Hielko

You also have to remember that at the moment the amount of new houses being build is lower than the amount needed for replacement / new households, so at some point in time the excess capacity build before the GFC will be gone and housing will recover.

Lucky for you adventure travel is one of the cheapest ways to travel! You might want to check some scientific evidence. To quote wikipedia @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food: Probably not true for most people; you don't need some high-end durable tool if you use it once a year. Agree with this a lot And a high quality desk chair!

I think your argument for increasing the dividend is poor. A company shouldn't take actions just to support the stock price, but because it's going to increase value for share holders. If they are indeed as undervalued as you say it seems to me that cutting the dividend and using all cash flow to repurchase shares is a better allocation of capital.

That's the most ridicoules part of the story. Leaving the US wasn't enough, he needed to give up his citizenship. As far as I know the US is the only country in the world that has this ridicoules tax rule where you are taxed even if you are living in another country.

I understand it's your board and he's a friend, but should you really respond differently based on who is discussed? I don't think it's creates a healthy atmosphere if you don't allow criticism; different viewpoints are one of the most valuable resources on this board.

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/05/10/995211/jpmorgan-whale-harpooned/

My best guess is that the ARB guys are doing this. However, knowing the cash is limited to $70M they would likely recieve a combination of cash and shares. They could offset the risk by shorting ABH knowing they will get shares back shortly to replace and make a nice, hedged return. That could explain the ABH downside recently and supports my line of thinking to manually transact. I actually thought that was a good idea (and bought the shares before reading the fine print closer...), but it doesn't work. The amount of cash that's available is prorated based on the number of shares tendered, and the share part of the offer isn't worth as much as it used to because ABT is down since the offer was made. So no way to make easy money (unfortunately...)

I own one Chinese company. It's has been public since 1996, has been paying out more dividends that they raised in capital in the '96 IPO (also no debt) and think this is the only way to be reasonable confident that you are not getting screwed; you need to see that management is willing to return (a lot) of capital to shareholders.

I'd like to buy some more stuff in Europe as well, but not finding a lot so far (do already own both ARGO and PRIS.B). Something in spain/portugal/greece with a lot of exports and little debt. Maybe I should checkout COR.Portugal.

From: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/abitibi-still-unable-convince-fibrek-145300057.html Since Abitibi has extended the offer date to the 4th of may I would guess that the Mercer bid is also going to be extended. Going to be interesting to see how this is going to play out. With Resolute holding 48% it's going to be hard for Mercer to get 50.1%, but not impossible.

Why do you think he will piss off many value investors? Seems to me that the paper is just a summary of value investing and some previous research, nothing new.

Always a good read, but I'm skeptical if 'career risk' is really the biggest inefficiency in market pricing. I suspect that fund managers often make suboptimal decisions, not because of career risk, but the same behavioral biases that also affect investors without this risk (loss aversion/anchoring/etc).

Thanks to HFT it's possible to offer smaller bid/ask spreads, and this makes it possible for you to buy and sell cheaper.

Funny how a total non news item removes a few billion in market value.

I have an online poker background as well, but can't say I made close to 1.5M yet, so at the moment I'm still playing poker and trying to find good investments to put my excess cash to work. About what you should do; you should ask yourself what you enjoy doing most, and try to make that happen. I don't think you really want to retire, just make sure you are doing something you want to be doing.

why aren't shareholders simply putting annual reports online from those dark companies?

the Netherlands :)

haha yeah, I also read it but most of the time I'm clueless on what exactly is discussed. Most of my sites I have in my rss-reader are already mentioned I think, but I do like to add this one: http://csinvesting.wordpress.com/ It's not about individual stocks, but more about the investing process itself. How to value a business, think about competitive advantages and more. I also blog @ http://alphavulture.com. Mostly on companies I've bought or considered buying.