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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Oblomov who wrote (26126)	2/22/2007 11:34:33 PM
From: Paul Senior	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78744

SPAC. Okay, I can see where one buys the expertise of the management team. They are compensated by the cheap warrants they get (20% of investors' money), and the deals they do have to be approved by shareholders. I'm still not sure how aligned their interests are with small shareholders. Perhaps the checks/balances make them aligned very well indeed. Just seems like they take lots off the top with little of their own money in the game, and investors still absorb a lot of risk. To me, it's not so much who does the deals. I don't know much of Michael Gross of the management team. I watch George Soros stock trades occasionally, and I dismissively describe them as trades, ----in-out in dozens of stocks at a time. I don't know what he's doing or how he does it now, but his trading 'schemes' do not look all that profitable to me. (But they may be.) In any case, these guys are pretty smart and savvy. I am getting the feeling I'm going in with them in a poker game and I'm the one looking around wondering who the patsy is. (Buffett has that answer. -gg-) The way I look at it, if these deals are good, who are the value investors who are actually buying the stock and when? Are they getting IPO prices, or, like me, are they buying later? On the one hand, some of these deals must (maybe) be okay: Seth Klarman has taken sizeable positions in several, if not many. I'm looking at SEA --- perhaps wrongly though in that I'm looking at the sector where the purchase will be made (bulk shipping) vs. who is doing the deal --- and I see Marty Whitman (of 'safe and cheap') is an owner of shares. But 23.5K shares worth maybe $225k doesn't seem like much of a conviction. Well, there are other institutional buyers, but I don't recognize them. ---------- Thanks for your opinion and stock ideas. At this point I'm still way too ignorant to be making any SPAC bets. Jmo; these things could work out very well for an astute/lucky buyer. I don't feel that's me.