Search results

It's only natural that the spreads on options will tighten over time. I would think that this would have a huge impact. is there any chance that IB would spin off the brokerage business? i think a lot of people would have great interest investing in the brokerage portion. there's a lot of...

IB is a market maker, mostly in options. This is where the majority of their revenue comes from. The brokerage unit is secondary to this.

Valuations are merely what a security is worth. Market price is the most recent price that a buyer and seller agreed to. While valuations and market price may seem to be the same thing, they are entirely different. In this case, it appears that the valuation is much lower than the market...

What kind of a loss will overstock post for the first quarter? I'm saying the over/under is -$20MM. My only interest is discussing the current valuation of OSTK. If the stock price is so suposidly so depressed, why doesn't management just take the company private for $20 a share?

Exactly. Nobody is stupid enough to short a company out of existence if the company is profitable. This would be suicide. I'm honestly surprised that this stock is holding up at 16. I still think a short is the right play

I saw that too. I don't know much about market making, but is typical or is this unconventional?

how is this a planned destruction? the company loses money. the shares in this company are worthless. a company may experience a falling stock price because of a reduction in profits, but a company does not experience a reduction in profits because of a falling stock price

Overstock has: 1. Never turned a profit 2. Zero Revenue growth 3. Zero margin growth How can anyone justify owning this stock, even if it were priced at $8?

how much would the tightening of spreads on the options market effect their profit? i think it's only a matter of time before 5 and 10 cent spreads are gone

IB is first and foremost a market maker their second line of business is their brokerage

yos, you're right as i forgot a zero. also i think the price goes down for more contracts

how long can overstock go on before it eventually goes under? I don't see them lasting another 4 years before they run out of cash. I think the business plan was to market heavily to attract attention and take low margins to get the sales. That obviously didn't work. As far as the...

since i don't think there's ant SSF's farther than a year out, it would be short term capital gains. if it's capital gains than you'd be able to use it to affset any capital gains losses. if it's interest income you wouldn't be able to do that. also any dividends you receive from an EFP...

how much did overstock lose on their stock buyback?

does anybody know how this is treated with regards to taxes? is it short term capital gains or interest income?

I just don't see how this company can make it. Their massive marketing campaign didn't work. The only thing left is for a big change in their strategy. Overstock is essentially the same as all of the "outlet malls" that were big 15 years ago. I think everybody knows what has happened to...

yes, turnover certainly is how you can make a business with low margins work. wal-mart is certainly the king of this business model. for '06 Walmart ran at a 24% margin. The problem for overstock is that they don't have a great deal of turnover. Their customers don't stop by every two...

shouldn't a company that deals with overstocks need to achieve an above average gross margin? it makes no sense to me how they can ever expect to be profitable with such low margins

it sounds like they got burned on their stock buyback plan.

didn't overstock do a large stock buyback a few years ago when the shares were at their high?