rukawa

The SEC is now providing financial statement information in database ready form. You no longer have to parse XBRL: https://www.sec.gov/dera/data/financial-statement-data-sets.html Essentially anyone can now pretty easily create their own financial statement database. I tried loading one of the files into postgres. Mostly it worked except that the file is encoding (UTF-8) is bad in some places and since postgres is anal about this it complained repeatedly. This is pretty fantastic. I'm a pretty big fan of the SEC right now.

AFAIK IB only allows trades on Korean stock futures. Not Korean cash equities. So if you can find a future on your stock your in luck. See here: https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=products&p=asia_stk

If the Chinese want to work for nothing ... I say let them. That's all currency manipulation really is. The Chinese essentially said: "Look we are going to work our asses off for you for 30 years in sweat shops and we expect very little in return" Essentially this is the story of the rise of nearly every single economic power or group. You rise up by giving much more than your getting. Immigrants do in when they come to the US, black people did it after slavery, the Chinese and Indians are doing all over the globe. Getting mad at someone because they want to get ahead ... its mean and petty and weak.

Your website is pretty impressive considering it was just the two of you. I am looking to create a website of my own. Just wondering, did you guys code this yourself and if so using what framework. What was the time, effort, expense involved?

If you don't have the data it would be good to have a message to that effect, otherwise the user will just assume its broken like I did. The density I would not sweat....its a general problem across the entire internet. I don't think its that easy to fix. For Sharadar, how much are you paying?

This page is not loading properly: https://stockrow.com/DRYS/financials/income/quarterly I would add more years of data. You go back to 2008. I would prefer at least 10 years. Second I often end up getting horizontal and vertical scrollbars on your data when I try to load a page. I would try to avoid this if possible but maybe its just my screen. I don't get why everything on the web has a lower density of information. Value line is really good at have a tremendous density of information on one page for their pdfs. But on websites I find there is just too much spacing between adjacent elements.

The only problem I see with IB is that for penny stocks their fees can be higher. For penny stocks you are probably best off with TD or one of the big banks since they don't even charge you ECN fees, whereas Questrade and IB both do. Canadian exchanges often charge about $0.0035 per share. I generally only use limit orders. For IB does better execution just mean that limit orders will have a greater likelihood of filling than TD or Questrade?

I wanted to pull prices from Japanese stocks automagically in an Excel spread sheet. The SMF addin doesn't really work for Japan. I looked at thread on Google tips: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/google-spreadsheet-tips-and-tricks/40/ Its pretty great but I ran into problems with ImportXML and I preferred to use Excel. So I created my own addin using ExcelDNA and C#. The attached addin was meant to pull prices from Bloomberg but it also has functionality to pull data from any site using xpath selectors. There are two xll addins: one for 32-bit Excel and one for 64-bit Excel. In addition the Examples.xlsx contains examples of how the functions are called and the attached word document provides some documentation. I've also include a zip of my full visual studio project for those who want to modify it. getPrice(ticker) – goes to Bloomberg page https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/ticker and grabs the price from that page using the selector //div[@class=’price’] getName(ticker) – same as get price except that it grabs the name using the selector //h1[@class=’name’] getBloombergAttribute(ticker, selector) - goes to Bloomberg page https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/ticker and grab text from xpath selector specified in function call getAttribute(url, selector) – goes to arbitrary url and grabs text from whatever selector is specified in function call argument The easiest and most useful one is getPrice. And an example call is: =getPrice("7922:JP") examples.xlsx Excel_Addin_to_pull_prices_from_BLoomberg.docx GetBloombergData-AddIn-packed.xll GetBloombergData-AddIn64-packed.xll

Lol. You really mean you hate the idea and so you refuse to think about it. I take your statement to mean that it is impossible to produce 1 million inflated helium balloons and release them. Your statement as it stands is ridiculous. That is a very interesting question. Its happened to me more than once on this board that people who should easily and obviously know better about certain things given their background, where they work ... somehow don't. And my final realization is that none of this has anything whatsoever to do with what someone "knows" or doesn't know. It has everything to do with what you would like to argue. If what you should "know" goes against what you are trying to argue than you will somehow stop "knowing" it. I know I do this...I think its called motivated reasoning. Scenarios 1) and 2) will only not happen if the current North Korean regime maintains power forever. And that will only happen if the US, China or some combo basically subsidize the regime indefinitely. Is that what you propose? I see two problems: a) The longer we wait the worse both 1) and 2) get b) North Korea has every incentive to rachet up their demands since they can just keep proposing war a) and b) have already happened under Clinton, Obama and Bush. The longer we wait the worse your scenarios 1) and 2) get. The subsidize the regime indefinitely stratagem has already been tried...it isn't working. On the other hand your scenarios may never happen. The North Korean regime can't afford war since it means the certain end of their regime and very likely imprisonment or death for leading officials. I don't understand the difficulty here. North Koreans are already starving to death and eating the bark off trees. How could any change be anything other than an improvement? And why the necessity of a Marshall plan? Vietnam has had no Marshall plan. China never had one. Singapore didn't. Plenty of Third world, dirt poor Asian shitholes have progressed without having any Marshall plans. And few of them had the advantage of having a neighbor to the South with the same culture, same language and a massive manufacturing industry that will face massive labour shortages going forward.

People commenting here are wrong to think that the one way for this to work is for it to be impossible for the North Korean regime to resist it. Any action only has to do two things: 1) Massively increase the cost of maintaining power for the regime 2) Increase the dissatisfaction of the North Korean people Generally speaking Eastern Europe and Russia regimes came down because of two things: their people were against them and they couldn't afford the military spending to maintain the existing system. The North Korean regime is hugely paranoid. They would have to spend tremendous amounts of money to deal with a sustained propaganda effort. For instance to shoot down a million balloon might be possible for the North Koreans but massively expensive given the man power needed to find the balloons. And even if 1 in 1000 balloons made it down it would be enough due to the magic of black markets. Consider the amount of money spent on 1 million balloons vs the money the US spends on bases, military etc. Its pretty cheap and effective.

Your right it is. So let me correct what I said. Brand's whose reputation is largely based on image will have a much harder time than they used to. I am thinking here of a brand like Coke. Why is Coke superior to other Colas? Brands will only have value if they actually do provide higher quality and greater value. Google is an example. Their brand reputation is not the result of advertising. Continually providing higher quality and greater value than all other competitors is in my opinion a lot more difficult than controlling distribution channels and spending large amounts on advertising. This implies the durability and value of good brands cannot be taken for granted. Each brand is only as good as their latest product.

We buy some kind of no-name detergent that costs 50% of what Tide costs and washes as well as Tide from what I see. But clearly a lot of people believe in what rb wrote and (continue to) buy Tide. 8) Its not the cost that I think is the issue. Its the advertising. Go to any supermarket and you will see Tide. Watching tv you were used to seeing Tide commercials. If you never saw a Tide commercials why buy Tide specifically? Rb talks about an agreement but he never explains how the agreement got initiated. Why Tide? There are only a few possibilities: 1) advertising 2) he tried every single brand of detergent and Tide was best 3) word of mouth. My view is that most brands today were built on 1). Google's brand was mostly based on 3) The way I buy currently on Amazon is to do a search and then look at most popular and highest rated product. Right now Tide is pretty highly rated but so is Persil...whatever the fuck that detergent is. Who knows I might buy Persil.

I had similar thoughts to this some time ago...though my arguments were a bit different: the-rise-and-fall-of-brands Basically I think the rise of brands is due to two things: limited distribution channels and limited advertising spots on broadcast television. The rise of cord-cutting, the demise of broadcast television and finally the infinite shelf-space of Amazon spell the death of brands in the long run. The question everyone should really ask is where the hell did brands even come from in the first place?! We tend to think of brands like we think of the air around us...like they are some inevitable fact of life. But why didn't we have brands in the 19th century? My argument is that we didn't have brands because we didn't have broadcast television and we didn't have highways. Broadcast television heavily favored the rise of brands because the limited advertising spots and massive reach of the medium created dynamics that favored larger companies that could afford massive advertising budgets. Highways enabled the rise of chain stores which needed the highways to provide distribution. The rise of chain stores heavily favored national brands since chains stores preferred to hold a single product nationally instead of many different local brands. In addition chain stores had limited shelf space and so often pushed companies to pay for national distribution (e.g. slotting fees) . Again this favors a few big brands. All of this is changing now. Amazon's shelf space is infinite. Think of the viewership of a show like Bonanza and compare it to any hit show today. Audiences are much more fragmented and with cord cutting and PVRs many people are not even watching commercials. There is simply no advertising medium comparable to broadcast television in its heyday. All this spells the death of brands like Coke. Other brand names may exist but will only thrive if they have a reputation for quality or service...think Toyota.

Not to get the thread of course, but this seems like a decent little cigar butt: -Mkt Cap of $34M is 56% owned by a company out of Hong Kong, leaving $15M in public hands -Current repurchase plan is for $5M. Runs through December -Lloyd Miller owns 1.5M and has been pushing for cash distributions for years. In 2015 the company did a $19M special dividend -Operating business is pretty poor (Import cheap electronics under the Emerson brand and sell to big box retailers), but they've managed the decline well. Sales have declined from $163M in 2012 to $21M in 2016 but EBITDA was basically breakeven in 16 and there's no capex. Inventory and AR have mostly already been converted to cash. -A licensing contract terminated at the end of 2016 that contributed $3.6M of revenue in 2016 at likely no cost. My guess is the licensor decided the Emerson brand doesn't have much value. Business now is largely selling cheap microwave ovens to Walmart, which, not surprisingly, doesn't have a lot of margin. -They recently terminated the CFO and replaced him with a board member affiliated with the controlling shareholder. This is a bit of a red flag, but the old CFO made $480k last year while the new guy will make $150k (plus bonus?). He also loses the $50k he received as a director, so net this saves the company ~$300k assuming a 50% bonus. Haven't dug into it too much but it seems fairly low risk for a negative enterprise value business. TBV/share is $1.98 versus $1.27 share price. If they execute the buybacks that gap will widen (although business is likely currently EBITDA negative). Seems like it's getting pretty close to the point where there isn't really anything left from an operating business perspective. Risk seems to be that the controlling shareholder decides to do something other than wind down the business. They haven't made any acquisitions that I can see though. The controlling shareholder was involved in a complicated liquidation of a HK holding company that may be worth reading into more. I didn't invest because I didn't trust management. I tend to stay away from all Chinese run companies that are listed in other countries. Basically I look at the board of directors and executives and if it sounds too Chinese I stay away. There are exceptions to this where the names are Chinese but they were born and raised in other countries or I have other reasons to not suspect the company. You can't do too much filtering in a net-net strategy but this is one of the few filters I do have. Geoff Gannon did an extended analysis of management for Emerson. https://www.gurufocus.com/news/172206/a-stock-where-neither-the-business-nor-the-price-matters

Net-nets generally aren't over-levered. And the table includes the worst drawdown. The last line in the table is 2007. What this means is that they bought the net-net portfolio on Dec 31, 2007 and held it to Dec 31, 2010. So it does include the worst drawdown of the period and doesn't end before it. In that drawdown your initial $10000 investment goes down to $3470 if you invest in the net-net portfolio and goes down to $3251 if you invest in the market. I believe you are applying what you know about low P/B stocks to net-nets. Then your comments about 90% drawdowns and over-levered companies makes sense.

I'm not sure where you are getting drawdowns that large. I'm assuming your talking about drawdowns at the portfolio level. Generally my observation is that the only way you can get drawdowns like 90% is by using a fairly small number of stocks. Tobias Carlisle's study has a table of 3 year returns from 1983 to 2007 (see Exhibit III) http://www.valuewalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/benjamin-grahams-net-nets-seventy-five-years-old-and-outperforming-full-tables1.pdf Basically net-nets beat the market every single year except for the 3 year period starting in 1988 where your terminal wealth is $9279 (from $10000 initial) vs the markets $14496. There is one big drawdown and that is in the 3-year period starting in 2007 where your $10000 initial investment drops to $3470...however in this scenario the market does slightly worse. There are a tonne of Japanese ones. Canada and Australia are the other countries that dominate. For instance this stock trades at less than half NCAV. Also in the US you are missing RGS Energy and everyone perennial favorite STRI. Thanks!!! I didn't even know I could buy Poland. I just now looked on IB and found out you could due to your message.

The 50% does appear to be too good to be true. My guess would be that at minimum net-nets provide 20% a year in a real life implementation based on Ben Grahams reports and the fact that nearly ever study has reported at least this performance. The 30%-50% range is more iffy. But if its wrong I would like to know exactly what is wrong. All the issues you pointed out like insufficient volume, low liquidity are things we can test for since volume is a measure in Bloomberg. I can filter for something like volume*price > $10000 cad daily. The bid/ask is what everyone states as an objection but its one that doesn't make sense to me. Any backtest is based on close price. So this already includes the bid ask/spread...a close price implies a bid and an ask at that price at that time for a trade. To be honest I have found with anything over about 4 million mcap I can almost always get my trade filled at the last close. Even under 4 million....lets say 1-2 mil I still get last close, it just takes a longer. Its only sub 1 million or dark companies which are no longer reporting where in practice I see real issues. Yes the same objection is given in US...that there aren't enough US net nets. My solution is to search internationally...Japan, Australia, Europe etc. Generally there are enough net-nets internationally to compile a good list.

I have just started this strategy about 8 months ago. Right now its too soon to tell. The only guy I know that tried this in real life and reported performance is Ben Graham. He was reporting about 20% a year. However he filtered for positive earnings and dividends, which according to some studies reduces returns. Tobias Carlisle reports 1.96% per month for positive prior year earnings and 3.38% per month for negative and 2.55% across the whole sample. This translates to 26% per year and 50% per year and 35% per year respectively. Though when I tried to filter like this I didn't see any difference between pos and neg earning net-nets.

Sorry not that I know of :(. Bloomberg actually tells you that that the datasets are point in time without survivorship bias which shocked me. Those datasets are tremendously expensive and only CRSP/Compustat has these AFAIK. Maybe Bloomberg is getting them from there.

No. In Bloomberg AFAIK, both these would be zero. The buy/sell criterion is buy when mcap is less than 2/3rds NCAV and sell when above this. Basically you can think of bloomberg as liquidating the portfolio each month and buying each stock satisfying the screen (mcap < 2/3rds NCAV) each month. However there is no reason for anyone to do this in practice. In practice you could keep the whole portfolio intact and only buy/sell those stocks that have moved significantly. I don't know that it is optimistic. In fact it seems really high to me to assume 1% total costs monthly. I don't see why slippage would be 0.5% of the whole portfolio in one month. You aren't trading the whole portfolio each month in practice. I would guess you are trading less than 5% of all stocks. The only way to get 0.5% on a portfolio basis for one month would then be to have slippage of 10% on a position basis which seems really high. I also don't get how its possible to get 0.5% commissions, even on a per position basis. I can and have bought net nets in Japan, Singapore, USA and Canadian Venture exchange. Generally you are paying around 0.25%. On questrade I recently bought $3000 of a US stock and paid $10. Which is $10/$3000 = 0.33%. In Japan I have looked at all my trades in interactive brokers over 2017 and I see that I bought $31478 and paid $25.23 in commissions across 9 trades which means I paid 0.08%. The worst, worst, is the Canadian Venture Exchange where I pay around 0.5% and sometimes even more (Russell Breweries!!). But this is all on a per position basis. On a portfolio basis if you are trading 5% of the portfolio each month and you paying 0.5% on a position, your cost across the whole portfolio is 0.025% or 2.5 bps per month. In 1 year that means 2.5*12= 30bps or 0.3%. I just don't get how that can eat up the additional 15% or 1500 bps you are getting from monthly rebalance. For tax consequences, a 50% return a year assuming a 25% capital gain tax and 100% annual turnover, gets bumped down to 37.5%. With 50% annual turnover, your after tax return is 50%*(1-turnover%*cap gain tax rate) = 50%*(1-0.5*0.25)=43.75% and with 33% turnover your return is 45.6%. So even at 100% turnover, just taking taxes alone you are still better off with monthly rebalance but at lower rates of turnover you are far better off. I don't think 50% turnover is unreasonable and at this level you are still getting nearly 9% of extra return. Of course I am assuming a certain story for what is going on and my story almost certainly wrong. It could be that you are actually trading much more than 5% of the portfolio in each month and that what is really happening is that large percentage of marginal stocks are bouncing around the buy/sell criterion for the screen and coming in and out of the portfolio repeatedly. My assumption is more along the lines of there are a few stocks which have big sudden runups. I'll have to investigate further to figure out what is driving this difference and how exploitable it is. That's pretty impressive. I tried all kinds of things and found it very difficult to get much higher than 35% without monthly rebalance. Considering your test included transaction costs and slippage I am surprised you could get that.

I was playing around with net-net screens with EQS on Bloomberg. The default on Bloomberg backtest function is monthly rebalance which I didn't realize. I ran the screen over the period from 2000-2017 and got some insane result: 70000% increase. An average of 50% returns over the period. I thought shit this result must be garbage resulting from data errors so I filtered out stocks with less than 1 million mcap and less than 1 cent prices. Still I was getting the same number. Then finally I figured out that the rebalance was monthly and switched to annual. The result was a more reasonable 35% a year which exactly agrees with the net-net literature (Oppenheimer, Tobias Carlisle). I knew this was a reasonable result. But here is the thing I don't think the monthly rebalance result was wrong. I think its real. Its been found with equally weighted indexes too that re-balancing monthly is what drives returns. Its also interesting to observe that the graph of returns I observed was very smooth...much more smooth than yearly re-balancing. There were less draw-downs, less flat periods...it just looked like a nice smooth exponential curve. Its also interesting to think about what is going on here. Because net-nets don't really change in value that often. There are probably only a small percentage of stocks that will increase substantially in any 1 year but it appears that selling these promptly and re-balancing is a fairly effective way of boosting returns. The real question is whether this higher return can be captured. I believe it can be without too much additional cost and that the effect is significant.

Just got the book "Benjamin Graham on Investing" that Packer suggested. I believe Packer is referring to the two articles: "Eight stock bargains off the Beaten Track" "Bargain-Hunting Not Thrilling But -- Immensely Profitable" These articles aren't what I originally wanted since they cover "Cash-Asset Stocks" whereas I am looking for when Graham first articulated the NCAV strategy of buying stocks at 2/3rds NCAV. However, they are something I should have been looking for, if I had any idea they even existed. I knew that Graham had considered not only Net Current Asset Value as a measure of cheapness but also Cash Asset Value in Security Analysis. But I had no idea about these articles. My study is going to be on Negative Enterprise Value which almost exactly aligns with Cash Asset Value. It appears Graham had anticipated this idea. Tobias Carlyle in his article: http://www.valuewalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/benjamin-grahams-net-nets-seventy-five-years-old-and-outperforming-full-tables1.pdf cites Henry Oppenheimer on Graham advocating Net-nets. Oppenheimer never cites anything...he just kind of states that its common knowledge that Ben Graham proposed buying stocks selling at 2/3rds NCAV. This suggests that Graham may have stated this in an Oral presentation to some society of financial analysts. Not sure. I not only don't know where he first proposed this...I actually can't find anything in writing indicating he proposed it at all.

My guess is you're going to have to go microfiche on these things. Maybe you could be the one to microfiche it, print then digitize? There's a lot of value investing karma out there for you if you do! I ordered the book. But there are other out of print references, books we as a community ought to digitize. I think the very first edition of the intelligent investor would be a candidate. Its in all the major university libraries and sells for >$500 on the used market. I think Kraven was the one who advocated reading it. Maybe I should start a thread.

Thanks Packer!! Had no idea about this book. He talks about NCAV stocks but I don't think he ever explicitly advocates buying stocks selling at 2/3rds Market Cap. In fact I don't think he ever really explicitly outlines any investment strategy throughout the whole of Security Analysis except in a very oblique manner.

Curious as to both the people and the stocks you are talking about in this category.