writser

These faiths cease to exist. They are at the bottom of the foodchain in the survival of the fittest (faithest).

@Liberty: I know, I'm an atheist as well. The point was: why bother ;)

Discussions about religion on internet forums are useless. Nobody here wants to be converted to the other side. All you end up doing is nitpicking at some specific details in each others' sentences and this can go on forever. At some point the atheists start about AIDS in South Africa, child abuse in the church, crusades and they will quote atrocious stuff from the bible like: The believers will reply: morality does not exist without a god. Don't take the bible literally. I feel that God exists. Hitler was an atheist. We pity you because you will burn in hell. At some point one of the sides will get tired of posting. The other side will proclaim victory until a new forum member decides to join the discussiony. Rinse and repeat. I would rather focus on investing instead.

I see your point of view. I enjoy visiting this forum and I track companies that might be good investments "for fun". I like the concept of thorough research and value investing and do not believe in a quick buck, unlike most people. However, the fact that it is just a hobby for me and that I can practice it if (and only if) I feel like it is probably one of the reasons it appeals so much to me. If one has to put in the same effort as David Einhorn and WEB I doubt whether most of the posters here would still like it as much. Would you really be able to enjoy investing if you had to do it for 10 hours a day 5 decades long? If you had to read all annual reports from all S&P 500 companies from the past 10 years? If you had to endure the internet bubble full-time for a couple of years while your own portfolio only goes down? I'm not sure (the path towards) being an excellent investor is fun. That's easy to say if you only spend a couple of hours each week on investing (take no offfense, I'm just describing myself :)). Few people have the obsessive drive and discipline required. It's the same with poker. Everybody loves it, lots of people try to "go pro" and 99.99% of them fail miserably. The swings are stressful, it gets boring and it is hard to stay disciplined. For most people it's a great hobby but a terrible job. The good thing about investing for a living is that you can also do it with OPM and earn fees.

A very interesting topic. Isn't there a rule of thumb stating that you need at least 10.000 hours to master something? I think the same holds for investing. I also think reading is not enough. You need "deliberate practice" (http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-World-Class-Performers-EverybodyElse/dp/1591842247), in other words, besides reading a lot you also have to do the hard stuff: building spreadsheets to valuate companies, follow hundred's of companies, monitor share prices, discuss stuff with other investors, analyze what went wrong in past trades, build checklists, etc. Stuff that actually requires effort. For me investing is mostly "a hobby", I put much more time in my work, which at the time is a far better investment for me. But this way I will probably never get results like Buffett, Klarman or Einhorn. These guys have put enormous amounts of effort (and hours) in investing from a very young age. It's like competing with Tiger Woods in golf. An example, I thought the short thesis on GMCR by David Einhorn was very impressive. It was much more thorough than anything else I have ever seen or read about the company. This guy probably knows more about coffee cups than 99.99% of all other investors. The required research involved took months. Not only reading annual reports, but also getting up to speed with the industry, visiting stores, doing market research etc. etc. But the most impressive thing is that, before he found GMCR, he probably did the exact same thing for 20 other companies. If you are reasonably smart and you are willing to put that much effort in it for decades, I'm sure you will become a master investor. But only 1 in a billion people are crazy enough about investing to do that. I read "Confidence game" about Ackman and "Fooling some people all of the time" by Einhorn and the most impressive thing about both cases was for me how hard these guys work. They made enough to never have to work again, yet they risk the reputation of their families, get threatened, criticized in the media and they cannot stop. It's an obsession!

Agree with all others, this is the best (only?) forum for value investors I know. Thanks for all the effort you put into it. Charging a fee for new (or even existing) members seems fair. cheers!

I am not particularly impressed by that presentation. I have never heard of Raoul Pal (he doesn't even have his own wikipedia page!). If I google his name I only find zero hedge articles and links to websites that preach financial meltdown. His presentation consists of a couple of line drawings created and exported from Bloomberg. I don't think head and shoulders patterns in graphs can predict the future. On page 11 he states his predictions are "facts", which is a lie. The $700 trillion in derivatives is a principal amount and tells us nothing about the risks involved. Is this serious? Both the messenger and the message are dubious and I don't think this material should be presented on this high-quality forum.

I saw this tender offer as well, can anybody explain the clause about 21 August? Does that mean we are not eligible to accept the tender offer? Do brokers even allow you to tender and does Heska have any way to find out who where shareholders at that date?

Agreed. This paper is a bit too academic for my tastes.

Yeah, it sounds like you want to apply for one of the most wanted jobs in the world without any relevant experience and without much knowledge about the field either. :) If we give you an idea and you "roughly" work it out in a week they will definitely find out if they grill you during the job interview and you will look bad. Your best bet is probably to come up with something very creative and to be honest about your lack of knowledge. I would suggest you read a boatload in the meantime, books (Ben Graham, Phil Fisher, Joel Greenblatt), the Economist, FT Alphaville, Seekingalpha to get up to date with what is happening in the markets currently. I wish you the best but others have better credentials though probably!

A possible idea might be Salesforce.com. 20 billion market cap, 3 billion revenue, hardly profitable, cloud computing overhyped, insiders get huge options grants and dump stock like crazy. No open market insider buys since 2009 and the stock has gone up 800% since. Accusations of dubious accounting (http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-09-01/tech/30127255_1_accounting-practices-marc-benioff-software-contracts). CEO acts like a snake oil salesman and pumps his own stock in Jim Cramers' show. Problem is that there is no catalyst afaik. I've been short for a while, and the ride has been "exciting", to say it positively :) Another idea was written up by another member of this board. I haven't looked at it in detail but at first glance it was interesting: http://alphavulture.com/2012/07/20/shorted-some-vivus-vvus/

That's a bit of a slippery statement: according to EMH the premium to book value would probably depend on the performance of the business :) I think that the time frame for judging whether investors are good is so large that it is almost impossible to judge value investors on their results within a decade. Hence you should focus on their reasoning instead. That's why Buffett, Berkowitz or Einhorn are so great to learn from imho. You can read/hear their reasoning BEFOREHAND: I think GEICO is an excellent stock because of these reasons. We love See's Candy because of those reasons. Green Mountain Coffee Roast is a short because of these reasons. Bear Stearns will collapse because of these reasons. Most of their reasoning turns out to be correct, and thus I tend to believe they can outperform the market. And personally I think that if you look at the pump-and-dump schemes and sky high valuations in Social Media and Cloud Computing, stuff like Sinoforest, the way stocks have been going up and down like crazy in the Euro-crisis, the endless speculation about QE or the Bank of America rollercoaster, the market seems hardly efficient at all.

If that would ever happen they will probably restate the T&C of the derivative contract, rather than blowing up the financial market. Just as they did with the Greek default. Markets are very resilient. I don't think a random flash crash will trigger a financial meltdown. The problem is obvious and easy to solve or sidestep.

Technically you are correct, but I think you lack some perspective. Of course it is ridiculous that apple trades at 1 ct, but it is definitely not a world-changing event. Somebody wrote a bugged program and lost money. Same thing happened before algorithmic trading was around: countless examples of fat finger trades. Fortunately exchanges have rules in place to prevent and cancel idiotic trading. If you piss away a couple of million manually your trades will be cancelled as well. I am not saying HFT is the holy grail, but I believe it receives too much (negative) attention. I guess we need a scapegoat because the market has been flat for 15 years and the evil anonymous robot is perfect for that. IMO, option backdating, corporate fraud, stock pumping, government deficits, and countless other things are far more harmful for investors, but nobody is going to write a nice Reuters blog article about it. Who would read it?!?

I beg to differ. Daily on-exchange volume isn't that big (and surely an algo can be stopped within a day). Exchanges are extremely transparent, there are circuit breakers, trade cancellations and a lot of regulatory oversight. I think it is extremely unlikely that a bunch of market makers are a "systemic risk". Even the "original" flash crash (which in the end turned out to be a human error) was almost completely negated in two days. The biggest risk in the market are still human participants, causing .com crises, mortgage crises and sovereign crises in the past decade. The flash crash is a non-event compared to those. It just gets a lot of media attention. It is new, we don't understand it so we are scared of it.

Most of his writings are also available on the Oaktree website: http://www.oaktreecapital.com/memo.aspx . From what I read on Amazon, the book mostly repeats / contains the advise given in these memo's. I recommend reading the memo's. They give a good overview of financial markets and what value investing is all about. However, it's all a very generic (basically boils down to: don't be stupid like other market participants) and I doubt whether the book contains significant extra material.

What I think: the LIBOR scandal is just the hype of the week, with massive media coverage because 1) it's a nice and easy subject, as opposed to the euro-crisis or US debt situation and 2) everybody currently likes to point to the bankers as the source of all evil in this world. The journalists scoop some nice articles, Joe Sixpack can complain about Wall Street, maybe the process of determining LIBOR will be adjusted and the banks will settle all lawsuits. It will mean nothing for the long-term earning power of these banks and in a few years everybody has forgotten about this. I can't imagine WEB being worried about this, he'd probably see it as a buying opportunity instead.

A valid point, but Microsoft has shown a double digit ROA and ROE for the past 25 years. They have (and earn) a staggering amount of cash and have a huge moat with their operating system and closed-end document formats being used by almost all corporations and governments around the world. Ten years ago everybody thought Linux and the Internet would destroy Microsoft, yet they still do fine. Now it's Apple and mobile computing. Their moat might decline in a few years, but I don't think you can compare this company to RIM.

I can't help but think it's kind of a nostalgic / "greater good" investment for WB. The size of the investment is completely irrelevant and returns might be adequate but it probably is not the next Coca Cola. But he can preserve some nice (I assume, haven't read them) local newspapers and it creates goodwill for Berkshire. He was a newspaper delivery boy and still reads a few newspapers daily, right? That sounds reasonably cheap though.

An important point Graham doesn't mention: it depends on whether you enjoy investing and if you think your current experiences will be profitable / useful in a later stage of your life. In that case it might be worthwile even if you don't outperform the benchmark by 5%.

Comparing the Holocaust to abortion? Is this a joke?

Have you seen his latest Bloomberg interview? According to himself he spends more time behind his computer than Bill Gates since he discovered online bridge. A couple of hours every night.

You can make a portfolio with Yahoo Finance. Add all the stocks you want to track and the portfolio overview will show you the daily news for all of them afaik.

I like google docs in combination with google finance. I don't know if this link works for you, but there you can see some of the possibilities. You can easily make a sheet that tracks some stock prices and, for example, lights up if a certain price goes below your threshold. The nice thing is that you can access it anywhere. I also have several stock in a yahoo portfolio. The nice thing there is that your portfolio shows you all the news and filings for the stocks in your portfolio. If you add some large-cap stocks you probably get swamped in information, but for small-caps it works pretty well.

These kids got punished, rightly so. But people who buy this stuff should be banned from the internet.