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Dont get me wrong - never said Truman was wrong to use this new weapon as means by which to bring the Japanese to surrender. We had already committed to concept of destroying Japanese cities by bombing at that point as a means to get them to surrender......before the nuke dropped we'd levelled 60-odd cities at that point killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese. What was another city at that point when we'd done it to 60+? Moving to use the nuclear weapon was a no brainer simply as means to potentially change the trajectory of things away from needing to do a ground invasion. My core point was that people over attribute the Japanese surrender to the nuclear bombs dropping and under attribute the entry of the USSR into war two days after Hiroshima but before Nagasaki. The best evidence as the article covers is Hiroshima on Aug 7th produced no emergency meeting of the Japanese Supreme Council - Hiroshima it seems was just another city being levelled by American bombing. What did produce an emergency meeting of the Japanese Supreme Council was news reaching Tokyo on Aug 9th of the Soviet declaration of war. The answer is both things undoubtedly fed into their surrender. The nuclear taboo is such that we tell ourselves it was 100% the dropping of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that did it. The evidence tells a more complicated story.

ICE, MKTX and TW Thanks Lance

Many thanks for this very detailed article @petec! Unfortunately I bought in here at the end of March 2020, and been watching the disaster unfold ever since, using it as a lesson in humility regarding my own modest abilities. Just to clarify a detail from your article: Helios (the asset manager) posts an annual loss of around USD 8 million, yet was carried on the books at a valuation of USD 104 million at the end of 2025? Is that a correct summary? Honestly that makes me worry about the potential gap between valuation and reality for the other assets... It would have been interesting to see a peer comparison included in your article, for instance with "The Bidvest Group Limited" (BVT.ZA). While buying into that stock during the COVID lows would also have been a mistake, it at least held up reasonably well and paid out some dividends since then.

haha i can do that already. I have all my financial institutions pushing via API into google big query. and have created a google gem called family CFO that can analyze probably 80%+ of my financial picture at almost any given time. I have been a big fan of journaling through my life and find a good amount of benefit from writing down my own thought. Granted my own writing style and grammar sucks so ive often taken to having AI rewrite things for me so they are more coherent to others. I think the exercise of writing my own thoughts on my investments on an annual basis would have some really solid merit from a self reflection standpoint.

Let's add another two months to the trend.

Sounds like they would be merged: "offers to make GoDigit and IIFL Capital subsidiaries of the bank."

This is worth a read (if you can get over the paywall): https://www.ft.com/content/b7a788de-0f31-4b31-992b-45ddf92ccdcb I mean, I don't want to be too much of a doomer, but it's a cycle isn't it: 1) Relax rules and let people buy homes who can't afford them because they only go up. 2) Relax rules and let people violently speculate on the stockmarket, because it only goes up.

Actually, after ready the above further it looks like the highest bid with 10-12% premium over current book. The reported book was rs67/share, which suggest a bid between rs73-75/share. So the new rs77/share is not much higher but the structure with IIFL and Digit is much different. This would also help explain why Fairfax increased their equity interest in IIFL last month to 51%. Doesn't Fairfax own only 49% of Digit?

They have been consistent in saying they are not interested in bidding on the multi year full season contracts. You think that will change? Or are you saying you think they will bid on more one-off sporting events in more sports? Like golf, or tennis or whatever else besides football.

See above for prior post on this. There was an article from May where the government was considering reducing their reserve price of rs94/share by 20%. The new rs77/share bid would line up with that. Adding IIFL and Digit to IDBI bank would transform IDBI to a larger financial company. This would likely be of interest to the Indian government.

If your portfolio up less than 2.5x since then, arguably you have effectively reduced your position when the risk reward has improved. I’m not very good at sizing and unfortunately too good at adding to losers so this is simply an observation assuming you agree with the premise.

Was that bid posted somewhere? I must have missed it.

@Maverick 47 Is it truly a blind spot or merely wanting to protect your own interests? People choose to believe what they want about a lot of things. It is entirely logical to protect yourself based upon your beliefs. Even Blake is taking a rational approach to investing based upon what he believes. The same can be said for so called Trumpers. If they (we) believe that the alternative to Trump would have been much (MUCH!) worse, why is that a blind spot? What I find baffling is the people who tend to criticize Trump the most by and large have no alternative ideas of their own about just about anything.

If accurate, the ₹77 per share bid is 20% more the the prior highest bid when Fairfax and Emirates NBD submitted their bids a few months ago.

This came up in another post, but deserves it's own post. Why CME Is Really Suing the CFTC Over Perps Anyone have any comments or questions about it? Feel free to chime in and if helpful, I'll answer legal questions from the perspective of a derivatives lawyer here's my take: Perps ARE swaps, not futures. The CME wants them regulated as swaps because they are set up to trade (and clear) futures AND swaps and the newcomer exchanges, like Kalshi, are set up for futures only, so classifying them as swaps would cut down the pool of potential competitors The CFTC called them futures because of regulatory capture (Trump Jr is a paid "advisor" to Kalshi and Polymarket) and to keep out defi protocols like Hyperliquid. swaps can be traded off-exchange or on-exchange, but futures must be on-exchange. so by calling them futures, you make protocols like Hyperliquid illegal in the US. The license Kalshi has lets them do futures too, not just prediction markets Most exchanges don't trade 24/7 which is one of the reasons why some of them see Perps as a threat. Perps are easier to understand than options, so market heavyweights think it will suck retail order flow into these products

Shorted MU, small position this morning I'm ready for the pain, searing punishing squeeze pain

https://www.outlookbusiness.com/amp/story/corporate/idbi-bank-divestment-could-revive-as-fairfax-returns-with-revised-offer (Not official) Revised bid for IDBI Bank! TLDR; CSB divestment, IIFL & Digit folded into IDBI Bank

If true, perhaps explains why they boosted their stake in IIFL Capital. It also looks similar to the playbook that Eurobank is following - diversifying earnings (growing the fee based part with Go Digit). IIFL Capital takes it one step further with capital markets. I wonder if the new financial services hire is involved… From Prem’s letter in 2025AR: “We are pleased to report that late in 2025,Hafize Gaye Erkan joined Fairfax as President of Banking and Insurtech. She has a wealth of knowledge of the banking sector through senior positions at Goldman Sachs & Co, Co-CEO and President of First Republic Bank and most recently as Governor of the Central Bank of Turkey. Hafize will initially provide oversight to our banking operations and assist with developing opportunities in the Insurtech space. A big welcome to Hafize.

Well you can try again against South Africa.

Based on MU earnings it doesn't seem like the flow down the AI valuestream is stopping anytime soon... like I hinted before, if this is a bubble, we are not in '99 yet.

Turns out the comment I remembered was from a talk and a q and a session Warren had with University of Florida MBAs back in the late 1990’s. Warren was talking about the Long Term Capital Management debacle and musing about how smart the folks running it were, and yet they still basically went broke. What he said was, “If I ever write a book it will be called Why Smart People Do Dumb Things….my partner says it should be autobiographical.”. Someone else actually did write a book with that title, which is the one I just ordered. I imagine I’d have enjoyed one written by Warren better, but will suspend judgement until I read it.

In your case, if you can figure out a way to feed your investment history into AI, and have it generate it for you...

Interesting @Blake Hampton. I’ve often wondered myself how and why relatives and acquaintances, who I’d generally considered previously to be smart, educated folks, ended up developing massive blind spots in one area or another. That is a bit more nuanced than considering that all folks with such blind spots are necessarily stupid. I think it does have to do somewhat with devotion to one dogma or another, or one particular world view. I think it was either Buffett or Munger who used to call that out as dangerous in an individual. My father-in-law, towards the end of his life, fell down the rabbit hole of emails, early Trump birtherism and scare tactics about Obama necessarily being the start of some sort of socialistic order that would also logically begin to come after his own carefully amassed retirement assets. He believed that folks would start taxing wealth as well as income, and that anyone with money in a savings account would see it taxed away. He was not stupid…he was accepted to medical school at age 19 and graduated before the end of WWII serving in the medical corps as a doctor at age 22. His wife also was bright— graduating with a Ph.D from Stanford at the same age. At any rate, how did he react to the screaming emails about how folks were coming after his savings? He regularly withdrew cash from federally insured savings accounts and deposited them in a safe deposit box at a branch office located in his retirement home instead. As executor of his estate, I did find several hundred thousands in cash in the safe deposit box, which, while they had in fact escaped the potential of taxation, also saw their purchasing power decline with inflation over the ten years they lay there. And there was a risk that he hadn’t considered. One year before he passed away, his retirement community almost burned up in a wildfire in California. He and his wife were evacuated in the middle of the night and couldn’t return for another six months. The building had caught on fire, but didn’t completely burn down. Fortunately, the branch office of the bank on the premises wasn’t affected…otherwise, in an attempt to save a bit of tax, he might have seen his cash burn up completely. Cash in savings accounts is generally held in electronic form, so a fire at one branch office wouldn’t affect the balances held in the accounts, but cash in a safe deposit box is not insured, and would have completely disappeared forever had it burned up. I don’t know how best to protect oneself against the dangers of such blind spots. I think it may involve developing and maintaining a high quality bullshit detector in one’s own mind. I hope I have one, and that as I age, I continue to put it to good use. As an armchair historian, I learned long ago the importance of taking into account the motivations behind the writer of any historical source document. When viewpoints of the same historical event diverge, this can help one determine which ones are more trustworthy and believable than others. The same sort of bullshit detector can be used in a variety of other circumstances, not necessarily historical. When someone tries to sell you an investment, for example, particularly via a cold call or personal visit, what could their motivation possibly be? How could they be paying for their time talking to me? It might have to do with a compensation incentive or commission structure that benefits them, at my expense. At any rate, you’ve sparked my interest. Buffett once mentioned a book called “Why smart people do dumb things.” I think I’ll pick it up and give it a read. I saw another small electronic book called “Why smart people believe dumb things.”. Don’t know if either will be worth the read, but for a few bucks I’m willing to take a chance at learning something that can help me make sense of these conundrums… Thanks again.

Including it here since it includes Digit but this would be huge if true. https://www.moneycontrol.com/banking/mc-exclusive-fairfax-could-bid-5-bn-for-idbi-bank-said-to-offer-to-fully-divest-from-csb-bank-article-13958248.html i wonder if they would only include their stakes and keep Digit and IIFL Capital public.

In 2014, I was 12 years old probably playing my Xbox. I also respect your views, and you are one of my favorite posters. But I still think I'm right.