frommi

For me, its easier to stay rational when i have cold hard (actual) numbers in front of me. You know how stupid the market sometimes is.

Thanks, i thought the overall investment in eurobank was only 400 million. I like to be ahead of the market. Imagine you knew that BV is 50% down in the quarter but the market hasn`t priced that in. Would you ignore that? Of course it doesn`t matter if it is now 5% more or less, but knowing it roughly gives me a good feeling.

That would be nice! Greek exposure should cost +/- 5% of book. I can`t really believe that number, what are the big greek positions that result in this?

From my limited knowledge bookvalue should be up more than 10% in q4 because of the bond portfolio. But who knows maybe i misinterpreted something in the annual report.

From my understanding since these indexes are all marketcap-weighted there is no additional rebalancing necessary. But stocks that fall out of an index can be hit harder the more money was in the ETF. Perhaps that is the best hunting ground for value picks in the future.

When he is right, FFH continues to be the pick for 2015. :) I am really curious to see the current value of the deflation hedges.

I am pretty sure that with the latest currency movements these costs are not anymore where they are in the graph. Or is it based on latest exchange rates?

Long term interest rates track inflation, yes. But short term rates are set by the BoJ. And since the government taxes capital gains or interest, they get a higher tax income with higher inflation.

Thats the weak point of your theory. They can always borrow short term where the BoJ has full control over the rates, and when there is inflation their tax income will grow because they get a share of the inflation as tax. But in the end nobody knows how it will exactly play out, there are dozens of possibilities with second and third grade consequences that can be good or bad. Think about the butterfly in china that influences the weather in the US.

Margin account with IB is the easiest and cheapest way that i know of.

Foreign automakers taken to task in China over dealers' bloated inventories: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/12/30/uk-china-autos-idUKKBN0K80EI20141230 Not a good sign for the world economy in 2015.

In the first chapter of "You can be a stock market genius" Greenblatt told the reader to concentrate on 5-10 stocks and gives the math to that. Perhaps its a good idea to reread that chapter. But in the end everybody has to find what works for him and do this over and over again.

Senvest Capital and Intralot

Whats your current pick?

I am always open to learn something new, so what is the stock that matches your criteria for that at the moment?

And it has to have long term options! That requirement alone would kill 90% of my ideas.

Academic studies have shown that there is no benefit of owning more than 20 stocks and you get the most benefits of diversification already with 5-8 stocks. I think Pabrai and Mecham do it this way,so thats probably not a bad idea. Mecham had at one point 50% in BRK, but he argued that BRK in itself is already diversified so that makes sense to me. Everybody talks about Schloss as the most diversified investor of the past, but i found no evidence that he was not concentrated in some stocks. In one interview he mentioned: "Generally, we are happy with a 5% holding but we can go up to 10-12% if we really like it.". Yes he told the interviewer that he is in 100 stocks, but does it really matter when most of the positions are just to follow the stocks and get annual reports? In current times i don`t see a reason for these toehold positions anymore. Putting 100% in one stock and securing it with a put option at 50% loss looks like a smart idea, but when you look at it its just a barbell strategy of holding 50% cash and 50% in a LEAP call option. Any way you turn it, you have to pay the cost of leverage which is bad when the stock goes sideways for a long time. So you have to have a pretty sick confidence that your catalyst will play out. @jmp8822 You wrote that you had more than one stock going into 2008 and you averaged down into one stock, but have you realized that that was only possible because you were diversified before? Imagine your only 5$ position would have gone down from 5$ to 0.5$, you networth would have tanked by 90%. I can`t imagine how depressed i would have been at that point, losing savings of more than 15 years of hard work. From what i learned from other investors is that a maximum limit of 10-15% for normal businesses and 25-40% for diversified businesses or funds is a good compromise between diversification and outperformance and that is what i am using for the future. But i don`t regret being very diversified when i started because that has given me a lot of opportunities to learn and at the same time reduced the magnitude of my mistakes.

NWH.AX trades at an estimated forward P/E of 3-7 and at 33% of net asset value with high uncertainty. But i wouldn`t say that the mining service industry in australia is stable at the moment. ;D Whats interesting is that they were kicked out of the ASX100 and ASX200 in the last quarter, so there was a lot of forced selling pressure. They traded at net asset value before that started.

Ok, thanks. Was that in the annual/quarterly reports before the announcement or could someone just act on the publication of the information and still get a similar result?

What were the catalysts in these cases?

I am happy when i find that 1 out of 10 stocks in my portfolio does >60% in any given year. How can i know which one will do it next year?

Merry christmas. Thanks Sanjeev for this forum and thanks Gio for posting here. I learned a lot from you about the importance of management and FFH! :) Thanks Packer for answering my questions about equity stubs/internal leverage and free cashflow yields, and Eric for your ideas about (external) leverage. Thanks Nate and west for your japanese ideas and yadayada for your comments about OUTR. Puh there were possibly thousand more helpful posts in here, so thanks all. Happy new year!

Around 15% after costs, but a lot of that has come from currency effects. I could have done a lot better, my mistakes sum up to around 8% and my summer hedges made me lose around 2%. 2% were transaction costs. So i could have made around 23-25% without valuation mistakes and stupid gambles. (like buying 2 week call options on BP or valuing NWH.AX on earnings when it was clear that there was no competitive advantage.) My goals for next year are lower turnover and no more stupid short term bets. I had turnover of 200% which is stupid, but comes from the fact that i just started value investing 1.5 years ago. I owned more than 50 stocks this year but the stocks i sold have performed on average by -1.5% after the decision to sell, so that was mainly not the mistake. My buy decisions were wrong in the first place and i have to get a lot better there, while working on my patience. I will concentrate more next year on small/mid cap stocks that are clearly mispriced (and where i have a clear reason why that is the case) and have at least 50% of my portfolio in long term compounders. (more tax-efficient and lower transaction costs.) I already swapped more money to IB from other accounts to have lower transaction costs going forward. Btw. thanks all for your contributions to this outstanding forum. It is a pleasure to learn from the best.

Short form of the presentation: blablabla Inflation blablabla Inflation blabla .... ;D He has positioned his portfolios into this direction with goldminers etc. Looks more like macro bets than like value bets and i think he is much to early for that. In his presentations its clearly visible that problems arise in the stock market when inflation goes above 3-4%, so he should probably ask himself if we are already at that point. The current numbers have a deflationary trend and are far from that terrain, so what is going on in his mind? (Perhaps its because he has publicy expressed that we get inflation and now has to defend his position while losing money.)

I don`t think its impossible that japan will see hyperinflation, but my point is that this will not come out of the blue sky. You will see a long time of "normal" inflation first, where it looks like everything is working like intended. Then slowly the BoJ will lose control and panicky money will flow out of the country like now in russia. Only that the BoJ is not able to raise rates at that point. (But that scenario is at least 3-10 years away) The interest rate the government is paying is under full control of the BoJ, so i don`t see how this can be a problem in the short term. And the japanese public has enough savings to spend, its just that they had two decades of deflation now, they are sitting on big piles of cash/bonds. They didn`t even start to realize that its worthless in the very long run. So as soon as inflation comes back they will start spending more with the result that the government gets more through taxes back. They don`t even know how it feels when everything gets more expensive every year, because that is not their reality since a long time. And commodity prices (oil,gas) denominated in Yen have gone down this year, only adding to this problem. Btw. the FTSE 100 will dive down below 5000 points and create lots of value opportunities in the UK in 2015.