UK

Selecting period right perhaps is always a problem. But you are probably right. But again not sure how practical it would be to include some longer previous periods with a valuations of single digits? Or what is a fair PE for the SNP500 in your opinion? 16x looks quite reasonable for me. Then I subjectively like this period since it basically matches my own participation in the stock market, despite I was mostly busy doing learning from mistakes and other silly things for the first decade of this period:)

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/30/full-transcript-from-cnbcs-charlie-munger-a-life-of-wit-and-wisdom-.html Yeah, but not like Warren. More than half of Munger money has already been passed to the descendants. So I made exactly the opposite, it’s a smaller amount of money, but I made exactly the opposite decision for the majority of our money. The majority of his money he gave away. And now he didn’t exactly give it away. It goes to Buffett Foundations that go on for another 100 years. Perhaps this timeframe he mentioned relates to only part / foundations run by children?

Just some nice charts from: https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/adv/insights/market-insights/guide-to-the-markets/

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/activist-investor-ubben-shutting-down-inclusive-capital-wsj-2023-11-29/ Despite Ubben's strong reputation, people familiar with InCap's fund raising efforts said it has been tough to raise cash and noted that investor tastes, especially when it came to environmental, social and governance issues (ESG), have shifted. With markets tumbling last year, many investors simply wanted to see returns instead of focusing on ESG issues. What a surprise...

Great news! I liked seasons 1-3 very much!

Thanks! Did not realised this.

https://omny.fm/shows/masters-in-business/masters-in-business-brad-gerstner-podcast

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-01/xi-takes-flurry-of-small-steps-to-open-china-after-biden-thaw?srnd=premium-europe

More recent research, however, has found that most children learn to lie effectively between the ages of 2 and 4. The first successful lie can be pegged as a developmental achievement because it marks the child's discovery that her mind and thinking are separate from her parents'. https://www.scholastic.com/parents/family-life/social-emotional-learning/development-milestones/truth-about-lying.html#:~:text=More recent research%2C however%2C has,are separate from her parents'.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/charlie-munger-life-money-ae3853ad?mod=hp_trending_now_article_pos5 It’s 1931, and a boy and girl, both about seven years old, are playing on a swing set on N. 41st St. in Omaha. A stray dog appears and, without warning, charges. The children try to fight the dog off. Somehow, the boy is unscathed, but the dog bites the girl. She contracts rabies and, not long after, dies. The boy lives. His name? Charles Thomas Munger. Charlie Munger, the brilliant investing billionaire who died on Tuesday in a California hospital 34 days before his 100th birthday, told me that story when I interviewed him last month. I’d asked the vice chairman of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway BRK.B -0.38%decrease; red down pointing triangle: What do you think of people who attribute their success solely to their own brilliance and hard work? “I think that’s nonsense,” Munger snapped, then told his story, which I can’t recall him ever publicly recounting. “That damn dog wasn’t 3 inches from me,” he said. “All my life I’ve wondered: Why did it bite her instead of me? It was sheer luck that I lived and she died.” He added: “The records of people and companies that are outliers are always a mix of a reasonable amount of intelligence, hard work and a lot of luck.”

https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/companies/fairfax-to-sell-68-stake-in-thomas-cook-india/article67587453.ece

I think you are right!

Rest in peace. Gone but not forgotten.

I think that, despite of some problems and imperfections, this immigration system and it's ability to atract and melt people quite successfully (contrary to some other situations e.g. in Europe) from all over the world is basically a secret source of US, Canada and maybe a few other, mostly English speaking, countries. And it bodes very well, especially for the future, when most of the world, including China, is starting to deal with huge demographic problems. Couple this with a deteriorating geopolitical situation elsewhere in the world and North America really stands out as a region which can defend itself and be reasonably safe, has abundant energy, water, agricultural resources etc, positive demographic, rule of law etc, and so not only people and ideas, but I think also capital will flock in a major way into this region long into the future. If you where a martian, looking at the earth from the distance, where else would you put majority of your capital:)? So of course it is not a minus for an insurer or a conglomerate with a major focus and exposure to North America:) I was just listening to the somewhat relevant discussion about this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4KR5dBh5OM If not for martians, this whole idea and attractiveness of Canada or US is sure much more understandable and obvious for some Eastern European investor:)

Thanks. Well, if main participants of events do not know what are they even talking about, everything looks even more accidental and confusing to me:) But his is the source of a full version of the story on mobile OS, from which I copied only a few funny lines: https://stratechery.com/2023/attenuating-innovation-ai/ 'This opinion is, to use a technical term favored by analysts, bullshit. Windows Mobile wasn’t three months late relative to Android; Windows Mobile launched as the Pocket PC 2000 operating system in, you guessed it, 2000, a full eight years before the first Android device hit the market.' But my whole point was, that for whatever reasons, Microsoft missed it and it is kind of scary how accidental some important developments in tech are.

Again, my simple understanding: because they already had like half of the portfolio in tech, in Apple, they liked the best.

Thanks. You are right, angst is not necessary and I need to be more patient, because, on the other hand, how could one even complain, with FFH up like 50+ per cent YTD, after a few up years before:)

And the story of how Xerox and it's PARC became so powerful and later failed is no less interesting: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Business-Adventures-Free-Chapter-Download https://www.gatesnotes.com/Business-Adventures One of Brooks’s most instructive stories is “Xerox Xerox Xerox Xerox.” (The headline alone belongs in the Journalism Hall of Fame.) The example of Xerox is one that everyone in the tech industry should study. Starting in the early ’70s, the company funded a huge amount of R&D that wasn’t directly related to copiers, including research that led to Ethernet networks and the first graphical user interface (the look you know today as Windows or OS X). But because Xerox executives didn’t think these ideas fit their core business, they chose not to turn them into marketable products. Others stepped in and went to market with products based on the research that Xerox had done. Both Apple and Microsoft, for example, drew on Xerox’s work on graphical user interfaces. I know I’m not alone in seeing this decision as a mistake on Xerox’s part. I was certainly determined to avoid it at Microsoft. I pushed hard to make sure that we kept thinking big about the opportunities created by our research in areas like computer vision and speech recognition. Many other journalists have written about Xerox, but Brooks’s article tells an important part of the company’s early story. He shows how it was built on original, outside-the-box thinking, which makes it all the more surprising that as Xerox matured, it would miss out on unconventional ideas developed by its own researchers. And then: https://youtu.be/_15DReQKbt8?si=Vc2bdixPvdhMnH75 There’s no doubt that the antitrust lawsuit was bad for Microsoft. We would have been more focused on creating the phone operating system so that instead of using Android today, you would be using Windows Mobile. If it hadn’t been for the antitrust case, Microsoft would have… You’re convinced? Oh we were so close. I was just too distracted. I screwed that up because of the distraction. We were just three months too late with a release that Motorola would have used on a phone, so yes, it’s a winner-take-all game, that is for sure. Now nobody here has ever heard of Windows Mobile, but oh well. That’s a few hundred billion here or there.

Re 1: I think there is so much information on tech companies that it is almost to much:). Like from daily news to books dedicated to a particular company. For me the best sources were: a. books: e.g. Jobs biography / Apple, In the Plex / Google, Everything Store / Amazon etc. Not that I get any clear answers from them, on the contrary, my main take away was maybe how hard it is to predict the future and how astonishingly accidental sometimes success could be. Like when Jobs saw the idea of the graphical OS interface (invented at Xerox PARC and he did knew what to do with it, and so Apple made it into the life, but than only Gates ans Microsoft made a real money (and monopoly) from it, also by copying the idea, but additionally by opening it to others (contrary to Apple's closed system). So a lot of stories like this, really good for not to have a too firm opinion on ones ability to know all the answers etc b. I really like to hear or read what other investors I respect has to say or write about tech companies they own. c. and then there is some quite quality sources, like stratechery.com, which I like to read. Re 2: So I did not really invested much into tech before last year (except the mistakes of following Buffett into IBM in 2012 and later trying luck with China's big tech in 2021), and it was quite a headwind not to own them like from 2015 to 2021, to say the least:), but last year I just thought it was irresistible not to buy some of these big tech companies and I ended the year with like 4 of them (and 3 in a major way) and some leverage to do this. After all reading and thinking, I came to the conclusion (and generally still think the same) that the best way for me is to go only with these really big leading tech companies which are understandable and investable for me enough not to be afraid to buy or to hold while they are not so popular, because all other/smaller/challengers or all these tech companies without profits etc are just too hard for me. This kind of rationale also really stuck with me: https://stratechery.com/2020/the-end-of-the-beginning/. So basically a universe of AAPL, MSFT, GOOG, META, AMZN, all from Magnificent 7 or 8, except for the TSLA, NFLX, NVDA. And maybe also Tencent and TSM, if I was not afraid of geopolitical and China risks (maybe someday). So any of these big 5 or 7 I am prepared to buy and own, depending on the valuation and situation, but currently I own only META (~60 per cent of original stake) and some AAPL indirectly via BRK. Also, I am not sure if payment companies qualifies as tech in your question, but currently some of these (e.g. PYPL or STNE) looks really attractive for me, but so far I do not have enough conviction to make them into a large positions (I am not comfortable with the risk, that Google, Apple or some other big whale could eat them alive:)).

Thanks Viking! And yet CB trades at almost 1.8 BV vs FFH at 1+ BV. I know, I know: everybody else has a better story, reputation, moat and never makes any mistakes etc...except you will not see this in their recent results or track record:)

Thanks. Again, then it is quite ironic and bizzare situation. Looking forward it to be fixed:)

Thanks. Sure. But how did this reputation was any better in 2016 vs 2023? This makes no sense to me? So OK, maybe it is still far from perfect in the eyes of the market, maybe only halfway to being perfect, everybody is entitled to have an opinion, but it seems to me, anyway you look, reputation should be way better now, than in 2016? But valuation is not.

Coincidentally, I was listening to this book (audio) for the first time and just went through this chapter another day:). Yes, I think this is just the right approach to FFH currently. Trust and verify, watch and enjoy:) Another thing I do not understand, but maybe somebody could explain this to me is why despite all it's sins of the first ~5 years of the last ~10 years, in 2014-2017, just when or after most mistakes were made and ZIRP was a never ending new normal, FFH was yet valued by market at 1.2-1.3 BV. And now, with much more clear future (at least for the mid term), better underwriting and with almost perfect track record in investing and everything else of the last 5 years, it trades only at 1 BV? I understand most of these attempts to rationalize current valuation, being cautious or skeptical on its future, or comparing to BRK and what not, but how does FFH of 2016 at ~1.3 BV vs FFH of 2023 at ~1 BV, while at the same time most peers enjoyed increasing valuation metrics, makes any sense? My guess would be a lot of this skepticism is because market participants just concentrate too much on the price chart and it's recent impressive gains vs valuation changes, which also improved somewhat, but not nearly as impressively (because of improving fundamentals).

Maybe will be helpful. ffh brk float.xlsx

On the other hand isn't it always the case, that those with momentum on their side are not keen to negotiate or they demand too much? And btw Ukraine did regained a lot of territory after that. The question is now what? Maybe everything settles into some Korean situation, but will this be so stable and sustainable? On the other hand, it appears far right, with Orban like ideollogy, just won elections perhaps in the most (former) open country in Europe...it is still hard to be very optimistic and sure about the future, at least in this part of the world. But hey, at least that German brigade is coming soon:)))