racemize

right, the underlying assumption there is that the patent is directly tied to your products. As a patent agent, a large number of software/tech patents that I write and get issued are fairly generic and are not specific to individual products--thus, they can have a much longer useful life.

Ah, I see, I understand the original sentence now. However, I'm not sure that using such a model makes sense for patents (when considering real value and not capital schedules), particularly tech ones. Even with a low future life (assuming still greater than 2 years), if it is a strong patent, it can still be very valuable. In other words, I'm not sure the patent value decays that fast. For example, I don't think a patent's value would decrease at all (or at least not that fast) for the first 10 years. I'd model it as having a steady value for a long period and then a precipitous decline. Now valuing patents in the first place--that's tough.

You probably were doing this on purpose, but the average patent length being 2.5 years seems very conservative. Patents last 20 years and a quick search shows them with 2500 issued patents (thought some of them are design patents, which may be of limited use). For example, the first few I looked at had priority dates >2005. Even on the 200th patent, the priority date was 2007. If the patent website weren't being so slow this morning, I could give a better estimate.

Could you explain the 40% look through tax and compare it to the compensation of his secretary? i.e., why look through taxes apply to buffett and not his secretary.

I've been considering construction/construction products (e.g., carpeting). However, I think there has been a run-up recently, so there may not be deals right now. I still need to look into it.

this may be old news to you guys, but there is a conference call scheduled: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Fairfax-Announces-Conference-iw-435002284.html?x=0

I think the key issue is whether they would/could get a good allocator--tech companies typically do not do their own allocations very well. Were I a shareholder, I'd rather they just buy back shares or pay a dividend so I could allocate rather than hope they find a competent allocator themselves.

I'd be curious as to how he got his earnings power estimates for AIG (I believe he was estimating at 6 dollars a share?). When I went over the filings, I didn't get that high of a number. However, we haven't been able to get him in our 401k, so I'm not currently a shareholder...

This link got posted in reddit and I thought it was pretty good. Then it turned out it was Plan Maestro! I figured I'd post it for him. http://variantperceptions.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/charting-banking-xxiv-pre-tax-pre-provision-earnings/

It may be somewhat excessive, but between my wife and I, we have 12 devices.

I guess there isn't a full interview video yet?

do we know the size of his RIM position relative to the portfolio/FFH? How big a bet is this?

I'm pretty stunned by this--it makes me somewhat nervous as a FFH shareholder, but I can also see it working out. I'm hoping for the best!

West, speaking from my own experience, it took me quite a while to set up a spreadsheet (using google docs) to manage my investments and calculate various metrics (e.g., TWRR, IRR) with live updates. When I started, it wasn't too clear how to do all this and my investment broker is terrible about performance (Fidelity), although they claim to add it soon (I bet it is only TWRR though). Potentially, this might be of value; however, I probably also wouldn't have paid very much money for the service, so perhaps that isn't too useful to you.

I think apple does this with snippets or some name like that--it never interested me though.

Adding on to what Cardboard said, with a more "normal" economic environment and ROA/ROE, earnings power should be much higher than the .97 cents. That said, it will probably take a while for all of that to come through.

Just finished reading: [amazonsearch]The Five Rules for Successful Stock Investing: Morningstar's Guide to Building Wealth and Winning in the Market[/amazonsearch] Although it has a terrible title, it is probably one of the best introductions to value investing that I have read. It starts out covering all of the basic topics: research, moats, margin of safety, long term holding, selling. It also gives several mistakes to avoid in investing. After going through that, it goes through basic accounting and financial statements with several examples. It also points out several accounting tactics to look out for. It wraps up these sections with valuation and intrinsic value, with examples. Finally, it covers several industries with information on what to look out for. Overall, I would recommend this book first (or close to it) for people getting into investing.

I actually know that author professionally! Crazy. Now I can talk value with him when I see him.

Tuesday was ex, Thursday was report.

Actually, that isn't true, LifeSize (now owned by Logitech) does the same thing for cheaper than (or at least as cheap as) Polycom.

I think there is a link problem.

This seems like a fair number of shares--does the board as a whole have enough shares to act as a significant group?

Thanks for posting this--it is very interesting. Out of curiosity, how much of your portfolio did you commit to the 13 net nets? Are you doing buy and hold for good companies for the remainder?

Hi all, I've read quite a bit about the various bubbles and crashes in the stock market throughout US history. Many of them seem readily identifiable during/prior to the time that they occurred (e.g., various times when stock become extremely overvalued, such as tech bubble, 1929, electronics boom, etc.). However, I'm curious as to how identifiable the current crisis was--was the board/members of the board aware of what was happening? Additionally, how identifiable was it for individual companies, such as AIG? In that case, my understanding is that many of the CDS contracts were written under a single rogue group, which seems fairly hard to spot.

I think it's more like one side wants to increase revenue and make large cuts and the other side refuses to any increases in revenue whatsoever (didn't all the candidates refuse 10:1 in the debate?).