Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Time to get serious


















with at least one of these: OSTK, WB, FED.

21 comments:

dvs112 said...

OSTK has been on a tear lately. I want to short it but am worried whether it is akin to standing in front of a train

With no EPS, how the hell do you put a correct valuation on it?

MTGSPY said...

"With no EPS, how the hell do you put a correct valuation on it?"

How the hell do you indeed?

Plus ... you cannot short OSTK sir. That is a guarantee.

dvs112 said...

Don't tell you cornered all the OSTK shorts also :-) . First DSL, then FED and now OSTK.. stop hogging all the shares man

D said...

OSTK has been cornered for as long as I can remember.

Jesse Livermore would be proud.

Mtg, I know you were looking for WB 30 to enter short...which didn't present. Did you decide to short the hole or what? That is a busted stuck if I ever saw one.

MTGSPY said...

yeah, short the hole 1000 shares. I think this can't be more than C stock price.

D said...

Look at the beautiful action on AIG!

douche_bag said...

vah mister spy...our old friend in charlotte is having a bad day

was wondering if you found out anything about TCBK or if you have any other tasty ideas???

thanks

MTGSPY said...

Nothing for now. Just hold steady, mortgage losses accelerate again from April - May after decelerating in March - April. A ton of modification and reperformance attempts are made accross the board.

douche_bag said...

did you have luck with your mod attempts?

do you actually call up the homeowner or do you just work with the peeps that hold the paper

MTGSPY said...

I am not a mortgage lender, but more of a mortgage investor and I am working on bulk basis so I don't call people although I would really love to find out what really happened in ground zero.

Now that we are nearly a year into the mod business we have tons of data across MANY cuts and I think this is $$$$$ to those who can use it in terms of predicting re-performance/re-default. I intend to understand it like the back of my hand.

douche_bag said...

gotcha...so you are building default models to price paper...sounds pretty cool

I hear sambol is looking for a job soon...perhaps he can help you, from what I hear he has extensive risk managment skills

MTGSPY said...

Maybe I'll end up asking him FOR a job. :D

D said...

Mtg -

I've seen better looking p*ssy on this blog...what the hell man?

Kitten fetish?

:)

MTGSPY said...

Hah! getting soft I guess. Been working non-stop for several days now, I'd be finding the right "kitten" picture to post once the work lets up.

D said...

how are those default tables coming along? Getting anything good?

MTGSPY said...

Very interesting results. This is like a final exam of my knowledge in the mortgage meltdown. Benchmarking an investment attempt like this is NOT going to be easy :D

Greenie said...

Who will you buy the mortgages from? Will you buy individual mortgages or a large number in a pool? Can you buy part of part of a rotten CDO?

Also, how do you model future change in behavior? With recession turning deeper and banks failing, there will be more debt avoidance, isn't it?

MTGSPY said...

Modified loans recently comes in a bulk of 1-time delinquent pools that the lender somehow hope to give to someone else so they can focus on a more dire stuffs like default and foreclosure. I am sorry that the identity of everyone I work with is clearly secret or the spetnatz will go after me. One third of the things we are doing by the way, were already owned by us when we modified them. :)

CDO contains JUNIOR bonds backed by home equity, mortgages, and autos/CC receiveables - multilayer securitization. Their investors do not have direct access to the underlying loans. Further, in the case of synthetic securities (CDS of the Junior bonds), has literally ZERO control of the mortgage underlying their investment.

They are HOSTAGE of the issuer/servicers of those loans.

We stop working securitization in early 2007. The last CDS we bought protection from was the day before BBB spread moved from 200 bps to 400 bps and never looked back (today it's close 5,000 bps).

douche_bag said...

mister spy

quick question about the CDS on CDO

you say the spread is on 5000bps on default

so with the cds of cdo that is in effect synthetic cdo

and do you know the counterparty you bought the protection from or is it like me selling calls to someone who has no idea who i am they just see me hit their bid

MTGSPY said...

There was no exchange for this you know, so everything was negotiated or was auction. The counterparty didn't understand collateral very well of course, but from what I understood most who dealt with us just tried to get our business and relied on S&P ratings to justify to their management. Up to the very last minute :D

douche_bag said...

poor basterds...always gotta find the greater fool I suppose