gary17

Sanjeev So you have no plan to ask your family to buy FFH - all in - if something were to happen? (But I'm sure nothing will happen! )

Fire safety / risk engineering - Vancouver, Canada. Going to eight years now. And enjoying it. The daytime job and value investing keeps my mind working for the 18h I'm not sleeping.

I'd guess the float was helpful in early years bit probably not so much now. But why not ask the man at the dinner that Sanjeev has setup this year.

Is there any other way to hedge this risk for retail investors who don't want to buy FFH or BAC puts?

I'm wondering if others have come across this article from bloom Berg. About China credit crunch. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-02/china-s-runaway-train-is-running-out-of-track.html We have some really bright minds here - let say the world's second largest economy has a 1998 styles Asian crisis or 08 US recession - what will happen? Do you think the market has already priced this in or are we like the summer of 08 largely ignoring things Thanks

I think if the issue is within your circle of competence, nothing wrong if the time is not that long. I thought about my apartment for about three days because I know the area and I'm always looking at things. If you have been following certain sector and have a sense of the market and when something obviously cheap comes by, I don't see much risk thinking for a few hours for a starter position. For a punch card position I'd really think about it - would I have more fun owning the stock or buy a Porsche (or whatever insanely expensive luxury item you don't need).

5％ 。。。 ;D At least it's not negative. Few more weeks to go until year end.

I suppose to be a bit more accurate one could calculate the present value of the dividends but given the dividend is a smaller number it probably doesn't make much difference. So when a Co issues a dividend, do we add that to the strike or subtract it from the strike price. Thanks

If you buy two 18 calls your committed to $72,.... no longer 36 so the dividend missed is more like 2

I like room2read.org Basically quite inspired by John Wood's mission to bring education to the less fortunate.

Perhaps the market is also ignoring the territorial dispute between Japan and China.

Gio I am wondering what's the margin of safety in your assessment of Fairfax - so you are thinking it should be worth north of 500? so at 380 it's a good entry point? On the comment of BAC - I think I tend to agree with you there's a lot of unknowns. But I am starting (just starting) to get comfortable with the idea that the years after the worst recession caused by these banks, they have very strict lending practices and there's indeed big changes going on... If I have to choose between a very predictable business for which the performance is may be 20 - 30% dependent on management vs another business where the performance is 50 - 60% dependent on management, I'd go with the former. I think one of the things in investing is to be flexible at times and being able to exercise that judgment. I think this is probably one of the reasons Prem invested in BoI - I think he had a look at the numbers, weighted the risks of his investments against the outcome in a fairly predictable industry at its worst time in history and decided the margin of safety is very attractive.

Doesn't slow down the machine in my office which is running windows 7, and there i probably have fifty tabs over three browsers, ten pdf, ten excel work sheet, etc It just doesn't crash, ever. I'm wondering if either I got a mini lemon or the ram is no good. But I'm just so lazy to go line up at the genius bar; these days there seems to be more people in that line.

I do think though we have the infrastructure today that wasn't available in 1999... So it may not be a fair comparison of today's dot com economy to that of 1999...

Do you not find Microsoft Word and excel lag a lot on a mac? I have a new Mac mini and it sucks so much - it can't handle two browsers (albeit I have 30 tabs) and iTunes and excel open at the same time. I have 4gb ram too. My old hackintosh from a windows machine did better. So is the office PC. I'm seriously thinking of getting a surface pro two...

lots of very insightful discussion... interesting the vote split is about 50-50

Some of you know this already, but it's RIM. My portfolio was up 40% this year around Feb (when RIM touched 17) Then down 40% or so after the earnings in June - Thanks to ideas on this board, and IRE (thx Prem!), i am back to roughly 0% for this year..... I would say what a roller coaster ride but I'm sure many would say I haven't seen nothing yet... The RIM investment has an awesome twist to it though - because I had made some money before the earnings and I was about to buy an engagement ring, I had to sell some RIM shares.... and through the jeweller in Taiwan, I got to know her husband, who introduced me to his friend, who introduced me to this board (I'm serious!) Prior to that I had assume no other value investor existed LOL

Thanks Packer for sharing so openly your wisdom and being so patient with newbies like myself! Congrats on this proud achievement.

I think there are probably two groups of investors on this board - those have high net worth or are relying solely on investment as the primary income And those who are doing investing as a second source of income. So for the first group, I'd think having cash or some form of hedge against the downside makes a lot of sense, regardless of the market sentiment. For the second group, for which I belong to, I think it makes sense to be 100% invested, and probably a bit more if the right opportunity comes up.... as the income from the primary job would allow one to buy more cheaper shares if we have a crash. And the loss of purchasing power if not participated in the market at this stage just feels almost as risky as a crash. The run up of Vancouver real estate is a great example... 500K used to buy a nice home, it is now a 750sf condo. yes, it may have a 30% correction but then prices are unlikely to ever go down to the affordable levels. And I feel it might be like that for the stock market. I guess the strategy has to do with where the cash flow for funding stock investment comes from... Overtime I'd like to train myself to be in the first camp, as at some point I'd retire and need to have the ability to manage the funds through different cycles.

I only know possibly one person who's good at valuing telecos and has said he's been adding GNCMA and is based in the US =)

Margin of safety I was satisfied with the argument that you don't buy stocks today for their earnings 10 years ago. You buy them for the next ten years' and beyond. What happens when your estimates of their future earnings power is incorrect? I thought this was a value blog.

Surface pro 2 8)

If you buy the surface pro 2 you'd get all three. I'm a Mac guy now thinking of going back to windows :)

Thanks SD!! =) You seem to know this kind of thing well - will take your advice into great consideration.

thanks for sharing Tom -