13 Comments

Ouch, that must really smart. I admire your candour.

Do you follow John Hempton? He's done a number of podcasts over the years and his fund's LP letters are publicly available. I learned a lot about the dark side from listening to John. What I think is the #1 killer from shorting is that when a position goes against you, your position size increases, which is the opposite of a long position. That is so hard to manage. If you are trading liquid US names, then IMO you should always consider put spreads over shorting the common: leverage with loss capped at 100% and greatly reduced vol.

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Yeah John Hempton is great. I really enjoy his letters.

Put spreads are a great idea. I will try them out as well.

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Dudes an arrogant internet troll. Shits on people while buying Pinterest at 10x sales and crappy MLM scheme stocks. I'm not sure why people are him seriously

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One issue with just buying puts is that IV tends to be high in good short candidates, so puts are expensive and theta burn kills you - spreads help with both of those.

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Hi...I am interested to know what is your Sibanye BUY thesis? Thank you, Conrad

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Hi. It is incredibly cheap and the underlying commodity prices got absolutely killed in 2023. South African problems stopped getting worse.

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Hi, what are your BUY thesis for Mongolian Mining and South Gobi Resources? Thank you. Filip

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It is cheap

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Mongolian Mining looks very nice but South Gobi Resources has negative book value and negative profit margin.

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Mongolian Coal prices just recently recovered and South Gobi Resources is the most levered one in the space.

If the current prices hold they will earn close to their market cap in 2 quarters. Recent import duties will dampen that and probably bring that to 3 quarters.

Ofc it has quite a lot of debt and is levered, so size appropriately

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Thank you very much.

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holy christ

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I think a pre-determined stop is the solution. I could not manually stop myself out when the short went against me. Instead I compounded my error by increasing my short as the position went against me. I also didnt cut losses early and let it become personal and emotional where I could not longer trade rationally. Put spreads seem the other solution to minimise risk.

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