bargainman

Does anyone know where I can get the warrants symbols for Interactive Brokers? I looked here: http://individuals.interactivebrokers.com/en/p.php?f=products under warrants (there are none in North America for some reason) and under NYSE in the stocks section but I don't see any warrants for AIG or C. Thanks!

When people would ask Bruce B about why he didn't close the fund he said that having the extra cash and liquidity allowed him to do deals he could not have done otherwise. Years ago near the bottom of the market in 2009 he said on a call how proud he was of FAIRX's shareholders for not doing any redemptions while the market tanked. I hope Bruce B has learned that having cash and liquidity in a fund is a function of the actual cash, *and* the willingness of his shareholders to let him keep that cash in a downturn! His original early shareholders had that willingness back in 2009, but by keeping the fund open for so long and hence attracting so much hot money he basically opened himself to this position where he was forced to redeem to this new class of shareholder, even though he very recently had close to 20% cash.. I don't know where the asset history is, but if I remember right probably 50% of his fund was new money since the financial crisis. That meant even a 20% cash buffer wouldn't help much.. Let it be a lesson Bruce B. I hope he learns it. I mean this in a heartfelt manner, and I am one of the 'older' FAIRX holders. And for the record I bought more FAIRX today... Hope this doesn't come off as preachery, I'm just a shareholder making an observation and hoping Bruce considers this next time he asks "how can I kill a company/how can I kill an investment?" - This time the answer is "by being forced to sell to liquidate to meet redemptions on hot money I attracted...

First of all I don't pay Bruce to explain every investment he makes to me and everyone else in detail and in a public forum. I pay him to make the risk/reward calls and do the research, so I don't care if he explains why he sold PFE or not. He bought it when it was selling for a 6/7 PE if I remember right, they had a AAA balance sheet with a ton of cash, everyone thought healthcare was going down the tubes. The risk reward was right. He never said there wasn't anything wrong with PFE, but I'm sure he knows in private was is wrong with every investment he makes. He uses the public forums to try to communicate with his shareholders, and that's great, but I don't that's his job. His job is to make the investments.

You can. It's just not a fundamental part of the architecture like in G+, it's not as easy to use, and it's not used as much by actual users. Plus it wasn't there from the start which means people are less likely to go and set it up now after the fact. With G+ it's one of the most highly advertised features. I'm kind of surprised that some don't use facebook etc, and yet invest in technology. While I wouldn't say it's a requirement it definitely gives you a leg up. Along the lines of 'circle of competence'

Sure, but back then his relative performance if I remember correctly, was still quite good, or at least average. This time other funds are doing well and he's not. That's different from everyone doing horribly and FAIRX doing less horribly or equally horribly. Plus he's had a lot of press lately (morningstar's manager of the decade etc) so I'm sure there's a lot of 'hot' money that found its way into the fund. Before that he was still reasonably well known, but no where near as well as he is now. So those investors who found him understood his style better. My bet would be most of the money pulling out is made of new investors. I'm sure there are a few long time investors pulling out because of the St Joe's hoopla, but my guess is that's the minority...

What I don't understand is, in his latest book he goes over himself to recommend ETFs as a tax efficient structure and the best way to go. Now he released mutual funds? Maybe ETFs are harder?

A sense of loyalty to the investors who trusted him from day one? Also, possibly because this vehicle is available to all investors, whereas an investment fund would be limited to accredited investors only. Cheers! Greenblatt has a few other gems in this video (and in his newest book) http://blogs.forbes.com/steveforbes/2011/07/05/joel-greenblatt-interview-transcript/ " if you look at top performers over the last decade, the top 25% of managers that have outperformed – came out with the best record for the last ten years – 97% of those top managers spent at least three years in the bottom half of performance. 79% spent at least three years in the bottom quartile of performance. And almost half, 47%, spent at least three years in the bottom 10% of performance" Bruce has stated numerous times in interviews that he chose a mutual fund structure and a relatively modest fee of 1% because it's accessible to everyone. Given his record he could have easily gone after a 2/20 or 1/20. He was also managing a reasonable amount of money as a broker before he opened up FAIRX.

Interesting comments about the unemployment issues: "you know, when i look at the unemployment in this country, it's really a skills gap more than a job gap. you know, if we set up a new site to hire 100 software or storage or networking engineers, we have to go find them one at a time and seek them out and convince them and cajole them to come work for us. if we set up a warehouse or distribution center and we have 100 jobs there, withe eel have a line of 10,000 people waiting outside to try to get those jobs. so this unemployment issue is really more of a skills gap in this country. and, you know, probably be more conversation about, you know, where are the highly skilled, highly educated workers that the -- you know, that we need and how do we make the united states a great destination for those -- for those people from wherever they may come around the world, i think -- i think there there's, you know, how to -- "

And you could say the opposite in search and ads.

So I just got an Android device and navigated to this site. It's pretty tough to read given the 4"+ screen. I'm wondering is there a mobile version of the site, or a better way to read the forum than the standard url? Thanks!

Here's an interesting article (not much depth to it, and kind of misses the point, but interesting nonetheless wrt the consolidation point in particular) http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/112989/brands-disappear-2012-247 5. Sears The parent of Sears and Kmart — Sears Holdings — is in a lot of trouble. Total revenue dropped $341 million to $9.7 billion for the quarter which closed April 30, 2011. The company had a net loss of $170 million. Sears Holdings was created by a merger of the parents of the two chains on March 24, 2005. The operation has been a disaster ever since. The company has tried to run 4,000 stores which operate across the US and Canada. Neither Sears nor Kmart have done well recently, but Sears' domestic locations same store numbers were off 5.2% in the first quarter and Kmart's were down 1.6%. Last year domestic comparable store sales declined 1.6% in the total, with an increase at Kmart of .7% and a decline at Sears Domestic of 3.6%. New CEO Lou D'Ambrosio recently said of the last quarter that, "we also fell short on executing with excellence. We cannot control the weather or economy or government spending. But we can control how we execute and leverage the potent set of assets we have." D'Ambrosio needs to pull a rabbit out of his hat soon. Sharex are down 55% during the last five years. D'Ambrosio's only reasonable solution to the firm's financial problems is to stop supporting two brands which compete with one another and larger rivals such as Walmart (NYSE: WMT - News) and Target (NYSE: TGT - News). The cost to market two brands and maintain stores which overlap one another geographically must be in the hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Employee and supply chain costs are also gigantic. The path D'Ambrosio is likely to take is to consolidate two brand into one — keeping the better performing Kmart and shuttering Sears.

Hmm.. Here is a thought, this seems to be the only major area other than Windows where MSFT is winning the consumer arena. It also seems to be the only place where they control the ecosystem from software to hardware no? How tight are their marketplace standards, does anyone know? Is it a closed system the way most consoles are?

On the same day last week I read these articles: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/06/biotech-and-the-unintended-consequences-of-moore’s-law/ http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/06/14/libya.rape.hfr/ http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/16/abolishing-sex-slavery-by-helping-one-girl-at-a-time/ It's just amazing to me how in one part of the world the progress we are making is incredible and exponentially getting better, and yet in other parts we're stuck with slavery still in existence and brutal dictators using sexual assault as a war weapon. It's truly a strange world.

Well I'm not sure if I would characterize my post as one of the over enthusiastic ones, but I do agree with this last point. it's more a reaction to MSFT's valuation vs its competitive position. The implication I made was just that MSFT isn't sitting down just letting everyone else own this market. They are actively engaged and very cognizant of what's going on, to the order of being one of the 3 biggest server owners. Now how successful they will be is a question. But they have a legion of developers they would like to keep and migrate. Sanj I don't understand your comment about Apple having the "most intuitive appliances to take advantage of the cloud". I guess you're referring to their consumer devices? I agree that they are intuitive. Or are you referring to some cloud appliance like Google's search appliances? MSFT at least is making a bigger play on the backend and the application development stack, that's less unrelated to the devices. As I've said a few times (I think on this board), MSFT is really more of an enterprise company now. Val, when you're talking about the "Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) stack" is that very scalable? Does it just sit on top of a scalable application server?

Wikipedia has a pretty good entry on this... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_capital

There are 3 companies that reportedly have over a million servers in data centers. Amazon, Google, and you guessed it.. Microsoft. If anything I would say Apple is the company that's bringing up the rear when it comes to cloud computing...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2001697/Microsofts-Bill-Gates-A-rare-remarkable-interview-worlds-second-richest-man.html

LOL! well that's all good then :-)

Personally I think it's not her finest work.. by far. She draws up a comparison, then basically complains about the progress of industry that makes basic goods cheaper, then complains that the internet retailers and putting the old school retailers out of business cause they're more efficient. Then complains about the entertainment economy and loss of manufacturing, which is ironic given she's a writer and could be classified as being in the entertainment industry. Then she offers no thoughts on any solution to the problem. A pretty shallow article IMHO.

What terms of recourse does the lender have in Vancouver compared to Florida which also has recourse financing? And Nevada which does too? are you sure Florida has recourse? http://www.loansafe.org/forum/foreclosure-laws/4130-recourse-v-non-recourse-states.html

I agree, only more so. I think you are off by many many orders of magnitude. --Eric Do you really think so? Remember that that MSFT was a convicted monopolist. The real question is, what would the world have been like without MSFT and all the monopolistic practices it engaged in over the 10 years or so when Gates led the company. I'm really surprised that people see Gates' past actions at MSFT in such a positive light these days. (no doubt his philanthropic actions are fabulous). I lived through the days when MSFT cast a very big shadow over the industry, and many people argued that MSFT killed a lot of innovation, and a lot of competitors, through uncompetitive practices. Now that the tables have finally started turning with large players like GOOG, AAPL, AMZN, and others (who are big enough to stand up to MSFT), we are seeing a rebirth of innovation in the web, devices, and software. Many would argue that MSFT prevented that for years by engaging in monopolistic practices.. Think about how slow browser innovation had been for years until Firefox and Chrome came on the scene. I'm not saying he didn't add a lot of value, just that I wonder how much more would have been added had his company not been a ruthless monopoly.

A lot of very interesting points of view. We had someone come by our company recently and talk about edible landscaping, and emphasize how much land is just wasted on green lawns! Apparently edible landscapes are all over the place in europe. I think this is her book: http://www.amazon.com/Edible-Landscaping-Rosalind-Creasy/dp/1578051541 On another note here is a projection by Oxfam calling for food prices to double by 2030 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43221576/ns/business-consumer_news/?GT1=43001 I suspect they mean in real term since doubling by 2030 in dollar terms is probably just matching inflation...

Wow, i thought you were kidding! http://dealbreaker.com/2010/01/jeffrey-gundlach-not-set-up-by-tcw-big-fan-of-dr--fellatio-series/ He did say in the interview that he used to be a drummer for a rock and roll band! Oh well I guess some habits die hard.

Can anyone give me and others on the board a general primer on how to value a bank? I only know a few very basic things. ROA > 1% ROE > 12% as a general rule. I've heard about tier 1 capital etc but I'm not 1005 sure what that means. I remember reading that changes by the FASB 157 back in the day became one of the tipping points since banks could no longer count assets at original value and had to mark them to market when the market was imploding. I understand that the bank has to hold a certain amount of capital/liquidity for all the loans they give out. Other than that I've heard that WFC, JPM are the strongest banks. I've heard good things about PCBC as a jockey bet. But I'm not sure what the 10 step checklist should be to evaluating banks. Anyone care to share? It'd be much appreciated.

Read this article: http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=271892