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Young man no more...Victor Willis passes away at 74! Cheers! https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/01/entertainment/victor-willis-village-people-death-scli-intl

On balance, Fairfax's equity portfolio had another solid quarter, up ~$1.1 billion or ~$50 per diluted Fairfax share (pre-tax). The Greek Freak (Eurobank) continues to deliver MVP caliber performance. Strong US$ is taking gold out behind the woodshed - Orla was the big loser in the quarter. Lots of Fairfax's holdings are doing well - strength is broad based. Looks like the mark to market impact could be slightly negative. BlackBerry will be a wild card - Fairfax has been selling down its position in BB over the past year. If they continued to sell in the quarter the gain will not match what I have below (I used 25 million as my share count). Eurobank paid Fairfax a dividend of $95 million in mid-June. Given it is an associate holdings, it will not show up in income statement. On the balance sheet, cash will increase and carrying value for Eurobank will be reduced (by dividend amount). My spreadsheet does not capture what has been happening at a large number of holdings - like the non-insurance consolidated holdings. As a result, it is a conservative estimate. Of course the big news from an earnings perspective in Q2 is the sale of ~50% of Poseidon that will deliver a realized investment gain of $837 million. In Q3, when the sale of Eurolife's life insurance business to Eurobank closes in Q3 we will see another +$300 million realized investment gain. PS: I attached my Excel file if board members want more details (at bottom of post). Fairfax May 2026.xlsx

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/01/science/synthetic-cell-research Cheers!

Digital currency is indeed the future and it has also been the past for several decades. And that digital currency is cash itself, which has been able to be exchanged digitally for a long time and continues to be exchanged in ever growing amounts. We simply have no need to take an electronically exchangeable currency (cash), convert it to a 'virtual' electronically exchangeable currency (bitcoin et al.), exchange that 'virtual' currency, and then reconvert that 'virtual' currency back to the original electronically exchangeable currency (cash).

Unrealized equity gains of about $1.3b (not counting the tax liability.) On a $42b bond portfolio, it looks like losses might be about 0.8%, or $336m, if rates are up from 4.01% to 4.20% as the 5y treasuries are. Does that look about right to you? What I should have also mentioned is that there will also be the realized gains of $837m from the Poseidon sale that will be booked in Q2. Then there will probably be the $350m gain from the sale of Eurolife to Eurobank, anticipated for Q3. Our investment gains in 2025 were $3050m from equity investments ($841m from the TRSs), $385m from bonds, and -$284m from other investments. It looks like 2026 is shaping up to be as good as 2025, except for the TRSs of course which are currently well down but could recover by the end of the year.

This is one of my favourite throw-away lines I've heard this year...

Happy Canada Day! Bonne Fête Du Canada! Cheers!

Oh wow, you're taking this way too personally. I was just trying to say nicely that to talk about military power at all is an indication of a lack of insight, because it's completely obvious to everyone that USA has a bigger military than everyone else on the planet by several times, and, to non-Americans, it's also obvious that the military victory is only the first step. Like, what person on here thinks that the Canadian military could hold off the American military? (Please put up your hand if yo do.) And what person on here thinks that someone exists on CoBaF who needs to be informed in detail that that's the case? To preempt future discussions, it's also not necessary to explain to people on CoBaF that Elon Musk has a bigger net worth than the average meth addict, or that most humans live closer to Washington DC than Alpha Centauri. Yes, even the Russians! (Though if you are inclined to make those explanations, I respectfully request links supporting each of your assertions.)

Reading comprehension not a strong suit? It may not be. But I see no superior alternative at this point and Bitcoin is the first thing that has come around that has been superior to gold in just about every way. I don't think it's "easy" to do this. I still think you're looking at this from a 1) short term 2) Western perspective and 3) focusing on a very limited subset of Bitcoin's capabilities. Longer term - fiat depreciates without exception. Bitcoin is volatile, but has demonstrated near constant appreciation over intermediate and long duration periods since it's inception. Dramatic appreciation. Relative to fiat. Relative to real assets. That growth will slow - but ANY appreciation is infinitely better than constant depreciation. Outside of the Western perspective, inflation isn't limited to 2-4% per year, or 7-8% in an inflation shock. Your monetary value erodes monthly, or the money is confiscated by the government, or your subject to US sanctions that tank your economy/currency, or your unregulated banks fail, or it gets stolen by gangs/thugs/politicians, etc etc etc Having a hard money that retains/grows over time, is permission-free and censorship resistant, self-custodied, and readily transferable globally are all exceptionally valuable qualities to have basically every where in the world - but more so in developing nations. Agreed. But I think we're seeing societal level changes. People were angry enough about the status quote to elect billionaire felon, rapist, pedo-associate and known-shyster to the White House because they were fed up enough with the status quo to believe whatever he told them about making it better....before making it worse...a second time. It won't let me attach charts for some reason, but are you not looking at wallet addresses with > 0.01 BTC in them or BTC held by ETFs or hash-rate? How could you look at this over 1-, 3-, 5-, or 10-years and claim there is no adoption and use that as evidence against BTC? Because TwoCities believes in selling worthless money before his valuable money and doesn't like selling things when they're down 50% regardless of what we're discussing. I didn't ask. Wouldn't be shocked if it was a no. But they also don't accept PayPal, Venmo, or Zelle which hasn't stopped those being from being widespread forms of payment in the economy. Why would that also have any implications for BTC at this time?

Thanks @dartmonkey without actually going through the calculations, I had a feeling that the MTM gains would be at best flat for q2. The bond yields started to spike higher yesterday so we will see a noticeable impact to earnings from the bond losses.

I guess my point is whether BTC is the best, or any hedge at all? No one argues against the deficiencies of fiat currencies. But where is the adoption? Why didn't @TwoCitiesCapitalsimply use his BTC to pay for the Porsche? Or could it be that the dealership doesn't accept BTC? If so, kind of nullifies the argument that it didn't accept Paypal, Venmo, etc... In the mean time, why hold excess cash or BTC when there are plenty of alternative investments that we discuss here daily which serve as a fine hedge.

I'd be curious what @gfp thinks but gaps on daily candles seem more normal than weekly ones. Weekly gaps seem to get filled at a higher rate by my unscientific observations

It will take a societal level change in order for BTC to become the standard global currency. Someday those "average people" will face differences that aren't widespread today. Will this happen? Truly, I hope not. But I do hold BTC as a hedge against that future tail risk.

Change of value in stock holdings for Q2 Clearly the authoritative source of info for this will be when Viking gets around to posting his table, but as a first guess, I took the 16 biggest publicly traded holdings from the end of Q1 and looked at their value at the end of Q2, assuming no changes in the number of shares hold (an assumption which is unlikely to prove to be true, especially for Blackberry which has gone to $32.6 to $12.65, and which we hopefully haven't sold just in time to miss out on a big gain..) Anyways, the total gains should be around $1.3b by my estimate, with almost all of that ($1.01b) coming from Eurobank, with an honourable mention for the unmentionable fruit stock ($329m) which will surely be smaller than that, and maybe much smaller if they have sold it early in the quarter. All the other changes pretty much cancel each other out, with the biggest in absolute terms being our gold miners Orla (-$190m) and Foran Mining, which has become Eldorado Gold (-$153m). Then come Metlen Energy (+$119m) and Egypt's Commercial International Bank (+$103m), with all the others smaller than $100m. Just for comparison, realized and unrealized losses from equity exposure in Q1 were $82m, so Q2 will be .. much better.

Again, you guys seem to be taking this way too personally. Simply pointing out in terms of military power Canada is not even in the same league. Also the US defeats you mentioned are mostly taking over and trying to convert theocratic societies or communist societies. That is vastly different than Canada just saying. And nobody said anything about occupation....simply saying that the US could easily militarily take Canada out. The boarder and support for or against works both ways...Guerilla warfare and terrorism are never ending I agree. But I don't think that has much to do with a strategic defeat.

Hmm, I send and receive large bank wires several times each month. Seemless and costs nothing. Why didn't you just wire the money to the Porsche dealership? As an aside, I believe digital currency is indeed the future but still have two elementary questions: Why will it be BTC and I still see no relationship between BTC price and value because there are plenty of viable and near cost-free alternatives for average people who typically only hold as much cash as they need.

Fitch has upgraded Eurobank to BBB. https://www.fitchratings.com/research/banks/fitch-upgrades-eurobank-to-bbb-outlook-stable-01-07-2026

Yes. Because those are both still true? You can still buy the same houses, in the same time, overseas with Bitcoin ? It just might require more Bitcoin now given the price movement? But that isnt an indictment of its ability - it's a reflection of the current market price? Additionally, Bitcoin hash rate is down from the peak, but still higher than mid-2025 or the start of 2025 so YoY is still up and more secure than 95% of its existence? So why are you claiming these are somehow different now in June of 2026? No. You just simply haven't stated what's changed to suggest this benefits are no longer present? Still true. It takes 10 minutes to use Bitcoin and send it anywhere. I just paid $30k to a Porsche dealership in Ohio. Guess what? They don't accept PayPal, Venmo, or Zelle. They do accept debit, but my bank blocked the transaction for being above my $20k daily allowable limit ...you have limits on how much of your own money your allowed to spend BTW. Even when I asked them to raise the limit I was told 'no'. So I tried to run $20k on my debit and $10k on my credit card and just eat the processing fees - bank still declined the $20k debit. So I had to pay $20 to wire the funds and then sit in the dealership for 90 minutes while waiting for them to confirm receipt of the wire. Whole ordeal took nearly 3 hours just to make a payment... This is how the traditional banking system works. You require 1) permission and 2) time to spend your own money. And even when you have both, the bank can still fuck it up. Had I wanted to spend Bitcoin, and the dealership open to receiving it, I could have sent the hole amount in 10 minutes for pennies and saved time, fees, and headaches. It's not why I invest - but I can see the benefits to people in under developed markets. I have a hard time I understanding why having global demand would be a bad thing? Or why recognizing the perspective of others is a negative? No - was just a point that Bitcoin is still spendable and being accepted for large purchases because your post implied something had changed there? I'm still not hearing anything supporting your claims of the change that is occurring to remove the benefits that have long been demonstrated? This is a strawman - it wasn't proof it would work out great. It was simply demonstrating that the characters of a handful of involved individuals doesn't detail a thesis for an entire industry. You should probably spend that time in the sun. It's pretty clear that your comments about things having changed were empty and your relying on price confirmation bias instead of an actual developed thesis and evidence

Options are for suckers at these implied vols. Didn’t wanna deal with actually shorting stuff. Tripled levered too much decay, single levered too boring. That’s about all the thought that went into it after for like the 8th time in 2-3 days hearing some mid 20s kids talking about which AI stocks they were buying while online at the store.

OK, I'll play along, but only for a bit as I should be outside enjoying the sunshine. I already listed "backed by the world's most powerful computer" and "being able to buy a mutl-million dollar house, half-way around the world, in a matter of minutes" as two "beneifts" that were promised. And now you need more? Why? Has the argument now changed to "no Bitcoin supporter ever promised any "benefits"? Ok, here's two more. How about "being able to quickly, cheaply and seamlessly move money around the world," even though you can already to this with PayPal, Venmo and Zelle. Or, "if you live in an underdeveloped country and are worried about blah, blah, blah..." yea, because most people here, invest to help out the citizens of underdeveloped counties. Good grief. And now apparently we can add "buying a Ferrari with your Bitcoin" as a "benefit." Because nothing says "wide-spread adoption" like being able to buy a Ferrari with your Bitcoin. And you think the assumption that Boomers, Millennials and GenX are into Bitcoin is funny? Ok, fine. So which generation would you say is most into Bitcoin? Maybe it's "The Greatest Generation"? Any chance you fit into any three of my mentioned generations? Because Saylor, The Winkelvi and the Mooch all seem to confirm that narrative. Finally, pointing to Elon Musk's lack of integrity as some proof that this is investment will work out great, seems like a real stretch, but you are certainly free to try to connect the dots.

curious why this vs shorting an unlevered ETF? or puts or something else. not straightforward at all to me to do it this way.

The 4 year cycle always seems like a load of nonsense to me. Doesn’t really make and logical sense and the sample size of 3 or 4 cycles is too short to draw any actionable conclusions. Although I’ve thought this for a long time and so far it seems to be following the cycle again. Maybe I’ll change my mind if it bottoms later this year and then proceeds to boom in 2027.

Bought a bunch of SSG. Seems pretty clear we re at the phase of the rally where “AIs gonna be big” is all the DD you need and any dumb bartender or grade school teacher is willing to give you that advice.