rukawa

I don't really think Canada and US are that different. Most of the noted differences between the countries, I believe, are due to the fact that most of you have very limited experiences. Business is definitely less competitive in Canada because we are a smaller market. But I don't think we are any less entrepreneurial. We just have the best ideas of 30 million...you have the best of 300 million. And my view is that, that is your secret sauce...a secret sauce that China has to an even greater extent, since they have an even larger population. Although in China's case they still have far more internal barriers due to the hukou system.

If its small it might make sense to compare it to American cities or to American states rather than the whole country. Its a bit like comparing the returns of Berkshire Hathaway to the returns of Warren Buffet when he was just starting out.

To me its a pretty interesting question. Burt Folsom has an interesting video where he attempts an answer: https://www.prageru.com/courses/history/why-america-so-rich I was thinking about this because of the healthcare thread. America spends 17% of its GDP on health and 4% on the military. Basically it throws away 20% of its GDP and yet somehow its still incredibly prosperous and innovative. My belief is that America's success is due to the fact that America represents the largest free trade zone in the entire world with the lowest internal barriers since language, legal system,culture are shared. Thus an idea can migrate from one end of the country to the other easily and the country benefits from the best ideas and abilities of 300 million people.

Questrade does it for me. Not sure how flexible it is. Have you checked whether your broker has this functionality..not sure if you want it for stocks you own or plan to own.

I think that's a fantastic idea

Since liberals profess such trust in people, I propose that every liberal on this board post their credit card numbers, pins, bank transit numbers, email passwords on this thread. This would be a good way for them to demonstrate their unqualified trust in people. DooDiligence you go first.

I disagree. Liberals often distrust people. RichardGibbons in other thread doubted that people were smart enough to make intelligent decisions in healthcare. For very similar reasons liberals are against school choice. Liberals also doubt that people can be trusted to manage their retirement funds. The divisions between liberals and conservatives has more to do with interest group alliances, tribalism, historical factors and other ideological differences like for instance the liberal belief in big government vs the conservative belief in markets/big business. What for instance does the historical liberal support for socialist dictatorships such as USSR, Cuba or Hugo Chavez have to do with trusting people. For that matter how are any of the following connected: abortion rights, environmental protection, pro-immigration, high taxes, ending rape culture,decriminalization of marijuana. Historically none of these things were connected. For instance many early feminists were for alcohol prohibition, against immigration and against abortion. The fact that these things are connected to liberals today has nothing to do with a coherent worldview and everything to do with political interest group alliances which are reinforced by the media and the tribalism of people.

I believe the British answered that question when the took over parts of Africa and all of India. Although I kind of agree with you its a logistical nightmare and its messy. I don't think what the British did was easy. But its definitely possible.

People are not very good at judging the quality of healthcare. They tend to judge it based on inputs: access to doctors/specialists, medications, sophisticated diagnostics. I have a very hard time believing that the US healthcare system is a good one. I define good not based on access to the healthcare, number of MRI machines but rather on its ability to actually improve human health. My reason for believing this is that in the US system there are no monetary incentives for anyone to actually improve health of patients. And additionally there appears to be little concern by anyone as to whether treatments actually work or are effective. The vast majority of things done by doctors don't have scientific evidence backing them up. There is also very little money devoted to operational effectiveness. For instance, a doctor meets a patient and he doesn't wash his hands. He then touches the patient. The patient contracts C. Difficile from contact with the doctor. In the American system there are zero incentives to prevent the scenario I just described from happening and in fact doctors generally are resistant to hand-washing programs. Why are they resistant .... because they don't have time. They get paid by the number of procedures they do and patients they see, not time spent washing hands. When you also consider the fact that many of the procedures doctors perform are contraindicated by research you realize that the system often incentivizes poor health outcomes. The Canadian system is not that different in this regard. The other thing that make me doubt the effectiveness of US healthcare is the fact that the number of iatrogenic deaths (deaths due to the medical system) is estimated at around 200k and interestingly no one appears to care. In a truly good system, that cared about health outcomes, this should be an absolute scandal.

That's a little harsh. Anyways I can think of examples, I was just hoping DYOW would give me more of them. Related party transactions comes to mind...where they give some loan to an executive with overly generous terms. Stock option grants where they lower the exercise price because the stock does badly. This all gives an indication that management is not to be trusted. In the Multibagger speculative thread, valcont brought up the fact that the fulcrum debt on Bri-Chem had an interest rate of 21%. I probably would not have caught that. So my checklist would be: 1) Check terms of the debt, interest rate, maturity, convenants, currency of debt vs currency of revenue 2) Compensation, option grants and related party transactions. Anyways to dyow I would say that if you are going to read all the disclosures you should be investing a great deal of time/money/effort into XBRL and much better visualizations. A good XBRL tool could show you all the related party transactions by date side by side or the MD&A by year on a single page. This would be order of magnitude more powerful than reading the disclosures as documents. The disclosures will be much more powerful if you can compare them across multiple years and you have a search engine that can quickly find information. Technology is your friend.

I skimmed the thread on Zinc and my takeaway was that people were only investing in Zinc because Monish Pabrai was. In fact at the beginning people were pretty confused about why he was even doing it.

You assume that my purpose was to put a burden of proof on you. But that wasn't it at all!!!! I actually wanted you to give examples so I could make a checklist of things to check. In a way your right you would not have changed my point of view...there is no way I would ever read everything in disclosures. I have better and more important things to do with my life. I was hoping, though, that I could profit from the hard work you had already done and narrow things down to a few things to watch out for. After all isn't that what this board is all about...mutually profiting from the work of each other.

Singaporeans live 3 years longer than Americans, spend less than 1/3rd of what Americans spend on healthcare and express very high levels of satisfaction with their healthcare. Wait times in Singapore are also vastly superior to the US. BTW, Singaporeans spend as much on their military in proportion to GDP as the US and also force their young into mandatory service where some of them actually die in training (they run themselves to death). Healthcare is an input. HEALTH IS AN OUTPUT. You are confusing the two. You can have a space age healthcare system and yet because you order needless tests, over treat, over medicate and don't wash your hands (poor operational effectiveness)...actually make peoples health worse.

I was a libertarian and now I no longer am. In fact I had gone so far down the spectrum that I was AnCap like rkbabang. So I would say that's its definitely possible to persuade a libertarian. My shift occurred due to two things: 1) reading history...especially the history of Japan, China, France, US 2) value investing. I have also seen ever bigger shifts than this...recently I found out that a good friend of mine who was a devout Muslim became an athiest. Incidentally these shifts often occur not due to direct opposition but due to what I would call sideways arguments. What I mean is that I was not persuaded that libertarians were wrong by opposition from liberals. I was instead persuaded by people who were not trying to make an ideological point but another point about a different issue. I think if liberals had made the same points I would not have listened. Though I am not libertarian I think both sides could learn a tremendous amount from each other. I think liberals hugely underestimate the correctness of libertarians on a wide range of issues and simultaneously overestimate the correctness of their own beliefs.

The Canadian system has absolutely no price signals and so tends to ration by controlling supply which leads to long wait lines, low productivity and waste. Mostly the Canadian system suffers from the same problems as the US system except that because we ration our costs are a lot lower. But we still have poor focus on preventative health, physicians in Canada are badly incentivized, treatments often have little scientific basis etc. None of these issues though are as bad as in the US but that's not saying much. Lets provide some statistics: Canada average lifespan: 81.96 years average age: 39.8 heatlh (% of GDP): 10.4% US: average lifespan: 79 years median age: 37.8 heatlh (% of GDP): 17.1% Singapore avg lifespan: 82.6 years median age: 40 heatlh (% GDP): 4.9% Singapore basically spends less than half of what Canada spends and 1/3rd of the US but outcomes are similar. Canada looks good compared to the US but when you compare it to Singapore you realizes its actually pretty bad. Singapore wait times for instance are much much much much much much much much MUCH MUCH lower than in Canada. Singapore measures specialist wait times in minutes, Canada measures wait times in weeks or months. The only exception to this is emergency wait times where Canadian wait times would "only" be 3-4 times longer than Singapore. And to give you some idea of how good Singapore's health system is. Singaporeans biggest complaint about their system are the wait times!! So they are basically complaining about something where they are 2 to 3 orders of magnitude better than Canada. To be honest though given the immense stupidity of healthcare my suspicion is that even Singapore could cut their expenditures in half and improve health simultaneously.

I mostly do this. Great. Do you have examples...more is better.

Actually its not just consumers...doctors also are incapable of understanding what treatment is required or judging the quality of treatment delivered: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/02/when-evidence-says-no-but-doctors-say-yes/517368/ The solution is two things: 1) A lot more research into what works and into increasing the operational effectiveness of medicine. Delong does argue for this in his proposal. 2) Strong physician and patient education Anyways Delong was primarily motivated to have price signals because of the large quality increases and cost reductions he saw in laser eye surgery and similar other treatments that are not usually covered by insurance. Its pretty clear that with laser eye surgery price has gone down, quality has increased and productivity has increased. I am also not sure what is casual here. You assume that healthcare is exceptional because of poor consumer information...but it could be exceptional because its covered by insurance and so consumers tend to spend less time researching. Most of the economy consists of products and services that consumers are not experts in. For instance, I am not an expert on audio-visual technology but if I were to buy a tv I would do my research and there would be review sites telling me which products to buy. Same if bought a car. Why isn't there anything like this for hospitals or for medicine?

Thought I would start a discussion on healthcare. Buffet brought it up in the annual meeting: https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/07/warren-buffett-healthcare-is-the-real-problem-for.aspx I think the US healthcare system is pretty bad. I am not such a fan of the Canadian system either, although its far better than the US. I am a big fan of the Singapore system and its everyone pays principle. I thought Brad Delong, had a pretty sensible proposal: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/06/dealing_with_th.html

Cap IQ

Thanks for the great information...it was exactly what I was hoping someone could tell me.

Chinese plastics looks pretty good: http://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/china-xd-plastics-ceo-confirms-delisting-from-nasdaq-65414/ So far only a non-binding proposal has been submitted and there is no timeline. But the consortium includes a Morgan Stanley Private equity fund and the companies chairman. Together the consortium already represents 75% of the companies shares. The company has a market cap of 235 million and so the merger requires the consortium to raise 235*0.25= 58 million USD I think the merger has a pretty good probability of going through given the consortium's pre-existing share ownership and their resources even though its early stages. I would appreciate the opinion of anyone who has more experience. The merger premium = merger price/stock price - 1 = 5.21/4.75 - 1 = 9.6% which is not bad.

Personally I think all of you are wrong. This bull market will last longer than most people expect. ETFs actually make the market more efficient and much less volatile. Individual investors are not really active traders. They are lazy and have other things to do with their lives like their jobs. On the other hand fund managers spend all their time investing and they have tremendous career risk. A fund manager cannot afford to do nothing while the market is tanking. Therefore the move to passive management implies less volatility and less sharp downturns. Its not surprising to me though that Seth Klarman or any fund manager would not believe this, given their incentives. Additionally I see the main reason for a long bull is the high rate of corporate share buybacks and low rate of corporate investment. Corporate investment implies increased competition between companies which you often get at the tail-end of bull markets. This will lower returns. To me the danger signal will occur when people start feeling really good about the economy because that is the point at which companies will really start investing. That may happen as unemployment continues to go down and may happen faster if Trump gets his way in economic policies. But even if it does I expect the bull to go much much higher...say 35-40 pe before it comes crashing down.

Pension funds and hedge funds are playing that game and they are good at it.

I'm Canadian and I have worked in financial services. My cousin is a IT consultant at Deloitte. My friend does User Experience Design. I recently met a couple that worked as chemists in the pharmaceutical industry in Brampton where they told me there are a tonne of companies. I think most people's economic ideas are based on 19th century Mercantilism. Essentially the idea is that an economy is only a REAL ECONOMY if its trading actual physical things for Gold (in our case its now dollars) and whoever amasses the most Gold is the strongest best economy. Its a very zero sum competitive form of thinking. But its the folk economics that a lot of people actually believe in. Thus China is a real economy because they make stuff and amass dollars. I once argued with an extremely intelligent person about this point. I asked, the question, about the whole world. The whole world effectively trades with no one and amasses zero IOUs with anyone else. This will continue to be the case until we encounter extraterrestrial life. Yet if your measure of economic strength is amassing IOUs through trade by selling stuff you make with other people...then on this measure the World as a Whole has no economic strength whatsoever. He basically refused to accept the point. I guess I understand to some extent. In the past the most powerful countries typically made stuff: Germany, Britain and US all rose to prominence as manufacturing powerhouses with big trade surpluses. However, I think that the economic powerhouses of the future will not be making stuff and trading it. In fact I think the poorest and weakest economies will be doing this. Countries like China have already realized this.

Really 2 stocks: Frost - Texas bank - highly interest rate sensivtive bank - lots of deposits per bank 200million deposits per bank - pays no interest to customers - increased 50%...already at 3/4rds of fair value BWX Technologies - 20% - supplies nuclear reactors for subs and aircraft carriers - monopoly/monosopy - US navy is only customer. BWX is only supplier. - everything involving nuclear for government...any defense stuff - very high quality business but pretty expensive right now Japanese net net - left over from when he did net nets. Not a real position He plans to by Howden - 4% same store sales growth - 4% growth in stores - perfectly predictable for next 5 years only - hasn't bought it yet for mostly stupid reasons.