oldye

He made most of his money when coke bought vitamin water which he got like 10% of for putting his name on some purple vitamin water.

Investors should not be focused on the dollar value of the house and condo that they own but rather on the number of houses and condos that they possess or Investors should not be focused on the dollar value of the tulips that they own but rather on the number and rarity of the tulips that they possess ;D

Its not only your interests but your age, sex, education, location etc...and like google they can just give away limited free advertising and increase the amount everyone has to bid. Google can do a lot of interesting things with Youtube which in hindsight almost seems like theft at a mere 1.5 billion.

I know netflix at 10 billion is overvalued but they get less than 1% of the worlds traffic while Facebook's 50 billion price tag is a lot I'm not so sure that the 2nd most popular website in the world with nearly 40% of all traffic is that grossly expensive. Getting them to show your ads is actually quite expensive and will probably become more so as more advertisers bid for traffic, I had to bid around 1.5$ per click to get my ad shown to a targeted local audience.

"As for the gold price, Paulson remains very bullish on the yellow metal, noting that the price of gold has been highly correlated to the monetary base for as long as his firm, Paulson & Co., has tracked the data. " http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/money-supply-charts According to this the money supply has been shrinking for most of 2010 and while gold is up 30%...

I never said we haven't had any inflation...That would be asinine.

In many important ways the value of the U.S $ has gone up and is going to keep going up. Japan shows that high debt loads compared to gdp can lead to long periods of low interest rates and ever increasing value compared to other currencies. Unless we're in for a period of increased trade barriers we probably won't see inflation.

Gold is still a great buy if you don't worry about the dollar value of your investments

Haha great letter. Obviously the company is worth 5x revenue, the only reason insiders are selling is because they're such good people and they're donating all that money to charity :P

Not bad for 294 million an A rated insurer with 450 million in premiums and nearly 800 million for Hamblin Watsa to put to work ;D

Gillette sent me a free mach 3 razor when I turned 18...I've been using them ever since and have probably spent about 400-500$ on blades...not a bad return on the 2-3$ investment they made. The few times I've tried other brands/electric I've been extremely disappointed and simply won't trust my face to anything other than Gillette.

Stick to your circle of competence Sanjeev, Lakers don't stand a chance against a healthy Lebron :)

When you own 34% of the company you get some input as to what acquisitions are made. At the AGM dinner they said they didn't buy more when the stock was lower because there is a poison pill in place. At this ownership level they'll have to consolidate their financials going forward.

I never liked Greenwald so I'm biased but when nobody does the work let alone knows how to figure out what the market cap is, I'd say Mr. Lu had every right to simply stop in the middle of the lecture and walk out.

Good thing we don't really sell to china :)

They're not mutually exclusive but if your going tech why not go with Dell which is much cheaper company and spits out more cash.

Hopefully this will boost interest in developing India's insurance markets and potentially get the authorities to change the rules to allow up to 49% foreign ownership!

David Winters owns a huge chunk of CTO but he seems to really dislike management, I haven't followed the story too much. As far as Tejon, Tiddman its obvious that you don't live in Los Angeles! Kern county is relatively poor and way too far from L.A for most commuters. I believe they settled most of their environmental issues by reserving most of their land for non development, they're going to be developing about 30,000 acres over the next 20 years and if you do the math and figure out how much of that land can potentially be sold you aren't getting in cheap!

The sfk plant makes roughly 1000 tons of pulp per day as do the rbk mills so if the nbsk mill is shut down for 6 days you have roughly 6000 tons less production at say 200$ ebitda ton (guessing it could be as high as 300 but with all the different discount/input costs its difficult to know for sure) you lose about 1.2 million ebitda for the quarter. Q2 will also be hurt by the refinancing, rights offering fees so its probably safe to say that if you expected 30 million ebitda it'll probably be closer to 26.

Pinksheet shares are the same exact shares as the Canadian shares... they're entitled to vote just like the Toronto exchanged shares so I'm pretty sure we'll receive our rights.

Why? I mean it could happen that way or it could be the exact opposite since theres a ton of value people are giving up by selling at these prices.

If for whatever reason (1000$ pulp and .95cent cad)...they trade higher between now and option expiry the rights can effectively be a fat dividend especially for those that bought their shares below 40 cents. With aprox 134m diluted shares outstanding by end of Q2 there will be less than 1$/share in net debt and 3.5-4$/share in equity value assuming 800-1000$/ton. Hopefully they use the proceeds to buy back the debs below par to make up for the fees!

The net asset value of Sandridge far exceeds it's market value. Arena is getting a very undervalued set of natural gas and other assets. I think Arena shareholders are getting a heck of deal, considering Arena is closer to being more fairly valued. Sandridge shareholders, on the other hand, are getting diversification, hedged oil production, & reduced leverage. Though Sandridge isn't in as bad a liquidity crunch as many are saying. Its debt doesn't even begin to start coming due till 2014/2015. The merger is a win-win in my opinion. Long SD. I agree that Arena is fully valued at 1.6 billion (23$/barrel)/450 million shares= 3.55/share Legacy Sandridge has 105 million barrels or 2.4 billion @ 23$/barrel = 5.33/share 680 BCF x 1.80 = 3.06/share Gives you a full value of 11.94 less 6.11/share in proforma debt gets you about $5.83 in asset value per share.

In what way is underwriting more important than the way capital is managed and how do you get 1.2-1.5? My 2 cents: there are a few exceptions eg BRK & FFH, but extraordinary underwriting earnings that are consistently good are thought to be more reliable and thus higher quality than high investment earnings that may not be as reproducible going forward. It is far more likely that Berkshire Hathaway and Hamblin Watsa will continue to earn satisfactory returns on investments than any particular insurer continuing to earn above average returns on underwriting. Even the companies you think of as good underwriters that focus on a small % of the total market will face ever increasing competition and will likely earn less than their historic return on capital if they don't know how to allocate capital.

In what way is underwriting more important than the way capital is managed and how do you get 1.2-1.5?