Marco Van Basten

Charlie, would you mind explaining why BRO is the best investment available presently amongst brokers? They seem to have the lowest organic growth. Thank you.

So, I am not a tax expert, however, if I remember my class in taxation correctly, when the shareholder converts in this case, effectively what happens is that the company is deemed to receive a tax asset = tax rate * (market value of the shares - cost basis of the converting shareholder.) So if I am an original investor with a cost basis = 1 cent a share and now I convert my private interest into a stock with a market price = $55, then the company can write-off $55 against its income for tax purposes over a certain period of time.

It is not. I have lived in Uzbekistan for many years, and know people who have lived there for decades. There were hardly any Uzbek nurses and very few Uzbek doctors, despite them enjoying preference for university admissions for these and other fields.

Because when I lived in Uzbekistan, there were essentially no Uzbek nurses or doctors, particularly nurses. I have also never seen an Uzbek nurse in a NYC hospital, and I have been to quite a few over the years, nor any of of my doctor friends have ever seen an Uzbek nurse in NYC.

There are no Uzbek nurses. Uzbeks do not go into medicine.

Fairfax to take KW private

Michael Pesch, a VP, bought 4,000 shares yesterday at $245.853-$248.717. Bringing his total holdings to 41,848 shares.

Be careful/ready for tax loss selling. Could come in another ten percent easily because of that by mid-December.

I would never, ever short on valuation. This is a way to ruin. It is an extremely tough business. There are very few good short sellers. The ones that last never short on valuation. There has to be a catalyst - typically major earnings miss, accounting fraud, drug being banned, etc... Again, I very strongly advise you not to short individual stocks. It was very easy to get ruined shorted stocks in 1999-2000, and again in 2020-2021. Just don't do it. Ask yourself, how many people made a fortune selling short, and how many lost one?

Three reasons: a) I spoke with someone who owns (with numerous partners) a large insurance brokerage firm, and he told me that thought that the most defensible model was RYAN's, and he also thought that it would have the fastest growth in the long run; b) RYAN is the only one that has had meaningful insider buying - Pat Ryan bought $15MM worth of shares recently; c) Wells Fargo analyst who seems very, very good thinks that RYAN will have the best organic revenue growth of the bunch, and yet the multiple is roughly the same as the rest of the field.

Growth in revenues and margin expansion + good capital allocation.

My candidates are: Amrize (I own), GE/Safran/AIrbus (I own all three), MCO (I own), V (I own), Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange (I own), JOE (I own), RYAN (I own), Fairfax (I own), MCEM (I own and it is very illiquid)

Parsad, with all due respect, in Europe, children were not even allowed to be vaccinated for Covid-19. We did not know the side effects of Covid-19 vaccine for children, and should not have experimented on them.

Facebook censored it, NYT published a letter from a bunch of ex-CIA liars that claimed it was all a hoax and nothing about the info on laptop itself. Washington Post ignored it as well. Can you point to any article skeptical of mass vaccination of kids or shutting down of the economy in NYT or WP in 2020?

Fascism is what Democrats did when they censored: Hunter Biden's laptop story, the theory that Covid originated in a Chinese lab, forced little kids to get vaccinated for Covid, any views that disagreed with Fauici. Forcing people to wear masks in the parks and on the beaches, etc...

Would you mind sharing why you like TBTC? Thank you.

Why? Robertet seems cheaper and faster growing

Charlie, with all due respect, I think that Pepsi, Mondelez and Hershey will be poor performers on a going forward basis. Coca Cola at least has volume growth.

Parsad, I can acknowledge that Buffet is 10x the stock picker that I will ever be. However, railroad purchase was a mistake, energy was a mistake, not buying Costco was a mistake, not buying insurance brokers was a mistake, not buying WM/RSG was a mistake, and the list continues. MA/V is another one.

Actually, importation of slaves was forbidden at that point into the US, and well before then British Empire ended the North Atlantic slave trade. As for calling slave owners evil, well, slavery existed since time immemorial. You and I can agree that slavery is immoral, but calling slave owners evil for owning slaves is like calling all of our ancestors evil - pretty much every human being is a descendant of both a slave and slave owner.

O'k, so if he didn't care about freeing the slaves, what was wrong with letting the South secede?

Thank you. If I may make a suggestion, I think that the ones whose P/Es came down from the 30s into teens, will do better than the low p/e ones.

Abraham Lincoln in my opinion was a horrible model. Under him, the country plunged into a civil war that costs hundreds of thousands of lives. Yes, slavery, which has existed since time immemorial is evil. However, why did you need a war to abolish it? He did not even try to bribe the South - we will pay you twice the market rate for every slave you free, however every single one slave in the South must be freed for this to work or the deal is off? Why wasn't this tried?

You clearly don't know what Gestapo was. If ICE was Gestapo, you'd be lined against a wall and shot just for criticizing them.

Like what? Thank you.