sleepydragon

AXP is a much better buy now at current price

Like many other hedge fund managers, I bet Loeb also set up his compensation so he is paid through some sort of ownership of His fund. People like him and Ray Dalio pay less tax percentage wise than low and middle class american.

Warren Buffett shows up at Coke's annual shareowners meeting http://www.coca-colacompany.com/stories/warren-buffett-if-youre-looking-for-a-wonderful-business-its-hard-to-beat-coca-cola

Why HOG? It seems a dying business. Younger people dont buy HOG and current fans are retiring.

They'll keep going after him as long as Jamie Dimon acts like Jamie Dimon imo... I have checking, savings, investments accounts with Bank of America, for the last 20 years. I put all my money there. But during the last week, I opened a checking, savings and a credit card at JPM Chase. I got a total of $450 signing bonus for the checking and savings accounts, and 45000 bonus (=$450) from the credit card. That's a total of $900 for just doing a little bit of work. JPM is using some very brutal methods to get clients from Bank of America and American Express. Their top credit card executive was hired away from American Express, who designed the new Saphire card. I liked their Saphire card. it's made of a piece of metal. Pretty heavy. Looks like a AXP blackcard, but only $95 fee (first year waived). When you no longer want it, you have to mail it back to them (and supposedly they will melt it in fire like in what they do in lords of rings). I think it's working. It's costly, but a lot of people who are not willing to move checking accounts can no longer resist. These people are pretty sticky (or lazy) like me. The only thing I think JPM is missing is an investment/retail brokerage. WFC and BAC both offers it. BAC give me 100 free trades/month. WFC charge about $7/trade.

+1 Thank you Mr. Bird. Awesome. :) What? It's free?! I can't believe it. Does this violate any anti-dumping law. Why are you doing this?! J/k :)

"Dammed" fool?! (Pg. 37) Editorial standards, they are a slippin' at Berkshire. Best, Ragu Perhaps not! The context is the extraordinary delegation to the subs. The sentences just preceding..."we don't have depts ...hr, pr, ir, mna...but we do of course have an active audit function..no sense being a dammed fool" reads to me as the foolhardiness of being totally insular or iow "wall omaha in" "damned fool": someone very foolish "dammed fool": a barrier to obstruct the flow of water?

He did sell (somewhat). He used his inflated HNZ equity to buy reasonably priced KRFT equity. Maybe? I don't think he looks at it like he sold Heinz at all. I think he figured adding $10 billion in equity plus Heinz to merge with Kraft was a value creating opportunity relative to Heinz stand-alone because 1) it permits 3G to cut $1.5 billion from Kraft costs, 2) allows Heinz to refinance its debt to investment grade, and 3) provides more product for Heinz's global distribution system to push through. I will add if he wanted to sell, he won't use the cash dividends. he would have used all stocks. he/3G essentially paid for all the premium without diluting his current Heinz stock.

Looks like it's indeed 10b profit! (81 - 16.5) * 588 / 0.49 * 1/4 = 19bn And he has prefered stock in hein as well, right?

The stock is at 81 now. But the new company will have different shares outstanding. So we can only say 81 is only an indication of what the new company will trade at?

Yes :) sorry about the mistake

you forgot to count BUffett has about 200m shares of kraft currently before the deal. He also get dividends on those

does anyone find it's a little odd that Munger would ask a question to Buffett? Aren't they suppose to talk everyday? And what his question really means (does Mr. Buffett has any regret of teaching people about investment)? It's kinda of odd

I am trying to decide if i shall add to my WFC or buy some JPM. JPM seems cheap. I know someone who work at JPM investment banking side whom i considered a high iq low iq idiot. His favoriate activity is to buy the most expensive things and then visit the neighbors. Compesation at JPM investment banking side seems very excessive.

yestoday wsj talked about it. It's about jpm start charging fees for some deposit. Rate raise is not coming, nim getting worse, but legal expense keep rising.

I love this article - if it can maybe bring down the stock by say, 10-15% ? I can buy a load :) And btw, the picture above is BusinessWeek (not newsweek), which is now a magazine bought by bloomberg? This sort of remind me when a Goldman Sachs story was on Rock & Roll magazine.

They amended Q3 13F to show sizeable increase in Deere. They didn't ever sell Deere, just switched it to confidential disclosure, best as I can tell. Could be WEB is selling out XOM and preparing an elephant bid? Could that be Deere?

I remembered Buffet said in an interview something like: "The best business is still those that need little capital but generate a lot of cash". XOM is capx intensive. Or maybe he's selling to get more cash for an Elephant deal. He had said before that he will first sell his smaller holdings when he need cash to get deal down.

I think WFC is much better than JPM and certainly BAC. JPM and BAC has much higher personnel cost due to their investment banking business. On the traditional lending side, WFC has more foot soldiers and do give more attentions to customers. When I applied for mortgage for my house, I had better experience with WFC compared to BAC. I think BAC's checking and online investments are better deal than WFC for retail customers, but WFC is definitely more aggressive in trying to lead me money.

I use American Express Servo card. it's a pre-paid charge card. There's no point, but I believe using it will save you much more than what you would get with other 3% cash back cards. The reason is: You have to put money in the account before you can spend it. Each day you can at most fund it with $200 from a credit card (unlimited from a checking account). This is similar to when you are using cash, where you are actively keep tracking mentally how much you are spending. Using the card will dramatically cut down your spending. I got one for my wife. :)

35.65%

It was much cheaper when I bought Sbux Leaps in April 2009 - stock was at $10. Unfortunately, well you know.... well, about 2 years, my wife said I shall buy SBUX. She's an art major, who can't even do multiplication well, and of course have no idea about investing. I gave her a lesson about P/E and value investing and then rejected her buy recommendation.

SBUX is actually trading at a much reasonable PE compared to the other two stocks. It's PE (29) is not much higher than KO (~24). It's a company with great brand and growth prospect.

I think it’s much more likely that she got lucky. She can’t have been the first woman to try. He may have started to realize just at that time that he needed more help for some of these things. To be fair, consider this: she was a new MBA graduate in 2009. During the summer of 2008, she had internship with Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, and 85 Broad (85 Broad is a None-profit organization founded by Women MDs/Partners at Goldman sachs). In 2008, every banks was firing people, nobody was hired. Lehman bankrupted. Yet, she got 3 jobs. And she had no real world work experience, especially in finance(before MBA, she was an undergraduate at harvard). After graduation, she got a job with Warren Buffet when I think she could be the only person in her MBA class who got a job.

i feel the point of 30-yr mortgage is that it allows me the maximum leverage /minimal monthly payment to buy the bigger house now. Even if i would be selling the house 5 or 7 years later, it's beneficial to get 30-year loan now which allow me the maximum leverage at a low cost. If rate go higher when I buy a new house 7 years later, I can get a shorter-term loan, perhaps paying the same interest rate i am paying now, but by then I would have had more equity in the house and can pay a bigger down payment.