mcliu

I think Dazel is suggesting that Biglari is a small position for Fairfax given that the company has likely unrealized gains of $500 million from Fairfax's various hedges..

I've been looking at coal business lately and I get that impression as well. It seems likely U.S. coal companies may face chronically declining demand given the availability and pricing of better substitutes.

Wouldn't the impact on domestic incomes come from domestic manufacturers? If you produce widgets in the U.S., your overseas competitors' products just got 5% cheaper, so you would need to lower your own prices causing higher unemployment, lower wages, etc.

I think the tech bubble is more evident in cloud based tech companies and software-as-a-service businesses, especially in late-stage venture and some publicly-traded firms. For example, take a look at Workday, NetSuite, ServiceNow. Investors seem to be assuming that subscription-based services have no churn, low CAC and limited competiton. The financials of those companies seem to tell a different story.

There's http://investorx.ca/ for free and CapitalIQ and Bloomberg if you're willing to pay..

By itself EBITDA is not too useful, but if you're comparing valuations or leverage across firms with different capital structure, a metric like EV/EBITDA or Net Debt/EBITDA is pretty helpful. I guess you can make the argument that EV/EBIT, EV/(EBITDA-capex) or EV/FCF is better, but at the end of the day they're all imperfect shortcuts..

Time for a Team CoBF? ;)

FFH and FRFHF has to trade in-line with the USDCAD exchange rates, or else you can make an arbitrage profit by buying FRFHF OTC and selling the shares as FFH on the TSX while shorting CAD.

Shouldn't you try to assign a probability from a to e and calculate an expected value?

Is fusion even worth building at this point? Why not spend the money making better PV and batteries? That way you can harness the sun's energy, which is a pretty powerful fusion reactor..?

I think it may also be beneficial to think of deflation in the supply context. Even if demand is growing, if capacity and supply is growing at a faster rate, you will see deflation. That's sort of what we've been seeing, for example, in the global labour market (huge supply growth as a result of globalization) and Chinese manufacturing..

I did L1 & L2. I think it covers a pretty wide-range of topics, but it won't help make you a better value investor. Unless you're planning on working in the industry, it's not that useful.

INTJ as well.

What if mortgage rates ever turn negative and you're paid to borrow? How will home prices (or asset prices in general) behave then?

Gio, how much of a premium to NAV would you pay for this? ???

Sorry to interrupt the conversation, but what's real inflation and nominal inflation? :o

Totally missed whatever happened here. ???

yadayada has a good point. There's significant productivity growth available for China's economy on a per capita basis. The current output per person is significantly lower than most developed countries. Meanwhile, Japan's productivity has largely caught up to Western standards by the late 80s. I mean GDP per capita is China is still 1/5 of Taiwan..

This is called a bull market ;D +1 ;D

All the banks have summer programs. Most do campus recruiting as well. That's a good place to start.

LOL "we're not bear stearns" Can't believe shares IPOed at only 17 just 3 years ago. In hindsight, that's quite a bargain.

Don't want to hijack this thread, but the median household income for NYC is ~$55K.. No one seems to address the fact that the numbers show that the cost to service debt has gotten significantly cheaper today in Canada than it was 10 years ago. And it's continuing to get cheaper to service debt. I think most media outlets quote that debt-to-income has gone up significantly over the past decade, but they fail to mention that the cost of that debt is actually lower today.. I mean a high debt-to-income ratio really becomes a problem if 1) cost of debt goes up 2) income goes down.

Manhattan's median annual household income is $67K. Toronto is around $72K.

That's the whole point though. Even though debt-to-income has risen by 70%. The cost of carrying that debt has dropped by more than 50%. So on a net basis, the carrying cost of your debt may have actually declined over the past 2 decades. From an affordability perspective, it's actually cheaper to buy a $600K today than to buy a $350K house in 2005, even though the price has nearly doubled. So you end up with a mortgage twice as big, but the cost of that servicing that mortgage is actually lower.. Obviously, if you believe that rates will go back to the levels in the early 80s, then the debt service is unlikely to be sustainable. However, you can't rule out the possibility that rates will continue to go lower.. I mean it's been going lower for the past 4 decades.. P.S. I actually think housing prices are ridiculous in the GTA area, but I just wanted to make sure we're covering all the possibilities.

Isn't the bigger issue: “It's not what you don't know that kills you, it's what you know for sure that ain't true.” ;D