rukawa

I find that all of this is total bullshit. Supposedly we are supposed to hate banks for selling piles of crap to investors. But this was exactly what the federal government was pushing banks to do. How the heck did anyone think they would respond. And they still are! Banks are now refusing to originate mortgages of low credit quality because they don't want to accused again of selling crap and the government is saying "pretty please sell more crap". The government policy is completely schizophrenic. There is simply no way it could not result in problems or encourage fraud. And lets remember where all this bullshit comes from. It comes from the ideological belief that the only way to build wealth is through housing. A belief that has not diminished even after the housing crisis.

You will also find more information on both in the investments section. Here are a few links. The first from our own Glenn Chan (ItsAValueTrap). http://glennchan.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/altisource-asps-updated-writeup/ Scour his blog and there is more on Malone and on Erbey. http://www.valuewalk.com/2014/05/john-malone-complex-study-financial-brilliance/ https://oraclefromomaha.wordpress.com/2014/04/29/altisource-portfolio-solutions/ I would also highly recommend listening to the class notes and videos of Greenblatt which can be found here: http://csinvesting.org/2013/10/25/value-vault-videos-and-book-folders/

How did you get access to compustat?

If you are really interested in spinoffs I have two suggestions: 1) Study the Liberty Media spinoff carefully and pay careful attention to all of John Malones spinoffs. 2) Do exactly the same as 1) with William Erbey and Ocwen.

Another thing about IB is that their FX commissions are low. Questrade for instance charges something in the order of 1% for FX conversions. Whereas the IB FX conversion cost is essentially non-existent. 1% can be a lot. Of course you could use tricks like this to avoid Questrades fx fees: http://www.moneysense.ca/invest/norberts-gambit-a-better-way-to-buy-u-s-dollars

What is the best way to track a 13 f. I know of a few sites: Insider Monkey Whale Wisdom Gurufocus. What is the most useful/cheap?

But this is exactly the type of logic that people made about housing or about stocks during the tech bubble. The point about all these bubbles is that you can't predict when something happens only that it will happen and so past experience is a poor forward-looking guide. Also the catalyst for these events is often extremely unpredictable. If there is substantial inflation, Japanese pensions and institutional investors will have to switch out of bonds and if they do where exactly do they invest? There is a high probability it is equities. Plus institutional investors in Japan have already indicated they want to make this switch. I work for an institutional investor and I can tell you that there home bias is extremely strong. The same will be true for other Japanese companies and individuals. I would predict that equity markets would become hugely overvalued. Bass named one case where equities did not skyrocket and that is Mexico. But the Mexican situation is different than Japan. Mexico had a peg and they removed the peg allowing the currency to devalue. Japan has no peg. Also Mexico has substantial hot money flows from foreign investors. Japan doesn't. In Argentina, inflation has led to equities going up in value. In Germany during their hyperinflation the same thing happened. The reason is simple, companies can increase their prices and so become the safe place for domestic investors to put their money. Equities become the "safe" assets for domestic investors. There a few things I take away from all this: 1) hedge your currency risk if you are investing in Japan 2) Don't invest in banks or insurance or any large bond holders 3) Stick to companies which will do well when there is inflation

It appears the maturity of Japanese debt is only about 5-6 years. This means inflation would be negative for debt servicing.

In a hyperinflation scenario Japanese equities skyrocket. You just have to make sure you hedge out the currency risk since JPY will hugely decline. But you have to do this anyways because we know that the Japanese plan on monetary easing which will negatively effect their currency. So even if there is no hyperinflation it makes sense to currency hedge Japan. I am not sure about the Japanese thesis. I understand the argument but there are a few things I would point out: 1. You can increase taxes which Japan is doing with the increase in consumption taxes. 2. Inflation will not wipe out the government budget. I don't understand where this idea comes from. Inflation will increase interest rates only on new debt. The existing debt will actually be easier to service because nominal revenues will increase due to inflation. The effect of inflation depends critically on the duration of Japanse debt. If most of the Japanese debt has long duration than inflation will be a reduce debt burden. On the other hand of it has short duration then that is a different story. Critical to knowing the effect of inflation is the duration of Japanese government debt. 3. Half of Japans debt is intragovernmental. Its debt that one agency owes another agency. 4. Japan has assets it can sell including Japan Post, Toll roads etc. These assets have value and can be used to reduce debt.

I want a rock solid xbrl browser/search tool that can enable me to do things like look at the last 10 years of management discussion and analysis or find every single spinoff in the last year. Currently I am playing around with finmodeling on ruby but I can't even manage to install the thing because it has some funky dependencies.

Reading he Ackerman presentation a few thoughts come to mind. Ackerman's presentation was made when the HK economy was strong and America's was weak. The idea was that accommodative monetary policy in an economy where factor's of production are fully utilized will result in inflation. HKD's monetary policy is the same as the US due to the peg. Thus HKD gets an accommodative policy at exactly the wrong time...when its economy is strong. However we now find ourselves in a situation where the Chinese economy is slowing down and the US economy is speeding up. The US is tightening its monetary policy. In this situation we have exact reverse of what we had before. If you want a tight monetary policy there is no point in removing the peg because the US is about to provide you with exactly what you desire which is tight monetary policy. You would only ever remove the peg if you wanted HKD to be devalued relative to USD. The other problem I have with this trade is that I believe the China bubble is bursting and the Chinese economy is slowing down. My vague impression is that HK is levered to the Chinese economy....when the Chinese economy falters...Hong Kong does even worse. So my view is that HKD is not likely to strengthen with respect to USD and HK properties and equities are likely to do poorly. In addition the HKD property market is in a bubble. I don't understand why you would want to bet on it. Finally and most importantly I think the decision to remove the peg would constitute the dumbest and stupidest possible decision anyone could make. The peg was created to provide stability at a time when people were fearful and markets were jittery (HK's transition to China). I fail to understand how removing the peg would increase political stability. Once the peg is removed there is no way of knowing what will happen. HKD could appreciate or over time depreciate. Removing the peg only add uncertainty, increase fear and promotes the chances of a major crisis. In addition removing the peg makes no sense given that China's currency is pegged and HK's currency would the free float relative to China's. This would result inhabit trade and commercial relations and doesn't make a lot of sense for two economies that are so closely linked. Think about what it would be like to do business in NY if NY had its own currency which fluctuated relative to USD. You would avoid it if possible. Therefore I conclude that the peg will remain to the extent that China's peg remains. One thing to note is that China is very slowly weakening their peg.

Ackerman presentation: http://www.marketfolly.com/2011/09/bill-ackmans-presentation-on-hong-kong.html

I understand the desire to get this off the main thread but I actually think you guys were doing a service to Sears investors. Oh well.

That's the main con for me. Seems like you want to buy this one during a housing crash like 2008.

Microsoft and Apple in the pc space Oracle and Microsoft in the relational database space

I am often interested in old news, articles, analyst reports on companies because I want to know why they had a lot multiple in the past. I haven't found a good method of getting this though. For example right now I am trying to figure out why Monsanto had such a low multiple in 2003. Any suggestions on sites/subcriptions etc that maybe useful for historical info.

I like his advice on investing in Japan and hedging out the currency risk..I think that's really smart. As for Prem's bet working out...I don't think that will happen. The United States in my view will recover. A devaluation from China won't necessarily have any effect on the US. After all the US has been dealing with a devalued Chinese currency more than 20 years. Low-priced Chinese labour and goods are not really that big of a deal.

Perhaps. But I am curious as to how they are wired differently. I feel like it tends to be the case that whenever you have some obscure hobby or area of interest, you only see men involved. But when it become more popular there are more women. And I find the feminist explanation that women are scared away because of sexist male behaviour to be thoroughly unconvincing. There are plenty of environments where the is plenty of sexist male behaviour and plenty of women...think advertising, entertainment and even finance. Plus most everyday environments are thoroughly worse in this respect than the worst tech conference or value investing seminar.

Yes I think this is the way to go. Only problem is you will have long periods of under performance. But if you stick with small cap value you will beat the market assuming past history holds true. I would say one other thing you could do which is still probably pretty lazy but a little less lazy than to invest in small cap value is to have a cash/bond component whose proportion you vary based on how expensive overall markets are. So when markets are terrible with pe ratios below 10 you should be fully invested in small cap value. When PE ratios are 16 like now maybe you are stay fully invested and when PE ratios go to like 25 and over you cash out. I don't have any idea of whether this would work but my guess is that it might beat a pure small cap value allocation. Anyways I would probably invest in this: https://www.google.ca/finance?q=MUTF%3AVISVX&ei=DP4tVMD_FIekqwHb-IH4Cw Although you might want to check out the following before you do: http://servowealth.com/resources/articles/vanguards-index-switch-they-still-dont-get-it

I guess the first question is which PE? 10 year cyclically adjust PE or CAPE, Forward PE or Trailing PE. I might agree with you that Forward or Trailing PE are fairly useless in predicting returns whenever PE is within a reasonable range: 10-20. But I would argue both are fairly predictive at extremes like 4 P/E or 35 P/E especially over 10 year time frames. But my question is what proof do you have that PE is not predictive? I do know that CAPE is predictive of returns over 10-20 years. You can look at the Wikipedia page which demonstrates this in a graph near the bottom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93earnings_ratio Also the Wikipedia page states that the highest SP500 PE was 44.20 in Dec 1999 and the lowest was 4.78 in Dec 1920. This high PE was of course followed by a massive crash and the low PE by a massive bull market. A find it difficult to understand based on these facts why you believe PE has no predictive value.

I read the WSJ which I would say is by far my favorite source of ideas. I like Globe Investor from the Globe and Mail and the Globe and Mail itself (Canadian paper). I don't tend to read things online. I really like Bloomberg Business Week. I also read the Economist.

I remember looking at IB and being very impressed by their FX fees which I think are non-existent. If you are a Canadian converting a lot of money to USD then IB makes sense for FX fees alone. This is one reason I was thinking of them instead of Questrade.

What is the long thesis on Sistema?

I use Onenote too. Its pretty great.

I would say retail is facing secular decline.