ZenaidaMacroura

Ah, Thanks. I've never been to the FL Keys. I've got to get down there someday. Yea, everything down there is referenced by mile marker since the entire collection of islands is only accessible via one road, which is US-1. oh man your description of the Keys sounds legit, never even considered it previously :D

I was talking with someone the other day about online retailers that bring last mile delivery in house (or were in the process of attempting to). Does anyone know any public OR private online retailers that are making this an initiative? As far as I know only Amazon and Wayfair?

Congrats!! It was like 18ish months ago when I first hit a mil, I don't think I did anything to celebrate other than throw up an obscure fb status: "the first one is the hardest" -Drake ;D

Different engineering philosophies German: precision, handling, styling heritage. they don't see upkeep as some tremendous failure -its part the course for the handling and precision they trumpet. Japanese: reliability, efficiency above all else.

I'm long the preferred (in my PA and through a partnership) but I have this tiny nagging voice that keeps telling me investors have goldfish memory. I know it's not as direct, and the time scale is way different, but there always seems to be a new crop of investors who rush into the void to buy the sovereign debt of a country like Greece, dismal track record and all.

Scott, What exactly does a DRM copywriter do?

Total neophyte here but there are people who comment on Asian markets and say that the lack of a burdensome property tax is the reason why Asian Real estate is in a bubble (you just have to stretch for the initial purchase/your family just has to give it to you -there's no upkeep/nothing compelling you to divest a property that is unused). Thoughts @ eric?

Must be nice having access to bespoke options

The market should be privatized not nationalized. The government restricts competition by providing licenses, and then it provides a captive market by requiring firms to use these licensees through an array of statutes and regulations. It doesn't matter whether rating agencies are subscriber pay or issuer pay. A natural duopoly plus government restricted competition and a forced customer base is going to have serious problems. Not to be adversarial (I have no opinion really, just curious) but why is a government restricted duopoly different from a natural one? Doesn't the government face the same pressure to do something to reign in the natural duopoly as it does to unrestrict the license induced one?

Paul, Yes, I [for one] noticed that. [However I'm not sure I understand your comments about the S&P 500 - as I understand things, S&P 500 is measured before tax]. Earlier [after my first post in this topic] I looked up the quaterly holdings for SA on Edgar, and what stoke my mind [from a quick view on it] was that XOM was the second biggest position, next to BRK, in the fund. I would really like to read more about that SA thesis [based on value investing [pricing power etc.], but I'm not entitled to, as a non client. However, that does not change my mind on or my perception of the SA BRK analysis. Is XOM a relatively recent pickup?

Sorry to bring this back from the dead -if the company was capital light and instead of acquisitons it paid out most of it's adjusted net income (buy backs/dividends) -could you use ROIC + Organic rev growth? And I guess at some point the ROIC would become meaningless if enough buybacks/dividends shrank the "Invested Capital" figure?

Great info, thanks. Land is so ubiquitous it would seem there would be a way to play it if you looked broadly (including internationally) and long term. I do think land values could take a hit in a credit crunch along with everything else, but populations are growing and the true value of basic food/ water commodities (particularly those without a futures market) could be vastly different than nominally believed. I've been thinking of the Saudi purchases along with Canada/ other EMs as partly a currency hedge but that may well be missing the broader picture. As Mitchell wrote: "land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it's the only thing that lasts" The nice thing about land is its quantity and general properties are clearly known (unlike precious metals or oil for instance). There will always be less of it per capita until the world's aggregate population starts declining, and at that point we'll have bigger problems to worry about. I might even go so far as to say that if I had 100 billion and wanted to do no work for the rest of my life, buying land in 3-5 years once the next commodity bull market begins might be the most logical secular trade. But I would definitely wait for a credit crunch to get some good prices. I am pretty sure if I have 100 billion, SPY will do me just fine for the rest of my life also. 100 billion in most things would equal "being fine" the rest of your life.

I wonder though isn't this the case with some soverigns -who keeps lending argentina money? :o

Scion Asset Management began around Q4 2013. I have nothing to back this up but I doubt Burry is generating anything close to the returns he did at Scion Capital. This is not an indictment of his investing abilities, it's more a reflection of the market environment post financial crisis. He tends to invest in very distressed equities and resource companies (a la fairfax) which have not done as well as they did pre-crisis. More generally, it’s interesting to observe all the sub-prime 'heroes' post-crisis. A surprising number have performed poorly over a multi-year period (Bass/Paulson/Whitney/Eisman/Whitebox/etc). As far as I know only Cornwall Capital have maintained their impressive returns. I still think there are very few investors of Burry’s caliber. He's one of only a handful of managers I would invest with. Do you mind sharing Cornwall's returns ? Thank you in advance Cheers GK 52% gross / 40% net Where do you find information on cornwall post crisis/do they file?

This was sort of a continuation/expounding of the “Tell me where I’m going to die, so I won’t go there” Mungerism. So like "tell me what instances will cause rationality to lapse...anger. resentment. jealousy. Envy." Those aren't as fun as Love (or gluttony) anywhoo.

loved your question, was the first answer I jotted down during q&a Wish I knew that was you!

What's the thesis/insight behind optimal payments position?

Competition Demystified by Greenwald It's been a while since I've read a business book that was engrossing AND doesn't whiff of survivorship bias.

from: (article not particularly relevant) http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-gravity-ceo-dan-price/ Was reading about the guy who pays all his employees a minimum of $70,000 the other day -the article isn't really relevant except for this part: What exactly do these payment processor companies do for a small business? There seem to be a lot of them popping up in the limelight recently -do they basically handle what a bank might do with regards to merchant acquisition? If a small businesses already has a merchant/business account with a card issuing/merchant acquiring bank are payment processors kind of redundant? It seems V/MA take relatively little versus the brand power/trust they bring to the table. Other aspects of the payment value chain seem to have "fatter" share of the interchange fee (thus are more susceptible to disruption). And even then it would necessitate a "capacity to suffer" in order for Goog/AAPL/AMZN to get to critical mass. I think AMZN might be the only one who's proven that willingness...

I just bought it for Audibles -gonna start on it tonight. Edit:won't let me access til 14th

Can you post/link the magic hat discussion? Sounds interesting enough. Sorry to revive an old post but I found this tangent interesting enough to (hopefully) dig it out -if this isn't the reference then maybe someone can point me to it but I found it very enlightening: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/fairfax-financial/time-to-buy-fairfax-again/msg189497/#msg189497 Starts from there and goes on a bit.

I work at a place that cracks Ethylene -it's interesting a lot of people around here were nervous about the price of oil falling but the division has made the approximately the same amount of money (not much more or less) despite the volatile oil price. There seems to be a boom though and alot of plants are making long term plans to expand capacity (I think a huge swath is expected to come online 2017-2019). These are somewhat longer dated projects because the permitting/building takes a while...

I've read in the AMZN thread that if amazon tries to take a bigger share of profits they lose customers -I can follow that reasoning although I don't necessarily agree. But I don't think this is true for facebook. The appearance of ads doesn't materially impact the user experience and people tend to leave because they think they are spending too much time on it (and invariably, atleast in the case of my network/circle of friends they always come back). This is probably one of the strongest network effect companies around. I think the fact that people have to deactivate or shutdown their account just to breakaway speaks to the stickiness. I never shut down my yahoo email (haven't logged into it in nearly a decade?) And my myspace account is presumably still floating around in the ether... Anyhow I'm usually behind the curve as far as social networks/new techie stuff is concerned so take this with a grain of salt.

eh, I feel that's more a case of TWC paying a hefty premium for the rights and wanting to monetize by creating a separate network. I went to UT Austin and a cursory glance at the Dodgers thing you mentioned reminds me of this: http://www.foxsports.com/college-football/outkick-the-coverage/the-longhorn-network-is-all-hat-no-cattle-051115 I'm not sure its particularly comparable but It seem like there isn't enough content to warrant that price on a standalone basis if you're not already getting it via being in TWC's footprint.

(at 4:54) he says "that wouldn't have had happened had the first one not happened". I didn't get what he meant by that sentence. wouldn't have met his wife and started a family if he didn't first become Mormon.