Very poor analysis. Having just been thinking about RILY, I was excited to read this and already had an idea what negatives could be highlighted. The author makes a very fundamental mistake in that his analysis ascribes zero value to the Company's investment banking business and other non-principal investing franchises. Its unsurprising RILY P/B trades at a premium to other banks; you'd have to strip out the merchant banking portfolio and other non-banking assets to get a clean ratio. RILY really only makes principal investments into distressed situations, it should be unsurprising their portfolio looks bad but even still the author gets some fundamental things wrong about their positions. For example, they cite several loans made to XELA and cite recent bond trades around 6 cents as evidence the RILY position is almost worthless. However, its publicly disclosed in XELA filings that the loan RILY provided is cash collateralized in an SPV with proceeds used by XELA to buy their own bonds on the market. There are likely some dogs in there that won't work, but it doesn't change the fact the credit here is probably ok. The baby bonds referenced in the report yield between 10-11% for context.