Via the Wall Street Journal
- You'd think these would be salad days for a repo man. So why is Tony Cooper laying off tow-truck drivers, trying to sell his impound lot and wasting half the night chasing down a waitress and her lipstick-red 2002 Jeep Liberty? Bad times for debtors, it turns out, aren't necessarily good times for debt collectors.
- "People are doing everything they can now to hold onto what they've got," says Mr. Cooper, owner of Professional Auto Recovery LLC. "Do you think they're going to wait [around] to give up their cars? They hide them. They fight over them."
- Revenue fell 23% in 2008 from the previous year. Competition has driven his per-car fee from the $350-to-$400 range to as low as $250. He's trying to save money by selling his lot but can't get a decent offer. He's laid off five of his 45 employees.
- The repo industry faces a surprisingly sour outlook, especially companies working for subprime lenders. Nationwide, repo orders rose to 1.67 million last year, from 1.49 million in 2007, reflecting defaults on cars bought over the previous 12 to 24 months, according to Manheim, a used-car auction company. But, in an ominous sign for repo men, vehicle financing is down 32% from a year ago, according to Experian Automotive.
- When credit was easy, many delinquent borrowers just handed over the keys.(that says a lot in and of itself about the culture) They could always get another car. (so does that) Now, many debtors are desperate to keep their vehicles. "When you do find them, they're the ones who are going to come out raising Cain," says Mr. Cooper.
2 comments:
Just curious Mark - do you list your performance from last year anywhere? You seem to have stopped keeping track once the market tanked...
What was your total return for 2008? Thanks.
I tried to post a history of what happened under the menu item "portfolio/performance" but here is a quick summary
I gave up on 2008 because I was using a different website to track my performance and first I could not short individual names so that killed half the strategy and second there were 3 days in October where the ETFs I was using were changed from 1 exhange to another in the real world and the tracking system did not recognize that so I was frozen. Could not trade them and that was in a period where the mkt was moving 5 to 6 percent a day. I literally lost 11 percent in 1 day because I was frozen out. So I gave up in disgust at that point.
There were no stop loss orders either in Marketocracy (the old tracking system).
I was beating the mkt generally from 20 to 30 percent from Aug 07 to 08 even with the handcuffs above and then gave back some of that in Sept and then that 3 day period in October when I was frozen out from almost half my portfolio I threw in the towel. Didnt have any tracking for a few months but then a reader found Investopedia for me which allows shorting and limit orders. So i started effectively from scratch. If you click on archives you can go week by week under fund performance and see the progression from aug 07... I used to do performance reviews weekly until I gave up.
So I dont have any clean answer...Frankly I had many excellent short calls in casinos, banks, retailers, REITs in 2007 and 2008 that I could never take advantage of because I could not short individual stocks so even when I was beating the market by 20 to 30 percent it was understating what it should have been. I ended up using Ultrashorts as hedges and despite starting to use them at the peak of the market (fall 2007) I ended up losing money on 3 of 4 of them (even though the indexes they were betting against fell 50%). So it was a very lame representation of what I was trying to accomplish in terms of strategy. The old tracking system was suited for a typical fund that only bought long positions...not for my style.
Overall I beat the market handily in 2008 but not sure if I would of been positive, negative or where exactly if all tools had been available to me.
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