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@Sweet I was also a late speaker (begin with 4 years). My older brother did all the talking. I had some speek therapy and all was fine. We have also twins (8 year old) and my wife always said that she thinks one has ADHS. No, he doesn´t has ADHS. He is just a normal emotional very active boy (he can 5 back flips in a row in a trampolin ). Don´t let the fears of you about your kids let you go crazy. I read a good medical article that children are overdiagnosed and than they get some kind of stigma. I would do some speek therapy and all will be fine.

I don’t have a great understanding of all the different executives at Fairfax, so thanks @Viking for this overview. Just as an aside, I didn’t realize Paul Rivett was such a longtime coworker with Prem. Out of idle curiosity I googled him and turns out he is CEO and president of Western Investments of Canada. They clearly are attempting to follow the Fairfax playbook, with an insurance company base (Fortress) and a value investing framework. Pretty early days, and even an aggressive premium growth target for Fortress to $100M by 2028 makes them small potatoes by comparison with Fairfax. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, even the loss of this one executive is a credit to the business model. I don’t know much about Francis Chou’s connection to Fairfax…was he part of Hamblin Watsa? He gets called out in the GFC storyline for being a solid proponent of buying Credit Default swaps. With his purchase of StoneTrust Insurance he would appear to be further down the road to creating a Fairfax-like company than Paul Rivett is with Western Investments. Too bad StoneTrust is not publicly traded, otherwise I’d be happy to consider being a shareholder…. I am also really growing to appreciate the value of decentralized insurance subsidiaries. There is just great value in having more than a dozen insurance subsidiaries with their executives all steeped in the Fairfax culture and focused on disciplined underwriting. With an emphasis on promoting from within, this makes it more likely to be a sustainable model going forward. I worked for an insurance company with everything centralized and succession planning was somewhat hit or miss. It was never clear what executive would make a good CEO when one was needed…they typically came from within from a lower level…such as a specialist in accounting, or finance, or even legal. They each would have been given rotations through divisions where they would get some general management experience for a few years before getting an opportunity to be CEO. A few didn’t seem to be great fits, some were too old to realistically put their stamp on the company since there was a hard age limit of 65, and in other cases, unexpected deaths, exits for personal reasons, or for poor business performance, led to a bit of a revolving door at the top until finally the Board selected an executive from outside the insurance industry altogether. That last choice was the nail in the coffin, and the company was sold in an auction process a few years later. The Fairfax structure strikes me as likely being a much better environment than what I experienced.

Sprinkling of down names this week: ADBE, NOW, INTU, DPZ, MSFT, UBER

Our therapist is a play-based therapist. She started with the toys our son liked and slowly branched out into other toys/physical activities with a different set of vocabulary/actions. One thing to note is that our son still has difficulty communicating in new environments. We are working through it but it comes with the territory.

That's probably what will happen. At $40, that's still less than half the price of cable. Streamers will become the defacto cable companies. You bundle as much or as little as you want. You order all NFL games for $10 a month during football season...or you might want to order UFC fight on a specific night for $25...etc. Rent a movie just in theatres...$15. You want Bloomberg, CNBC and other financial stations...$3 a month more. Cheers!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/25/trump-news-at-glance-supreme-court What a world we live where a supreme court justice, a supposedly serious and grown-up adult, is actually making this argument. I've heard more convincing stuff from toddlers: Because US immigration law entitles migrants arriving in the US to seek asylum, the supreme court case hinged on what, exactly, it means to “arrive in”. In Justices Samuel Alito’s opinion, he wrote: “In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place … before the person enters that place.”

Egypt vs Iran tomorrow Pharoah vs Chosroes

Fairly easy to do with beauty products/ cosmetic because SG&A is huge (marketing expenses). Check out COTY how to go broke with ~65% gross margins.

If they do it like that, they need to increase the subscription rate to $40 or so (basically a cable bundle Netflix branded) and a lot of people will cancel. They can do this as an add on for additional cost but will get way fewer takers doing so.

I found it curious that Scotland has a team separate from UK. Looks like there are some exception that are grandfathered in.

Sweet, didn't know you were a fellow twin dad, I also have twin 3yr old boys. I am not an expert regarding diagnosis, kids, parenting, well....any topic for that matter, but I know that watching my boys, being twins does change things a little bit with regard to development. One walked and crawled first, but talked last, one is more physical constantly wanting to rough house and be thrown around (he's the linebacker) and the other is more calculated, enjoys the roughhousing but would rather ambush you than run head on like his brother. One can throw a ball and catch already easily, his arm mechanics are surprising so much so that we had to tell him not to throw things in the house anymore because he threw with enough force to break things....regularly, when his brother throws, he doesnt have the arm movement down at all and the item usually goes straight up in the air and comes down on his head and Im not worried about him having musculoskeletal issues. For some things I felt like it was an advantage, one sees the other do it and then has it quickly, like using the senior bird dog to train a puppy haha. One of my sons is very outgoing and the other is slightly more timid, but then once he sees his brother do it, then hes totally fine and all in. Just wired that way and I think I wouldnt have noticed it if they werent side by side. I have seen some instances where one takes a backseat to the other, and I only noticed it when I had started spending more time with just one of them vs both of them together, when I spent the day with the "quieter" one it was almost like he came out of his shell without his brother around! A significant difference. I think its normal for parents to wonder where their kids are in development, and there can be pressure. Our boys are not fully potty trained, have just started telling us they have to pee during the day still need reminders, will go stand behind the couch and hide when they poop in their pullup, and wear diapers at night, we have tried the underwear all weekend plan and tried a totally naked weekend, doesnt seem to stick yet, wife has pressure to get them potty trained, probably mostly from herself comparing to others and some probably from family. I told her that I didnt know any kids in college that wore diapers, it'll be fine and we have a couple years before kindergarten anyway, just keep trying to make progress, it'll happen. Good luck with whatever direction you go, parenting is a unique experience for everyone. We can tell you love and support them...with that everything will work out

Not really. For example, the NFL and NHL charge cable companies a flat fee to show their games. FOX is paying the NFL $2.25B a year for 11 years under the current contract to show games. NFLX can make a bid and get the rights, and then show those games globally across their platform. FOX gets maybe 20-40M viewers for the big games other than Superbowl...and those games would be FOX's highest viewed shows. Whereas NFLX has 325M subscribers and growing! Cheers!

There was an article in the June edition of UK Corporate Financier magazine on the MW Eats acquisition by Fairfax. Of course Prem had to ask this question. As 82-year-old Mathrani allegedly told Watsa when asked to keep working for longer: “I can’t hold your hand while I’m being led to the crematorium.” https://www.icaew.com/-/media/corporate/files/technical/corporate-finance/corporate-financier/full-editions/2026/corporate-financier-june-2026.ashx

A close friend of mine is a Doctor of Psychology and specializes in autism disorders for young children. Now that I have two sons I pick her brain every so often on behavior that seems bizarre to me. She tells me it’s normal and also told me they are constantly flooded with parents bringing their kids in for evaluation. She said “End of the day, kids are just F&$@ing weird” By all means though it doesn’t hurt to get it checked out. The more info you have the better imo. It does seem like there is over propensity to diagnose these days and that the spectrum is ever expanding. I also think the term “autism” has changed quite a bit over the last few decades as there is more awareness and understanding.

Check this out. https://www.amazon.com/Late-talking-Children-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465038344 https://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Syndrome-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465081401/ref=pd_sbs_d_sccl_1_3/142-2505292-2946855?psc=1

Yeah I think the old FAH was just a mistake. Helios makes a lot more sense as a partner and structure, but has had a hell of a time through covid, inflation, rising rates, the emerging markets fundraising cycle, the PE stranded asset problem, and the way US markets have dominated returns. In a way this is a bet that some of those trends stabilise or reverse, funds flow back to EM, and Helios 2026-2040 looks more like Helios 2004-2020 than Helios 2020-2025.

More TSLX below NAV.

Looking at msft

Specialists do amazing jobs, but there is also a need to give kids their space. One of our nephews used to get very frustrated as nobody would play monopoly with him (a favourite game), 'cause he was good at it, and way too competitive. It came to me to break dishes, swap the monopoly money out for Zimbabwe dollars, and play him for hours at a time, both of us picking up $200,000 at a time for passing Go . Sadly, he ultimately went into the computer industry .... c'est la vie! At boarding school, I wore orthopaedic boots as a kid, as I had extreme flat feet, and no arches; it doesn't go well when you're very junior, and now a target. However, you quickly learn to change the game, and there were no more objections after I dragged in a live mamba (poisonous snake) with one of its fangs buried in the heel of my boot. The boots were eventually replaced with oversized ankles and wide feet, that were great for water polo ... disabilities can also be opportunities. SD

The issue is that the sports content provider hold the cards and charge per viewer basically. So the Netflix advantage of having more scale really doesn’t work here.

Lol! Do you know if your parents were worried or you referred for an assessment? Thank you for this. I get very frustrated at times, but when I stand back I realise that my frustration is borne out of a supposed expectation of what a child should do at age x. My father says kids don’t follow a manual and develop at their own pace. Your son sounds a bit like mine. He too has some traits which might be a symptom to those who don’t know him. He probably had more of them when he was younger but has largely grown out of them. However my instinct is that, yes he is different, but it’s not autism. My feeling is that it is a speech delay which has knock on effects to other things which involve communication. I feel fairly confident, but I could be wrong. Until he speaks we won’t know for sure. Regarding the therapist who your son took to. Did she practise any kind of specific therapy like play based, or the Colorado method or ABA?

Thanks to @73 Reds @Parsad @thepupil and @lnofeisone for your replies. I’ll admit it has been a lonely slog. Couple of things, I’m from the UK, so everything has a waiting list! He’s on a development assessment (autism included) and hearing assessment waiting list. He also is with the NHS speech therapists who sees him bi-monthly. In addition, we have him seeing a private speech therapist fortnightly, she says that until something clicks, or you find a way to drag just a few communicative words out of him, you just have to wait and when it does come it will be a flood. She’s confident he will speak and that he understand a lot. She says that unlike many children she sees with speech issues, he is by some way the best natured and most attentive. No tantrums or anything like that. All of which is very encouraging. We have also approached school and mentioned his speaking, and that he has a communication delay, and we will be working to get him a classroom assistant for his first school year. I should also say that he is only partly potty trained even approaching four! Thankfully he was born at the very start of the school year and will be the eldest in class so he still has 14 months before he starts. Regarding autism diagnoses, I’ll admit I was and continue to be skeptical. I won’t go into it much, but I will say that in the course of my lifetime it was a debilitating condition recognisable at 100 yards, to something were the people who are autistic appear indistinguishable from anyone else. My worry about such a diagnosis at a young age is that it bounds him to lower expectation and differential treatment which is simply unnecessary and ultimately damaging. If I close my eyes, and think about him when he’s 25, I can see a well adjusted young man… provided he speaks because everything else fixes itself. It’s really the key to bringing on his behaviours. It’s a tough call, and I’m not arrogant enough to think I have it right, so that’s why he is part of the aforementioned programmes. If it becomes clear he does in fact have autism, or some other development issue, we can get whatever support he needs. I’m fortunate that he is obsessed with books. I have been reading to him but I need to do more of it, much more maybe. A few other things about him. He’s a twin! He has a brother who was also a late speaker, he didn’t speak until he was 3 and now he won’t shut up. His twin brother speaks for him all the time, and whilst he is kind and loving, his brother is a dominant character. Finally, I didn’t know this until we had children, but on my wife’s side there is a pattern of high IQ boys who speak late. At least three relatives who didn’t speak until 4 or 5 and who otherwise turned out fine and intelligent. So yes, a lot to think about, and even from the replies in this thread, it seems to be a more common that many know.

These things are just a swap with no expiry date, and a more frequent settlement schedule. But the real market isn't predictions, it's the institutional ALM market. Create a 'unit' with a nominal face value of 1,000 and a nominal term of 1,000+ (proxy for infinity) .... and you have a zero coupon bond with a duration of 1,000+ . Duration x change in yield between MTM intervals = MTM settlement. A duration of 1,000+ ..... multiple times higher than today's typical leverage. Viscous little bastards ..... SD

This is a great open-minded post. Open mindedness is incredibly rare when it comes to Trump.

There is also one area where many European countries have the US beat and that is something else not measured in $ and €'s.....and thats trust....many European countries when measured still have all the hallmarks of high trust societies - citizens trust in the institutions and trust in fellow citizens...if you've never experienced this you probably don't realize what a quality of life enhancer it is......the US in its period of economic outperformance over Europe has seen both those metrics degrade meaningful such that many surveys place it as now a medium to medium-to-low trust society.