racemize

I've got a rough adjusted book value at $448.5, which includes the $33 BVPS bump on the sale. Is there more to adjust by?

Is there a "Please god stop talking about this" option? I doubt anyone is learning anything new at this point, and we have a bunch of concurrent threads going on this nonstop.

+16% on ~$6m, ~20% compounding since 2010 (although not so much the last 4 years). Sold a few things too early, plus took some hits on the hurricanes (fair amount of insurance). Getting increasingly cautious and safe on ideas.

UCCMAL, feel like giving us any SSW related updates? I think this is one you followed for a long while?

am i correct in saying that the bull case for the prefs now is that because of this tax bill the DTAs are worth less and thus they will have to take a write down and thus this will force trump/mnuchin to act to "set them free"? tax bill should increase the future value of Fannie Mae->better value for unlocking the warrants, from governments point of view.

Also, if anyone finds something written by Buffett that's missing, please let me know. I tried to put everything I could find in it.

As an alternative: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxTPR9eP5nWeeENXNExLcGtCUEk/view?usp=sharing (It took me a long time to make it)

A man for all markets for sure, I’d say.

I thought he was joking?

It's been a while since I put this up, so seems like as good a time as any: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxTPR9eP5nWeeENXNExLcGtCUEk

Depends on what we are evaluating. I think most of the time, we are evaluating the investor’s experience (or are a prospective investor), which is why I presented it net. If it were just to evaluate the skill of the manager, then certainly gross.

... Well Austin's strategy is just what I'm doing plus my partner, who posts on here occasionally. ... I'm not trying to be rude, nor condecending, or anything else here [i have no reason or basis to be so], but this - at least to me - sticks a lot deeper. For your part, [naturally, I'm not referring to Joel [racemize] or Jeff [rainforesthiker] here] please take your time to make up your own mind. Alone doing that, will be quite time consuming, here on CoBF, by reading the board. It has absolutely nothing to do with a "strategy" - in its ordinary business understanding - [in the meaning: "We are at "A", and we want to get to "B", in a certain sense]. In short, it's an investment framework, that you can relate to [no matter what's on your watch list, or in your portfolio], or you can't. Austin Value Capital - Philosophy. CoBF book topic : here. John has done a much better job responding than my lazy answer below—more evidence that we should have him on our non-existent payroll. The book, essays, philosophy, and letters lay out the framework fairly well for anyone interested. My answer related more to how the returns have been generated than what framework or strategy we are using. So, the framework is fixed but the strategy is opportunistic.

Well Austin's strategy is just what I'm doing plus my partner, who posts on here occasionally. The outperformance mostly came from 2010-2013 and 2016, it's been tougher in the last few years. We did a ton of investing in financials from 2011 to the trump run-up and also invest in the usual compounders, now more than ever, given the type of environment we are in.

Regarding Graham, I actually tried to get him on the list. Unfortunately, there are a few holes in his record I couldn't fill in. Moreover, it appears that his record is mostly better than the S&P 500 because of Geico.

Yes, I had forgotten he had done that in the annual letter. I should mention that, in case it isn't clear, this wasn't a new idea, but it seems to not be used very often to evaluate managers' performance. A friend of mine who was a quant just told me this is the normal way of evaluating quant strategies and they use a really nice heat map to visualize the results. Hopefully, I can figure out how to generate those.

FYI, for Chou, I had to go find the S&P 500 in CAD myself, and the data isn't quite lining up with how he reports it (it looks better on his semiannual report for trailing periods than what my spreadsheet says). I'm reaching out to him about it, so there's some possibility that results will be higher/better for him.

Yeah, I was thinking I could send it to them. There's a ton of really cool stuff that could be done, but it requires a lot of decent web programming. Of course, then I'm just handing it to them, but oh well. Well, if you think that it's something you can make money off, you can do what oddball did and roll out your service. Or just talk to oddball and make him roll it out and you get percentage. ;) (and you guys can send me a beer for getting you together ;D ). (Edit: there might be other guys here who would be interested to try to roll out a service. oddball just seems like top choice since he kinda knows the market, possible business size, probably has a lot of software that can be reused from his other project, etc.) If you are not gonna do it commercial, then IMO making it public and promoting it to Morningstar or whoever (Bloomberg?) is a way to go. They'll probably not gonna do anything about it, but c'est la vie. If they do, then good free publicity to you and some benefit for investors. 8) Take care. Yeah, all of those ideas sound decent. I don't think I have the time/energy to invest in making it myself, but I know how a really good implementation would look (which would be particularly nice for brokerages I think). Anyone have any contacts at Morningstar or Bloomberg that would actually look at this? I'll send Nate an email too.

For anyone who wants to do this analysis, I can provide the spreadsheet. It's currently a google doc. Moreover, looking at the data itself gives some more insight on how things actually developed rather than overall statistics, but I didn't want to make this essay 50+ pages so I didn't include all of it.

Yeah, I was thinking I could send it to them. There's a ton of really cool stuff that could be done, but it requires a lot of decent web programming. Of course, then I'm just handing it to them, but oh well.

I've just wrapped up my latest essay, which I think will be of particular interest to this forum. It revolves around how performance is reported and proposes a different statistical method. I then used the method on 19 famous value investors: Warren Buffett (1957-1969), Walter Schloss (1956-2002), Charlie Munger (1962-1975), Tweedy Browne Partnership (1958-1983), Sequoia Fund (1970-Current), Davis Venture Fund (1970-Current), Tom Russo (1984-Current), Francis Chou (1984-Current), Longleaf Partners (1988-Current), Bill Nygren (1992-Current), Chuck Akre (1993-Current), Yactkman Fund (1993-Current), Francis Rochon (1993-Current), Tweedy Browne Value Fund (1994-Current), Guy Spier (1997-Current), Mohnish Pabrai (2000-Current), Bruce Berkowitz (2000-Current), Arlington Value Capital (2000-Current), and Austin Value Capital (our record) (2010-Current). It has definitely shaped my opinion about which investors I want to follow in the future. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxTPR9eP5nWeNTJWOF9lUm1uOFU/view?usp=sharing

It needs both currencies to convert. so NOKUSD is probably what you want.

Yes: =index(GoogleFinance(J3,"price",K3,K3+1), 2, 2) Where J3 is currency conversion (e.g., HKDUSD) and K3 is a date value

I'm not too sure what you are trying to do? Are you trying to convert between two currencies? Here's what I use for getting the CAD to USD currency exchange for FFH price conversions: =GoogleFinance("CURRENCY:CADUSD")

If it helps, I decided to convert my JPM warrants earlier this year as I thought the valuation no longer warranted leverage. I feel like BAC is in a similar spot now.

Buffett on the Nevada stuff: Q – Solar energy in Nevada. Why are there new rules in Nevada on solar energy? Warren Buffett: – The public utility and pricing policy is everything in Nevada as well as other places. There are three commissioners that decide what’s proper. The situation in Nevada in terms of rooftop power was that for the last few years, if you had a solar project on your roof, you could sell back excess power you generated to the grid at a price that was far, far above what we, as a utility, could buy it for elsewhere. They were being subsidized by the federal government. The people who had the 17,000 rooftop installations were selling back to the grid at roughly 10 cents a kilowatt hour energy that we could purchase elsewhere for 3.5 cents or thereabouts. Ninety-nine percent of our consumers were being asked to subsidize the 1% that had solar units by paying triple the market price at what we could otherwise buy electricity and sell it to the other 99%. It’s a question if you wish to have the 99% subsidize the 1%. The PUC in Nevada originally let this small group experiment by giving them this 10 cent rebate. They then decided the 99% should not be subsidizing the 1%. For solar to be competitive, it needs subsidization. Who pays for the subsidy gets to be a real question. I personally think if society is the one benefitting, then society should pick up the tab. I don’t think someone sitting in a house in Nevada should be picking up the subsidy for their neighbor. It is not right for 1 million customers in Nevada to subsidize 17,000 customers. The PUC agrees with that. Greg? Greg Abel, president of NV Energy – One, as you’ve touched on earlier, we absolutely support renewables. We are for solar. We want to purchase renewable energy at the market rate – not where 1% of the customers will benefit and the other 99% will not. A working family in Nevada who cannot afford the rooftop unit, and you ask them if they want to subsidize their neighbor, 2016 the answer is no. By 2019, we will be replacing 76% of our coal units and replacing it with solar energy. Warren Buffett: – Put up Slide 7, it will give you a view of what the situation is. This accounts for all of our Berkshire Hathaway energy operations. In a 20 year period, we will have a 57% reduction in our coal usage. It’s moving at a fast pace. You want to be sure that you treat fairly the people involved in this. Someone pays the cost of electric generation. If you are doing something to benefit the planet, and it’s important that it be done, you should not have the costs assessed for that on a specific person who’s having trouble making ends meet in their job. They are not the ones to subsidize the person who can afford to put the solar unit in.