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Thanks, This is a tremendous resource. Personally, I'm into the field of longevity; I read the (scholarly) articles weekly and am really am up on the field. With these experts in the field, I learned a number of things out on the bleeding edge--some of which is not even published yet! I am going to have a very education weekend listening to the other talks!!

Parsad, I think you are being a trifle too harsh, (on the model not the professors!). Z-score equation is simply a model, the question is how accurately does it predict distress, which the good professors don't profess to explain. They are implying infallibility, which in the world of finance ain't good.

One of my favorites of all time. Thank your post got me to re-read this, which I really should do at least once or twice per year. Netnet

FYI-The whole left brain right brain thing is a popular myth, although seemingly embedded in popular culture. As a general rule, you really should love what you are doing, so if [*]you do not like the reading, once you know and understand what you are reading, i.e. the 10K's, etc. [*]your temperament is not suited to investing then may be value investing is not the "career" for you. (Don't you find reading the annual reports of businesses you know about interesting? For whatever reason, I suspect many on this board do actually like this sort of thing.) That said you may have a career in the business, but not as value investor.

Parsad, What made you dislike this business? I assume that it was the structure of the business ecosystem--supplier to companies that were (are) struggling, with no particular market power beyond a contract that could go poof if repudiated in BK court.

Very funny. I got a chuckle out of that one!

Sanjay has some very nice lecture notes on the web. Great guy, I've occasionally corresponded with him. i think he also runs a small fund in India. I've looked at the pdf of his lectures over the years. They are excellent. He periodically revises them. I have not read the latest revisions. His lectures principally relate to mental models useful for finance. (BTW, guys don't crash his site; it's slow enough already.) Also check out his personal reading list: http://www.sanjaybakshi.net/Sanjay_Bakshi/Books.html

I happened across an article in Seeking Alpha titled Berkshire is not mispriced. http://seekingalpha.com/article/427701-berkshire-hathaway-is-not-mispriced For those of you who are knowledgeable about these things, the flaws in the arguments are pretty transparent; however for any newbie out there, without reading the comment section find as many flaws in the argument as you can. (This is a timed quiz, starting now. ;)) This is NOT to say that you should not know countervailing argument, just in this case the argument is not very good.

I'm not a commodities guy, but why is the stream model superior to royalty model? (That said I do know that Silver Wheaton was tremendously successful, and I believe it is a stream company.)

It was an interesting quick read. It was not particularly insightful and was inaccurate in places--understandable as he calls himself a financial disaster tourist.

I loved the text, but just hated the illustrations that range from mildly juvenile to absolutely idiotic. Get the book but ignore the pictures. Unlike, those men's magazines you really are buying it for the writing :D

It's funny I had not realized that not only he had purposefully copied Anand Kumar, but he had tried to co-opt him. Cloning works!

Thanks for the article. (Mostly because it confirms what I've been thinking--love that confirmation bias!

This thread kind of misses the point of the Economist article. Nor is the magazine American.

I liked Didier Sornette's dragon king paper--at least the parts that I understood! What paper was the best on forecasting bubbles?

Hindsight bias is such that what is perfectly obvious now was at best dimly perceived at the time. That said, finding a way of profiting was very hard. (or at least it was beyond me!) Even those expecting a down turn did not expect the cataclysm that occurred.

It's interesting what Pabrai said in the article: "Humans don't appreciate the power of cloning," This is what he did in investing, copy Buffett's method!

Just by sheer numbers I think that Pabrai is going to do more than Anand Kumar. He's that math teacher, who similarly trains poor kids for the IIT-JEE exams at his free boarding school. I think Kumar had something on the order of a 90% success rate. at his Super 30 school. Pabrai is going to help way more kids in the long run and has seemingly a sustainable model, but obviously both are "angels".

Thanks.

Eclectic value, I'd love a copy too, if you are inclined. I do not have a copy of the partnership letters. You can send via this website I believe. Also, for those value the editing and not the price Lawrence Cunningham has collected the BH letters and organized them by topic. That's available on Amazon.

A few thoughts: 1. Is it possible to do a retail transaction in India. I had always thought it was next to impossible. 2, Ajay Pirama has an alpha on par with Buffett, 11% greater return than the market--28% versus 17%.

It's an amusing bit of satire, that's all! It's fiction like say Gulliver's Travels.

this guy looks pretty impressive, at least on first blush. (Of course I said that about Big Liar, I mean Biglari.) He does have a long track record.

That is even more apt given that WEB had his own similar and admittedly misguided foray into retail--his department store purchase in the 1960's.

There are a variety of courses that are free online: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/ (U.C. Berkeley's courses) http://academicearth.org/subjects/ (various universities) http://oyc.yale.edu/ (Yale) http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm (MIT's open course ware covering most of the courses of the university, some have lecture notes and quizzes --Note MIT will soon be giving online courses MITx.mit.edu) http://www.khanacademy.org/ (Salman Khan, ex-hedgie's 5-10 minute lectures on on everything from calculus, Venture Capital.)