netnet

This is a good topic, which makes me think that each stock on the investment board should begin with what is the key ratio for this company! By the way, ROIC and RD expenses/revenue for tech companies. Owner earning/EV for all companies. for oil companies exploration cost per incremental barrel of oil.

The mining business is horrible often a hole in the ground with a liar on top. BUT on the other hand the royalty business is wonderful. That's how Seymour Schulich made his money. Check out Sandstorm and Altius.

Nassim Taleb will be at Stanford on Wednesday, April 10. I am trying to change my schedule for that day and hope to be there. For you value folks, it's free. This generally taped and is available on the web in a few days. (I will also be hosting a brunch this spring in the bay area for anybody in the neighborhood. http://events.stanford.edu/events/371/37131/ http://stvp.stanford.edu/blog/?page_id=1277

Posted the link above. http://www.pimco.com/EN/Insights/Pages/A-Man-In-The-Mirror.aspx I don't watch CNBC, I do like his comments in the annual Barron's Roundtable.

Interesting article from Bill Gross of Pimco. Gross: "Am I a great investor? Is Buffett?" the trope is: when you look in the mirror what do you see. He sees flaws, plus a superb time, in the past to have been an investor. Gist: Investors should be judged on their ability to adapt to different epochs, not cycles. An epoch may be 40-50 years in time, perhaps longer. Bill Miller may in fact be a great investor, but he’ll need 5 or 6 more straight “heads” in a future epoch to confirm it. Peter Lynch is a “party pooper.” Warren is the Oracle, but if an epoch changes will he and others like him be around to adapt to it? No matter how self-indulgent you think this IO is, I just looked in the mirror and saw at least a 7. You must be blind! whoops, here is the link: http://www.pimco.com/EN/Insights/Pages/A-Man-In-The-Mirror.aspx

Dan Ariely course starts today on coursera!

Roger, I read the Columbia paper. it's not all that convincing nor is it necessarily relevant. Three points: Japanese transistor radios were pretty crappy in the late fifties and early sixties too, but we know how that ended. Secondly, Washington State Community Colleges vs MIT??? I suspect that Community Colleges (CC's) will use the available curriculum to combine with face to face. A high school used Harvard's intro CS course. Just because the grades are worse does not mean anything. It was free! It won't be the CC's that are hurt by this anyway. It's the for profits and the bottom tier residential that will be the first to crack. (80 to 90% probability on that I would guess.) I do wonder if the middle tier residential colleges, whether state and private will suffer. .

Harvard already does this sort of. They have their regular extension courses, plus in the online space they started edX with MIT. It's free for now. A bunch of other top tier universities have joined. UC Berkeley, Ecole Polytechnique, McGill etc., but none of them would want to "cheapen" their core programs. They are playing a very different game than the low tier colleges. One very interesting factoid, in conversations with a MOOC instructor, I learned that the best scores were not from the "residential" students, i.e. the students at the school giving the course, but the wider audience. Now ordinary stats would predict that, give the enormity of the sample size, but nevertheless interesting. (To me that indicate the monetization model: here is a student who can do a circuit class or code better than -fill in the blank--how much is that worth to a hiring manager?)

This is 3 year data, hardly statistically valid. In fact given the tumult, I would expect something like this during this period. That said, to me MF is a beginning, it gives companies to analyze. Whenever I hear this response I wonder how long is needed for something to be statistically significant? I've heard people claim 120 years of market data isn't enough to show stocks outperform bonds at a statistically significant level. At the minimum, you need to go a whole market cycle. Also, I would guess, that the Chinese fraud problem really screwed up results. No experienced investor should have bought into that crap, though. Again, I look at MF as a starting point. If you scrub for the Chinese frauds, and the results were good, one could still argue that that was cherry picking. You would expect value stocks not to do as well on a big leg up in the market.

Here is another industry that the internet is disrupting--higher education. I'm a huge fan of MOOC's (massive open online course). see this thread for example:http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/model-thinking-course/ I don't know how this will end, as in how do you make money when it is free, but I think that low tier residential liberal arts colleges and the for profit sector are quite vulnerable. Why go to DeVry or Nowhere.edu when you do quite well with Coursera? Clayton Christensen anyone?

This is 3 year data, hardly statistically valid. In fact given the tumult, I would expect something like this during this period. That said, to me MF is a beginning, it gives companies to analyze.

Likewise, I took my time with it.

I thought that was Buffett and Gates.

I have done a bit of work in this area and I'm in California. send me a private email via the board.

There is a bit of moralizing here, which of course is fine, but don't let this get in the way of making money. The bank, I suspect, did fine until the crisis and capitalized will do fine again, at Prem thinks so; at some point, as Parsad points out, business will be investing and borrowing and will need a financial intermediary!

Well the speculation on WEB and dividends A) was so much twaddle. B) and obviously so if you read WEB's previous letters!

They were not on my lists; at least Atari, Netscape and Palm weren't. Things change, GM was the most valuable company on the planet once. (And, as for AOL, they gave you a fantastic exit with a bell ringing at the top!)

I just a quick check but 6/1 ratio is wrong, even if you count the pref. as debt. I did not look at the filings just Yahoo, but 8 billion in equity on about 20 billion including the preferreds, which I would not include as debt. (xo comment is right on.) Also, the bonds are senior in the (unlikely) case of BK, so that's another error...tut, tut Alice.

Happy coincidence I was just going through some old reading material and this was buried: http://www.fool.co.uk/news/investing/2011/10/20/6-ways-to-invest-like-a-young-warren-buffett.aspx An article from UK Motley Fool re: investing like a young Buffett. Two take aways, Although he was patient, he did want a catalyst. This Buffett quote was interesting, assuming he said it: "The best decade was the 50s; I was earning 50%-plus returns with small amounts of capital. I could do the same thing today with smaller amounts. It would perhaps be even easier to make that much money in today's environment because information is easier to access." emphasis added.

10 people from the board and not a soul posted on the Events board. (Grumble, Grumble, i would have gone had I remembered. my bad. Next year I'll be there!)

Parsad, Have you given any thought to setting up a separate category for Special Situation? Obviously, it's an investment idea but a separate category might get more use and postings. It would be easier to sort through for spinoffs and merger ideas as well. thanks, Netnet

I found the commentary very interesting and their perspective on owner operators a convincing. HOWEVER, as I read through some previous commentary, specifically the treatise on owner-operators, I did not find their arguments convincing. (http://www.frmocorp.com/_content/essays/The_Owner_Operator_Company.pdf) The counter-point to owner-operator companies, such as Apple or BRK, was...owner operator Netflix and Salesforce and Chipotle, WTF????? The founders of the companies are still at the helm and they are most certainly not "agent-operators" to quote the letter. I guess I should give these guys the benefit of the doubt; the caveat for owner operator companies is watch out for those that have significant insider selling, which was the case with Netflix, etc. But, I don't really know what I think about their research after gross errors like that.

Not much new here and is not really correct, because he had better returns, both absolute and relative before he had the leverage of the insurance float, i.e. his partnership years.

I trust WEB and CM aren't going to put on running shoes!

Whoa, someone is in high dudgeon! I too have seen what I would call casual racism personally as well as in the media. Documented: Here: The state senator who said "slavery was a blessing". There is no way to parse that one well; approximately 10 million African perished on the way over to the Americas. It gets worse. He also said will it become "possible for black people in the United States of America to firmly establish themselves as inclusive and contributing members of society within this country?" Here: From someone who should know better: Haley Barbour, former gov. of Mississippi, "I don't remember that racism was that bad." Really, lynchings, Jim Crow, etc. Here: From Jim Greer, the former chairman of the Fla. Republican Party: “Unfortunately, I found that many within the GOP have racist views... " Mr. Munger has some interesting things to say about the psychological underpinning of denial...