival of AMC over the past year, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise they threw them a bone,” Edward Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda Corp. said in a message. “This was a perfect time to have a capital raise as the retail army of traders were excited AMC was raising money for acquisitions and investments.”
They also apparently ignored Mudrick’s dim view of AMC’s valuation. While the stock stuttered briefly on Tuesday after the news of Mudrick’s sale broke, it still finished up 23% for the day at $32.04.
I love it. It was good news for AMC that Mudrick was buying stock. It was good news for AMC that Mudrick was selling stock. Nothing matters.
Also the traditional way to do this trade would be with an at-the-market offering: Instead of selling the stock to Mudrick to resell to enthusiastic meme-stock traders, AMC could have hired an investment bank to sell the stock to enthusiastic meme-stock traders. Then if the stock went up as the bank was selling, AMC would capture the gains rather than Mudrick. AMC did this back in December, and again in April; I do not know why it didn’t do it yesterday. Presumably having Mudrick resell the stock rather than Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was funnier, and doing the funny thing makes the stock go up more.[1]
Speaking! Of! Which!
AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: AMC) (“AMC” or “the Company”), announced today that it is launching AMC Investor Connect, an innovative, proactive communication initiative that will put AMC in direct communication with its extraordinary base of enthusiastic and passionate individual shareholders to keep them up to date about important company information and to provide them with special offers. Over the last several months, AMC has seen its retail shareholder base grow beyond 3 million owners. With this sizable number of retail shareholders, AMC is taking a groundbreaking new approach to investor relations and investor communications. …
[Chief Executive Officer Adam] Aron added, “During my five-plus year tenure as CEO at AMC, I’ve taken great pride in the relationships I have forged with AMC’s owners. With AMC Investor Connect, that effort in relationship building will continue apace even if our shareholders now number in the millions. After all, these people are the owners of AMC, and I work for them.”
Beginning today, shareholders can sign up to receive special offers and investor updates by registering at amctheatres.com/stockholders. Investors who sign up starting today and in the coming weeks will be awarded with an initial free large popcorn usable this summer when attending a movie at an AMC theatre in the United States. The offer will be made available in their AMC Stubs rewards account.
Yeah. I have no notes, that’s perfect. “If you buy AMC stock it comes with popcorn” is the greatest capital-markets innovation of the century so far. I used to work in investment banking, building equity derivatives and equity-linked securities to help companies raise money and optimize their capital structures, and in hindsight we were idiots. “What if we used the contingent payment debt instrument regulations to increase the tax deductibility of non-cash interest paid on a 30-year-non-call-5 convertible bond,” we thought, like fools, when the actual way to optimize equity capital raising is by throwing in a large popcorn.
As of 11 a.m. today, AMC’s stock was up 28% to $40.42, an all-time high. It is up about 300% since the start of May, and about 1,800% year-to-date. Popcorn!
We are going to talk in the next section, I am sorry to say, about Elon Musk. Musk is the pioneer here; I once wrote:
What if the actual source of shareholder value, in 2021, is good tweets? Elon Musk built Tesla Inc. into a $600-plus-billion-dollar company partly, sure, by making a big bet on electric cars and then building good ones, but also by tweeting all the time, becoming a weird folk hero/villain and amassing an enormous following of retail investors who enthusiastically bid up the stock and finance Tesla’s projects. “Unchecked tweeting by Musk has made it easier for Tesla to secure financing than pretty much any company in history,” I wrote on Monday; it has also made his shareholders a lot of money. When people want to buy your stock, the stock goes up, creating shareholder value. When people want to buy your stock because you are funny and obnoxious on Twitter and they feel personally connected to you, the stock goes up, creating shareholder value, same as if they want to buy your stock because of expectations about future cash flows. Shareholder value is shareholder value.
This is not in the textbooks yet, but it will be. … Surely other CEOs will learn from Musk, no? Surely others have?
Back in January, AMC and GameStop Corp. became the leading meme stocks; retail traders bought them for laughs, to fit in with their friends on Reddit, and to profit from their wild momentum and the prospects of a short squeeze. GameStop spent the next few months looking very embarrassed about all of this and studiously avoiding talking about it. AMC leaned way into it. Aron has gone on a YouTube show to complain about short sellers. He tweets. He’s giving away popcorn with his stock. He’s hitting the retail bid at every opportunity. And he has raised tons and tons of equity financing, at extremely attractive terms, to help AMC not just survive a pandemic that shut down its movie theaters but also to “go on the offense again.” He has created billions of dollars of shareholder value at AMC not by making good business decisions — though maybe that too, I don’t know — but by cultivating the wild enthusiasm of a newly powerful shareholder base, by catering to them with flattery and press releases and popcorn. “After all, these people are the owners of AMC, and I work for them.” He’s doing a great job!
Oh also, hilariously, AMC’s biggest problem is that it has almost run out of shares to sell? The right corporate-finance move for AMC at this point is to keep selling stock until the stock goes down; if that means selling $50 billion worth of stock and, like, buying eBay Inc. or something then, fine, whatever. If people want to give you free money you should take it! Unfortunately AMC’s corporate charter only allows it to issue 524,173,073 shares of common stock, and (after the Mudrick trade) it has issued 500,780,240 of them. There’s not much more it can do unless its shareholders vote to allow it to issue more shares. It asked them to do that back in March, seeking another 500 million shares, but then withdrew the request in April, presumably because it couldn’t get enough support.
But AMC still has the expansion on its mind; announcing the Mudrick trade yesterday, Aron said: “This transaction underscores the real value of having some authorized share capital available for us to opportunistically capitalize on shareholder value creation possibilities as and when they arise.” Yes, right, if you are a company whose special talent is being amazingly good at selling stock, it’s a shame to run out of stock to sell.
1 Like
I’ve 5 AMC shares 
2 Likes