crastogi

It is indeed a great book!

+1

I do. and it is up today big on speculation that it will be bought out. I just hope it is not a take under. Insiders own almost 20%. what is your estimate of intrinsic value? EDIT: That was in response to DTEDJ post on Nevsun

Thanks. That's really awesome!

I have not looked at this in detail, but it did catch my eye with the big drop lately. Question: How confident are you that they will be able to offset losses caused in their LT care insurance business? Any write up I can refer to understand the nuances better? Thanks

Congrats! looks like in your country it is more efficient to keep capital in a operating business and invest than take it out as dividend an invest as an individual?

Congrats Packer! and hello to your dad. I remember getting to meet both of you at the COBF/Pabrai lunch in Chicago

I have been selectively coattailing (based on thesis i can understand and agree with) since jan 2012. So far, for all the closed positions, i have gained 52% more than if i had invested in SPY. My criteria for choosing a manager is same as that of many folks here - concentrated portfolios, low turnover, business/value investor. In fact, i found that many names drop after being bought by these managers, so if you are comfortable with the rationale, it is a better buying opportunity. Some manager coattailed include Einhorn, berkowitz, pabrai

It is correct. That is what is puzzles me too - he is doing what he panned in the past

Thanks. Very useful

Fantastic, Insightful!! +1

Thanks!

Thanks for the presentation. A lot of it is covered in Quant value also. However, some of the slides were truncated. I am wondering if someone has the PDF file, or the video they are willing to share

I am waiting for it to be available at the local business school library ;D

Well, I don't follow their strategies exactly, I don't know how an ETF will do, specially if it starts getting big. Most of the most interesting companies I find have relatively small volumes. But it is a very interesting compendium of what works and what doesn't. You can use their results to build you own screens or to modify existing ones. They look in detail at the MF performance, and I love their study of Graham's very simple, p/e<10, debt/equity < 50% strategy: "Graham's simple strategy sounds almost too good to be true. Sure, this approach worked in the 50 years prior to 1976, but how has it performed in the age of the personal computer and the Internet, where computing power is a commodity, and access to comprehensive financial information is as close as the browser? We decided to find out. Like Graham, we used a price-to-earnings ratio cutoff of 10, and we included only stocks with a debt-to-equity ratio of less than 50 percent. We also apply his trading rules, selling a stock if it returned 50 percent or had been held in the portfolio for two years[...]Graham's strategy turns $100 invested on January 1, 1976, into $36,354 by December 31, 2011, which represents an average yearly compound rate of return of 17.80 percent—outperforming even Graham's estimate of approximately 15 percent per year " In their approach they "clean" their investable universe by eliminating questionable stocks (bad accrauls, Z score, beneish score, etc) It is a little hard for a small investor like me for replicate as it requires a sophisticated database and a ton of programming to trim the universe. crastogi, I think you got the idea. I understand Buffett when he said finding stocks is easier now because information is much more readily available. And as the above quote points out, the market hasn't gotten that efficient. The key is how to process that information. I am from a tech background and I have applied some of my software skills to automatically process financial information. But I don't think it is "a ton of programming", I think it is a lot of very creative programming. The world has I estimate 60,000-80,000 common stock tickers that we can easily get information for. And we can also buy them easily. Anyone else do programming to mine stocks? indirectly through portfolio123.com - easy platform to play around with, like you said, creativity/ideas are the keys. its universe is much smaller - mostly US and Canadian stocks. out of curiosity, where do you get your fundamental data? Txitxo/ PatientCheetah - Thanks for the input. I signed up for the basic screening package on P123. I am happy with around 5-6000 stock universe. It looks like it can query the S&P compustat database and also define custom formula's In the book - pg 223 gives a summary of "cleaning" the universe. Have you taken a crack at defining those in P123? I have to do some research to see if all the variables are available> If you have a head start, it would be great to compare notes

Well, I don't follow their strategies exactly, I don't know how an ETF will do, specially if it starts getting big. Most of the most interesting companies I find have relatively small volumes. But it is a very interesting compendium of what works and what doesn't. You can use their results to build you own screens or to modify existing ones. They look in detail at the MF performance, and I love their study of Graham's very simple, p/e<10, debt/equity < 50% strategy: "Graham's simple strategy sounds almost too good to be true. Sure, this approach worked in the 50 years prior to 1976, but how has it performed in the age of the personal computer and the Internet, where computing power is a commodity, and access to comprehensive financial information is as close as the browser? We decided to find out. Like Graham, we used a price-to-earnings ratio cutoff of 10, and we included only stocks with a debt-to-equity ratio of less than 50 percent. We also apply his trading rules, selling a stock if it returned 50 percent or had been held in the portfolio for two years[...]Graham's strategy turns $100 invested on January 1, 1976, into $36,354 by December 31, 2011, which represents an average yearly compound rate of return of 17.80 percent—outperforming even Graham's estimate of approximately 15 percent per year " In their approach they "clean" their investable universe by eliminating questionable stocks (bad accrauls, Z score, beneish score, etc) It is a little hard for a small investor like me for replicate as it requires a sophisticated database and a ton of programming to trim the universe.

+1. That's true, and that is also why BRK is selling at historically low p/B

Buffet_groupie - you are pretty good :D

Hi frommi - what is your thesis on this?

Here is the OID interview. The interview has a performance record. It does seems he lost less than the market in down years Walter-Schloss-OID-Interview89.pdf

Excellent! Thanks for sharing.

Thanks. GVAL looks promising

I'm of a similar mindset as you. The amount conspicuous consumption and essentially total lack of saving is really amazing in the US. There are people around me who earn far more than I do, but are in near dire straights financially. So we talk about what they can do, they see the problem (silly spending) and continue as they always have. One or two bad months they'll be in big trouble. It's only useful to say "stop spending" so many times. Eventually it becomes unwelcomed, so I just say ok good luck. No wonder the average NW is so low. This is sort of a side note, but does anyone else here think about how much an item would cost in terms of how many hours they'd have to work to earn the money? Sometimes I do and then realize I don't want item X nearly that badly lol. :P The lure of "having it all" has put these folks in a treadmill, doing work they may not enjoy, to pay for things they buy to impress people they may or may not even like. America needs to wake up!

Good luck to Mohnish. It is hard to find insurance companies that have consistent underwriting profitability AND are growing float and revenues. I guess the existing owners may be looking to squeeze better returns from the float. I am sure Pabrai has no desire to run the operations Prasad - do you know if Pabrai is past his hurdles and charging fees now (finally)?

I have graduate degrees in engineering. 15 years in Auto OEM engineering. Also real estate and business development