Hi guys,
I have been using reddit for years in my personal life (not trading!) and wanted to give something back in an area where i am an expert.
I worked at an investment bank for seven years and joined them as a graduate FX trader so have lots of professional experience, by which i mean I was trained and paid by a big institution to trade on their behalf. This is very different to being a full-time home trader, although that is not to discredit those guys, who can accumulate a good amount of experience/wisdom through self learning.
When I get time I'm going to write a mid-length posts on each topic for you guys along the lines of how i was trained. I guess there would be 15-20 topics in total so about 50-60 posts. Feel free to comment or ask questions.
The first topic is Risk Management and we'll cover it in three parts
Part I

• Why it matters
• Position sizing
• Kelly
• Using stops sensibly
• Picking a clear level

Why it matters

The first rule of making money through trading is to ensure you do not lose money. Look at any serious hedge fund’s website and they’ll talk about their first priority being “preservation of investor capital.”
You have to keep it before you grow it.
Strangely, if you look at retail trading websites, for every one article on risk management there are probably fifty on trade selection. This is completely the wrong way around.
The great news is that this stuff is pretty simple and process-driven. Anyone can learn and follow best practices.
Seriously, avoiding mistakes is one of the most important things: there's not some holy grail system for finding winning trades, rather a routine and fairly boring set of processes that ensure that you are profitable, despite having plenty of losing trades alongside the winners.

Capital and position sizing

The first thing you have to know is how much capital you are working with. Let’s say you have $100,000 deposited. This is your maximum trading capital. Your trading capital is not the leveraged amount. It is the amount of money you have deposited and can withdraw or lose.
Position sizing is what ensures that a losing streak does not take you out of the market.
A rule of thumb is that one should risk no more than 2% of one’s account balance on an individual trade and no more than 8% of one’s account balance on a specific theme. We’ll look at why that’s a rule of thumb later. For now let’s just accept those numbers and look at examples.
So we have $100,000 in our account. And we wish to buy EURUSD. We should therefore not be risking more than 2% which $2,000.
We look at a technical chart and decide to leave a stop below the monthly low, which is 55 pips below market. We’ll come back to this in a bit. So what should our position size be?
We go to the calculator page, select Position Size and enter our details. There are many such calculators online - just google "Pip calculator".
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https://preview.redd.it/y38zb666e5h51.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=26e4fe569dc5c1f43ce4c746230c49b138691d14
So the appropriate size is a buy position of 363,636 EURUSD. If it reaches our stop level we know we’ll lose precisely $2,000 or 2% of our capital.
You should be using this calculator (or something similar) on every single trade so that you know your risk.
Now imagine that we have similar bets on EURJPY and EURGBP, which have also broken above moving averages. Clearly this EUR-momentum is a theme. If it works all three bets are likely to pay off. But if it goes wrong we are likely to lose on all three at once. We are going to look at this concept of correlation in more detail later.
The total amount of risk in our portfolio - if all of the trades on this EUR-momentum theme were to hit their stops - should not exceed $8,000 or 8% of total capital. This allows us to go big on themes we like without going bust when the theme does not work.
As we’ll see later, many traders only win on 40-60% of trades. So you have to accept losing trades will be common and ensure you size trades so they cannot ruin you.
Similarly, like poker players, we should risk more on trades we feel confident about and less on trades that seem less compelling. However, this should always be subject to overall position sizing constraints.
For example before you put on each trade you might rate the strength of your conviction in the trade and allocate a position size accordingly:
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https://preview.redd.it/q2ea6rgae5h51.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=4332cb8d0bbbc3d8db972c1f28e8189105393e5b
To keep yourself disciplined you should try to ensure that no more than one in twenty trades are graded exceptional and allocated 5% of account balance risk. It really should be a rare moment when all the stars align for you.
Notice that the nice thing about dealing in percentages is that it scales. Say you start out with $100,000 but end the year up 50% at $150,000. Now a 1% bet will risk $1,500 rather than $1,000. That makes sense as your capital has grown.
It is extremely common for retail accounts to blow-up by making only 4-5 losing trades because they are leveraged at 50:1 and have taken on far too large a position, relative to their account balance.
Consider that GBPUSD tends to move 1% each day. If you have an account balance of $10k then it would be crazy to take a position of $500k (50:1 leveraged). A 1% move on $500k is $5k.
Two perfectly regular down days in a row — or a single day’s move of 2% — and you will receive a margin call from the broker, have the account closed out, and have lost all your money.
Do not let this happen to you. Use position sizing discipline to protect yourself.
​

Kelly Criterion

If you’re wondering - why “about 2%” per trade? - that’s a fair question. Why not 0.5% or 10% or any other number?
The Kelly Criterion is a formula that was adapted for use in casinos. If you know the odds of winning and the expected pay-off, it tells you how much you should bet in each round.
This is harder than it sounds. Let’s say you could bet on a weighted coin flip, where it lands on heads 60% of the time and tails 40% of the time. The payout is $2 per $1 bet.
Well, absolutely you should bet. The odds are in your favour. But if you have, say, $100 it is less obvious how much you should bet to avoid ruin.
Say you bet $50, the odds that it could land on tails twice in a row are 16%. You could easily be out after the first two flips.
Equally, betting $1 is not going to maximise your advantage. The odds are 60/40 in your favour so only betting $1 is likely too conservative. The Kelly Criterion is a formula that produces the long-run optimal bet size, given the odds.
Applying the formula to forex trading looks like this:
Position size % = Winning trade % - ( (1- Winning trade %) / Risk-reward ratio
If you have recorded hundreds of trades in your journal - see next chapter - you can calculate what this outputs for you specifically.
If you don't have hundreds of trades then let’s assume some realistic defaults of Winning trade % being 30% and Risk-reward ratio being 3. The 3 implies your TP is 3x the distance of your stop from entry e.g. 300 pips take profit and 100 pips stop loss.
So that’s 0.3 - (1 - 0.3) / 3 = 6.6%.
Hold on a second. 6.6% of your account probably feels like a LOT to risk per trade.This is the main observation people have on Kelly: whilst it may optimise the long-run results it doesn’t take into account the pain of drawdowns. It is better thought of as the rational maximum limit. You needn’t go right up to the limit!
With a 30% winning trade ratio, the odds of you losing on four trades in a row is nearly one in four. That would result in a drawdown of nearly a quarter of your starting account balance. Could you really stomach that and put on the fifth trade, cool as ice? Most of us could not.
Accordingly people tend to reduce the bet size. For example, let’s say you know you would feel emotionally affected by losing 25% of your account.
Well, the simplest way is to divide the Kelly output by four. You have effectively hidden 75% of your account balance from Kelly and it is now optimised to avoid a total wipeout of just the 25% it can see.
This gives 6.6% / 4 = 1.65%. Of course different trading approaches and different risk appetites will provide different optimal bet sizes but as a rule of thumb something between 1-2% is appropriate for the style and risk appetite of most retail traders.
Incidentally be very wary of systems or traders who claim high winning trade % like 80%. Invariably these don’t pass a basic sense-check:

• How many live trades have you done? Often they’ll have done only a handful of real trades and the rest are simulated backtests, which are overfitted. The model will soon die.
• What is your risk-reward ratio on each trade? If you have a take profit $3 away and a stop loss $100 away, of course most trades will be winners. You will not be making money, however! In general most traders should trade smaller position sizes and less frequently than they do. If you are going to bias one way or the other, far better to start off too small.

How to use stop losses sensibly

Stop losses have a bad reputation amongst the retail community but are absolutely essential to risk management. No serious discretionary trader can operate without them.
A stop loss is a resting order, left with the broker, to automatically close your position if it reaches a certain price. For a recap on the various order types visit this chapter.
The valid concern with stop losses is that disreputable brokers look for a concentration of stops and then, when the market is close, whipsaw the price through the stop levels so that the clients ‘stop out’ and sell to the broker at a low rate before the market naturally comes back higher. This is referred to as ‘stop hunting’.
This would be extremely immoral behaviour and the way to guard against it is to use a highly reputable top-tier broker in a well regulated region such as the UK.
Why are stop losses so important? Well, there is no other way to manage risk with certainty.
You should always have a pre-determined stop loss before you put on a trade. Not having one is a recipe for disaster: you will find yourself emotionally attached to the trade as it goes against you and it will be extremely hard to cut the loss. This is a well known behavioural bias that we’ll explore in a later chapter.
Learning to take a loss and move on rationally is a key lesson for new traders.
A common mistake is to think of the market as a personal nemesis. The market, of course, is totally impersonal; it doesn’t care whether you make money or not.
Bruce Kovner, founder of the hedge fund Caxton Associates
There is an old saying amongst bank traders which is “losers average losers”.
It is tempting, having bought EURUSD and seeing it go lower, to buy more. Your average price will improve if you keep buying as it goes lower. If it was cheap before it must be a bargain now, right? Wrong.
Where does that end? Always have a pre-determined cut-off point which limits your risk. A level where you know the reason for the trade was proved ‘wrong’ ... and stick to it strictly. If you trade using discretion, use stops.

Picking a clear level

Where you leave your stop loss is key.
Typically traders will leave them at big technical levels such as recent highs or lows. For example if EURUSD is trading at 1.1250 and the recent month’s low is 1.1205 then leaving it just below at 1.1200 seems sensible.
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If you were going long, just below the double bottom support zone seems like a sensible area to leave a stop
You want to give it a bit of breathing room as we know support zones often get challenged before the price rallies. This is because lots of traders identify the same zones. You won’t be the only one selling around 1.1200.
The “weak hands” who leave their sell stop order at exactly the level are likely to get taken out as the market tests the support. Those who leave it ten or fifteen pips below the level have more breathing room and will survive a quick test of the level before a resumed run-up.
Your timeframe and trading style clearly play a part. Here’s a candlestick chart (one candle is one day) for GBPUSD.
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https://preview.redd.it/moyngdy4f5h51.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=91af88da00dd3a09e202880d8029b0ddf04fb802
If you are putting on a trend-following trade you expect to hold for weeks then you need to have a stop loss that can withstand the daily noise. Look at the downtrend on the chart. There were plenty of days in which the price rallied 60 pips or more during the wider downtrend.
So having a really tight stop of, say, 25 pips that gets chopped up in noisy short-term moves is not going to work for this kind of trade. You need to use a wider stop and take a smaller position size, determined by the stop level.
There are several tools you can use to help you estimate what is a safe distance and we’ll look at those in the next section.
There are of course exceptions. For example, if you are doing range-break style trading you might have a really tight stop, set just below the previous range high.
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https://preview.redd.it/ygy0tko7f5h51.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=34af49da61c911befdc0db26af66f6c313556c81
Clearly then where you set stops will depend on your trading style as well as your holding horizons and the volatility of each instrument.
Here are some guidelines that can help:

1. Use technical analysis to pick important levels (support, resistance, previous high/lows, moving averages etc.) as these provide clear exit and entry points on a trade.
2. Ensure that the stop gives your trade enough room to breathe and reflects your timeframe and typical volatility of each pair. See next section.
3. Always pick your stop level first. Then use a calculator to determine the appropriate lot size for the position, based on the % of your account balance you wish to risk on the trade.

So far we have talked about price-based stops. There is another sort which is more of a fundamental stop, used alongside - not instead of - price stops. If either breaks you’re out.
For example if you stop understanding why a product is going up or down and your fundamental thesis has been confirmed wrong, get out. For example, if you are long because you think the central bank is turning hawkish and AUDUSD is going to play catch up with rates … then you hear dovish noises from the central bank and the bond yields retrace lower and back in line with the currency - close your AUDUSD position. You already know your thesis was wrong. No need to give away more money to the market.

Coming up in part II

EDIT: part II here
Letting stops breathe
When to change a stop
Entering and exiting winning positions
Risk:reward ratios
Risk-adjusted returns

Coming up in part III

Squeezes and other risks
Market positioning
Bet correlation
Crap trades, timeouts and monthly limits
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***
Disclaimer:This content is not investment advice and you should not place any reliance on it. The views expressed are the author's own and should not be attributed to any other person, including their employer.

Hi AusFinance, i thought i would write on a topic i'm rather passionate about, and hopefully offer some 'food for thought' and an alternative to the standard answers of 'Super is the best environment for your money'.
Disclaimers:

1. this is not financial advice, i am merely trying to offer some food for thought
2. these examples are greatly simplified, they do not take into account interest rate risk, legislation risk (both on super, on changes to tax, etc..).
3. The case study below does not take into account the ability to margin lend inside super. the ability is there, such as Bell Potter's Equity Lever platform, but this is not available to your average retail/industry super, hence it is excluded.

Margin lending for the uninitiated:
For those of you unaware, margin loans are borrowing to invest. Your shares/fund units act as security that let you borrow money to buy more shares/fund units. These are given different levels of "Loan to Value Ratio" aka LVR.
a 75% LVR means you can make up a total investment with a minimum of 25% your money, and a maximum of 75% borrowed money. So with $2,500 you'd be able to borrow up to $7,500 (Making up a total portfolio of $10,000).
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Why borrow to invest?
Simply put, Margin lending amplifies your gains and your losses. I have included a table below to demonstrate what a margin loan will do to a $25,000 investment at an 8% p.a. return at different LVRs. I am using Leveraged Equities variable 4.24% interest rate on their direct investment loan as the interest cost - the product offers access to the vast majority of funds and shares that an investor needs, it's just lacking advanced features like options trading (who cares!)
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https://preview.redd.it/42p6co191lb51.png?width=786&format=png&auto=webp&s=764b15d0695792766367cc05b5adae78f3af840a
Here we can see the return improve from the standard 8% all the way to 11.8% if using 50% LVR. But in my opinion, 50% LVR is too risky for many investors appetite here, even if it is my ideal point. Instead, i would direct your attention to 35% LVR.
Why 35% LVR?
a 35% LVR comes with a number of benefits to an investor doing standard VAS/VGS/VDHG style etf investing.

1. Increased returns - as we can see it takes an 8% return and increases it to a 10.1% return
2. Returns slightly understated - The return is not factoring the effect that the interest will have on your tax return - it is tax deductible.
3. Low chance of a margin call.

Let's talk about #3. Margin calls are without a doubt the scariest part of margin lending, and i don't blame you for being afraid of them. Many people who leverage too aggressively and fly too close to the sun get hit with a nasty cycle where:

1. Their investment falls into margin call territory because it has dropped
2. They are forced to sell their assets at the worst points in the market to get out of the margin call
3. they miss out on the recovery because their excess cash was used covering margin calls on the way down.

But this is where a 35% LVR is so appealing. the calculation to figure out where your margin call will happen is:
1-(Loan/(Lending Value + Buffer)).
So if we take a standard favourite of Ausfinance such as VAS, VDHG etc, we can see that they have a LVR of 75%. Industry standard buffer is 10%. so let's figure out a margin call on a $25,000 investment, with $14,000 borrowed funds (35% LVR):
1-($14,000/(($39,000*0.75)+($39,000*0.10))) = 58%
it would take a 58% drop in the portfolio to bring it to a margin call. This is the portfolio dropping from $39,000 to $16,470.
This requires a staggering drop before you experience a margin call, and if you are concerned reducing your LVR to only 25% will still improve your return and increase your chance of never being margin called.
You have time to add to your holdings with equity only (buying a dip + decreasing your overall LVR). the important thing is you can manage your risk and it requires truly a cataclysmic level of decline before you experience a margin call ,and at that point that may not be your biggest concern.
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Why all the fuss? What's the point of risking being margin called?
It's all in that % return. in the following example i will use ASIC's compound calculator, along with the following parameters:
$25,000 initial deposit (your capital), $0 regular deposits, annual compounding, and a 30 year time horizon. The only assumption is that as the portfolio grows in capital value, the 35% LVR is maintained.
Case 1 - 0 LVR (AKA [email protected]%) - after 30 years of compounding at 8% you end up on $251,566
Case 2 - 35% LVR (AKA compounding at 10.1%) - after 30 years of compounding at 10.1% you end up on $448,291
Verdict - Case 2 ends up being $196,725 better. a 78% superior return
Every % matters so much in a long term strategy, it is truly impossible to overstate how important it is to long term outcomes.
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Case Study: Super Showdown
As a final demonstration of the power of a low leverage strategy we will put two different cases head to head. Let us assume that a 30 year old intends to retire at age 65, and has the option of either having $50,000 in super, or invested at a 35% LVR.
After retirement, they will either 1. Take the money tax free in pension phase or 2. pay capital gains tax by cashing out their own 'pension' each year, with their marginal tax rate being 30% (using the currently legislated but not implemented rates). Case 2 will overstate their tax slightly, as i will not scale it, i will just hit the whole thing at 30%.
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https://preview.redd.it/86c7xcrc7lb51.png?width=530&format=png&auto=webp&s=045a1774106ac8d8ac848decb04bec9a142bdc52
We can see that with the CGT discount, paying 15% tax is actually better than paying a 0% tax rate due to the higher return. It's an out-performance of $508,681
But okay, i hear you, CGT discount may be gotten rid of, let's recalculate it with no discount:
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https://preview.redd.it/yafmmg6p7lb51.png?width=530&format=png&auto=webp&s=d9ae4b0db5de48808ca202f7c6e40d599c34c065
Even without a CGT discount (and 30% flat is more tax than you'd pay on a CGT discounted method on the highest marginal rate currently) there has been an out-performance of $306,102
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What do i hope you take away from this?
Even if you decide that the risk of margin lending is too much for you, or that i'm absolutely insane to choose an outside of super strategy that relies on borrowing to invest, i hope that i have given you something to think about.
the one thing i hope everyone takes away from this just as a general point is the sheer power of small changes in your long term return %.
I really strongly believe in conservatively leveraging safe and boring investments to boost that all critical return over the long term to create outstanding long term results.
minor edit: fixed up some grammar

tl;dr - Earnings is gonna be lit!

PRPL earnings is tomorrow, 8/13, after hours. Any other date is wrong. Robinhood is wrong (why are you using Robinhood still!?!).
I'm going to take you through my earnings projections and reasoning as well the things to look for in the earnings release and the call that could make this moon even further.
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Earnings Estimates

https://preview.redd.it/w3qad4gb9ng51.png?width=854&format=png&auto=webp&s=7a88656a9867d0e40710736f61974a22b5f4a631
I'm calling $244M Net Revenue with $39.75M in Net Income, which would be $0.75 Diluted EPS. I'll walk you through how I got here

Total Net Revenue

I make the assumption that Purple is still selling every mattress it can make (since that is what they said for April and May) and that this continued into June because the website was still delayed 7-14 days across all mattresses at the end of June.
May Revenue and April DTC: The numbers in purple were provided by Purple here and here.
April Wholesale: My estimate of $2.7M for Wholesale sales in April comes from this statement from the Q1 earnings release: " While wholesale sales were down 42.7% in April year-over-year, weekly wholesale orders have started to increase on a sequential basis. " I divided Q2 2019's wholesale sales evenly between months and then went down 42.7%.
June DTC: This is my estimate based upon the fact that another Mattress Max machine went online June 1, thus increasing capacity, and the low end model was discontinued (raising revenue per unit).
June Wholesale: Joe Megibow stated at Commerce Next on 7/30 that wholesale had returned to almost flat growth. I'm going to assume he meant for the quarter, so I plugged the number here to finish out the quarter at $39.0M, just under $39.3M from a year ago.
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Revenue Expectations from Analysts (via Yahoo)
https://preview.redd.it/notxd6hhbng51.png?width=384&format=png&auto=webp&s=aa0453414f467aa6c5bf72ce8a8046c0ae6e62a5
My estimate of $244M comes in way over the high, let alone the consensus. PRPL has effectively already disclosed ~$145M for April/May, so these expectations are way off. I'm more right than they are.

Gross Margins

I used my estimates for Q3/Q4 2019 to guide margins in April/May as there were some one time events that occurred in Q1 depressing margins. June has higher margin because of the shift away from the low end model (which is priced substantially lower than the high end model). Higher priced models were given manufacturing priority.

Operating Expenses

Marketing and Sales
Joe mentioned in the Commerce Next video that they were able to scale sales at a constant CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). There's three ways of interpreting this:

1. Overall customer acquisition cost was constant with previous quarters (assume $36M total, not $93.2M), which means you need to add another $57M to bottom line profit and $1.08 to EPS, or
2. Customer Acquisition Costs on a unit basis were constant, which means I'm still overstating total marketing expense and understating EPS massively, or
3. Customer Acquisition Costs on a revenue basis were constant, which is the most conservative approach and the one I took for my estimate.

I straightlined the 2.2 ratio of DTC sales to Marketing costs from Q1. I am undoubtably too high in my expense estimate here as PRPL saw marketing efficiencies and favorable revenue shifts during the quarter. So, $93.2M
General and Administrative
A Purple HR rep posted on LinkedIn about hiring 330 people in the quarter. I'm going to assume that was relative to the pre-COVID furloughs, so I had June at that proportional amount to previous employees and adjusted April and May for furloughs and returns from furlough.
Research and Development
I added just a little here and straight lined it.

Other Expenses

Interest Expense
Straightlined from previous quarters, although they may have tapped ABL lines and so forth, so this could be under.
One Time and Other
Unpredictable by nature.
Warrant Liability Accrual
I'm making some assumptions here.

1. We know that the secondary offering event during Q2 from the Pearce brothers triggered the clause for the loan warrants (NOT the PRPLW warrants) to lower the strike price to $0.
2. I can't think of a logical reason why the warrant holders wouldn't exercise at this point.
3. Therefore there is no longer a warrant liability where the company may need to repurchase warrants back.
4. The liability accrual of $7.989M needs to be reversed out for a gain.

This sucker is worth about $0.15 EPS on its own.

Earnings (EPS)

I project $39.75M or $0.75 Diluted EPS (53M shares). How does this hold up to the analysts?
EPS Expectations from Analysts (via Yahoo)
https://preview.redd.it/o2i1dvk6hng51.png?width=373&format=png&auto=webp&s=27e63f7934d85393e1f7b87bf2e2066c28047202
EPS Expectations from Analysts (via MarketBeat)
https://preview.redd.it/psu5rajfhng51.png?width=1359&format=png&auto=webp&s=0612d43777c644789b14f8c5decbe36f41925f5e
These losers are way under. Now you know why I am so optimistic about earnings.
Keep in mind, these analysts are still giving $28-$30 price targets.
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What to Watch For During Earnings (aka Reasons Why This Moons More)

Analysts, Institutionals, and everyone else who uses math for investing is going to be listening for the following:

• Margin Growth
• Warrant Liability Accrual
• Capacity Expansion Rate
• CACs (Customer Acquisition Costs)
• New Product Categories
• Cashless Exercise of PRPLW warrants

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Margin Growth
This factor is HUGE. If PRPL guides to higher margins due to better sales mix and continued DTC shift, then every analyst and investor is going to tweak their models up in a big way. Thus far, management has been relatively cautious about this fortuitous shift to DTC continuing. If web traffic is any indicator, it will, but we need management to tell us that.
Warrant Liability Accrual
I could be dead wrong on my assumptions above on this one. If it stays, there will be questions about it due to the drop in exercise price. It does impact GAAP earnings (although it shouldn't--stupid accountants).
Capacity Expansion Rate
This is a BIG one as well. As PRPL has been famously capacity constrained: their rate of manufacturing capacity expansion is their growth rate over the next year. PRPL discontinued expansion at the beginning of COVID and then re-accelerated it to a faster pace than pre-COVID by hurrying the machines in-process out to the floor. They also signed their manufacturing space deal which has nearly doubled manufacturing space a quarter early. The REAL question is when the machines will start rolling out. Previous guidance was end of the year at best. If we get anything sooner than that, we are going to ratchet up.
CACs (Customer Acquisition Costs)
Since DTC is the new game in town, we are all going to want to understand exactly where marketing expenses were this quarter and, more importantly, where management thinks they are going. The magic words to listen for are "marketing efficiencies". Those words means the stock goes up. This is the next biggest line item on the P&L besides revenue and cost of goods sold.
New Product Categories
We heard the VP of Brand from Purple give us some touchy-feely vision of where the company is headed and that mattresses was just the revenue generating base to empower this. I'm hoping we hear more about this. This is what differentiated Amazon from Barnes and Noble: Amazon's vision was more than just books. Purple sees itself as more than just mattresses. Hopefully we get some announced action behind that vision. This multiplies the stock.
Cashless Exercise of PRPLW Warrants
I doubt this will be answered, even if the question is asked. I bet they wait until the 20 out of 30 days is up and they deliver notice. We could be pleasantly surprised. If management informs us that they will opt for cashless exercise of the warrants, this is anti-dilutive to EPS. It will reduce the number of outstanding shares and automatically cause an adjustment up in the stock price (remember kids, some people use math when investing). I'm hopeful, but not expecting it. The amount of the adjustment depends on the current price of the stock. Also, I fully expect PRPL management to use their cashless exercise option at the end of the 20 out of 30 days as they are already spitting cash.

Positions

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https://preview.redd.it/tho65crvkng51.png?width=1242&format=png&auto=webp&s=6241ff5e8b26744f9d7119ddef7da86f163c741d
I'm not just holding, I added.
PRPLW Warrants: 391,280
PRPL Call Debit Spreads: 17.5c/25c 8/21 x90, 20c/25c 8/21 x247
Also, I bought some CSPR 7.5p 8/21 x200 for fun because I think that sucker is going to get shamed back down to $6 after a real mattress company shows what it can do.

UPDATES

I've made some updates to the model, and produced two different models:

1. Warrant Liability Accrual Goes to Zero
2. Warrant Liability Accrual Goes to $47M

I made the following adjustments generally:

• I reduced marketing expenses signifanctly based upon comments made by Joe Megibox on 6/29 in this CNBC video to 30% of sales (thanks u/deepredsky).
• I reduced June wholesale revenue to 12.6M to be conservative based upon another possible interpretation of Joe's comments in this video here. It is a hard pill to swallow that June wholesale sales would be less than May's. The only reasoning I can think of is if May caused a large restock and then June tapered back off. The previous number of $19.0M was still a retrenchment from the 40-50% YoY growth rate. I'm going to keep the more conservative number (thanks again u/deepredsky).
• I modified the number of outstanding shares used for EPS calculations from 53M (last quarters number used on the 10-Q) to almost 73M based upon the fact that all of the warrants and employee stock options are now in the money. Math below. (thanks DS_CPA1 on Stocktwits for pointing this out)

Capital Structure for EPS Calculations
From the recent S-3 filing for the May secondary, I pulled the following:
https://preview.redd.it/qw7awg8w7sg51.png?width=368&format=png&auto=webp&s=66c884682ddb8517939468ab1e6780742f55d427
I diluted earnings by the above share count.
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Model With Warrant Liability Going to Zero
https://preview.redd.it/cz2ydomi4sg51.png?width=852&format=png&auto=webp&s=53cc457a3143cabb16bfff9a1503054a9a8c0fca
Model With Warrant Liability Going to $47M
https://preview.redd.it/o2hltrgf5sg51.png?width=853&format=png&auto=webp&s=41cbe73a7aa0894a86a09ccc9179b100e9d3372d
A few people called me out on my assumption, that I also said could be wrong. My favorite callout came from u/lawschoolbluesny who started all smug and condescending, and proceeded to tell me about June 31st, from which I couldn't stop laughing. Stay in law school bud a bit longer...
https://preview.redd.it/dd4tcdue4sg51.png?width=667&format=png&auto=webp&s=d27f3ad40c702502ee62f106b6135f0db2c1e7be
One other comment he made needs an answer because WHY we are accruing MATTERS a lot!

Now that we have established that coliseum still has not exercised the options as of july 7, and that purple needs to record as a liability the fair value of the options as of june 31, we now need to determine what that fair value is. You state that since you believe that there is no logical reason that coliseum won't redeem their warrants "there is no longer a warrant liability where the company may need to repurchase warrants back." While I'm not 100% certain your logic here, I can say for certain that whether or not a person will redeem their warrants does not dictate how prpl accounts for them.

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The warrant liability accrual DOES NOT exist because the warrants simply exist. The accrual exists because the warrants give the warrant holder the right to force the company to buy back the warrants for cash in the event of a fundamental transaction for Black Scholes value ($18 at the end of June--June 31st that is...). And accruals are adjusted for the probability of a particular event happening, which I STILL argue is close to zero.
A fundamental transaction did occur. The Pearce brothers sold more than 10M shares of stock which is why the exercise price dropped to zero. (Note for DS_CPA1 on Stocktwits: there is some conflicting filings as to what the exercise price can drop to. The originally filed warrant draft says that the warrant exercise price cannot drop to zero, but asubsequently filed S-3, the exercise price is noted as being able to go to zero. I'm going with the S-3.)
Now, here is where it gets fun. We know from from the Schedule 13D filed with a July 1, 2020 event date from Coliseum that Coliseum DID NOT force the company to buy back the warrants in the fundamental transaction triggered by the Pearce Brothers (although they undoubtably accepted the $0 exercise price). THIS fundamental transaction was KNOWN to PRPL at the end Q4 and Q1 as secondary filings were made the day after earnings both times. This drastically increased the probability of an event happening.
Where is the next fundamental transaction that could cause the redemption for cash? It isn't there. What does exist is a callback option if the stock trades above $24 for 20 out of 30 days, which we are already 8 out of 10 days into.
Based upon the low probability of a fundamental transaction triggering a redemption, the accrual will stay very low. Even the CFO disagrees with me and we get a full-blown accrual, I expect a full reversal of the accrual next quarter if the 20 out of 30 day call back is exercised by the company.
I still don't understand why Coliseum would not have exercised these.
Regardless, the Warrant Liability Accrual is very fake and will go away eventually.
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ONE MORE THING...

Seriously, stop PMing me with stupid, simple questions like "What are your thoughts on earnings?", "What are your thoughts on holding through earnings?", and "What are your thoughts on PRPL?".
It's here. Above. Read it. I'm not typing it again in PM. I've gotten no less than 30 of these. If you're too lazy to read, I'm too lazy to respond to you individually.
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