Another name worth looking at in my opinion is CLUB. Hugely levered company, activist hedge fund manager Patrick Walsh just took over as Executive chairman of the company so he's had a chance to look under the hood as the stock has dropped from $6 when he bought to $2 today. Last few days he started buying the stock in the open market at $2. This company has been under concerns about going bankrupt so i highly doubt he would be throwing more money at this if that was actually a concern to him.

Here was a recent forbes profile on him: http://www.forbes.com/sites/antoineg...-sports-clubs/

Has anyone done any work on the for profit education sector? So many of these companies are popping up on my value screen. Any good reading material on the current regulatory environment?

poker volumes declining is an incorrect perception...

from Amaya 2nd quarter conference call ( http://www.amaya.com/wp-content/uplo...ation_v2.2.pdf )

Comparing Q2 2015 to Q2 2014:

-9% increase in real money customer registrations
-Mobile >60% of new accounts in Q2 2015
-Unique depositors to real money platform increased ~3%
-Gross deposits increased ~7% on a constant currency* basis
-Due to Spin & Gos tournaments increased 90%


I've been playing mtt/SNGs on stars almost daily since black friday, and this month I've paid 10k in rake the most of my career by far, the action at spins is nonstop, its taking away players from cash games and raking them at 57+3 and 95+5 in $60 and $100 spins, a pure printing press for amaya.

I know very little about them but a lot of talk from the GOP candidates has been on breaking up the monopoly that uni's have as far as driving costs and the accreditation cartel they have.

Would think a victory would be a boost to the best of these companies but I haven't looked into much of it yet.

It's not shocking a new format is drawing players in. If you think the growth of spins will continue then it's probably fairly valued but it can't and it won't. That format is one of the worse for ensuring a healthy poker economy. The fish will get skinned faster and the regs won't win as much leading to games drying up. Also this Sunday was the first time they missed they're million guarantee tourney in ages. You may think that's insignificant but they haven't missed that guarantee, ever. The point is poker is in a major decline and as long as it remains a fragmented market that won't change. It would seem if there is any hidden upside it'll come from their casino/sportsbook operation but I'd defer to ahnuld on that.

Fish have much better chance of winning in a spin than playing cash games or husng vs regs. Many of the jackpots being won are by recreational players it creates the MTT effect where they proceed to lose most of their winnings back into the community.

Also spins are addicting its a mix of pure gambling and poker that recs love you can't say that about zoom cash or 18man sngs. The main factor in health of the poker site is deposits, and if they were shrinking I would be a lot more worried. Also pros are making more EV and rakeback than ever at these games so your speculation about regs not winning as much is just that.

After looking only a few seconds at this: who is this wizard Gregory Bartoli and why is he worth millions in salary, bonuses and stock based compensation?

I'm not gonna argue about the game being good for fish or not. Its clearly terrible, especially with the software being used against them. Fish winning the jackpot is great but 99.9% of the time that doesn't happen and you end up with frustrated fish. As for the game being +ev for regs, any game where the edge is this small you end up with massive swings. I assure you regs would prefer a steady income over the variance they endure playing these. I think a 300 buyin downswing is the norm.

What will end up happening is the top 5% of players will rise to the top while mediocre players go busto or drop a level. This leads to fewer games and less rake but in the short term its great for the site as players don't realize they're not good enough. You can see evidence of this in a number of threads here already where regs complain they can't get games off because there are to many regs in the queue.

Also pretty sure their rewards program is taking a major cut shortly making RB even lower and these games less grindable.

It's not, play around with swongsim and you have a 5% ev in these games about the worst low point you can have is around -220 buyins and thats a 1% chance out of 36k game sample.

Also you realize how many MTT regs there are that would love to only have 200 buyin downswing max?

I agree that poker is likely to continue declining on Stars even though last quarter's metrics suggest otherwise. This part of the conference call is interesting:

question about dividend investing for income: assuming you're investing in dividend aristocrat types on a long term basis, is their a flaw to the thinking of holding these positions through thick and then? a lot of the articles from good Seeking Alpha authors on dividend investing preach not selling and are not phased when their positions are down a lot because it just makes their yields go up. if macro market moves dont effect their stocks ability to pay a divi, they are never selling.
im in the income phase of investing after being in the growth phase since 2009. there is much that is appealing to me in this kind of investing strategy as it makes investing much easier then trying to time the market with entries and exits. the work is put into selecting your portfolio in the beginning, and then after that their shouldnt be much effort put in besides re-balancing periodically and occasionally reducing positions that have become over valued.
please poke some holes in this line of thinking for me.

Are you asking if you should try and time the market? Sure go ahead if you can do it.

Agreed, all tough it got hit badly this week .. Any of you got Some news?

you know this is all standard amaya bull**** right?

Growth in account openings? 95% of registered accounts didnt play a real hand in the q.

Mobile growth? Those guys dont multitable and don't play nearly as many hands as desktop users

revenues? Missed substantially. The "constant currency" thing is bs. They report in canadian dollars, not US, so any currency effect is taken into account.


Let me demonstrate.

last year canadian/usa exchange rate 1.1.

A canadian deposits 110$ or $100 USD and has enough to play and lose 10 sit n goes of $10, paying $1 rake on each. Amaya now has $10 US revs or $11 Canadian revs (reporting currency)

this year exchange rate 1.30

A canadian deposits 110 or 84.6 USD enough to play 8.46 sit n goes. Amaya generates $8.46 US revs or 8.46*1.3 = $11 canadian revs.

Its all bull****

ya
90% of what execs say on a conference call is blowing sunshine up your a@@

no I'm asking the opposite. if an investor is only interested in value investing in companies that pay a rock solid dividend for income purposes, does it make sense for him to hold in through the worst of market corrections because they yield on his dividend paying stocks goes up?

what has always put me off about this sort of buy and hold philosophy is the old lose 50% / gain back 100% to be break even. i feel like someone investing like this would be forced to sell stocks at inopportune times like this oil sell off. some of the most popular dividend aristocrat type stocks are in the oil industry. sure your dividend yield goes up and up as your stock plummets, but the macro events happening in the world will keep your stock price depressed for a long time.

i guess im struggling with the idea of when you become active in a portfolio like this? i read a few dividend income investor blogs and it seems like a few of these guys have got stuck in some oil sector stocks that they either have to sell at massive losses or just grit their teeth and hold on for years before they could see their positions get back in the green.

I'm really having a hard time understanding your question.

You own value stocks that pay dividends
You believe they are substantially undervalued to what the current price is in the market
They drop in price because of market panic or external factors that have nothing to do with the businesses prospects
Dividend yield goes up
You wanna sell them because their yield has gone up

The only time you should be selling is when #2 has changed.

The strategy you are referring to only sells when a dividend is cut. The idea is that this is a rare event given the long history of increases. You live off the dividends in retirement so that you don't have to sell 4% during a bear market.

thanks for the input, but yes you are misunderstanding me.
I'm just wonder if there is a flaw in buy and hold dividend aristocrat investing philosophy? getting a 50% haircut is pretty devastating to a portfolio.
my portfolio is in a transitional phase from growth oriented to income oriented so I want to be buying stuff like O, T, BCE, PGX, etc. its a pretty major change in my investing thesis so I'm inviting people to poke holes in it before i go ahead and do it.
I'm not talking about selling my stocks atm regarding this recent market panic. I'm talking about selling them in a big event like tech bubble or 2008. do you just grit your teeth and bare it in that type of environment?

a little off topic but good article i read today.
https://rpseawright.wordpress.com/20...es-like-these/

Thoughts on DSWL?

It's a classic Graham net-net trading at ~60% of NCAV, but it also has all the negatives of a typical net-net.. losing money, poor management, etc.

The chairman has been buying a bunch of shares lately (now owns over 25% of the company). Seems strange for him to be buying if they're not going to make any changes. Winding down operations would clearly be the best move--sales have been steadily declining (down 50% over the past five years), and they're in a competitive industry with ****ty margins. But will that ever actually happen, or will management just keep collecting their paycheck and run the company into the ground?

Haircut is definitely possible someday. I'd be surprised if it didn't happen in say the next 50 years.

They'll raise tax % on it certainly and I rarely see that as it is factored into the ROI graphs everyone uses.

brokerage goes out of business so you lose it all (everyone's favorite the -100% ROI)

anyway, I get annoyed when everyone who repeats the buy and hold mantra uses the dow charts when the dow adds/removes stocks it counts. The rich keep getting richer and buy stocks therefore it'll go up due to increased demand is a reasonable argument. A misleading at best graph is not.

If it's a good company with $ and a decent dividend paying out I see no reason to sell. If you own say the grilled cheese truck at 100 million valuation* with like four trucks--I'll let you guys invest in all of those types of companies. That's not my thing. (I fully admit I don't know what the hell I'm talking about so listen to me at your own peril)

*it's back down to 25M now or so, still absurd to me but that stuff doesn't matter essentially at all in the market these days.

Ahnuld what are your thoughts on Patient Home Monitoring, if you have any.

ahnuld and others, are you not worried about their purchase of victiv and the boom in DFS being a huge win for AYA? I believe they should be able to make StarsDraft into a viable third player in what is currently a duopoly in a market that is growing at an insane rate and could become as big or larger than sportsbetting itself (imo).

draftkings, which is one of the biggest, got valued recently at 900mm. so fine, add that to amayas cap table and the stock is still overvalued. And I dont think they can easily get as big as draftkings

realistically these side things like DFS, casino and sportsbook will only serve to backfill the poker revenue.

I think ur referring to draftkings, draftday was sold for $4m recently . There is zero chance victiv/starsdraft will ever come close to Fanduel and DK. They just dominate the market and there's no room for a third player. Their best hope is to carve out a nich by catering to soccer fans in European market where these sites don't operate but that's a tiny tiny market.