hardincap

Does anyone know roughly how ESL's portfolio is structured? Many mistakenly assume SHLD and AZO are 30%+ holdings from their look at the 13F filings. In reality, we don't know of any amounts of cash, non equity investments and investments through other entities that Lampert controls. He has analysts that look for special situation and risk arbitrage opportunities. I wonder if he keeps a separate portfolio to do these kinds of trades?

Uccmal, can you elaborate on the decline of Sears Canada over the past two years? Comps fell 8% in Q3.. quite ugly.

I'm no expert in retail, but anyone have a theory why Sears has been performing so terribly this year vs last? 39 weeks ending Q3 same in 2010 (810) (189) The other retailers dont seem to be hurting nearly as bad - TGT, WMT, HD, L all increased Q3 profit from '10. Is Sears becoming irrelevant quickly?

Does anyone know whats the deal with Lampert's purchase of Citigroup in 2007? He supposedly lost 90%+ of his $1B+ investment. Has he spoken about this publicly? Its fascinating how someone with such a good track record got it so wrong

I recall a quote by Burry in The Big Short that went something like, I cant pick stocks in good conscience when I can clearly see this storm that is about to hit and make stockpicking meaningless (liberally paraphrasing) I think its also interesting that he's put a significant amount of his assets into farmland. If that isn't a macro play I dont know what is.

The last 10 years were unlike any other. Total global debt increased by 11% compound rate vs real GDP growth of 4%. Credit growth has outstripped real GDP growth by 275%. Peter Bernholz noted 28 episodes of hyperinflation in 20th century, with 20 occurring after 80s. He found a pattern that a tipping point of hyperinflation occurred after government's deficits reached 40% of its expenditures. The US is past this point. Banks are holding massive excess reserves, which if they decided to deploy or lend out, could increase the money supply by 6 TRILLION, triggering massive inflation. Ken Rogoff along with Carmen Reinhart studied sovereign defaults and put a tipping point of defaults at approximately 4.2x debt/revenue. The US is coming dangerously close. At 16x debt/revenue, Japan may blow up sooner than we all think. With massive tectonic shifts happening in the global economy, consider the performance of traditional value investors versus macro investors. All the winners you can think of off the top of your head - Paulson 07, Burry ('05-'09), Kyle Bass - have been macro guys. Value investors Berkowitz, Paulson '11, Ackman, etc have not done very well at all (first two are down >30% this year). Has value investing become impractical in todays day and age? FWIW, I have been spending an inordinate amount of time on the macro, but have yet to switch my investing style away from cigar butt value to macro.