no_free_lunch

Berkshire has a number of wholly owned subsidiaries that are not publicly listed. if they were they would trade relative to earnings not book value. As such it may not be fair to compare them other conglomerates. Another way to look at it, imagine if Berk had bought apple outright. They would list it at book, purchase price, and you would only see gains to book. However I suspect the stock price of apple has outgrown the book value increase of the same company. So by owning the equity shares their "book" has gone up more than if they had owned the same company consolidated on their balance sheet. Hence why buffet believes true book is some multiple of the reported value. I am just echoing above a discussion I read here years ago. Essentially it is complicated and not all book values are the same.

You have already started. Just work through the threads and ARs.

I think the best way to invest in blackberry is via ffh. At these level, the surge in BB stock is in no way priced in. You are getting the upside from the past 4 months for free and in addition you have an option should it go higher.

In one of the more recent articles on Digit insurance they had mentioned how they were expanding to build out an api to allow other companies to use their infrastructure. Does anyone have any more insight into what that means? It's all very preliminary but that would have huge potential if they can become some type of cloud provider in addition to their core insurance business.

Buying ffh. It's a big change for me. I haven't owned more than a small amount in years. It appears quite cheap relative to the rest of the market. It is selling at less than 90% of Sept 30 book value. Yet with digit and blackberry and other subs you still have this ability to participate in a rally. I still very much question BB but as I said, even using Sept 30 prices FFH is cheap.

Thank you for the feedback everyone. I will capitalize on this. :) I just wanted to see if there is some announcement I missed that pushed it down.

FFH is down over 4% today. I don't see other insurers down. Is anyone aware of any news that may be driving this?

My strategy is to stay 80% invested and attempt to buy qarp/garp stocks. I think there are a lot of stocks out there that are still ballpark reasonable priced. Yes you might lose 50% temporarily in a crash but you should do fine if you can wait 5 years. Still safer than a huge cash allocation when interest rates are below 2%. I started investing in 2000. My first experience was buying a tech stock that had fizzled and was down 75%. I watched it drop 90% further from my purchase price. It was a company with real revenue and earnings and a near monopoly business, not an idea stock. It actually eventually came back but it took 15 years. Many of the other stocks never recovered. I probably have some kind of risk aversion as a result of the whole thing, maybe gregmal and Xerxes are right but Ipersonally know people who gave up much of their equity in that crash.

Morgyard isn't multifamily, it's heavy into office , retail, industrial as I recall. However yes good operator.

Thanks for everyone's replies. I have looked at many of the ideas. I just sold a bank stock, somehow it's near all time high and moved to AVB. For anyone interested AVB is a multi-family REIT. Has 4% dividend and is down some 30% y over y. Good long term record of growing the dividend back into the 90s. Geographic diversification seems excellent. Average term to maturity is around 10 years. It only pays out about 70% of affo so expect growth in future. Trades at below average affo multiple as do most of these type of REITs I assume. I am no expert just reporting what I have found.

It's time to harvest gains and move to sensibly priced securities. I am hoping if I throw out a few ideas I hold that are still investable others will do the same. GD defense contractor going for 13-14x earnings. Long term cannibal. MO tobacco, 8.5% yield and PE of 9. ELF.to life insurer at half of book with management eating shares to close the gap. Other ideas?

FFH preferred. I think I own series g. Good dividend @6.5%. Price is down substantially still.

I guess I will share , can't hurt. I will ignore % but bam and Brk are big everything else 2 to 3%. ELF.TO SEC.TO BAM BRK FFH small position MO GD HHFA.DE MOTR.L gud.to Isv.to Dsg.to FCAU Vie.to The balance in miscellaneous ETFs.

Ourkid, don't mean to be rude but since you asked, why the BB stake. You have exposure via ffh already. Are you that confident in it?

Viking and cwericb, what you say makes a lot of sense. There is substantial profit to be made there given equity and RE prices. I hate it but it is logical. The liberals are clear, based on actions, that they will push to the left for new votes and I don't see a capital gain bump impacting that segment in any negative way. Meanwhile they keep most of their base. I think they lose centrics with a home cap gain tax. Can they bump the cap gains tax so it impacts us in '21?

Dead space, where did you hear about this primary residence cap gain rumor? That would be a HUGE change. I just don't see it but with the feds I guess anything is possible. On top of being complicated it will work to further decrease labor mobility. I am not that old yet but most of my peers sit on 200, 300k equity with much from appreciation. Imagine getting taxed on that if you want to take a new job.

Perhaps the flip side to this is remote work. Why pay $1.4m in Van when you can get the same thing for $700k in Kelowna.. So construction will boom somewhere but not sure its van/Toronto.

I remember that time where the Nasdaq didn't go any where for over 10 years and the most important thing was to determine how close peak oil was. Or you could have just invested in emerging markets in the same period. I would be very careful about extrapolating the past decade out.

What did the Japanese companies do? I am hopeful that they will offset low yield via focus on combined ratio, aka rational industry pricing. From what I have read it's already starting to happen. I just can't help thinking that while ffh is dirt cheap, so are other insurers. Personally I am in elf, Brk and likely investing into mkl soon.

Jan 2022 calls on GOLD. $30 strike. Just an inflation hedge.

Where did the pandemic talk come from? Nobody holds that against prem. That's a strawman argument there. The debate comes down to ffh book growth over past decade and even before covid there was underperformance. I look at my own accounts and it's all outperformed prem. Even thus little RRSP I manage for family with 60/40 stock bond ETFs has completely whipped his record. I am pretty sure with lower beta too. I certainly didn't predict the government intervention but I definitely predicted it could happen. It's the only reason I have stayed invested. That's nonsense to say it's some crazy theory that nobody thought of. These world class investors have never heard of the fed? They didn't watch what they did in the 08 crisis? Buffet did, that's probably why he's on the fence with cash buffer and stock allocations. I'm not buying it. Prem FD up.

Gold and crypto seem to have diverged with crypto moving up while gold has pulled back significantly. Dies this mean gold is a buy? Or is crypto moving up for reasons other than inflation hedging? To go back to JRMs reasoning. Don't forget to factor in crypto. If a large portion of gold is to hedge inflation and crypto can start to take that on then what does that mean for gold demand?

I agree JRM in principle. In practice, to get really pedantic, gold prices are still subject to supply demand. The price crashed in the 80s and part of this was due to chemical extraction processes which pushed up supply significantly. I guess it's possible for the opposite to happen and for it to exceeded inflation.

DTEJD, i had a look at CMCL, that is not a good example of a company that has rewarded investors is it? When I look at the chart it is down over all but shorter time periods. It looks it was 5-6x higher in the early 2000's when the last gold cycle started.

So then why isn't Canada a hellhole with no talent? Not to mention that there's been a lot of talent that leaves the US for Canada because they have a certain feeling that "they're not welcome" there or that they're actually told to leave. We have had the liberals, not the NDP, at the federal level so they haven't completely killed the entrepreneurial spirit. No seriously, taxes are still supportive of private businesses, so we do okay. However we just don't have these mega corps being developed in Canada. It's a real problem. I think we float by a lot on high natural resources relative to population, it just adds a little air. Without that I just think we would be kind of screwed. Too many people looking for public jobs. Anyways the above is all subjective, note that the GDP per capita in Canada is ~75% of the US.