Martian

Warren Buffett on Bitcoins from an interview from 2023 I will say this about Bitcoins. If you took all the bitcoins in the world, it would roughly make a cube of 67 micro millimeters on a side…Now for that same cube of bitcoins, it would be worth at today’s market prices about $7 trillion – that’s probably about a third of the value of all the stocks in the United States…For $7 trillion…you could have all the farmland in the United States, you could have about seven Exxon Mobils and you could have a trillion dollars of walking-around money…And if you offered me the choice of having some 67 micro millimeters of bitcoin which you can not even look, touch or fondle it occasionally…Call me crazy, but I’ll take the farmland and the Exxon Mobils.

I know that they paid dividends by borrowing money. But I'm not sure who lent it. This is from the yahoo board. start-quote Don't get me started on that - OMG!!! 1. Declare $2.55 special dividend. $1.75 of it to be funded by money you don't have. Bulk of the dividend will go to CEO. 2. Take on $60 million of new debt for part of it 3. Now, for the financial engineering - the remaining $20 million. CEO figures that with interest rates so low, he could only get maybe 1% rate on long term CDs for his own money. However, with $20 million of his special dividend he's going to "lend" the money back to the company in exchange for these new D shares (cumulative preferred) - so, for the company, it's "equity" (that is, debt disguised as equity). Note, these preferreds are senior to the common stock - meaning no dividends will be paid to common shareholders going forward before the D shares get their dividends. 4. So, what was the necessity for paying out $2.55/share if the company didn't have $1.75 of it? The necessity for CEO to withdraw money from the company, and then set up a personal dividend for himself going forward. A "dividend" which tracks LIBOR. To me it looks very much like an inflation adjusted variable rate interest only loan. Was there a necessity for taking on the $60 million debt when the company was debt free? Of course not - because there was no need to pay the oversized special dividend in the first place. That is, unless you own most all of the shares and decide that you want to take money out of your piggy bank. Now, what is the debt/equity ratio? 102% - really great move. Then, the D shares - no need for that either. Dividend could have been reduced by $20 million. But, with the extra $20 million paid out, now CEO (and whoever else is hiding under veil of the LLC) can collect their personal dividend going forward indefinitely. end-quote

If you bookmark "http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/unread" it will always show unread recent posts since your last visit

Garth Turner had an article on this today . http://www.greaterfool.ca/

Somewhere I read that RSS reader is not one their top 23 apps. It is used by less than 0.18% of google users. i think google is nuking all the small projects which do not bring revenue.

I could not find a way to easily link one tab with another..but this is a workaround. 1. When you go to the destination tab, copy the url in the browser (it will have something like #gid=1 in the end) 2. Go to cell where you want the link 3. in the formula enter the following =HYPERLINK("https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Au85vG0QePvMdDFvWEY0LU1Gsdfsfsdfssddsad#gid=1" , "Link Name") This will open the tab in the new browser. also if the order changes, I think you need to link again.

We’re partial to putting out large amounts of money where we won’t have to make another decision. If you buy something because it’s undervalued, then you have to think about selling it when it approaches your calculation of it’s intrinsic value. That’s hard. But, if you can buy a few great companies, then you can sit on your ass. That’s a good thing. - Charlie Munger ---------- This breaks the thread rule and this is my personal comment. please ignore if you don't want to read ----------- actually, when I started, I operated the same way. buy good companies and hold them even when they became way overvalued. so when the drop eventually came and I gave back lot of my profit. I knew what I wanted to buy, but I really did not have a sell strategy. Then I read Mohnish Pabrai's "Dhandho Investor" and wised up. So when some stock reaches IV, I sell some. If it becomes overvalued, I sell out. Now I'm happy with my results.. The good thing is that, since I'm a small investor, I sometimes find something else. Otherwise I just sit on cash.

22.57% from sep 2008. No leverage and pretending no such thing as tax..

+30% with a concentrated portfolio and min 30% in cash all the time.. Thanks to everybody on this board..

I think Buffett said something like this about the LTCM failure..why risk what you have and what you need for something you don't have and you don't need ?

That's exactly what I'm talking about. A guy can make a profit on it yet it might not be a value trade at all. It might just be a trader under the grand delusion of seeing a future that is just completely made up. But that grand delusion gives him the discipline to sell after a big rally because he believes it to now be close to intrinsic value. So to see if an investor really has the talent to spot a large discount to intrinsic value with a high degree of accuracy you do this to him: 1) Ignore his actual track record 2) Look at what he purchased 10 or 15 years ago 3) Based on the actual underlying cash flows of the past 10 or 15 years, use that information to see whether the investor is actually talented at all in terms of assessing intrinsic value This doesn't mean he can't make money as a good volatility trader. But it might be good for a given investor to be handed a report card that is grounded in reality. Some of them might actually be highly surprised because I doubt they audit their own results like this. Except Buffett most of Graham's disciples did not go for the growth or holding it for a long term. It was mostly buy at a discount and sell when reaches intrinsic value. Each one had a different style. But that does not mean it is not value investing. In the superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville, Buffett showed their results and said each one had a different process but the concept is the same. for ex, Walter Schloss bought companies with discount to their intrinsic value. He ususally waited for at 3 years to come back in value. He also held a lot of stocks and was not concentrated. He did not go for growth. Until Munger came along and influenced him Buffett was also in that camp eventhough he was a fan of Fisher. Buying a stock with no moat which is worth a dollar for 70c and selling it when it reaches $1 in 3 months is value investing (Graham). Buying it again when it reaches and 70c the next day is not volatility trading as long as IV story stays intact. The volatility is just in price, but not in the intrinsic value. If we disregard IV and just buy it again for 70c when the IV is not longer $1 is volatility trading. Buying a company which has a moat which is worth $1 for a $1 and selling it for $10 years down the line is also value investing (Fisher) Buffett buys Fisher stocks at Graham prices. Thats why it is so effective and successful. I think the time a stock is held does not matter usually. A portfolio can contain some of Graham, some of Fisher and some of Buffett stocks at the same time. They dont have to be all the same.

Whenver you buy something, somebody is on the other side and selling it. You are already making a bet that you out-analyzed and out-researched the other guy. How come you just realize that only when you bought something sells off? You just need to find a reason why it sold off. If you don't have that conviction, you are just playing with price movements.. Baupost could have sold it for a number of reasons. May be they had a better investment lined up. Or if you think they somehow figured out the IPO call off, you need to go back and reconstruct how you could have found it out yourself. There is no easy way. The key is to choose a company which will not be undone by a single event. Lets say if a company has a customer which contributes 70% of its revenue, and when it loses the customer the company will be sold off.

I also read his articles in msn pre-crisis. He was very critical of Greenspan. He was squarly blaming the housing mess on him and the low rate policies. I think he also wrote a book about it. He ran a short-only fund at that time and closed it in 2008/09. I did not know anything about Michel Burry at that time. But Bill's articles really helped me to think that the housing is not sustainable and it had to come down soon and the banks will be affected a lot.

If you look at the evidence, it is. There are gay people, gay animals. It has evolved. It can either have evolved as a primary adaptation or be the side effect of another adaptation, but however it happened, it did. Otherwise we wouldn't find all these gay people and animals all around the world through the ages. You don't have to know why humans have exactly the variety of hair colors that they do (why not other colors? Why did evolution pick those?) to see that it's what we got. The 'why' might be obvious or obscure, but the end result is the same. right.. genes mutate..sometimes it is trivial like hair color, height, eye color obesity and sometimes important things like like sexuality..In always there will always be people who are bit different from the norm. Gay people are born gays..they just realize/reveal it late because of social pressure..A straight person just doesn't become gay because it is allowed. The Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley is a good book to read..

All dog species have as common ancestors wolves. As with all selective breeding, useful traits were selected and reinforced over generations. Selection from wolves probably started with docility as the primary traint, but once you have a lineage that doesn't want to attack you, you can then start selecting for other traits; Some dogs were bred to hunt, or herd sheep, as alarm systems, or to act as companions, or just to be cute. In fact, it's no surprise why puppies and especially kittens are so cute -- the cuttest animals in any litter had more chances of being picked by humans for companionship, and over thousands of years, this results in huge selective pressure for traits that humans would describe as cuteness* :) *Exhibit A: http://cuteoverload.com/ Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond clearly explains how the dogs, cows, chickens, goats, pigs and horses were domesticated by humans. He also explains why zebras, wolfs and other animals were not domesticated. The book starts from 10,000 years back, at the end of last ice age. It explains how different continents evolved at different speed, mainly because of climate, domesticable animals, domesticable plants like rice, wheat, corn. The book explains how humans was able to domesticate certain plants and could not do certain plants till this day. He discusses how humans evolved from nomads to living in big cities..How some tribes/groups perished and some succeeded. It is a very interesting book recommended by Charlie Munger.

I thought you had a mail specifically for this purpose ..anyway this will only reduce the automated registrations !

I was thinking like this.. 1. Let the users register as usual. 2. Apart from registering the site, they need to send a mail to the moderator with specific text 3. This text can be made as a sticky topic and changed when required. 4. Parsad can filter his mails using this text and approve. So he just has to check what is in his to-be approved folder and ignore others.

The market is efficient most of the times. But not all of the times. That is a difference between day and night..If they were efficient all of the times, I will be in the streets with a tin cup - Warren Buffett

When I sell a stock and make money on it, I need to pay taxes. We don't pay taxes till the end of the year. If I use that tax money to buy another stock, I consider it indirect leverage in my portfolio :)

If I remember correctly, from poor charlie's almanack, Charlie is not a big fan of DCF. he said that when you mix correct data with imaginary data (discount rate) you will still get imaginary data (same as mixing turd and raisin still gives you turd) Charlie says that whenever we see EBITDA we need to replace it with Bullshit since that number is meaningless :-)

Fiasco - Frank Partnoy