pumpkin futures start going up this time of year

all-spice is always the bridesmaid. shame...

Don’t sleep on cinnamon for those pumpkin pies.

nutmeg you rubes

please stop yelling.

I never followed through with this. Oh well.

T-bonds going up. Big rush on distressed assets. I guess if you're a big player, you de-risk with the treasury and try to get in on some leveraged buyouts? Not really my thing but that seems to be the conventional wisdom?

Not going to lie, I have no idea what any of this means.

it's an Albany expression

I need to margin call my shorts

well I'm from Utica and have never heard of pursuing LBOs at this high level of interest rates

Lol

Also yeah that’s an interesting insight. Lots of coverage of how distressed assets are so hot right now, but the interest rates are something else. Maybe sovereign wealth funds can help with bolt-ons and break-offs and be happy with not losing money?

Explain it so we can understand it, Dave Ramsey

He's pulling your leg

Still learning, and glad to be corrected on anything I’m wrong about…

LBO = leveraged buyout. Let’s say a private equity group wants to buy a distressed (struggling) business using leverage (debt) for $100M. They’ll put up $10M of their own cash, then borrow $90M from banks, bond raises, or elsewhere using the acquisition target’s own assets as collateral on the debt. So if the company fails, then can liquidate the company and sell its assets to pay off the debt.

A popular narrative right now is that there are more distressed assets available than normal because Covid relied funds extended a lifeline to a lot of business that would have otherwise gone under. Those funds have dried up, so there’s a backlog of companies that are in rough shape and are ripe for the plucking.

Bolt-ons and carve-outs are slang for (respectively) when PE adds a smaller company or product to a portfolio entity, or takes one out and turns it into its own company, to increase the return of their portfolio investment.

The Albany joke about interest rates was suggesting that despite there being a lot of distressed assets out there, interest rates are so high as to make LBOs an unattractive option for the stereotypical investor in PE funds. I suggested that sovereign wealth funds might put more cash than usual into these sorts of strategies because they’re not really looking for high risk/high reward scenarios; they’re governed more like pension plans, looking for low risk and stable returns over long horizons.

Gotta take advantage of those nice CD rates.

Moved our student loan savings into a 3-month CD w/ 4.5% APY, so we'll actually make a little money before we pay off our remaining balance.

Moved another chunk into a 1-year CD in preparation for some things we'd like to think about doing in another year or so.

Meanwhile Ethereum is up 75% year-to-date! Good thing we got rid of all those crypto investments, eh? all good, when I see you guys buying back in again I will know it’s time to short the market

you are doing the prudent thing investing in FDIC-insured cash equivalents

stay away from the fun stuff that eventually goes to zero

Do you just cash in your crypto at the bank when you're ready to stop?

I should probably learn something about investing and cds and maturity.