rukawa

I sell netnets at NCAV, but after 1 year i reassess the situation and when i find something a lot cheaper i make the switch. I sell net-nets often below NAV (80% of NAV is typical for me). But I buy them even cheaper...typically at least <60% of NAV. And I rebalance often...almost continuously actually. I'm thinking of lowering to once a quarter. My backtests indicate quarterly rebalancing is significantly better than annual rebalancing. The following appear to really work well in a "net-net" like strategy: 1) Large cash balances....lots of cash is far far better than lots of inventory or receivables 2) Few financial but not necessarily operating liabilities 3) Lots of extra, not necessarily current assets What you are basically looking for is a company in an excellent liquidity situation because they have a tonne of cash a few financial liabilities (operating liabilities are far less important). And simultaneously a low price to book ratio...lets say around 60%. Examples of such companies are: 1) KDM Shipping 2) Namura Shipbuilding 3) Kikukawa Enterprise Inc 4) STR Holdings 5) Walker Innovation Interestingly 2) and 3) often don't show up on net net screens. In other words net nets are really a combination of two things: 1) cheapness 2) great liquidity => immunity from bankruptcy Traditional nets-nets which may include companies with a tonne of inventory and often lots of financial liabilities...can be terrible.

If the tax cut works as expected which is to increase employment, wages and investment...it should be bad for stock holders. Seems like more of a Politics thread.

One day I'm going to go to the Berkshire Annual meeting and ask Warren Buffett why he doesn't use screeners or Bloomberg which i think is kind of idiotic. I'll say something like: Hey Warren, stop all this amateurish stuff. When are you going to get serious about this value investing thing :)

Why not just keep avoiding it? Can anyone make a good case for investing in banks?

What ratios do you look at to determine value? I mainly use P/E (price / earlier price) but more suggestions would be appreciated. The problem with that approach is that it penalizes growth. I first match to an exponential curve to get a growth rate and then I divide the PE by the growth to get PEG ratio. Basically I'm banking on mean reversion to the intrinsic exponential.

The best way to learn valuation is to read all the basic financial statements (balance,cashflow etc) for a company and then guess the price.

You have to think of the groceries stores in the context of meal delivery and prepared foods. I expect prepared meals segment to continue to increase in size. If you think of a busy person in a city who has no time to cook what do they want from a grocery store: 1) Fully prepared fresh meals that require minimal prep 2) staples like juice, eggs, milk, fresh fruits I would guess that in the future far fewer people will cook from scratch. You might have convenience type stores to sell the staples. In this context a large grocery store makes no sense. Its just time wasting from the consumer point of view and its inventory is wasteful from the business point of view since most of it just sits there.

Not sure what the best is. But one solution is to use xpath to screenscrape prices off bloomberg. Find mine here: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/excel-addin-to-pull-prices-from-bloomberg/msg315889/#msg315889 And find the Google method here (see Writser comment) http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/google-spreadsheet-tips-and-tricks/40/

KDM Shipping

My understanding is that for heroin and all opioids its pretty difficult to have a fatality without also using alcohol or some other drug. People can survive without overdosing for years. The problem is nearly always mixing drugs.

Notes from Underground. Intelligent Investor.

Merry Christmas!

Agreed. My one great realization is that I don't know what I am doing. And so my goal has been to beat the market while being a fairly ignorant and useless investor. I only go with cigar butts. Since I have no clue about industries and their tailwinds...but cigarbutts are very easy to identify. I am happy to have good or bad management in bad industries. I expect diversification and mean reversion to do the work I refuse to do. Part of the problem is trying to "make things work". I've realized that often the best solution when something is too complicated and difficult is to just walk away. But how do you do that if that is your job. Could a Sequoia analyst just say after reading Valeant: "Yeah I was reading their financials but you know they were just too complicated and there were too many guesses and assumptions. Its too hard..can I just cover something easier?" Would he get a promotion for that? Because in my process I do that all the time and its saved me from losses.

Have you thought about using excel with the IB API? What does the IB api provide?

I derived the formula (actually I had an extra 1/2 which I am still not sure how to get rid of) which tells you how long in seconds it would take from the rocket ships point of view to accelerate to a given fraction of light speed with respect to earth. It is: time = (c/a) * ln ( (1+q) / (1-q)) where q is the fraction of light speed you want. So if we want q = 0.999999995 then time = (3 x 10^8 m/s / 10 m/s^2) * ln ((1+0.999999995 )/(1-0.999999995 ) = 129030899.9 s = 2986 days EDIT: Turns out I was right originally and the 1/2 is needed. time = 1/2 * (c/a) * ln ( (1+q) / (1-q)) = c/a * tanh-1(q) where q is the fraction of light speed you want. So if we want q = 0.999999995 then time = 1/2 * (3 x 10^8 m/s / 10 m/s^2) * ln ((1+0.999999995 )/(1-0.999999995 ) = 2.97 x 10^8 s= 3,438.71 days

Yes I was trying to do the same thing. What I did is kind of a poor man's integration. The accelerated rocket has its own proper time...but its proper time is instantaneously increasing at the same rate as an observer that happens to be travelling at the same speed at that particular moment. To figure out the real proper time in the rockets frame of reference you have to do an integration where the proper time is continuously changing. I'll work on that this week. But what I did kind of approximates that since I look at observers that are within 0.5c of the rocket at each stage of the calc...their proper time must be within a factor of at most 0.866 of the rocket itself and so I can figure out what the rocket is experiencing by looking at what each successive observer measures. But you are right. Acceleration to speeds close enough to light speed to make the galaxy seem really small are possible within a lifetime. So its possible to traverse the whole galaxy in a person's lifetime. Pretty cool. This is fascinating. The question is then what sort of thrust is required? How much energy do you need for each acceleration? From what I've read there are two issues. The first is the raw power, the second is overcoming Earth's pull. So in theory if you wanted to do this you'd need to build the ship in space. You wouldn't need to waste as much energy escaping the Earth. Unfortunately we don't have the tech to build spaceships in space currently. I feel like a huge issue will be shielding. If you are travelling at close to the speed of light relative to the rest of the galaxy then space dust will be hitting you at nearly the speed of light. And the space dust will also appear to have higher apparent mass. So if you manage to shrink the galaxy from 100000 lc to 10 lc by travelling near speed of light...you also managed to make all the dust particles appear to be 10000 times more massive, with 10000 times greater density (since the galaxy is now much smaller) and hitting you at near the speed of light. I feel like you would get shredded in fractions of a second.

Yes I was trying to do the same thing. What I did is kind of a poor man's integration. The accelerated rocket has its own proper time...but its proper time is instantaneously increasing at the same rate as an observer that happens to be travelling at the same speed at that particular moment. To figure out the real proper time in the rockets frame of reference you have to do an integration where the proper time is continuously changing. I'll work on that this week. But what I did kind of approximates that since I look at observers that are within 0.5c of the rocket at each stage of the calc...their proper time must be within a factor of at most 0.866 of the rocket itself and so I can figure out what the rocket is experiencing by looking at what each successive observer measures. But you are right. Acceleration to speeds close enough to light speed to make the galaxy seem really small are possible within a lifetime. So its possible to traverse the whole galaxy in a person's lifetime. Pretty cool.

I'm pretty sure your calc is wrong. A confusing way to see this is a kind of Zeno like argument for relativity. Warning: A long complicated overly complicated argument follows because I'm overly interesting in this and need to understand it. Suppose I just accelerate to 0.5c. That would based on your calc take 175 days. Now lets consider you from the point of view of an observer travelling at 0.5c (O1)...he would think it would take another 175 days for you to get to 0.5c relative to him. Now consider a second observer (02) travelling at 0.5 c relative to 01...he would think it would take another 175 days to get to 0.5c relative to him. At this point what speed are you travelling at relative to earth rest frame? Your speed relative to 02 is 0.5c. Your speed relative to 01 is u = (0.5c+0.5c)/(1+0.5*0.5)= 0.8c Your speed relative to rest frame is (0.5+0.8)/(1+0.8*0.5) = 0.928c We can continue this calc: (0.928c+0.5)/(1+0.5*0.928)=0.976 0.991803279 0.997260274 0.999085923 0.999695215 0.999898395 0.99996613 0.99998871 0.999996237 0.999998746 0.999999582 0.999999861 0.999999954 0.999999985 0.999999995 So you got to 0.92c and it took 525 days. Now this calc is not completely correct because you are not in the frame of the observers and so you will experience less time that each of them for each of your 0.5c speedups. But in each calc you are only within 0.5c of each observer and in this case time is reduced by at most a factor of sqrt(1-0.5^2) = 0.866. So it would still take you at least 525 days * 0.86 = 454 days. And to get to 0.999657123 it would take you 175days * 8 * 0.866 = 1200 days. But you are right it does take a lot less than 44 years to reach the required speed. Based on calc above you need 18 speedups to get to 0.999999995..which takes at least 175*18*0.866= 2727.9 days. At this speed the galaxy is only 10 light years across and will only take 10 years to traverse. So its doable.

Thanks for the tip, will take a look at those two. Yeah I’ve been using Japan Express to translate the balance sheets as well I've actually got a few other but wasn't sure whether to include them because they have gotten more expensive like: Chuokeizai Sha Holdings Echo Trading Mansei Corporation Sanko Sangyo Sanko Co Nichiwa Sangyo But admittedly my research is much less through than even yours is. So Buyer beware. BTW, anyone know how to obtain xbrl for Japanese companies? Its here: https://disclosure.edinet-fsa.go.jp/E01EW/BLMainController.jsp?uji.verb=W1E63012CXW1E6A012DSPSch&uji.bean=ee.bean.parent.EECommonSearchBean&TID=W1E63013&PID=W1E63012&SESSIONKEY=1512362339345&lgKbn=1&pkbn=0&skbn=0&dskb=&dflg=0&iflg=0&row=100&idx=0&cal=2&mul=9476&fls=on&mon=&yer=&pfs=4

You have a large number I've invested in and a few I've never seen. I have a couple not on your list that are still cheap: FUJIX Ltd 3600 FUNAI ELECTRIC CO.,LTD 6839 Although its been posted on other threads I thought I would remind people that Japan Express provides translated Japanese financials https://www.kaijinet.com/jpExpress/Default.aspx?f=company&cc=5918 Not sure how much time you spent on this but I just used a screen. I would guess I spent a lot less time and there is a pretty large overlap in the stocks we have. There were a few things I didn't catch but I strongly suspect that the thorough search you did is not worth the additional effort given the limited added benefit compared to screening. My screen is basically a net net one. There is one huge benefit of your search...I now realize that I shoud include certain non-current items as part of my net-net screen like rental properties, investment securites and long term time deposits which hit the non-current asset section.

The milky way is 100000 light years a across in distance. That means from our point of view the trip across the milky was would take 100,000 years if you travelled at max speed. But from the point of view of a rocket travelling at lets say 0.99999999 of the speed of light relative to us the time take to travel across the milky way would be: 100000*sqrt(1-0.999999999^2) = 44 years. So the real question is how hard is it to get someone to travel at that high a speed. You need very high rates of accelerations for very long periods of time....my guess is much much longer than the trip itself. It would be a really stupid idea to do this with human beings. Its most sensible to send robots. Anyways you don't have to travel across the whole Milky Way. The nearest star is 4 light years away. I'm guessing you can find a planet with life within 1000 light years. But lets say you can't get close to the speed of light and so you can't take advantage of time dilation. Still....a few thousand years of travel might be reasonable for a robot designed by sufficiently advanced civilization. What you would probably do is send trilllions of very small robots that could accelerate to very high speeds using some nuclear process for energy and maybe could even reproduce in space and you would have these robots include some representation of the coordinates of your solar system relative to some galactic coordinate frame. It would be complicated but possible.

I've been thinking about this lately. The history of Value Investing. When did it begin and what has been its historical evolution. Obviously the Newton of the field is Benjamin Graham. But what ideas were floating around that Graham used? I think a large amount of the original ideas of value investing come from two sources: 1) Bond investing which was more developed as a subject that equity investing. I think there was a very large bond investing book in Graham's time that he read. 2) SEC, Utility and regulatory/legal type reports early in the century. There was a lot of work by regulatory agencies to establish some concept of enterprise value. What fair value should you pay for a company. I think a large part of Graham's work was based on these principles established by regulators for various purposes. But admittedly my understanding of this is hazy.

Thought I would revive this since I'm pretty interested in Buffett's early investments since that is the style of investment I'm pursing. Any new info on this?

Thought I would revive this thread since it appears that things are preceding as I predicted. The rise in value of bitcoin is not a good thing for its use as a currency though people seem to think it is. And its already leading to an interesting problem...people are starting to regret spending bitcoins. https://www.wired.com/2013/12/bitcoin-homeless-redux/

No. But google docs has even easier solutions....see here: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/google-spreadsheet-tips-and-tricks/40/ for google docs if the call used to be: =ImportXML("https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/BOCS:SP", "//div[@class=price]") But now after bloomberg change their site it should be something like: =ImportXML("https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/BOCS:SP", "//span[starts-with(@class, 'priceText__')]") Both solutions are based on looking for stuff on webpages using xpath expressions. The first expression says find a div element where the class = price The second says find a span element where the class starts with the text priceText__. If you use Chrome and go to the bloomberg site https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/BOCS:SP and right click on the price and click "Inspect" it will give you some idea of what is being done.