Jump to content

Leaderboard

Popular Content

Showing content with the highest reputation on 03/24/2026 in Posts

  1. When I read this, it seems dismissive of the common sense probabilistic bets they made and continue to make, which may not be how you intended it. Most capital can’t make the same bet because the institutions are investing other people’s money. There aren’t many expected value / probabilistic investors around and most investors don’t respect us because we don’t invest like they do but it is a valid strategy. Worked for Buffett especially in the partnership days and Templeton etc… I have great respect for quality investors. I cosplay as one with small parts of my portfolio with mixed success (KNSL going badly right now but it’s a great business). The multiple expansion in quality compounders forced me to think long term and I think that’s really helped my returns since then. I never would have predicted would have such a concentrated position in anything ever even 5 years ago when I started buying FFH but the risk/reward seems that good. As an expected value investor I know I could be wrong but the odds that I’m wrong in a way where I don’t meet my 10% hurdle seem very low over the next 5 years. If I’m even remotely right though, I should handily beat my hurdle. I might beat it spectacularly. That’s a possibility when buying Fairfax but probably not when buying Costco. Quality investors follow Buffett’s rule #1, never lose money. Expected value investors expect to be wrong a third of the time. They also expect to underperform the market for long periods of time but if it’s a successful strategy they will also beat the market for long periods of time. Expected value investing is an absolute returns game. Quality investing has been hijacked by the relative returns crowd. Most self-described value investors are quality investors with a value filter on the buy decision. The ones that are out of business are the ones who used the value factor to inform, the sell decision. Never sell has all of the assets. It’s worked because growth and predictability factors have high correlation with stock prices. The value factor hasn’t had high correlation with stock prices for a long time. Most institutional capital is trying to beat the market in the short term. That’s how they keep the capital. That means keeping up with the quants. That’s why they are selling Fairfax despite the incredibly low valuation. They don’t even bother predicting expected return. Gross premiums are slowing. In every other sector this means the stock price is going down, so they sell. What’s surprising to me is how much they own. To keep the stock flat despite earnings beats every quarter means they owned a lot and might still. The big multiple expansion we saw from 2020-July 29, 2025 was due much more to institutions chasing the revenue growth than anything else. I think value investors were selling on the way up because the multiple was expanding from 0.6x to almost 1.7x BV. A lot of investors on this board contributed! Since June 2024, between index demand and buybacks over 2.1m shares have been spoken for. I was also buying on pullbacks. My position is up 68% since then and I used leverage to fund it. Channeling Buffett Partnership days. I think it’s a similar kind of market from what I have read. Now we are getting the big multiple contraction as momentum investors continue to unwind their positions. The beauty is the multiple can contract 20% and the stock might be flat. The share count will also be much smaller. We might have $2.4b to spend on buybacks between proceeds for Poseidon ($400m held at holdco) and dividends from the insurance subsidiaries. We are allowed to pay out $4b and the last few years they have been doing half and using it for buybacks.
    1 point
×
×
  • Create New...