investor-man

What about Russian stocks? or Greek stocks? Korean stocks keep popping up too

Oh! But we've heard him talk about Horse Head Holdings!

INTP

@cpan -- whenever I see your name, I think of http://www.cpan.org/ (it it makes me shriek in horror!) I also have noticed the abundance of engineers on this board, and being a software engineer for the last 15 years this topic is interesting to me too. To my mind, value investing is not something that is inherently appealing to the engineering mindset, because I know a lot of engineers who will argue to their death in favor of EMH. There are entire degrees, even at Columbia University, the capital of value investing, dedicated to financial engineering, which is grounded in EMH. And when I take a step back from my money and look at EMH, there are some pretty cool engineering problems there: exotic probability distributions for your probabilistic graphical model, monte carlo simulations, various optimization algorithms like gradient descent and the simplex algorithm, etc. -- these are all really cool engineering problems and there are a ton more in the world of financial engineering. But when I ask the question, "what's important to me when it comes to my money?" like everyone else, it's maximizing returns and minimizing risk. I just know for my personal situation and context, risk simply does not equal volatility, and everything I do with my money is to make sure is true: I don't use leverage. I don't trade derivatives. I don't have clients. I'm not living on the income produced by investing. Volatility just isn't a risk for me, so EMH kinda goes out the window, and with that, all of those engineering problems. I do, however, think that one engineering concept does remain, and that is the concept of parsimony. And it's here that I think value investing shines. I like simple models and simple solutions. In the crazy world of Mr. Market only value investing gives you a simple model that has been shown to work: use a company's fundamentals to come up with a value; buy a company trading for much less than that value; wait. It's simple, but that's about the only thing in value investing that I can relate back to engineering, and honestly the connection is pretty weak since "parsimony" is such an abstract concept ;)

Just out of curiosity, was it that he was eating ice cream for breakfast or was it the banana split specifically? Would a bowl of Rocky Road have been better? At least it wasn't Cherry Garcia or Chunky Monkey or something. In fairness, maybe he was just coming down from the high of an all night poetry jam session with his beatnik buddies and needed to take the edge off. Ice cream for breakfast is utter insanity. Pancakes can take the edge off of an all night poetry jam. Fact: at any given time, 75% of IHOP patrons are stoned.

I used to live in the West Village in Manhattan, and Malcolm Gladwell must have lived in the area because I would see him on the sidewalk about once a month. One day I was on my way to work at about 9:30 or 10:00am and I saw him sitting down outside at a table at an Italian restaurant near my apartment eating a banana split for breakfast. I can't really take him seriously anymore.

Haha! That is some solid gold comedy right there

I'm also a pretty avid runner. A few years ago I switched to minimums shoes. The transition took about 4 to 6 weeks but then I was fine for about 18 months. Then from out of nowhere I got the worst case of plantar fasciitis of my life. When it came I could barely walk for about a week and the only way I could kick it was by going back to regular shoes. I'm pretty curious if anyone else has had a similar experience

actually most people on this forum seem to have shorter term strategies. i guess trading is the new holding. I've noticed that too, but berkshire (and Fairfax) is about holding good businesses long term, I wonder how the board members can seem to agree with the logic but don't follow through in their actions.... It's a "value investing" board. Greenblatt and Pabrai don't hold stocks "forever". From my perspective, value investing means fundamental analysis is the most important factor in making an investment decision. The time required for an undervalued stock to reach its intrinsic value can take a while so you're forced to hold a stock for a long while (taxes can be a factor too), but this is just an unfortunate part of life, not an important part of value investing

Stupid list - no Journey

I'm on vacation with only my ipad and the article won't render on it, so my comments may be out of context... I recently read that the FED is thinking of paying interest on the funds banks keep in their reserves as an alternate to adjusting the fed funds rate because banks have so much cash on hand that adjusting the funds rate would have little effect. Perhaps big banks are loading up their reserves in anticipation of this?

Anecdotally, I'm a little shocked that both Gasprom and Lukoil were both down a percent today

Heh actually the 22nd is a catalyst day for CKI.TO. Not sure if anything will happen, but it's worth reading through the thread

I stop by Boggleheads every now and then too. I find the general reluctance to being "active" kinda frustrating. It's foolish to make macro predictions but when interest rates are as low as they are now it's a fair certainty that they will go higher at some point, like when the fed stops QE as they've clearly indicated it will. And the sophistication behind their (boggleheaders) arguments for thier bond allocations is doubly frustrating. If they spent as much time investigating businesses as they did investigating why they shouldn't investigate businesses then they'd be much better off

I vote Palantir for "Most disturbing profile picture." Yes can I vote Palantir change his profile pic. It has honestly tainted my perception of him, and I've never met him :)

I love that it's typed on a typewriter :)

More info: http://heartbleed.com/ I'm not sure why Yahoo is singled out, especially since a Google engineer found this, thus identifying an opening they had running for a long time on their own servers. Basically every website out there uses OpenSSL, including all of the banks and financial institutions. Change your passwords! And even better, use multi-factor authentication when available.

Hi all, There has been a lot of jitters on the board lately with regards to stock market overvaluation, Ukraine, and China, and more and more people on the board seem to be turning to cash as a hedge for these jitters. I'm young'ish, I've got a relatively small portfolio, I'm fully invested and looking to stay fully invested. The two latest Brooklyn Value Investor blog entries pretty much explain my stance on why I want to stay fully invested (Go Brooklyn!): http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.ca/2014/03/perils-of-trying-to-time-market-ii.html http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.ca/2014/03/buffett-market-timer-part-1-partnership.html Like Brooklyn Value Investor, I've been looking to see what Buffett did during times like these to outperform the S&P. It looks like he'd put more money into he called Work-outs and he defined them as: My question to the board is what are some current special situations/work-outs that you see? I'm still a value investing neophyte, but I'll start: Liberty Interactive Liberty Interactive (LINTA or LINTB) plans to "spin-off" its QVC and e-commerce portfolio. This won't actually result in two separate companies, which is why I use quotes, but will result in two different tracking stocks. Its QVC unit is a much better business than it's closest competitor, Home Shopping Network (HSN), but is trading at a discount to HSN. It's e-commerce businesses are pretty good and generally look undervalued. Forming the tracking stock will make it easier for analysts to see the undervaluation and should push up prices. This doesn't look like a double, but it looks like a good way to unlock some value. Here's a good breakdown: http://oraclefromomaha.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/92/ Altius Minerals Altius Minerals (ALS.TO) is interesting from several angles. I'm definitely not the best person on the board to describe this business, but in short, it's a company that buys land in Canada and turns it into mines/mining companies which it spins-off and keeps a royalty on the gross revenues. It has had an annualized growth rate over its 15 year history of about 30% and its management is heavily beloved by the board. Right now it's currently awaiting government approval to develop several projects, and if any/each of these are approved, the value of the company ought to increase dramatically. I like this because even if the projects don't turn out, it's a great company that's fairly priced, providing a nice margin of safety. Another angle is that this company is valued much more like a mining company than a royalty company. Over time the more mines it spins-off and turns into royalties, the more people will look at it as a royalty company, and royalty companies trade at much higher multiples. As I mentioned, I'm not the best person on the board to explain ALS.TO, so check out the thread: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/investment-ideas/als-to-altius-minerals/ Fiat Fiat (FIATY) -- (this is using the term "work-out" very loosely) is planning to list on the New York Stock Exchange by October 1st. Giving Fiat and more visibility and access to American capital markets ought to provide a strong catalyst for share price increases. That said, I think of Fiat mostly as a typical undervalued stock, and I'm not sure it fits the bill of "work-out" or "special situation". I've really only been looking for special situations recently and I feel that these are a bit of a stretch. What ideas out there can you guys point to?

In the ALS.TO thread Dazel posted a link (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-16/china-plans-over-163-billion-shantytown-investment-cctv-says.html), and it got me thinking -- because China is a communist country, it has the ability to wield fiscal policy much easier than the US. I don't know exactly what that means or how it will play out over there, but it's likely to be different than what is expected from similar issues happening over here. I don't want to sing communist praises, but having both fiscal and monetary options on the table will make for a much softer landing in a crisis. I feel more uneasy making macro guesses than I do having my money in very undervalued businesses. Given I've got time on my side (I'm in my mid-30's), I'm just going to stick it out and do nothing. My money is in a few undervalued businesses, so if/when the market takes a drop, my companies will rise back up with it -- that's what I'm doing about China.

I think this is a misrepresentation of what Buffett said. His remarks were something like "over the next 20 years stocks will go up." And when pressed about a family who had invested for their child's education and now needed to pay it out, he said it may be a good idea to sell. Basically he stuck to the same old Buffett mantra of buy and hold and not worry about the macro for long term investments, but only invest money you will not need in the next five years

Buffet often claims his portfolio will vastly outperform the indexes in bad years, and he said this in early letters before he was "buying fantastic businesses at fair prices." His returns reflect his predictions. Why is this? Does a large margin of safety account for this or are there other factors?

I'd love to see their take on the lightning round. "Hi Warren, I'm thinking of selling Coke." "HOLD HOLD HOLD" "HOLD HOLD HOLD". "IBM has been down a while. What do you think about cutting my losses." "HOLD HOLD HOLD" "HOLD HOLD HOLD" etc.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/02/14/groupthink.aspx I like Morgan Hausel, the author of the above article, but I have a problem with his premise. I've often questioned whether or not "contrarian investing" actually exists. It kind of smacks of the fallacy in "stock ABC got cheaper because there are more sellers than buyers". When there are X number of outstanding shares, they are always certainly owned by someone, and unless the ownership of "out of favor" (aka undervalued) stocks in general become more concentrated, I don't think one can even say a stock is "out of favor" or buying it is "contrarian", because if there are a bunch of other owners, who are you "contrary" to? Anyone know if undervalued stocks tend to have a more concentrated ownership? If they don't then the word "contrarian" ought to be thrown out of the value investing lexicon. I think it has been mixed up with "buy and hold" which is more consistent with the value investing mantra. And if we're talking about a "buy and hold" strategy it doesn't matter how many people jump on board with the idea. BAC is probably one of the most popular ideas of the last couple of years, and who cares how many funds bought it? That's groupthink I can get onboard with!

Maybe just to add some color... My worry with "fixing" this site is the better looking and more usable it becomes, the more it will start to become like the Yahoo Finance message boards, which if you haven't seen them, are honestly barely a step up from youtube comments. The quality of the conversation and the people in this community is incredible, and I'd hate to pollute it with lower quality people, which I suspect would happen if it were "fixed".

This message board is perfect. I wouldn't change a thing.