indythinker85

[amazonsearch]The World’s 99 Greatest Investors[/amazonsearch] Anyone here of this book? Not much info available but looks interesting The world’s 99 Greatest investors (The secret of success)

Exxon Mobil (XOM) http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.com/2013/11/exxon-mobil-xom.html

Howard Marks: Equities are Under‐owned and Un‐loved http://advisorperspectives.com/newsletters13/pdfs/Howard_Marks-Equities_are_Under-owned_and_Un-loved.pdf

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/18/dropbox-an-online-storage-start-up-seeks-8-billion-valuation/ Dropbox is just the latest young technology company to seek a sky high valuation. Last week, it was revealed that Snapchat, a photo sharing application with no revenues, turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook. Twitter is valued at more than $22 billion after a week and a half of trading. Box, another online storage company that competes with Dropbox, is valued at more than $1 billion and is looking to conduct its initial public offering next year. And Pinterest, a bookmarking service, recently raised $225 million at a valuation of $3.8 billion.

http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/11/howard-marks-hard-find-bargains-dow-16k-meaningless/

I dont have position just know that some shorts have brought up these issues in the past, and that BAM is no FFH or BRK but is popular stock here so thought people would be interested.

http://sirf-online.org/2013/11/18/brookfields-looking-glass-world/ A wry investor might be forgiven for concluding that peering at Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management’s filings is akin to Lewis Carroll’s Alice peeking behind the mirror and finding a universe in reverse. Consider the third-quarter earnings just released by the real estate management, energy and infrastructure conglomerate, disclosing a handsome $813 million in net income for those three months, walloping the $334 million the public company reported for the same period last year. But instead of popping corks, investors who read the filing will probably want to reach for a bottle of aspirin. The reality is that a combination of legally permissible accounting maneuvers and Brookfield Asset Management’s singular definition of profit allowed it to script a victory.

BlackBerry’s Woes Draw Canada’s Contrarian Mogul Into Spotlight Arguably Canada’s leading contrarian investor, Mr. Watsa enjoys a disproportionately large reputation as a canny player within the country’s relatively small financial community. But unlike, say, Conrad M. Black, he is far from a public figure. Both Mr. Watsa and his executives gave no interviews to media outlets for years and now do so only sporadically. And Fairfax, which was founded in its current form in 1985, only began quarterly conference calls with analysts in 2003. No one from the company would be interviewed for this story. Even in a country with a large population of immigrants from South Asia, many of whom went on to great success, Mr. Watsa, 63, stands out. He was born near Hyderabad, India, and studied chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology before joining his brother in London, Ontario, after his graduation in 1971. He sold air conditioners and furnaces door to door to pay for M.B.A. studies there at the University of Western Ontario. In Mr. Watsa’s legend, a key moment is when one of his managers at Confederation Life, a now defunct insurer, gave him a copy of “The Intelligent Investor” by Benjamin Graham. The book’s advocacy of value investing resonated with Mr. Watsa, who also came to admire Warren E. Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, for similar reasons.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/business/treasure-hunters-of-the-financial-crisis.html?_r=1& Five years ago, the global financial system was falling apart. Lehman Brothers had imploded. Banks had stopped lending. Foreclosure signs were as common as weeds on the front lawns of suburban homes. And Bruce A. Karsh saw the buying opportunity of a lifetime. Mr. Karsh, a low-key money manager from Los Angeles, had spent his career analyzing and trading the debt of companies. With the world economy buckling, the prices of corporate debt had plunged to levels suggesting that much of American industry was hurtling toward bankruptcy. So Mr. Karsh, through his Oaktree Capital Management firm, plowed money into distressed debt at a torrid pace, investing more than $6 billion over a three-month stretch. “Unless the second Great Depression lies ahead,” Howard S. Marks, Oaktree’s chairman, wrote to their clients on Oct. 6, 2008, “today’s purchases should produce substantial returns, and in a few years we’ll reminisce together about how easy it was to take advantage of the bargains of 2008-09.” It paid off. With the help of an extraordinary government bailout and stimulus, the second Great Depression never came and a global recession eventually faded. A half-decade later, Mr. Marks’s prediction has come to pass. Virtually all of the debt bought on the cheap has fully recovered in value. The trade yielded spectacular profits, earning about $6 billion in gains for Oaktree’s investors and $1.5 billion for Mr. Karsh, Mr. Marks and their partners.

Hmmm.. Not sure either number looks off, even CAPE is higher.

http://markets.ft.com/screener/customScreen.asp Thanks for this screener. I bought the Russian ETF in late 09 and again recently. Obviously Russia is tough country to invest in but I was looking at the screener and some names are absurdly cheap. Im thinking of a basket of stocks after I speak to some value guys there. Anyone else investing in Russia. Iv only seen a few write ups or sell side research on any specific names (besides Gazprom) http://contrarianedge.com/2013/10/11/germany-europe-and-mother-russia-excerpts-from-valuex-vail/ http://www.marketfolly.com/2013/09/harvey-sawikins-pitch-on-gazprom-neft.html http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/10/kerrisdale-capital-profits-herbalife-buys-russian-bank%E2%80%8F/

http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/11/mauboussin-santa-fe-institute-complex-adaptive-systems/ Elliot: Did you have a bias towards one market philosophy before you adopted the complex adaptive system mental model? Michael: Although I had a solid liberal arts background before starting on Wall Street, I had very little background in business or finance. As a result, I had few preconceived notions of how things worked. It’s a challenge to come up with clear conclusions based on an observation of what happens in markets. On the one hand, you see clear evidence that some people do better than the indexes and that there are patterns of booms and crashes over the centuries. These suggest that markets are inefficient. On the other hand, there’s also clear evidence that it’s really hard to beat the market over time, and that the market is more prescient than the average investor. So for me, at least, there was an intellectual tug of war going on in my head. I have to admit to being struck by the beauty of the efficient markets hypothesis as described by the economists at the University of Chicago. At the forefront of this, of course, was Eugene Fama, who recently won the Nobel Prize in part for his work in this area. What’s alluring about this approach is that it comes with a lot of mental models. You can equate risk with volatility. You can build portfolios that are optimal relative to your preference for risk. And so forth. Because you can assume that prices are an unbiased estimate of value, you can do a lot with it. The market’s amazing ability to impound information into prices impresses me to this day. So it was with this mental tug of war as a backdrop that I learned about the idea of complex adaptive systems. Suddenly, it all clicked into place. A simple description of a complex adaptive system has three parts. First, there are heterogeneous agents. These can be ants in an ant colony, neurons in your brain, or investors in a market. Second, these agents interact leading to a process called “emergence.” The product of emergence is a global system that has properties and characteristics that can’t be divined solely by looking at the underlying agents. Reductionism doesn’t work. What instantly drew me to this way of thinking is that it describes markets very well and it is very common in nature. The central beauty of this approach is that it provides some sense of when markets are likely to be efficient—in the classic sense—and when inefficiencies will creep in. Specifically, markets tend to be efficient when the agents operate in a truly heterogeneous fashion and the aggregation mechanism is working smoothly. Diversity is essential, both in nature and in markets, and the system has to be able to take advantage of that diversity. There are some neat examples in experimental economics to show how this works. It’s really wondrous. On the flip side, when you lose diversity the system can become very inefficient. And that’s also what we see in markets—diversity loss leads to booms and crashes. Now the loss in diversity can be sociological, in which we all start to believe the same thing, or it can be technical, such as the winding up or winding down of a leverage cycle. But here we have a framework that accommodates the fact that markets are pretty darned good with the fact that they periodically go haywire. And SFI was at the center of this kind of thinking.

And yet, despite all of this negativity, and the stubbornly high rate of unemployment still plaguing the country, Greek shares have been slowly recovering. The Global X FTSE Greece 20 (GREK | F-61) is up more than 20 percent YTD, and if you’re a traditional value investor, that could prove to be just the beginning. Based on our in-house data, the trailing priece-earnings ratio on GREK is just 1. In other words, you’re paying just $1 for every single dollar in earnings the 20 companies in GREK brought in over the past 12 months. And that figure is not some quirk of the companies in the fund or the selection process. The MSCI Greece Investable Markets index has a P/E of just 2.5. That’s significantly higher than GREK’s portfolio, but still drastically cheaper than any other single country currently covered by an ETF. http://www.indexuniverse.com/sections/blog/20393-the-cheapest-etf-in-the-world.html?showall=&fullart=1&start=2

http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2013/11/06/valueact-hedge-funds-big-microsoft-bet-is-paying-off-so-far/?utm_source=followingdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20131107

http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20131106-907733.html?dsk=y

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/actually-warren-buffett-wrong-derivatives-richard-sandor-140540626.html

http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/11/steve-romick-letters/ http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/11/fpa-international-value-fund-letters/ http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/11/fpa-new-income/ http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/11/fpa-perennial-fund-inc/ http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/11/fpa-paramount-fund-letter/ http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/11/fpa-capital-fund/

I know but I wanted to stick with "safer", but they have appreciated nicely in a few months you have valuation metrics on hand on A shares vs HK? EV/EBITDA, PB, CAPE etc handy?

This decent (short) article on the topic http://blogs.barrons.com/focusonfunds/2013/11/05/its-a-communist-party-kraneshares-gets-chinas-a-shares-nod/?mod=BOLBlog

http://www.marketfolly.com/2013/11/hedge-fund-investment-conferences-in.html

Interesting comments from Lipper: I do not know when and from what sector a bubble will appear. Others have identified bubbles in 1929, 1962, 1987, 1998, 2000 and 2008. I could add some others that I have lived through. The main point is that we could be due for one, and it will be called an upside breakout to recognize how productive the world will be in the future. What has me particularly concerned is that various studies at Caltech and elsewhere have found that many participants in a simulated bubble knew it was risky, but were playing the so-called “bigger fool theory” — knowing full well that were paying too much but believing that they could sell at a bigger price. When the eventual decline is underway the most likely panickers will be the bigger fools turning on themselves. http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/11/behavior-patterns-help-hurt/

ill Ackman, American Hedge Fund Manager and CEO of Pershing Square, joined Dean Peter Tufano in conversation at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford on Tuesday 29 October 2013 as part of the School's Distinguished Speaker Series.

Ackman’s controversial Herbalife short also gained during October, as the stock fell 7 percent for the month after he announced in early October that he restructured his short bet. It has moved against him all year, with investors like Carl Icahn taking the opposite side. Ackman covered 40 percent of the equity short, replacing it with long-dated over-the-counter puts. The equity short is now about 10 percent of the portfolio. http://nypost.com/2013/11/04/ackman-making-a-4th-quarter-comeback/

I saw that outside my core competence but bought HK ETF. I doubt it, but any way to find out names from Oak filings?

I couldnt evaluate these banks (or US ones) but iv been looking and invested in Europe (mostly Greece for two years already) anyone have list of some Italian banks with stronger balance sheets at cheap valuations? Id consider some as a basket. Thanks!