LC

LOL. Of course oil has intrinsic value: without oil nobody goes anywhere. If you believe that businesses have intrinsic value - and I guess you do because you mention "cash flows" - then you should realize that without oil pretty much all your businesses have no intrinsic value either (there are few exceptions perhaps). It's amazing how for people with a single hammer ("cash flows") everything looks like a nail... ::) I agree with Jurgis. Intrinsic value is not a PV calculation. Nike sells sneakers. Do the sneakers themselves have no value the same way oil has no value? Of course not, they make millions (billions?) of people's lives easier by protecting their feet.

Same for me, bought one for my sister-in-law as well because it's proved such a good value.

I find that the subject matter determines the comfort of the chair.

So I'll just give my thinking, I graduated ~6 months ago from a grad school with about 40K of "student debt". Now, I have cash in the bank to pay this off today if I wanted, I had the cash before I applied to school from saving for years. I said, screw paying for grad school in cash: I'm taking out loans, and sticking that money in the stock market. Turned out to be a good decision (probably 80% luck, 19% copying this board, 1% me being functional enough to navigate an online brokerage account). But now having graduated, it's apparently time to pay it back, and I'm in the same boat as your friends from the poker table. Heck I'm not even sure if I should pay it back. What are "they" going to do, come after me with a bat? Or maybe I just pay the minimum and kick the can down the road as long as possible. Maybe the gov't will eat the bill in 15 years. Why pay it back in that case? Maybe lock the interest rate, and sit on it. And you know, the only reason I'd consider this is because what you mentioned is so prevalent. NOBODY is paying these things, so the ones that do are the suckers at the table.

Are you talking about silicon valley bank? IIRC when they made loans to these tech co's they received warrants, which gave them exposure to tech equity valuations. Those valuations shot up in the 90s.

I'm not sure if they will, but they should. Government policy allowed banks to lend absurd amounts to anyone, because borrowers can't default on it. So the banks lent. And schools raised their prices in turn. Allowing more of a free market would have created a totally different landscape than what we have now. Everyone wanting to study 19th century poetry could still do it, just without 150K of debt. The government failed.

JBSS

What makes you think NYC RE prices need to correct, rather than wages? There is "tinder" on that side as well: record corporate profit margins (or so I hear), low tax rates paid by corporations/wealthy individuals, record high income-inequality, etc.

-8% I'm grateful it's not worse due to big losses on zinc, aiq, lukoy, fhco. I think I just suck at doing cursory valuation on small(er) caps. Didn't fully know the risks I was taking, pretty much, and how fragile the businesses of most small-caps are. Fiat carried the portfolio. well, prevented something like 40% losses haha. Thx again Sergio.

Hello, nice to have you here and thanks for introducing yourself. Happy new years!

not really sure but maybe they issued the securities below par with the promise to make whole upon redemption? so there was a 600M non-cash discount sitting on the books that is being reversed?

Take a look at Charlie Munger's list of cognitive biases.

Andrew Schaffer, tesuji partners

Damn you post good stuff, SD. Thx for your thoughts as always.

Anecdotally it seems that MC pretty much lost most US. I always try to have at least one MC just in case (haha) some place does not take Visa. Through years, pretty much all big US banks switched to Visa usually without even telling me. I've got Barclays MC, but that's pretty much it. There might be smaller US banks still offering MC. Really? My citibank and capital one cards are both MC. And they are both recent (<5mo old).

perhaps sales/sqft? strategically located stores imho are still valuable. they legitimize the brand. but i agree the traditional mall model is dying.

I haven;t read Damn Right yet. Can anyone provide a brief synopsis? Is it worth it to someone having read Charlie's Almanack? I couldn't find a thread here.

kraven is a user here, who (and i feel i can quote this), fervently believes that "anyone who dares call himself a value investor in the footsteps of graham and buffett should be reading AT LEAST 500 pages daily, of only the most tediously informative material." other activities such as: eating, sleeping, bathing, spending time with your family (aside from a predetermined 30 minutes during federal holidays), or doing ANYTHING else is simple counterproductive. if you don't know how the latest soybean harvest in the Jiangsu province will impact the cost of freight in the southeastern US, you simply shouldn't be managing your own capital and better leave it to the true geniuses working at kiewit plaza. just kidding of course :D

how much stock do you guys put in them? do you listen to them at all? i feel like it's just a pony show put on for both parties and not worth the brain damage trying to delve through all the cryptic nuances of canned management responses. i've found value in them for really small, off-the-radar companies and something like Fiat. in both cases management doesn't seem to give a #&(# and is willing to be blunt and candid. the common thread being when management has no incentive to add layers of nuance to shade the truth.

Thank you marlin

A lot of people think they know enough about a certain idea but really don't (myself included!). We fool ourselves because we fall prey to the same psychological misjudgments that we profess to know like the back of our hand.

Assuming you have the standard finance & accounting knowledge and have read the oft-cited value texts (Graham, Buffett, Klarman, Marks, Greenblatt, etc.), I think your best bet may be to propose investment ideas and receive feedback and criticism. You will learn quickly by this process (and even more by actually putting money at stake). My most impressive learning experiences from COBF was having generally positive feedback on certain ideas proposed and then having those ideas flop. A cheap tuition for a valuable lesson.

Yes I was talking about cement kilns, but they exhibit the same characteristics of regional monopolies (which is what attracted me to them). I would suspect the aggregate miners are even lower margin than cement producers but without the added regulatory risk.

Miners I guess are different: I think it was Monarch Cement I was looking at where every quarter for a while they were just complaining about having to comply with tighter emission standards and having to upgrade their kilns. This was after being allowed to delay the upgrades for a few years. I agree with the NIMBY rationale you suggest, that seems to make sense to me. Also another exercise is to map out where the producers are in comparison to demand centers for cement (large cities etc.) to give an idea of relevance. One of the cement trade journals had a good map to use as a starting point with the major plants. Found it here: http://www.globalcement.com/images/stories/documents/articles/eGCMay2012-32-33.pdf

BG - true: competition is limited within the industry. the "competition" comes from the gov't imposing costly regulation every few years, usually to improve environmental effects. upgrading kilns can wipe out half a decade's profits in a year for some of the smaller players.