rukawa

I actually don't think Buffett biographies are bad as investment books. From a Buffett biography you will learn about the following: 1) net-nets 2) Benjamin graham, Security Analysis and the intelligent investor. 3) wide moat investing...even if you don't agree with this method...its pretty important to know about it so you understand when people are making the argument 4) Walter Schloss, Irving Kahn, Tweedy Brown and other things in the value universe 5) merger arbs, activist investing Basically Buffett's biography is a great introduction to value investing....it just tends to push people in a direction that may not work for them...namely trying to be the next Warren Buffett. My picks would be: 1) Intelligent Investor 2) Making of an American Capitalist 3) Benjamin Graham on Investing 4) You too can be a stock market genius

I like this list. The only way to beat the market is to do things that other market participants are not doing. And the question then is why is it that market participants are not doing it. The above list provides a bunch of reasons: 1) Its gross 2) its boring 3) it takes too long 4) its too small This list of reasons also extends to other areas of life ;D BTW, writser, what broker do you use to buy stocks on AIM. IB, AFAIK doesn't have this capability

I like this list. The only way to beat the market is to do things that other market participants are not doing. And the question then is why is it that market participants are not doing it. The above list provides a bunch of reasons: 1) Its gross 2) its boring 3) it takes too long 4) its too small This list of reasons also extends to other areas of life ;D

Sorry but I have no clue. This is all based on Excel-Dna so I would suggest checking their website to see if Office365 is breaking anything.

Yea, I have a problem with that. Did we really get to a place where it's ok not to comply with laws as long as you make money? The taxi monopoly is the result of lobbying and pushing by entrenched cabbie interests...mostly people who in the early days of taxis realized they could make a lot of money if they could control the supply of cabs. The regime created does not serve the public interest now. But its a low priority in a democratic society compared to other issues. Not to mention the fact the voter turnout for municipal elections is abysmal. So the only people that end up shouting and lobbying the hardest are the monopolists. And the issue never gets resolved. Also ordinary voters and consumers will never vote for a change because they have no clue what the counterfactual world would look like. They don't know whether it would be better or worse. And the entrenched monopoly can come up with all kinds of reasons not to change: health and safety, driver training etc which an ordinary person doesn't have the time or inclination to think critically about. There is also zero empirical evidence that any of these laws did anything whatsoever to improve health and safety. One way to get around this impasse is to break the law. But lets understand what that means. Uber didn't murder someone. They didn't break into someones house. They didn't dump toxic sludge into a river. Your statement mentions breaking the law...but that covers a huge range of things which go right from murder to jay-walking. You fail to distinguish between any of this and treat it as the same thing...one big blob that is somehow all the same. Uber broke a bad law that was not serving the public interest and the evidence of this is that once the public had experience with Uber they prevented politicians from getting rid of Uber. The fact that for decades the voters did nothing to change the law and only after they experienced Uber they decided a change was necessary is evidence of Democratic failure (the political system not the party). The real travesty is not what Uber did...its the fact that they had to break the law in order to show us something better. In a properly functioning system those laws would not have been there in the first place. Ultimately what your really arguing is that Uber should have just behaved more like the taxi monopoly and spend decades cultivating a network of compliant politicians. I can't see how your solution..intensive lobbying, chummy networks is a good thing. Or do you have something better in mind? I also can't see how it would have worked given that a law-abiding Uber would have been making no money and therefore couldn't fund such a lobbying effort.

I think that what Rockfeller did in business was a lot more socially beneficial to American society than Buffett. I also don't see how he was a shady businessman. I find it weird how the businessmen of the nineteenth century are considered these evil Robber Barrons when if you look at the era all you end up seeing is vast reductions in poverty, large improvements in living standards, low unemployment, rising salaries and lower costs across the board. On the other hand Buffett's great skill appears to be choosing companies that are able to increase prices repeatedly without losing market share. Even today people have problems with guys like Bezos and Uber's former CEO but again these are the guys lowering prices and expanding service. Uber would have never gotten as far as it did if they were "nice"...they would have been complied with government laws and that would have been the end of that.

:) I spend about that amount of time. I reject in 5 minutes. But then most of my plays are net-nets. I'm really only trying to figure out if the assets and company appear to be real and there aren't obvious disqualifiers (heavy share issuance, capital raises, chinese, dark etc) . I created a habit to spend 15 min a day on investing but these days I have nothing to do. Returns have been good so far but its too soon to tell. I realized a few year ago that I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to investing so I stick to things that are dead simple and a 10 year old can do. And I diversify heavily. I'm not a true investor and I never intend to become one. I'll leave that to all of you :P

How about the Chinese red chips? Like 392, Bejing Enterprise Holdings.

Steven Shen often comes to the Fairfax AGMs. I understand he has a fund. I believe its based in Delaware. Anyone know what the fund is called?

Watching the Founder and even reading books about McDonalds it seems like there was a time when they had a great tasting burger. At some point though they switched from fresh to frozen meat. And lately they are making a switch back to fresh meat. Did McDonalds ever have a good burger? Before the switch from fresh to frozen in 1973, a test was conducted and the supplier, Equity Meat Company, had to prove that frozen was as good as fresh to a highly skeptical McDonalds president Fred Turner. Equity had some special flash freezing cryogenic method. Supposedly the test was a success. I don't get how that is possible. The difference today is pretty obvious.

Thanks. Your right! I had no idea. Cost for an international order is 1% of market value or $195 USD which ever is greater which means at minimum its $195 per trade. Number is 1-866-980-9590. I wonder if there are cheaper options.

I have plenty of cash in my RRSP and nothing to invest in. Generally I like Canadian/US net nets but only have found a handful. I prefer 2/3s NCAV or ones with lots of cash. Any ideas? I'm restricted to US/Can in my RRSP since that is all IB and Questrade offer.

RSX or RSXJ etfs. https://www.vaneck.com/etf/equity/rsxj/overview/ Or for Poland: https://www.vaneck.com/etf/equity/plnd/overview/

Yep, do it for myself, do it for clients. It can be a pain in the ass. A few points. 1. The values for the 1135 are cost not market value. 2. Securities in TFSA and RRSP are not counted. 3. Foreign securities held at a Canadian institution do count. 4. If the cost cost of the securities is less than $250k then you can do the simplified version which is a lot easier to do. I'm above 250k but I understand that if you hold it with Canadian Brokerage you can just report the total by country. Is that right. How does one report this. Is it the total for each country for each Broker I have. So would it be something like this structure. IB USD Market value Cap gains Income JPY Market value cap gains income Questrade USD Market value Cap gains Income

Anybody ever have to fill this out. My undertanding is that anyone with more than $100k in foreign property has to fill this.

And why would the buyers do that? What do they get out of it? You are telling me they are paying 8 cents more than NAV. And the Cline assets are going to result in a separate distribution. So it seems like the payout of existing shareholders kind of screws over the buyers. Why would the buyers agree to it unless either the non-Cline assets are worth significantly more than reported NAV.

How do you calculate hard NAV? Is this non-cline NAV? I don't really get where they are getting the $0.53 in cash from. Is this coming from the private placement. If it is what do the private placement investors get out of it? Did they sell all the non-Cline assets to someone? I feel like I'm missing something.

I probably walk for around 1.5-2 hours each day when I'm at work. During that time I'm thinking and reflecting. Even if I wanted to not do this I couldn't. After about 45 to 1hr of work I get restless and need to step away and walk. There is a nervous energy that builds inside of me. This happens really strongly when I'm in a social situation with a large number of people. Basically everything described in the article I have been doing for most of my life because its basically genetically pre-programmed into me.

Vaclav Smil is pretty good when it comes to energy. He has a book on steel: https://www.amazon.com/Still-Iron-Age-Steel-Modern/dp/0128042338/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1524143610&sr=8-1&keywords=still+the+iron+age%3A+iron+and+steel+in+the+modern+world The other thing I would do is the read a history of the industry. Like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Steel-Mine-Mill-Metal-America/dp/0760347425/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524143679&sr=1-1&keywords=history+of+steel\ That said...I don't think reading any of this will improve your investment ability since all these type of trends and information are understood much better by analysts than they are by you. You won't "win" by understanding an industry better than others.

I don't see the point to brain exercises. The brain is adaptive and its structure is altered depending on what you do. Make it good at one thing and it becomes worse at another. There is no way to make it good at everything otherwise you would be born that way. So to me it would make sense to spend time on either things that really interest you or on things you want to become good at. Otherwise you are just making the brain really good at doing pointless things.

European law also appea There are no property rights in the US protected by the constitution...probably because it would have protected slavery. Interestingly Europe does have similar jurisprudence protecting corporations and it also has property rights explicitly protected: http://theconversation.com/how-human-rights-law-has-been-used-to-guarantee-corporations-a-right-to-profit-74593 Everyone appears to be against rights for corps. But as far as I can see no one would be against the way any of these cases were decided...or at least no one has made a single argument. How would you protect the NAACP? Or the Washington Post? I look at South America and what happened to Venezuela and I feel the rights corporations enjoyed in the US including the liberty rights that Cigarbutt distinguishes would have prevented what has turned out to be a horrible disaster. At every step of the way the lack of property rights and corporate rights allowed the systematic dismantling of every institution that opposed the Venezuelan government. Why is this a good thing? The effect of these rights to create a set of numerous factions. Each of which is very powerful and in competition with each other for power and money. This makes it difficult for a demagogue or national saviour (e.g. Trump, Hugo Chavez) to effectively do whatever he wants. At ever step he can be opposed by these factions which cannot be easily destroyed because they are protected in various ways by courts. In some sense this is the exact opposite of the totalitarian corporatism that was desired by fascists and socialists at the turn of the century where all entities would be suborned to the needs of the State.

It would be interesting to see how Europe deals with this. Its not that straightforward. As this example makes clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAACP_v._Alabama And of course another good example is this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post_(film) What I found really surprising is that the vast majority of freedom of speech cases are actually brought by corporations. The reason this is difficult it because individuals alone are relatively powerless. If you give all civil rights to only individuals then it makes it impossible to group together and pool resources as the NAACP did when it was fighting for the civil rights of blacks. Or as the Washington Post did when it published the Pentagon papers. Some of these cases are interesting. For instance should Tech companies have fourth amendment rights: https://techcrunch.com/2015/12/13/should-tech-companies-be-subject-to-the-fourth-amendment/ What is really interesting is the extent to which liberals have argued on behalf of corporate rights in order to advance various causes. Heck Ralph Nader even argued for corporate freedom of speech to enable pharmacists to compete more vigorously: http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1813&context=wmborj

Pretty interesting discussion of how corporations amassed various constitutional rights:

The question the articles asks is not whether the symptoms of PTSD are real but instead whether they reflect the horrors suffered in war or the difficulty in adjusting to civilian life. A brilliant science fiction novel that explores the same idea is Forever War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War

A really great article on PTSD: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/05/ptsd-war-home-sebastian-junger From the article: Another article questioning PTSD: https://www.wired.com/2012/03/the-ptsd-trap/