ItsAValueTrap

See http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonjohnson/2011/03/31/are-solar-power-incentives-a-nasty-regressive-tax-on-the-poormisinformed/ QUOTE: In short, the way solar incentives work is by taking money from the poor to subsidize the rich homeowners, businesses, and investors who can afford the high upfront costs of installing solar power (a reverse Robin-Hood structure), which is among the most expensive forms of energy available today. While the solar industry has grown considerably, increasing its lobbying power globally, which in-turn has allowed for a massive expansion in marketing (with the key selling point being you must support solar to stop global warming), it remains among the most costly and inefficient forms of electricity available when observing: (1.) cost/kWh compared to other forms of electricity (i.e., wind, hydro, geothermal, nuclear, etc.), and (2.) usage (solar power is only available when the sun is shining, and declines in output with less intense sunrays and cloud coverage).

I'm not sure it will get cheaper. We try to mine the most economic coal first. Over time, the economics of coal will deteriorate because we mined the best stuff first. The cost of labour and the cost of complying with environmental regulations is going up. Politicians want to shut down coal plants to please their voters. On the other side of the equation, technology could bring down the cost of production slightly. But I just don't see any promising technology on the horizon. Overall we can probably do cheap coal for a long time. I mostly agree. *Technology is bringing down the cost of shale gas somewhat. We are getting a little better at fracking, longer laterals, and changing business practices to optimize shale extraction. In some areas, the economics will improve once midstream infrastructure is built.

I don't think this is correct. Joel Greenblatt's public track record for the 10 years he had his hedge fund, which did exactly the type of investing he describes in You Can Be a Stock Market Genius, was 50.0% per year gross/40% net of incentive fees. I don't think that Buffett beats this in any 10 year period. Buffett's track record is very long and he is one of the richest people in the world. I don't see Greenblatt putting up a similar performance when he hits Buffett's age.

Personally, I don't think that spinoffs give you a huge edge. In terms of growing intrinsic value, financial engineering rarely creates values. The more interesting financial engineering situations happen where one group of people takes advantage of another group of people. Sometimes this happens with spinoffs... mainly with John Malone. 2- I would just study Warren Buffett. His track record is better than Joel Greenblatt's. At least to me, it makes sense to invest within your circle of competence. It takes a while to develop an understanding of an industry. It took me a long time to really understand mining. 3- Warren Buffett did incredibly well in Berkshire Hathaway with zero spinoffs, very little in share repurchases, not that much tax avoidance, and very little financial engineering.

I really liked that Fortune article. 2- TJ Maxx pays Meyrowitz (CEO) a lot of money. On top of that, she has a defined benefit pension plan. http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/109198/000119312514157068/d711800ddef14a.htm So it seems that the top brass gets the special defined benefit plan while everybody else doesn't. It's a little sneaky in my opinion... the pension kind of hides insider compensation.

finviz.com's screener will let you do P/B and EPS growth past 5 years. Yahoo Finance's Java-based screener will probably do it too.

Ack, there are some data errors in the spreadsheet. The average underperformance is around -9.16%... so a little short of 10%. But the year ain't over.

Here is the Google spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1niama3CrEor43OvdXeF99SrhaLoRdGNdJ052WVZ3JY0/edit?usp=sharing Anybody can edit it.

Here are the standings as of August 5: ItsAValueTrap -45.07% Orange -25.97% Hielko -25.91% watsa_is_a_randian_hero -22.54% thepupil -20.75% Frommi -13.58% Edward -12.48% Constructive -7.94% watchwoord -7.50% Rkbabang -4.89% enoch01 -3.03% Racemize -2.20% txitxo -0.36% Otsog -0.29% deepValue 0.17% JEast 1.11% Zorrofan 1.24% compoundinglife 3.93% longinvestor 12.02% Congrats to Orange, who is in the lead. Many people (such as myself) did not strictly meet the requirements of this contest or chose stocks that weren't trading. Orange: Check your private messages?

Retail seems to be heavily dependent on management. Aeropostale tanked after the new CEO (formerly co-CEOs) came in. JC Penney got Ron Johnsoned. One of the retailers Buffett purchased did poorly after the CEO left. Then there was Nebraska Furniture Mart, which did poorly when Rose Blumkin left to set up a competing store across the street. The other reason retailers do poorly is due to some type of secular change outside their control. Mainly all of the retailers getting killed by Amazon (e.g. bookstores).

There were a few years when the company was buying back shares and Stanley Ma had bought a huge chunk of the company. The stock went up around 100X (yes, one hundred).

Some possible candidates: Bill Gates - no longer a CEO *David Zaslav / Discovery (DISCA) *Michael Fries / LBTYA *Tom Rutledge / Charter Richard Kinder / Kinder Morgan (KMI) Bill Erbey / ASPS and AAMC *Brett Roberts / Credit Acceptance Stanley Ma / MTY Food Group Murray Stahl / FRMO *Michael Fifer / Ruger Retail: *Christine Day / former CEO of Lululemon *Bob Sasser / Dollar Tree Carol Meyrowitz / TJX *Allen Questrom *Mickey Drexler * = Doesn't fulfill owner operator criteria.

1- Read the LMCA thread. Because it explains a lot of things. 2- Yes, the rights offering allows LMCA to buy back shares. Or to retire debt. 3- LBRDB has little volume, so having it trade on the OTC bulletin board would make sense. 4a- The rights will have the future ticker symbol LBRKR. I don't think they will trade OTC. 4b- The rights will likely trade in line with LMCK shares. It's Charter that has massive deferred tax assets, not Liberty Broadband. Doubt it. But that's just my opinion.

Your all-in costs might actually be lower if you pay multiple commissions. If different from the logic you described a few pages up in this thread, I'd be curious to know why. Relatively small position sizes so it wouldn't take many fees for costs to start exceeding ~2% (after 1% FX fees also). It's the same logic. You have to guess how much money you may or may not lose on the order execution versus commissions.

Your all-in costs might actually be lower if you pay multiple commissions.

Yeah that's me. I think the writer had to re-write the article to make it a lot more "hey retail investor you should buy stocks and support the advertisers of this newspaper"... because an earlier draft of the article was more two-sided/balanced.

That technically wasn't an internal audit but an investigation. (Internal audit refers to something else in the auditing world.) Buried in that press release was this tidbit: 2- Regarding the 30% drop on July 3rd: Part of the drop could be attributed to the board member leaving for personal reasons. Some cynical people out there might assume that the departure was not for personal reasons. This is partly because being a director is a very high paying part-time job. As well, the timing is suspicious. On top of that, cynical people might assume that insiders are stonewalling its auditors (PWC). *Cynical viewpoints on NQ may turn out to be incorrect. **Disclosure: I am short NQ common shares.

canadianinsider.com is much easier to use than SEDI. Sometimes you have to use Sedi.ca though.

Banks have to make money somehow. The clerk you talked to and her manager are paid a wage. Their time spent talking to you costs the bank money. Fraud and compliance are other costs that the bank has to deal with. Normally, banks subsidize most of this stuff because they hope that they will make money off their clients elsewhere.

I think even people who are really smart have a hard time predicting where things are headed. Just read Bill Gates' book The Road Ahead. He was wrong with some of his predictions (the smart TV, the smart home, speech recognition, etc.). He was right about the Internet. Unfortunately, Microsoft did not capitalize on the Internet. It was very, very difficult to predict that most of the money would be in search advertising. It turns out that search engines make most of the money; display ads, web browsers, and email software is secondary to it.

I think you should. Buffett probably sold his position (a long time ago) in part because he didn't like what management was doing. Certainly if you read their 10-K you might discover that they are doing something that's not obvious. There might be something funky going on in how they value their securities, the risks they are taking, the derivatives they are using to hedge, etc. etc. The Level 2 and Level 3 assets have the potential for shenanigans. *I do not understand Fannie and Freddie. Nor have I read their 10-Ks.

I thought about shorting them but didn't dig too deeply into them. There are better shorts out there. Normally I will want to short an oil and gas company if it satisfies three criteria: 1- SG&A is more than 10% of revenue 2- Retained earnings versus capital raised is abysmal. 3- Cash flow is poor. XCO "only" satisfies #1 and #2. (#3 is debatable and hard to figure out.)

You should probably look at forums where there are people experience in doing this: Web Hosting Talk Sitepoint etc. etc. What little I understand is this: 1- Somehow you have to figure out what domains people want. This is an open-ended problem. For example, maybe you do permutations of LOCATION + NAME OF PROFESSION. So OmahaDentist.com may be valuable. 2- There are ways to get your costs down... which generally involves buying a huge volume of domains. 3- On each domain, you can generate additional revenue from (A) advertising and (B) selling links and/or gaming search engines for SEO purposes. Some domain campers may have some way of automatically generating content and getting listed organically on search engines to generate advertising revenue.

Insiders lining their own pockets. This happens very frequently in the stock market...

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst The Wolf of Wall Street The Snowball Tap Dancing to Work The Warren Buffett Way