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Good stuff. Thanks. Ripping today

Depends on your age and marital status but moving to NY is like going to college. Your experience is what you make of it. You can embrace the chaos and energy and go with it or hunker down and ride it out. And you need to be a bit careful because anything and everything is available in abundance and its easy to get sucked in. Its crazy expensive but try and forget that if you can and take advantage of whats available since you probably won't be there for decades. Go out a lot.

I'm up 0.73 per cent 2026H1 [YTD] and it's awesome [- while pretty constantly reinvesting dividends], -at the end [late] of March I was down minus 9.61 per cent. All while none of these focal points matter at all, - long term.

Happy Canada Day! Get out there, enjoy, take some time out with family and friends, and enjoy some of that craft beer while catching the evenings concerts and fireworks. SD

If you think USD devalues 30% as reserve currency status is threatened, and that AI investment eventually turns into a dog .... it's more a matter of when, versus if. If it takes 3 years .... that 24%+ 3-yr CAGR (72/3) is not bad . SD

About : "You can't take the same actions as everyone else and expect to outperform." I have the impression that people mainly interpret that in picking obscure stock or unpopular stock.... You can buy very popular blue chip stocks that everybody and his mum have and outperform...most fund managers/investors are "too much" diversified and with short time horizon... How many people have outperformed owning the most popular stocks...?...just holding for a very long time... Underperforming is a problem only if you are an employee...of course you fell better when you overperform and print money (...even if rationally you should not be...but we are human...).

Our portfolio is almost certain to not resemble anyone else's, and we can attest that Marks is bang on the money . The problem is ability to hang onto the gains ... as you are the outlier, and there are no comparables. While there are techniques to getting around it, you need to invent/refine them yourself, and most often it's via systematic removal of chips on the table. There is also a need to remain flexible; successfully unwind a pair trade, and your portfolio will both look very different, and have spun off a significant block of cash. The resultant weightings may not be what you had in mind, and what happens with that cash matters. Fortunately, with Canada's infrastructure build out, we have one of the best places in the world to deploy it. Assuming continued infrastructure investment, over time we will essentially be building a Brookfield, that both pays a better dividend, and is more o/g versus real estate weighted; eventually, we will hold Brookfield directly. The solution to always 'drawing' in retirement, is 'building'. Good luck! SD

Totally echo the sentiment. Thank you all for generously sharing your knowledge of this industry.

I'm curious as to what 'benefits' you feel it's failed to deliver on? On why 2026 is different in this regard than say ~2021 when $60k was a euphoric bubble top ...but now is sign of death? I dunno about half way around the world - but I expect I may do something like this halfway across town in ~2-years. Ferrari started accepting it too - and it's not because nobody was asking. I think it's funny that you think there is an abundance of Boomers or Gen X in this trade It's been around for 15-years and I still have Boomers/GenX ask me what it is before dismissing the response 30 seconds later. Unsavory characters are everywhere. xAI/Musk don't strike me as bastions if integrity, but nobody is suggesting AI is a scam because of his involvement.

@Viking thanks for starting this thread and for all that you do! Feel free to ignore my request, but I would love it if you wrote an article for this thread expanding upon Buffett’s following quotes about how float can be worth more than book.

We are super fortunate. Happy Canada day!

I sometimes wonder if the 125k mark in Bitcoin will ever be seen again. Or, if that was the all-time top. We’ve had everything from “the most crypto friendly administration in the world,” where everyone and their son’s (and wife, #smelania), has pumped this turd through every means possible to Congress’ enacting of the “Genius” act, along with every Boomer brokerage house stuffing this poop pile into every crypto product/ETF they could conceive of, and 125k is all it could do? What’s going to take Bitcoin higher than that? Especially now, when everyone is competing for capital. It seems to me that AI is the “new cool thing” in town and is actually delivering on it’s promise, where as it’s becoming clear that Bitcoin will never offer any of the “benefits,” or live up to the hype that we were promised by the promoters. I remember being told that Bitcoin’s value was so great because it was “backed by the most powerful computer network in the world!” Welp, seems like some of these “computers” currently being developed by Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI etc. may just be slightly more powerful than a computer network that does one thing…tracks the price of Bitcoin. I was also told that with Bitcoin, you could buy a multiple-million dollar house, half-way around the world, in a matter of minutes! Is anyone actually doing that!? No they are not and they never will. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are much too sharp to carry on the charade of acting like Bitcoin is anything other than a big, money-grabbing scam. They’ll let the Boomers, GenX and the Millenials waste all of their free-time trying to convince themselves, and others, of the “value.” When Michael Saylor, The Winklevoss Twins and Scarramucci are your industry’s biggest supporters, you may want to find another industry.

More gaps, just because it is interesting.

@Gamecock-YT, There are so many valid qualifications aginst the CofB&F 'What are your <last year> return, pre tax' topic, that I'll do my best to keep it alive, running and kicking! It is an - to me, at least - interesting exchange among CofF&B members of experiences had during the year that has passed.

This forum is fertile ground for imposter syndrome. I can't figure out if I suffer from Dunning-Kruger by thinking I have imposter syndrome.

I'll know it is time to start selling my stocks when they start getting popular with the 'in' crowd.

The idea that the consensus here is safe because the average member is 'above-average' is the ultimate behavioral trap. Look at the annual COBF returns thread, it’s a perfect bell curve every single year. Half the forum underperforms the other half, no matter how smart everyone is. A crowded trade is still a crowded trade, even if the crowd has a high IQ. Of course, that bell curve only captures the people who actually choose to post. The year-end thread always seems to be a lot quieter.

On July 1st I always take a little sliver of the day to reflect on how lucky I was to be born in Canada... and what a time it is to be alive... then I go party with others or tramp out into the woods to be attacked by bugs! Happy Canada Day to all Canadians and to everybody who celebrates.

I thought I was the only one here with an "uncomfortably idiosyncratic portfolio". Somehow, I remain relatively comfortable with this short term underperformance. Oddly enough, days like today my portfolio frequently does the opposite of the market 1.5ish%

Kennedy Wilson likely delayed these announcements until after the acquisition by Management and Fairfax has closed. It will be interesting to see how Kennedy-Wilson grows over the coming years. Kennedy Wilson and Jamison Announce Joint Venture to Deliver 4,000 Affordable Housing Units Across the City of Los Angeles Kennedy Wilson acquires 421-unit multifamily community in Westchester County, NY for $237 Million Does anyone know if there is any truth to these statements.

Eurobank is planning to invest €1 billion by 2028 in Digital banking, including AI. There is quite a bit of detailed information from this presentation. I have pulled out a few interesting comments. https://cyprus-mail.com/2026/07/01/eurobank-unveils-e1bn-plan-to-reshape-digital-banking At the centre of the strategy is the largest technology investment programme in Eurobank’s history, with approximately €1 billion earmarked for the 2025 to 2028 period to strengthen infrastructure, cloud technologies, data capabilities, AI and new digital services. It said the strategy rests on three interconnected pillars. The first focuses on using data and AI to anticipate customer needs and deliver highly personalised services. The second aims to simplify customer interactions through conversational digital banking. The third integrates banking and non-banking services into broader digital ecosystems designed to create additional value for customers and businesses. A significant part of the presentation focused on artificial intelligence, which the bank said is playing an increasingly important role in customer service, productivity and innovation. Its AI ecosystem includes EVA, the bank’s customer virtual assistant, myEVA, an internal AI voice assistant for staff, the GenAI Factory platform and the Digital Brain programme. AI is already being used in areas including mortgage assessments, customer feedback analysis, contract processing and the development of new digital services. Eurobank said its GenAI Factory combines Microsoft Azure, EY.ai Agentic Platform and NVIDIA accelerated computing, while a strategic partnership with Fairfax Digital Services makes it one of the first banking groups in south-eastern Europe to adopt structured Agentic AI solutions. The bank is also developing an enterprise-wide Digital Brain with Accenture to integrate AI throughout customer experience and internal operations, while its Global Delivery Centre in Pune, India, established with LTM, formerly LTIMindtree, and Fairfax Digital Services, supports innovation across the group’s international operations. Eurobank added that more than 1,500 employees completed specialist AI training programmes totalling over 17,000 hours during 2025 and 2026, while the bank continues supporting the MSc in AI for Digital Transformation at the Athens University of Economics and Business. Its Digital & Technology Hub has recruited around 250 new professionals in recent years, while its Digital Factory, comprising 13 agile teams and 146 specialists, has reduced the development time for new digital products from approximately 30 weeks to just eight weeks.

They did sell their stake in a life insurer they had owned part of with White Mountains, but that is different from selling a wholly owned insurance subsidiary, which Fairfax has been known to do. https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-MBB-40289

@John Hjorth Thanks John!

Yeah, absolutely. Though you could also argue that if we hope that the average person here is 'above-average', it's not unreasonable to have some consensus CoBF stocks, which hopefully over the longer-term will compound (as they have done historically). Part of the problem (not such a bad one...) is that a reason these have become material positions is because they've gone up a lot in the past. And so then the really tough part happens - do you trim or sell, or is that a dumb thing to do if the business is doing OK? I still don't know. And yes, six months is nothing. This topic was meant to be reasonably light-hearted, just a grumble and acknowledgement that even though I know all the rational arguments, sometimes I still struggle with it. And I find it particularly frustrating when the 'good businesses' I own (I hope!) are underperforming while one or two sectors are rocketing up, backed by a ton of retail speculators using leverage! I'm jealous!

If memory serves right, I think Berkshire's cost basis for DVA is around 15 USD!