randomep

Maybe that's what gets me through the day after dealing with you assholes! ;D Cheers! Well this asshole appreciates that you do......

I agree. 90% of money managers did not foresee the housing bubble, but many survived by not exposing themselves to the worst of the housing dependent stocks.

Wow, I never knew he had problems. I enjoyed his movies. I remember taking a tour of SF and being shown his mansion. Makes me wonder what it takes to be happy.

I have 3 Japanese netnets, two of which are mentioned in this thread. The last one is Tachibana Eletech (TSE:8159). It is a technology distributor for mitsubishi similar to one oddballstocks mentioned. The company CEO appears on a TV show and talks about the dry details of the company results. Anyway heard of this show? Is it common for companies to appear on this show? http://www.tachibana.co.jp/ir/movie/index_2014.html

Not so, I think people are very suggestive. People will say our medical service is crap, as if medicine is worse than it has been in the past. People will probably think we have more crime today and past decades (not true). etc etc. Same for prices.

How do you trade this stock?

Investor-man

I agree with you oddballstocks, I can own 2 life insurance companies which are trading at no more than 65% book. And they don't have a lot of annuity exposure. That's just an example. But how do you think of the market today, as compared with another era, say the 70's, or the 80's? I have no sense of perspective there, I am not that old. I guess I could read old newspapers like WEB does.

Great job thanks!

The Japanese equivalent of the SEC filings page is EDINET: http://disclosure.edinet-fsa.go.jp/EKW0EZ1001.html . If you run a search query you can view the resulting documents online or download them either as PDF or XBRL. Download the XBRL version (it's a zipfile), unzip it somewhere and you can open the HTML-files it contains with Chrome. How are your Google Translates working with Japanese? My past experience has resulted in some bizarre translations, possibly related largely to different syntax (Japanese and Korean syntax is heavily dependent on declension/conjugations, kind of like Latin, whereas English and modern European languages and even Chinese rely more on word order in sentences). My $.02, if you're investing at a big enough discount I'm not sure the minutia in the filings matters all that much. If you can read the essence of the filing and know that the business isn't going under then you should be fine. I will invest in these things without reading anything beyond the financials or a few metrics. Most investors probably think I'm crazy, and I'd agree to that, but to each his own. No I don't think you are crazy at all! Let's invert the problem. When was the last time you lost money because you failed to read some minuta in the management discussion? When I look at financials I just jump to the balance sheet and income statement. Then I look around and get an impression of the company from their website (esp. for japanese companies)

I'd have to totally disagree with the article on that one. I am not a fan of Milton Freeman but he has a great point. The crux of the article is that short-termism is an problem in corporations. I think we too often disregard long-termism which I think is a bigger problem. For example, Amazon has been around 20yrs and they are barely able to turn a profit. Yet they still justify expanding! I really wish shareholders can quantify when Amazon can be a normal company with a 15x earnings multiple? Instead proponents say you should buy because they will take over the world someday.....someday...... In the 2000 cisco was bought cerent for $6bil. I was discussing with a coworker, that cerent will have to have blowout earnings for something like 60yrs to justify its price. Too often I have seen long-termism as an excuse to cover up incompetence and bad ideas. Japan in the 80's was touted as a culture that promotes long-term growth, really what it means is to buy time for bad or a lack of earnings. And look at the result now. It also happens in engineering, in my line of work, managers and employee love to talk about projects that are well into the future, because it means they don't have to pay the piper for a few years, in which time, projects get cancelled, employees get laid off and the money wasted on the task is long forgotten. Short term means also accountability, now as for fraud that is mentioned in the article, well that's a byproduct, just as increased suicides is a byproduct of work stress. We don't say government should force high paying engineers, doctors and management to work less hours...... my 2cents that is out of the box

I have Japanese relatives and I work in a Japanese company. On occasion I have prodded them to translate. But they don't help much at all, the small cap financial reports are just management-speak w/o delivering much information.

I'll add to the information overload with yet another data source. To gather your own info which saves money and allows you to find original ideas, you should get a list of all securities in the world and filter what you need. The following is a wonderful source: it lists all the stocks in the world and gives key statistics. I use it as a first pass to get what I want. In this case it is Japanese small cap stocks. http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/data.html Then you can write a program or some such to mine the internet for data on your pruned list of stocks. The internet is like a giant database of information. All this is free. AFAIK there is no free filter for netnet stocks. I use finance.yahoo.com and ft.com for mining my data.

I don't try to predict the future, but this time it is different because I found the ultimate contrarian indicator: news media is resorting to using psychics for their expert opinion on the market! http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/28/investing/psychics-predict-stock-market-future/index.html

GLBS after selling a year ago, well no sense crying over spilt milk.

Mildly off topic here. Does Canada, or any other nation for that matter, placing sanctions on Russia matter to Russia? Does it affect them or do they even care? I can't help but think as the Harper/Baird duo sanction Russia that if Putin even notices, must just be shrugging his shoulders. Surely Russia has its own maple syrup. ;D But I heard hockey pucks have tripled in price due to a shortage there. It is a little known fact that hockey pucks is one of canada's biggest exports around the world.

Well, good to know PatientCheetah. I was seriously asking of the 10 posts which is a joke and which is not, so I can digest them properly. I still don't know the answer but plz everyone forget I asked. Oops, I misread the tone. On the internet, words in caps = yelling. It's all good.

Well, good to know PatientCheetah. I was seriously asking of the 10 posts which is a joke and which is not, so I can digest them properly. I still don't know the answer but plz everyone forget I asked.

Breakouts are in my experience often false breaks, so i ignore them. And when you are a value investor breaks to the bottom are not really important because the value will "protect" your downside. But they are often turning points because a lot of big limit orders are waiting at these points and soak up the sell orders. Ok, I have a question: WHO IN THIS THREAD IS SERIOUS?

Italy??? What is Fairfax going to do in Italy? Dear Mr. Watsa, if I can be of any help, please don’t hesitate to let me know! Sincerely, Gio Did he respond yet? I think he can use you to translate italian annual reports...

LMAO, i didn't know that

Funny story, first time I saw it. And you know what, nothing really stopped.......

He is going to be the James Dean of investing.

Because of the saying: "religion exists so that the poor people don't kill the rich" Upon reflection, I suspect it's because people are bored, and there's not much to do in the markets right now... I love this forum.

Because of the saying: "religion exists so that the poor people don't kill the rich"