mcliu

The future is difficult to predict. Isn't it better to hedge your bets probabilistically rather than go all in on one scenario?

It seems like a lot of retail banking can be automated.. Maybe the only reason there are still bank branches is to cater to legacy customers.. Capital markets/commercial banking would be harder to automate. A lot of custom solutions. I don't think your average "gas guy" can do these jobs.

RFP is in a highly cyclical commodity business. Stelco is in the same type of business, but they are slightly better positioned by having a cost-advantage. However, it's unclear how long that'll last. BB's technology faces numerous competitors and obsolescence risk. In the long-run, with large capital base, FFH needs to invest in the equivalent of BNSF & See's Candy to leverage their float instead of trying to hit occasional home runs. That said, shares are cheap & investments are doing well, so you can still make money in the short-run, but might not be a great long-term holding.

Imagine if they had bought msft or aapl instead of bb though.. I don’t think rfp, stelco, bb, recipe are businesses with a moat, which is what they should be buying at this size.

Thanks. Good suggestions.

Some of the cyclicals are minting money right now, but it won't last forever..

I think the simple explanation for the TRS is that, at the time, FFH shares were very attractive but the company needed to preserve capital given all the uncertainties in the market. The banks were likely be the counterparties to earn their fees and would have hedged out their positions by buying shares. I think the cash raise and SIB will also help cushion the stock price if they unwind the TRS.

They really need to monetize some of those mediocre cyclical assets that have gone up a lot and buy back more!

When calculating returns, is there an easy way to distinguish the value of "stock-picking" vs the value of allocating more to cash at the right times?

I think for "effectively outstanding", they deduct 799,230 of intercompany holdings of shares. And then the rest might be newly issued stock compensation.. Anyone can clarify?

There's a lot of paraphrased equity research. No real "insights". I think some CEO/HF manager interviews are good to watch just to get a sense of what they're like. Otherwise, not that helpful.

10% minority interest = $0.9B, implied valuation of Odyssey is >US$10B. FFH trades at only US$13B.

Which car has the most comfortable seats? We have the Lexus NX, it's nice and reliable but the finishing is not great like German cars, and the f-sport seat suck so bad.

How good is the Tesla self driving compared to the autonomous features on other premium cars?

@Spekulatius You can use the watchlist to create a comp sheet if that’s what you’re looking for.

Thanks, really interesting responses! I thought it was a good exercise because when I did it, the types of investments that I looked for was much different from my usual set of ideas. There's less focus on valuation and one-time business improvements and much more emphasis on growth, business quality, competition/disruption/longevity and capital allocation. The 15Y total returns for AXP/KO are decent when you include dividends. But LearningMachine is right, it is a very difficult question to answer, even for a master like WB.

If you could only hold 3 stocks in your entire portfolio and you have to buy and hold for 15 years, no trading. What would you own? And what kind of returns would you expect?

Yup, auto & home rates all up double digits.

Government focus too much on taxing the rich instead of making the poor richer.

Why are public schools pushing LGBTQ sex ed so early?

I don’t think you’re allowed to use the R word anymore. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/why-you-shouldnt-use-the-r-word/2011/06/06/AGISc3nH_story.html

Jim Pattison has a yacht: https://www.superyachtfan.com/yacht-nova-spirit.html

Watched this from the coronavirus thread. Fascinating stuff, thanks for posting!

???

Would the mainstream media purposely report negative studies of hydroxychloroquine and ignore positive studies just to show that Trump was wrong? ???