Milu

Thanks for answers so far, the main reason I still track is a want to see if my results over the long term have been better or worse than just dumping it all into S&P index fund. So far they have been better. But I suppose the question I’d have for myself is if they ended up being worse would i then decide to go the index fund route or not. If I’m being honest I don’t think I would as I enjoy the investing challenge and process. So the tracking of returns is just a habit really that perhaps no longer serves a purpose for me.

Likely a question for some of the wealthier folk on the board but I’m curious if you tracked your returns and CAGR etc during the earlier part of your wealth building but then when wealth got to a certain size it kind of became pointless. Obviously that number would be different for everybody depending on where they live and their lifestyle but if you are a good investor over time you will eventually get to a point where your net worth is large and whether you end up getting 5%, 10% or 20% return on that it mostly becomes meaningless. Do you still like to track it to compare yourself to others or see if you still got it, or do you now just check your net worth every now and then, and as long as it’s not dropping all is good. Maybe some people never tracked their returns, nothing wrong with that either. For me I track things quite diligently but sometimes wonder should I bother.

The challenge I have with buying Salesforce though is that the only thing I like about it now is that it is so hated by the market and seems like decent value. Everything else such as the leadership, capital allocation skills, constant insider sales of stock historically, large SBC (although that is same for most SAAS businesses). I live in Salesforce every day due to my job configuring it for clients and I can see the sticky nature of it, I just don't really like or trust the leadership that much.

I think we are getting close to the point where I might hold my nose and buy one or two SAAS stocks. CRM is almost worth a shot at this price. If they can execute well stock could be a bargain, if they don’t then I think the product is sticky enough at large enterprises to stop it from falling down completely.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/spacex-erupts-after-hours-trading-soaring-above-210-and-surpassing-apples-market-cap Seems a tad bubbly and this is coming from somebody who has drunk the Musk Kool-aid . No position in spacex but just enjoying the show.

Probably because he is a decent human being who doesn’t just dump his wife the second he becomes rich and popular. Make me respect him more actually.

Initial 4% position in Uber. I think it represents a great entry point at sub $68. Like the management, low capital intensity (for now), global brand recognition and expansion, and expansion of new higher margin services like Uber one subscription and advertising. Current price is just about down to a price I am comfortable paying, would average in further should price drop down below $50.

Yes fully agree with this.

I’d count myself in the enthusiast bucket. Currently paying €20 a month to use clause pro, my employer provides copilot as the standard ai tool for staff but I haven’t found it great. As to what I would pay each month, if I had to I could see myself paying €100 per month for it. It’s too useful to for the work I do that I’d hate to have to go back to the old way. And I’m not even the target market for Claude code, I’m a consultant with some average coding experience rather than an actual software engineer. I can only imagine how much value a proper software engineer gets out of it.

Zcash down 40% today after critical bug discovered that may permit counterfeiting.

There definitely seems to be a lot of PTSD or scar tissue with the long term Fairfax holders. 10 years of a stock going nowhere would do that to a person. I’ve recently been buying Fairfax for the first time so don’t have any baggage around what the stock did in the past or that it recently had a 20% pullback. It’s still a small position at around 3% of portfolio but I’m hoping to add more over the coming months. I’m still not fully convinced Prem and co have shaken that habit of trying to buy turnaround stories, I thought they had but then seeing them take decent stake in under armour feels like they are back to the RIM/Blackberry days. I’m not sure why they didn’t take a leaf out of buffets playbook and just buy high quality large compounders like Coca Cola, Moodys, Apple etc. if only Prem had a Charlie munger sidekick to help him see the light. Maybe my assessment is wrong and they have genuinely got these type of value traps out of the system.

Tracking and caring about calendar year performance is the first issue I see. And focusing on the performance of a single 10% holding is the second issue. Better off to focus on trailing 3-5 years compounding and to just look at the overall portfolio. The short term volatility of the market and individual stocks over a 5 month period (year to date 2026) is mostly meaningless and should be to you and your wife regardless of what age you are.

Yes I think you are right, the development approach hasn’t really changed, so even though it takes much less time to do things, the estimates for the user stories and what has been sold to the client is based in the old world. So developers are just delivering a standard chunk of work faster and probably chiliing more with nothing to do. So yes while developer productivity has improved massively in the sense of delivering the same chunk of work faster it doesn’t yet show up in actual productivity numbers because the pre AI block of time estimated or sold for the work hasn’t factored in the change in speed of what can be delivered.

That’s fair enough. And yes everybody’s personal situation is difference. Perhaps you just need to reduce the weighting you have in the stock by a few percentage points. I would disagree on the description of unexpected drop. I have about 10 stocks in my portfolio and in each year I would fully expect that they could drop 20% or more no matter how bright the outlook is for each of them.

Yes I would assume anybody who invests in stocks would understand that 20%, 30%, even 50% drawdowns in individual positions is par for the course. Hasn’t Berkshire dropped at least 50% on three occasions.

Hard to say, I personally use Claude each day for my job in Salesforce development and it’s allowed me to complete tasks in 30 mins that would ordinarily have taken 4 to 8 hours. I suspect the same for other developer use cases. I think we will eventually get to a stage where each employee is given some sort of token budget each month to use as they please. So an employee cost will be some combo or salary plus token cost. For AI early adopters maybe the ratio is 80% salary 20% token, and for more conservative companies maybe 95% 5%. I expect the portion of token percentage to trend upwards over time.

And people think that there won’t be a return on investment for these AI investments? 18k per year is a lot more than the $1200 or so per year for normal enterprise SAAS companies like Salesforce.

How do you know what the top is? Unless you have a crystal ball all we know for now is Google is higher than it was a few years ago. If the stock doubles over the next 3 or 4 years then today's price is just a stepping stone to a continued march upwards. I remember when Abel took over I predicted people would be quick to doubt the new leadership and critics would be out in force as soon as some new investments were made. Wasn't expecting the turn in sentiment to happen this fast though.

I suppose the main question for you is have the reasons you like and bought bitcoin in the first place changed. For me I bought it as fixed supply non sovereign store of value that allows me to maintain a portion of my wealth outside of money printing apparatus of modern governments. For me it was always a digital gold and unless someone points me to a better alternative I don’t particularly worry if I’m missing something or if there is something structural going on. I’ve held gold for a long time in the past and I remember when it went nowhere for years and people were constantly discussing various theories about how paper gold or futures were holding back the market, or central bank manipulation. Eventually the price goes where it should so if enough people want bitcoin over time it will for up, if people no longer see value in it, then it won’t.

I’d be more curious to see this shown as percentage of the total holdings bucket rather just seeing an independent number. As the company grows you’d expect this number to generally go up and to the right, but the thing that is useful to this discussion is whether the percentage of equity accounted holdings relative to the rest has grown or not.

Ok thanks. Makes sense now and yes looks like the growing percentage of assets falling under this accounting standard is undervaluing book value by increasingly larger amounts each year as the value of these investments grow. Do you feel that book value as a metric is no longer relevant for Fairfax or that it is relevant as long as you adjust shareholders equity to reflect the current best guess of intrinsic value of these ‘held at cost’ holdings?

Just wondering has this difference between carrying value and market value always been a thing throughout Fairfax history or has there been some change in accounting that makes it more important recently?

Same, been building up a small position after finally coming around to the company and management. Only took me about 15 years!

Ya probably not. I haven’t been buying anything in that space. My existing holdings of meta, google, amazon etc are obviously giving me some exposure to the AI trade but I’ve owned them for a long time. Well before AI became a big buzzword in the markets. I’m not planning to sell these if they get a bit overvalued due to an AI bubble. Semis and other AI related stuff I don’t really have any skills at evaluating so any new investments I’ve made have been mostly outside of any AI impacted industries (Dominos, Ferrari, Hermes, small amount of Fairfax)

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. A lot of capex being spent on the hope that frontier models continue to improve and businesses will see value and spend. And then a lot of good open source models trying to keep up. Most people alway fall into two binary camps, one is that the frontier models will continue to add value that justify the crazy spend, and the other is that these companies will all go bust as open source catches up. In reality, like with most other things some middle ground will likely prevail where maybe some over spend occurs but these frontier models continue to show value while also being back up by top quality open source solutions. And businesses will use both.