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MOU that is now being called off because Israel went ahead and did what is good for Israel? Whay I enjoyed is the news of Israel capturing a huge network of tunnels paid for by Iran with estimates of several 100s of hezb fighters and drone operators running short on water and food.

I'm a bag holder here since September 2022. You think it's a hopeless case, so time to throw in the towel admitting defeat?

During about the last month or so, I have sold [all out] small positions in the following Danish mid and small caps : SOLAR.CPH - Solar A/S, RTX.CPH - RTX A/S, SPG.CPH - SP Group A/S, & NORTHM.CPH - North Media A/S. Loosers, laggards, or I just lost interest in and, or patience with them, or legacy stuff not bought by me, but by my sister in law before I took over for her [SOLAR], all, to move on.

Added shares during this week in the following companies, a few in each of them : CDI.PA - Christian Dior SE [CofB&F Investment Ideas forum topic], BAIN.PA - Société des Bains de Mer et du Cercle des Etrangers à Monaco S.A. [CofB&F Investment Ideas forum topic], WY - Weyerhaeuser [CofB&F Investment Ideas forum topic], ENTRA.OL - Entra ASA [Link] , & WALL B.STO - Wallenstam AB [Link]

https://x.com/ihtesham2005/status/2067336730693509150/video/1 Bill Ackman video, first half is a great pitch for owning Fairfax and second owning JOE (he talks about neither though)

And I 100% agree with this. I am lucky to have spent some 1-1 time with him and discussed investments with his team. will also be seeing /meeting him at a conference tomorrow. Excited! His book is my investment bible and assessing capital allocation is the most important aspect in my investment decision making.

Yeah, @Sweet, It's kind of pathetic. Politics is about getting stuff, sh*t done. Not about hanging out on SOME, bothering, pestering others.

Excellent point. The prospect of double digit returns without a sizable risk of loss of capital is an ideal investment for me personally. For more than ten years now I have set my personal expectations for investment returns at somewhere in the range of 6 to 8% annually. That’s the level that should allow me to reach my reasonable goals for income in retirement. I would be well satisfied with that result. Finding a candidate for inclusion in my portfolio that has outpaced this target for the last five years, with a realistic prospect of doing so for the future five years as well, is already “icing on the cake” for my personal needs, and as you note, the business model of Fairfax and current store of unrealized gains may well produce results skewed to the upside. Fairfax under Prem’s stewardship for 40 years has produced stellar annualized returns of roughly 19%. I don’t need Fairfax to produce anything like this for the next 40 years in order to achieve my personal wealth goals, and in fact, even the achievement of their current target of 15% would be far in excess of what I would hope for. I am reminded of Charlie Munger’s comment regarding Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett’s stewardship thereof, made sometime near the turn of the century:

I agree it’s hard to be precise but I find it an interesting endeavor. Personally, I would include the CDS, hedging, TRS all of it and not exclude them. They were decisions taken by management at the time to maximize risk reward of the model. So I would first calculate the all-in number and then if you wanted to strip out specific items you can. I don’t think it would be impossible to approximate a rough FI returns using historic financials (though it will take time and I may make an attempt), and if you have that number you will also have a directionally correct equity return. It would be nice if management did the hard work for us as I’m sure they have the numbers ~15% CAGR of equity compounding for 40 years is mind blowing and so is 19% of bvps and share price compounding for 40 years.

Now that its available to trade on IB, if there is any interested, I'm starting to build out korean financials for the entire KOSPI index. Looks like this. Still buggy but should see improvements every single week.

Would have been worth $4bn in theory...

Pretty much everyone knows Trump is lying, he basically says this stuff over and over about people he is dissatisfied with for one reason or another. I’ll admit it was funny in his first term but his whole shtick has gotten lame partly because he takes himself much more seriously this time around. Meloni too has been a bit of a drama queen in photos, deliberately pulling faces, which is mildly irritating. I like many of the policies of both, but for Trump specifically, I just don’t like him as a person - I’m sure he will be devastated!

Thanks. I have added in additional data since. Beneficial ownership filings globally (you'll see Berkshire's Japan holdings and Value Act's Japan holdings) Gradually adding mutual fund data one by one of famous funds. Gradually adding full financials. US was relatively easy to add. Working on Japan and Korea and eventually more Europe/Canada.

I hope you enjoyed the MOU in which Iran/US determined Israel’s faith. Please stop thinking Israel is anything more than the sugar baby in the relationship with US.

Thats what I was saying about being invested in the model than the stock/equity picking acumen of HWIC. If they manage to do that, it would be icing on the cake. Even a mere 5% annual gain on the equity book get you to double digit equity returns. And we already currently have billions in unrealized gains in the trunk(almost worth around 15% of total equity worth).

Thanks for proving my point about your absolute lack of understanding of this situation. You think you got something here? You are dropping a clip of DJT, the same DJT who is famous for his hypoerbole and claiming credit for sunrise and you are taking it this pitch as a Pentagon debrief? He is feeding his own brand and not arguing that Hamas, Hezb, or Iran are millitary masterminds. Thanks for confirming your entire worldview is built on 15-second social media clips.

“If it weren’t for the United States of America, with me … Israel wouldn’t exist right now. Israel would have been blown off the face of the earth 100% and every smart person in Israel knows that” -DJT https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2066828883295371641/video/1?s=46

I think it is pretty much impossible to determine a rate of return on Fairfax’s equity book over the past 40 years. What do you include? CDS? Equity hedges? TRS? Some of these were risk management positions, others were investments? But we do know with certainty one thing: Fairfax’s share price compounded at 19% for the past 40 years (US$; dividends reinvested). That is elite performance. Clearly, Fairfax is doing a number of things exceptionally well. Fairfax has two businesses: Insurance Investments. We also know returns from the insurance business were weak pre-2010. As a result, I suspect investments have been an important driver of long term results. What did they return each year? No idea. And I don’t need to know… All I have to do is look at the stock price to know what I need to know. (Fairfax’s total performance has been elite.) I am a quickly becoming a Thordike desciple…. Capital allocation is the most important thing over the long term for a company like Fairfax. Capital allocation drives per share results over the long term more than anything. But assessing capital allocation is not easy - so most investors/analysts ignore it. Instead they focus on other things that are easier.

Well yes the mechanics of an issuer turning on the ability to 'BNPL' something after purchase is relatively easy, and has been done by issuers for many years (I think Amex, Citi, Chase all have had offerings live for years) but they have not made a dent into the integrated at checkout BNPL players. The interesting question is not whether they can create their own offering post checkout, it's WHY these offerings have basically been a 0 while the core BNPL players continue growing at 20%+ annually. A few reasons: (1) The offer AT POINT OF SALE is the product!! You need to offer this while someone is checking out for conversion to be impacted. It's a much harder change in behavior to say to someone "buy it like normal and then split it in our app". An installment plan activated in a banking app after you already bought the thing does none the conversion work. ... whether you think it should is beside the point. It's just clearly not a viable offer based on the fact that these products haven't worked. (2) The economics are all wrong. What makes the BNPL at checkout model work is that the merchant is willing to pay fees because BNPL increases conversion and basket sizes. They're willing to pay ~4% on a pay in four txn vs. 2-2.5% on a normal cc txn. If you are Chase and offering an installment plan post checkout, you are taking on the same amount of risk as a BNPL provider, but not getting paid anything by the merchant to do so. For the group of consumers that would want to use this product, it becomes uneconomic (can you really compete with Klarna or Affirm when they get 4% from the merchant and you don't??) ... further, the lifeblood of the subprime issuers is the revolving interest on balances. Why would you transition someone from that highly profitable product to a much less profitable offering (installment loans). And if the issuers decided to charge substantial interest on the installment loans, why would a consumer use the product when they could get the same loan from Klarna or Affirm at a much better price because the merchant is paying a large chunk (or all) of the fee? (3) Because you are underwriting every transaction, Klarna and Affirm can reach consumers the credit card companies can't. For example, a thin-file consumer can get accepted for a $200 bnpl loan but would never be accepted for a $5k line of credit. Therefore, if a cc company can't bring in a customer on a normal LOC, they won't be able to offer them this post purchase installment product either. The beauty of the BNPL model is the reunderwriting of every transaction. the moat is that the loans are (a) merchant-funded (b) at point-of-sale (c) each txn is reunderwritten (d) signing agreements with all the merchants who have specific / custom terms that work for them and their customer base (e) the model puts Affirm and Klarna in front of consumers who have traditionally been excluded from the credit card ecosystem so there's a legitimate case that these consumers are incremental to merchants and improve conversion.

More of the same from the International Politics kindergarden sandbox [ ] : - - - o 0 o - - - One would think the two were married, ripe for diworse! [ ]

Sure. It's a risk (that Israel and US will take the high road) Iran took and it paid off. Again, we agree on the outcome but I think Iran is shrewed when it takes risks and up to this point it has been paying off. More so in the last round with Trump.

I think picking a fight with two nuclear capable adversaries and stating that your goal is destroying two nuclear armed states is asking to be nuked into Stone Age. How that is rational is beyond me. Had USA in 1979 or Israel since been run by anyone with guts, Iran and its great civilization (I truly believe that Iranian civilization is a great one and I am not being ironic) would have been wiped off the face of the earth.

It is genuinely embarrassing how much loud, confident ignorance you manage to cram into a single post. You aren't analyzing Middle East politics. You are typing out a fever dream of fiction fueled by TikTok algorithms with zero historical literacy. Let's ground your post a bit. First, your delusion that Iran and its proxies could "eliminate Israel at any moment" if the US steps away is mathematically and militarily brain-dead. Iran couldn't even protect its own proxy leadership from being systematically turned into statistics over a single weekend, and Hamas is trapped in a blockaded strip, having lost nearly 50% of the land from beforec Oct 7th. Believing they pose an existential threat to a nuclear-armed state with one of the most tech advanced militaries on Earth shows you are absolutely no grasp on conventional warfare. Nevermind that Israel won its most decisive victories of '48 and '67 without massive US aid alignment. Second, calling a collection of religious extemeist loons who have economically gutted Lebanon, ruined Gaza, and hidden in tunnels while their chivilians take the hit "discipline and restraint" is a peak Stockholm syndrome. If watching your entire command structure get obliterated by exploding pagesr and airstrikes is your definition of "defeating a superpower", then please, keep on winning. Third, falling for fake internet quotes in 2026 is pathetic. The "gaza holocaust" quote you attributed to May Golan is widely exposed, illiterate mistranslation of a Hebrew interview, where she said she was proud of "ruins of Hamas infrastructure." Seriously, go listen to it and use Google Translate. If you have to invent fake quotes ot make your point, you already admitting your actual argument is a loser. And by the way, this isn't the first time I caught you falling for fake Internet memes from propaganda accounts. You can scroll back many pages back and it's all there. Maybe it's time to reconsider what echo chamber you are in? Finally, trying to use JD to imply US is cutting Israel loose completely exposes your political illeteracy. Vance's entire stance is to cut through the red tape and let israel finish the job faster and harder. JD knows that this particular excursion by Trump was a huge miscalculation and as an American, I do too. I have no clue what Trump was thinking about here and in Trump's fashion, he is trying to bull his way into a deal and disengage, even if it means bullying Israel into stopping its activities. But to think JD or anyone sane thinks that Hamas/Hezb are good guys and the US is going to throw Israel to the wolves is just naive. You lack the basic factual baseline required to have this conversation. Seriously, pick up a history book. It is fascinating how much pro-pal and anti-israel folk just refuse to help themselves and continuoully humiliate themselves. Oh and do consider changing up your X/TikTok algo. I suspect you are getting fed a healthy diet of propaganda.

@skanjete - I visited Prague and it is magical. But, can one get a good enough job there like NYC, Silicon Valley? My son and I saw the Prague Astronomical Clock (The Orloj) in Old Town Square is widely considered one of the city's most underwhelming tourist experiences. lol. But, the people were nice.

If it's not a sneakhead finish eating the tadpoles, it's another invasive specie that ravishes an eco-system. Laws of the jungle.