EXM ==> The Honest Abe Winner

[stockedup]

nice profit

I do get your emails as soon as you send them out. Thank you.

I haven't been in the market since August, so I appreciate receiving your email on EXM. I made a nice profit on it.

So, thank you, Mr Market. First, though, it is fitting to thank our gracious God above for giving you a giving heart.

[mrmarket]

Got the email today, it was dated that I got it on Feb 22?? But can't complain after this drop. Why does this happen to all MM picks. He picks beauties and they go down right away then to amazement of many they outperform everyone. Maybe Market analysts wait for MM's picks and then downgrade them to pick up cheap shares!!

As far as the delay in the email...remember, this board is free for all. That means I can't pay a lot of money for a fancy server. Oh well.

[alice4321us]

Yes Got it!! Right on Time

did you guys get the email on this one?

Got the email today, it was dated that I got it on Feb 22?? But can't complain after this drop. Why does this happen to all MM picks. He picks beauties and they go down right away then to amazement of many they outperform everyone. Maybe Market analysts wait for MM's picks and then downgrade them to pick up cheap shares!!

[New-born baby]

I will be in EXM monday morning. Also holding LQDT, MR , STP ,LGCY. I am new to this board and wish everyone success. I follow Canslim and hope to gain some insight from all who post and trade here.

Welcome, Tim. Best wishes to you with your trades. I think EXM is extended and due for a pullback before proceeding higher. But of course, I could be wrong.

Current holdings

I will be in EXM monday morning. Also holding LQDT, MR , STP ,LGCY. I am new to this board and wish everyone success. I follow Canslim and hope to gain some insight from all who post and trade here.

[SundialMan]

OT: Great Armenian-American investors - besides Ernie

I would have put this fascinating story on my writing thread, except I didn't write it. It is about Kirk Kerkorian's early life. The woman who taught him to fly planes was the same "Pancho" Barnes, 1930s aviation pioneer who owned that bar in the 1950s near Edwards Air Force Base that was featured/shown in the movie "The Right Stuff." I think a lot of us know about Kirk Kerorian's current wheelings and dealings with MGM and General Motors, but how did he get started? Here is a section of the Las Vegas Review-Journal's account of his life from childhood up to the time he opened the International in Las Vegas (now the Las Vegas Hilton, where Elvis performed).

http://www.1st100.com/part3/kerkorian.html

Las Vegas Review-Journal: The first 100 people who shaped Southern Nevada

Part III - A City in Full

The Quiet Lion

Long Excerpt from article:

Kerkor Kerkorian was born in Fresno, Calif., on June 6, 1917, youngest of Ahron and Lily Kerkorian's four children.
When the recession of 1921-22 wiped out the family, the Kerkorians moved to Los Angeles.
"Our first language, although we were born here, was Armenian," Kerkorian recalls. "We didn't learn the English language until we hit the streets."
He sold newspapers and hustled odd jobs.
"When you're a self-made man you start very early in life," he says. "In my case it was at 9 years old when I started bringing income into the family. You get a drive that's a little different, maybe a little stronger, than somebody who inherited."
The Kerkorians moved often, and Kirk was always the new kid in school, obliged to prove himself. Big brother Nish, a pro boxer, coached him. By junior high school, he had been transferred to a disciplinary campus where order was maintained with a metal-studded leather belt. There were more fights than ever.
Kerkorian became the Pacific amateur welterweight champion and wanted to box professionally. He might have boxed himself into addled obscurity. Instead, he met Ted O'Flaherty.
In the autumn of 1939, Kerkorian was earning 45 cents an hour helping O'Flaherty install wall furnaces. Some days, Kerkorian would go with him to Alhambra Airport and watch him practice maneuvers in a Piper Cub. Originally disinterested, Kerkorian consented one day to go aloft with O'Flaherty.
As the plane rose, and the Southern California landscape became visible from the mountains to the ocean, Kerkorian experienced a defining moment.
"He was sold on it right then," O'Flaherty later recalled. "He had never been up in a plane before. But I'm telling you, after that first flight he went right at it. The very next day, he was back out at the field to take his first flying lesson."
With war clouds darkening Europe, he worried that he would be drafted into the infantry before he became a licensed pilot.
One day in 1940 Kerkorian showed up at the Happy Bottom Ranch in the Mojave Desert adjacent to Muroc Field, now Edwards Air Force Base. Owned by Florence "Pancho" Barnes, a pioneer female aviator, the ranch was a combination flight school and dairy farm.
"I haven't got any money," Kerkorian told Barnes. "I haven't got any education. I want to learn to fly. I don't know how I can do it. Can you help me?"
No college was needed, just the willingness to pull teats and shovel bovine backwash. Within six months, Kerkorian had a commercial pilot's license, and a job as a flight instructor.
But teaching bored him.
"I heard about the Royal Air Force flying out of Montreal, Canada, and I went up there and I got hired right away," he recalls. "They were paying money I couldn't believe, $1,000 a trip."
The mission of the RAF Air Transport Command was to fly Canadian-built Mosquito bombers from Labrador to Scotland. Only one in four made it.
The Mosquito's fuel tanks carried it 1,400 miles. It was 2,200 miles to Scotland. Pilots had only two possible routes, each worse than the other.
The roundabout route was Montreal-Labrador-Greenland-Iceland-Scotland, but the planes' high-performance wings could be distorted by a paper-thin coating of ice, causing it to fall out of the sky. "The snowfields and forests around that frozen perimeter were strewn with downed Mosquitos crushed like matchboxes," wrote Dial Torgerson in the 1974 biography "Kerkorian, An American Success Story."
Or one could fly straight across the Atlantic, riding a west-to-east airflow called the "Iceland Wave." It blew Mosquitos toward Europe at jet speeds, but it wasn't constant. If it waned in midflight, plane and pilot were lost.
Kerkorian and his wing commander, J.D. Woolridge, rode the wave in May 1944, and broke the old crossing record. Woolridge got to Scotland in six hours, 46 minutes; Kerkorian, in seven hours, nine minutes. He came in second. He hated that.
The following month, the Iceland Wave died halfway across. The sun set. The reserve tank ran empty, and Kerkorian prepared to ditch. His navigator begged Kerkorian to drop low just once. As they broke through the cloud, the lights of Prestwick, Scotland, twinkled ahead.
Kerkorian made a perfect landing.
In 2 1/2 years with the RAF, Kerkorian delivered 33 planes, logged thousands of hours, traveled to four continents and flew his first four-engine plane. He also saved most of his generous salary.
Kerkorian clearly recalls his first visit to Las Vegas in July 1945. His RAF service completed, he paid $5,000 for a single-engine Cessna in which to train pilots. "And I used that same plane to fly charters. That's what got me into the transportation end of the business."
Jerry Williams, a Los Angeles scrap iron dealer, hired Kerkorian's plane two or three times a week to fly to Las Vegas. "I was just overwhelmed at the level of excitement in this little town," he says. "The best times of my life were in Las Vegas." One morning, Kerkorian and Williams emerged into the dawn after a fruitless night at the tables. They had $5 between them, and Williams suggested they save it for breakfast.
"What good's five dollars going to do?" asked Kerkorian, and headed back to the craps table, where he won $700.
Kerkorian became well known as a high roller in Las Vegas during the 1940s and 1950s, "the Perry Como of the craps table," for the unruffled way he could win, or more often lose, $50,000 to $80,000 per night. He eventually quit gambling entirely.
Married twice, Kerkorian met his second wife in Las Vegas. She was Jean Maree Hardy, a former dancer at the Thunderbird. The marriage produced Kerkorian's two daughters, Tracy and Linda. Kerkorian named his personal holding company Tracinda Corp.
In 1947, Kerkorian purchased a tiny charter line, Los Angeles Air Service. He later changed the name to Trans International Airlines, and offered the first jet service on a nonscheduled airline.
In 1965, Kerkorian took TIA public. Armenian-Americans knew of Kerkorian and bought his stock. It rose from a low of $9.75 to a high of $32.
"It brought the stock up to begin with, and then our earnings were great, too, and it kept going up until we sold to TransAmerica," says Kerkorian. In that 1968 deal, Kerkorian received about $85 million worth of stock in the TransAmerica conglomerate, making him its biggest shareholder.
In 1962, Kerkorian pulled off what Fortune magazine called "one of the most successful land speculations in Las Vegas' history." He bought 80 acres across the Strip from the Flamingo for $960,000. The price was low even then, and for good reason. A narrow band of property cut the 80 acres off from the Strip.
"It was landlocked," says Kerkorian, "We traded the owners four or five acres for all of this thin strip that they could never build on. Then I got a call from Jay Sarno, and that's how Caesars Palace got started."
Kerkorian collected $4 million in rent before selling the land to Caesars for another $5 million in 1968.
With the cash from the Caesars sale and his TransAmerica stock, Kerkorian was ready to build his first Las Vegas megaresort.
In early 1967, he had bought 82 acres on Paradise Road for $5 million and hired Fred Benninger.
"All I knew about Las Vegas came from the other side of the table -- the contributing end," Benninger recalled years later.
"I'm not a firm believer," says Kerkorian, "that you have to have 30 years of experience, if you've got good, common sense. I knew he could cut the mustard and he did. He helped, no, he built the International. He built the old MGM and he built this MGM. It was all Fred Benninger.
"I can't take much credit except for seeing the big picture; the amount of rooms, what kind of showrooms, I'm into that part of it. But when you get the nitty-gritty, I don't have the education to really get in there and dissect it."
Benninger suggested that given the size of the International, they should buy an existing hotel, and use it to train staff. The Flamingo Hotel fit the bill.
Benninger installed Sahara Hotel Vice President Alex Shoofey as Flamingo president. Shoofey then stole the cream of the Sahara's executives -- a total of 33 -- including casino manager James Newman and veteran entertainment director Bill Miller.
In February 1969, Kerkorian's International Leisure was given the go-ahead by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to offer the public about 17 percent of the company's stock at $5 per share. This was not a routine approval, though. The Justice Department was investigating the Flamingo's previous owners.
Justice Department officials had identified Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel's old partner in Murder Inc., as a hidden partner in the Flamingo. Skimming was suspected, and Kerkorian more or less proved it.
"The reason, I think, that they allowed us to go public," says Kerkorian, "was that I don't think the Flamingo ever showed anything more than $300,000 or $400,000 in profits. In our first year, 1968, we showed about $3 million."
The location Kerkorian chose for the International was criticized. It was off the Strip and, at 30 stories and 1,512 rooms, the biggest hotel in the world. Too big and too far out, they said.
"We had the same doomsday people when we were building the MGM Grand, same people, same doomsday," sighs Kerkorian. "You have to ask a lot of questions and listen to people, but eventually, you have to go by your own instincts."
The International had a "Youth Hostel," where kids could play and swim while their parents were doing grown-up stuff. The hostel organized field trips for the kids to Lake Mead, Mount Charleston and other local nongaming attractions.
"And that was before anybody's time," reminds Kerkorian.
"We opened that hotel with Barbra Streisand in the main showroom," says Kerkorian. "The rock musical 'Hair' was in the other showroom and the opening lounge act was Ike and Tina Turner. Elvis followed Barbra in the main showroom. I don't know of any hotel that went that big on entertainment."
One month before the hotel opened, International Leisure common stock, which had opened at $5 per share, was selling over the counter for $50. But Kerkorian had some expensive European loans to pay off. He was confident he could retire them with a second offering of International Leisure stock.

[jiesen]

yep, got it! thanks!

[Nummerkins]

Yes, I got the email. Unfortunately, I checked my mail after market close. Still, I got in the next morning. Thanks!

[mrmarket]

not yet... patiently waiting

You need to check your spam filters or set "[email protected]" as a friendly sender, if you have not been getting my updates.

[peanuts]

did you guys get the email on this one?

not yet... patiently waiting

[Karel]

Yup, and I liked it. In at 19.15, limit order at 22.03.

You're HUGE!

Regards,

Karel

[mrmarket]

did you guys get the email on this one?

[jiesen]

go EXM!

at this rate we'll get our 15% by tomorrow! I only wish I'd bought more, instead of buying NFI... now why did I do that?

[SundialMan]

OT: Telly Savalas & EXM

First, Mr. Market, I want to say this looks like a great pick.

Secondly, I want to talk about Kojack, a guy so popular even Brittany Spears is copying his hairstyle. Kojack is a Polish name, pronounced "Koy-yack." But back to Telly. I saw his biography on the Biography Channel. They hinted that his first "acting job" was as a spy, but his official Army records in WWII deny it. Baloney. He was a spy, in my opinion.

Telly looked at the camera in the show and said that in his home in New Jersey, his dad put up a card that stated you had to speak Greek at home - or else. So Telly grew up speaking perfect native Greek and looking like a muscular young guy from Athens. When the Army drafted him in WWII, Greece was under Nazi occupation. So the US needed guys who could get a job at a port or railroad yard in Greece, speaking non-academic Greek and looking the part, to report on troop train movements and material like tanks being shipped around. Although older immigrants who had friends from growing up in Europe were not trusted as much, young guys who went to high school in the US and spoke a European language often wound up in Army Intelligence. Another such guy was Henry Kissinger. I very seriously doubt the Army was gonna stick a guy like Telly, who read and spoke perfect Greek in the Motor Pool. Another actor who was an intelligence agent was Christopher Lee in the English Army - and he admited it, but didn't talk about details. It's great training for acting because you're on stage 24/7.

[titanomega1]

Exm

Mrmarket Says Buy I Buy, U U U U U U U U U .