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Awesome! Hope you have a great time! Feel free to ping me directly on restaurant, hotel, brewery and/or other recommendations.

sold some January puts on Venture Global at $10 and bought some calls at $12.50.

We're headed to the Algeria Austria game! Looking forward to it! Just picked the KC match with the cheapest tickets since we aren't big soccer fans.

Today’s games are on FOX over the air. Interesting that they’re on Peacock too. KC is presently really excited and busy with Argentina and Algeria both playing and practicing here as their home base (England & The Netherlands too). Seems like all have great fan bases. I didn’t know what to expect, but wow!

One of the things that used to drive me a little crazy with Prem was his constant praising of every CEO - even the ones who were clearly terrible. It made him look like a dummy. Fast forward to today… he has toned it down. And his collection of CEO’s are much higher calibre. I love it.

I don't know about you, but I am not invested in Fairfax because I have some great conviction that they will beat the index. In fact purely based on their equity investments over the last 17 years that I have been observing the company I would have to say my confidence is pretty measured in this regard. 50/50 at best. My reason for being invested is that I believe in the integrity of its leadership and love the way the company is structured. I believe the quality of their Insurance side is now underrated, I like the leverage that a float of that size gives them, I think their bond team is stellar, and I like their international exposure. As long as they don't completely suck on the equity side, we should do reasonably well. As you saw in one of the earlier posts by Viking about the lost decade, they still managed annual returns of 4% despite crappy equity investing and low interest rates. If that's the extent of the downside scenario, sign me up.

I am salivating at backing up the truck on this lower. Hamblin Watsa are probably putting restraints on Prem to keep him from hedging/shorting this stupid market. He is buying shares back instead that’s what you do at Fairfax 3.0

A good review of arguably the period I felt most pessimistic ever about Fairfax. All while markets were ripping higher year after year. Perhaps it felt slightly outside of your time window, I don't recollect the exact dates but another peach was Sandridge energy which was built into an almost 60M share 10% position. I believe Prem even brought the since disgraced Tom Ward to one of the AGMs. Soon after he was fired by the board and eventually the company declared bankruptcy in 2016.

The fact that the principals are retaining their stake in the newly formed company, makes it more likely that that is the case. Because if they felt they were getting a great deal, they probably would've cashed out.

Ah, ok, this makes sense to me, and what @Spekulatius says. Essentially, my probability estimate was way off, which explains the discrepancy in our views.

It is always good to run the numbers. And size matters - focus on the largest holdings. Fairfax's largest holding by a country mile is Eurobank. How has it performed YTD? Value creation = ~$1.3 billion. Rate of return = 25%. Outstanding. The company just paid Fairfax a dividend ($95 million). But that timeframe is too short. Five year return is better. How has it performed since Dec 31, 2020? Value creation = $6.0 billion. Annual rate of return = 45%. Investors? A big yawn. Let's expand the analysis. What is Fairfax's second largest holding? It is FFH-TRS. How has it performed over the past 5 years? Despite being flat year over year, it has been outstanding. What is Fairfax's third largest holding? Poseidon. How has it performed over the past 5 years? It has been outstanding, with a big investment gain coming in Q2. BIAL? Orla? I could go on and on... Fairfax's equity investment have been having an epic run over the past 5 years. And investors? They aren't happy...

https://babylonbee.com/news/oh-no-trump-negotiates-deal-with-england-and-now-they-have-the-colonies-back

I watch this in Peacock. Their Telemundo channel has all the games but commentators are speaking Spanish (which I don’t mind).

The protest were already over 2 month when the war started. The Iranian regime is very good at suppressing protest and they had similar ones several times before. Also, the regime had more popular support than most in the west believe. Even those that don’t exactly like the regime because of corruption likely want to keep an Islamic state rather rather than a western style secular democracy. You can see that on how people vote in surrounding states.

You have a point there!

Peller is one of the largest players in Canada. I suspect this is one of those Recipe type investments to consolidate the industry over time. The wine pays for the land...the land goes up over time in value. Cheers!

Like this guy? Kristi Noem's husband... Maybe she should shoot those puppies! Cheers!

Only thing missing was "YMCA" playing all night! We know that the GOP is made up of many closeted gay men and women...I think they may be the biggest supporters of LGBTQ+ rights...just from the closet! It's a shame they don't have the courage to come out. Cheers!

Abraham Lincoln, incidentally the first ever Republican, was a voracious reader. He had less than one year of formal education before reaching the age of 18. Most of what that great man knew came from a book. Of course some of our favorite heroes here, being both Buffett and Munger, essentially devoted their entire lives to reading. Has Donald Trump read a single book in his whole life? The same man who is making unilateral, world defining decisions near daily, has he ever read one book? One? Newspapers? Financial statements, periodicals, literally anything that would give him the knowledge required to make a good decision? Anything? Maybe he read The Cat in the Hat.

Tvk.to and ipco starter

You mean like this man's man: Cheers!

Probably prepping for the K shares redemption

Arguably the expected return for the equity portfolio to justify the stock price is under 5% given the leverage. I really don’t expect them to beat the S&P 500 in the equity portfolio but think they can over long periods of time. Currently the accounting returns are significantly lagging the economic returns so much I think over the next 5 years 15% for accounting returns is more likely than 5%. The last three years they have done 20% according to Wade on the most recent conference call. Fairfax is about generating absolute returns not relative returns. I think it’s similar to my own process. Beating the market over the long term is the output but it’s not a goal seeking exercise. Fairfax has the added benefit of the leverage due to float and borrowing at the holdco which can turn “pedestrian” equity portfolio returns into 15%+ BVPS growth.

The following chart is from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. This survey is used to create the basket for measuring CPI, which is interesting: Look at what comes in dead last as a share of household expenditures: reading. The average household spends six times more on tobacco products and alcohol than on reading. Nothing better in my mind explains the advent of Trump.

Fairfax announced new $300M Notes offering. https://www.fairfax.ca/press-releases/fairfax-launches-c300-million-senior-notes-offering/