CorpRaider

As Munger has said, I never cease to be amazed at the power of incentives. I think the US has got to rework the incentives so that impoverished persons are not financially incentivized to procreate beyond replacement numbers (i.e. you only get additional welfare and EBT, refundable tax credits, all forms of governmental support for the first two kids). We also need to liberalize parental leave and other incentives (like the scandinavians do) for those who are well suited to create and raise kids who are not products of poverty. This will become ever more important as robotics and computers make labor scarcity an antiquated concept.

Yeah, I linked to this in another thread a week or two ago. It is really neat. I love bloomberg, BTW anyone heard anything else about them buying the FT? There were some reports they might do it last year, but I haven't heard anything since.

Barrons and some others, like Doug Kass, are focusing on these and other CEFs a lot lately.

Hey, you might run through a dynamite factory with a lit torch and survive, but you're still an idiot.

A 40% "correction" in US equity markets.

If borrowers could have the debt extinguished via bankruptcy a lot of these shitty Caribbean medical schools and some of the for profit diploma mills wouldn't be in business defrauding kids. Just saying, maybe the normal rules governing obligor and obligee have some merit. Also re: income inequality, we have got to modify the social support system so that the bottom of society is not financially incented to procreate beyond two kids we don't need to be created incentives to explode the population at the bottom economic rung. Maybe there was some merit to this back when labor was remotely scarce, but that was before the advent of computing and robotics.

Nat Gas hits $4.40. Highest close since 2011. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/oil-futures-fall-further-despite-inventory-drop-2013-12-12?link=MW_home_latest_news

Sounds like a typical blowhard prognosticator. I'm going to cast my lot with WEB and an outlook for this country that is just a bit above trendline for the (much) longer term performance of the Dutch and British systems.

LOL a post about Gold (it was gold right?) mutated into two threads; one about global thermonuclear war and the other about timber. hah! EDIT: I suppose it is primarily my fault for coming out of left field with the timber talk. Thanks Oddball for sharing your wisdom. I had read a couple of articles about timber's long-term (as in predating financial assets) ROI running at 7-8% real, of course there was a spike during the bubonic plague. hah. But I have used 6-7% as a sort of shorthand/indicator for the rate I want to see timber REITs yielding before I get interested. I figure I can let them keep a % off the top for me not having to look in lumber jack trader weekly. But your strategy of stacking the tax sales is much slicker (as usual).

What is EBIT/Tev? Earnings Before Interest and Tax/Total Enterprise Value. You could go further up the income statement to EBITDA yield, but I prefer EBIT when running loose screens (uses depreciation as a proxy for capital deterioration, which as we know isn't true). Papers that I have seen seem to show it is roughly a wash on performance between the 2 stats. Enterprise level metrics show superior correlation to results as they normalize for leverage. P/E and for that matter book/market screens give an "unfair advantage" to levered up firms. Finally book screens don't seem to work well on mid-large cap stocks in practice. Return on Capital seems to add some juice, as Greenblatt claims in the Little Book. The Magic formula ranks stocks on a 50/50 factor of ROC and EBIT/EV... but, you should know that Tobias Carlisle contends that the cheapest value decile stocks, ranked by ROC, should outperform the seemingly random 50/50 factor that Greenblatt has chosen. At some point of course, over fitting may be an issue, but I suspect Tobias is closer to the truth, hence my comment on XOM. Perhaps we should move this discussion to another thread. I do think it would be valuable to discuss apples/apples metrics though. I have noticed quite a bit of confusing ratios that cross compare firm, value, and equity level metrics. Each metric can of course be useful, but only as long as you are comparing apples to apples, if you follow what I mean. EDIT: Oops...I realize you may just be looking for the XOM EBIT/ev yield? I use this metric a lot as a screen for companies to monitor/check out. Maybe layer on a subjective opinion on management and get really interested if there is a catalyst. That's what put me on to OXY to begin with. CVX and XOM were ranked highly as well.

Hey no recommendation on my part. Just saying if you're looking at hard assets due to inflation fears, timber and/or farmland to me make more sense to me than gold, all else being equal. WEB probably thinks KO will kick the ___ out of timber in any inflationary environment. hah! Nah BM that was my bad, portfolios has an obvious meaning on this board and it ain't tax law comic books.

Sorry, the portfolios are just reference books on taxation topics published by BNA. They're often referred to as the "comic books" by the tax jocks. You can probably get your hands on them at a local law library or maybe one at a business school. They're usually just a good starting point to get an overview of a subject. It has been a while (years) since I looked at the area. I think PCL has some stuff on their site about the dividend treatment for their investors that might be interesting to you. WY or RYN might have some presentations as well since they both (fairly) recently converted to REITs with greater straight timber focus (I think).

KMI

Yeah or you could do that. Buy half of Maine. Timber really must have had a prolific lobby. Even the timber reits get to pass through mostly cap gains because of the treatment of timber. There's a whole BNA portfolio on taxation of timber. hah! I kid you not.

How are you investing in timber? You could do CUT, WOOD, PCL or RYN. WEB has called out PCL once upon a time. Its a little rich for my blood at the moment, but I've owned it in the past. Or you could straight up buy some timberland; you can get some state tax advantages in some states.

I keep my gold in a safe in asia with mark faber. No seriously, my "inflation hedge" would be timber. I prefer stuff that sits there and grows to stuff that just sits there.

Yeah I would love to get on board with this thesis, but then I ask myself how much cash did he just set aflame in SYWR and online retailing efforts and how does that square with a machiavellian scheme to constrain investment in retail and transition to an insurer? Also, they point out how SHLD created all these assets by securitizing the real estate and the intangibles then gush over the fact that there are assets in the sears re. I don't get it. Didn't they just essentially transfer some assets in a related party transaction and mark them to market and overlay some securitization? Sounds a little like talking crap mortgages sticking them into an entity and blending them into AA credits.

I must say, that is some pose in the picture on value walk.

Train, The Money Masters and The Snowball; Periodicals: Bloomberg Businessweek; Barrons; Forbes; Bloomberg Markets; Skim Valueline most weeks. Just finished Dhandho and the Most Important Thing this past fall. Both were really great.

Can't wait to watch. Lynch is one of my favorites.

Barron's had an article on this situation this weekend. Nothing really substantitve imop (it was really just a political opinion article to my mind) but thought I would note it for you.

Thanks for sharing Ben.

Maybe, but it looks like we might be exit stage left in afghanistan and I don't think the Iraqis are going to be attacking Iran anytime soon. The military is largely comprised of Shiites (which we liberated from a brutal regime), isn't it?

The messes the US "created" on either side probably make it less likely Iran would be attacked by a nation state which could be disuaded by nuclear capability. You think they can work better with malaki or sadaam? The afghans aren't attacking anyone, they couldn't organize a light bulb change. The kurds could take over the whole country in a month. We are bombing the radicals in wasiristan back even further into the stone age. We basically built them buffers. As far as the interim deal; what's the problem? The israelis are constructing a straw man of iran totally and immediately dismantling its nuclear program immediately and with no conditions. Yeah that would be nice and I bet you can get alot of congressmen to say, "we should do that". But if your options are, let the israelis strike them preemptively because they are about 6 months from a bomb (as they have been for the past 8 years or so if you believe them) or lets get in there and inspect and see if we can get a deal...I choose B.

Two words: Lucent Technologies.