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bargainman

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Everything posted by bargainman

  1. Thanks for the feedback… I took a quick look at the top 3 holdings and I just don't see how Joe is going to do anything. In fact it hasn't been anything for the last 10 years or most other than bounce around and go down… I haven't done anything approaching a deep analysis, but it's trading at 2 times book value for a real estate developer somewhere in Florida. It's strange it looks like their shareholder equity jumped up significantly a year ago and then drop back down I wonder what happened there… With regards to SRG once again it's a real estate developer tied to a very specific market to begin with, with their Sears connection. At 1st glance once again it doesn't look that cheap but have done far from a deep analysis on it. That said no one on the SRG board is screaming that it's a screening buy either… The Fannie and Freddie plays also seem to be some sort of binary outcome… I'm not sure what their downside risk is since I know they are preferred shares and maybe they have more protection? That said he emails shareholders articles here and there on occasion talking about court opinions… To me most of them just come off as some random reporter screaming how the government is doing something illegal... Yet I remember reading the original or one of the original judicial opinions, and it basically boil down to sounded like a boiled down to "well the lawmakers make the law, and this is basically what they said so it's not illegal".. Of course the larger concern here is that what is the downside and as others mentioned what is opportunity cost for waiting?? I remember years ago when Bruce would take up public opinion on a stock and then happily sell it the next day if he changed his mind… Yet he seems to be hanging on for dear life with Sears and Joe.
  2. Here's a question. If you sold out of your FAIRX or FAAFX, I would be interested in why you made that decision. I was just taking a look at the top holdings of both of these funds which I have pasted below. Sorry for the formatting … In addition he is holding about 20% cash in each one and charging 1% to do so.. I have to ask I mean does he really think that JOE, AIG WT, SRG, SHLD, and the Freddie Fannie stuff is going to outperform the market? I mean are these really his best ideas? For reference this is coming from a long time shareholder... I should qualify that as saying long time underperforming shareholder sadly I bought about a decade ago when he started this long string of underperformance... FAIRX: Symbol Company Name % Assets JOE The St. Joe Co 13.15% N/A Amer Intl Grp ([Wts/Rts]) 11.83% SHLD Sears Holdings Corp 9.11% N/A Fed Natl Mort Assc Pfd 6.74% N/A FHLMC Pfd 5.87% FAAFX Symbol Company Name % Assets SRG Seritage Growth Properties A 19.89% SHLD Sears Holdings Corp 10.16% N/A Fed Natl Mort Assc Pfd 8.89% N/A FHLMC Pfd 7.95% N/A Bk Amer ([Wts/Rts]) 5.86%
  3. fwiw http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-18/vancouver-housing-market-implodes-average-home-price-plunges-20-1-month-market-devas
  4. The thing that will make you understand what Trump is doing is this: One of his mentors was Roy Cohn, look him up. He was tied at the hip with Sen. McCarthy during the Communist witch hunt years. He's actually very formulaic. He never addresses actual criticism, instead he attacks the person leveling the criticism or in the case of 'rigged elections' the system. He's done this with Obama, Buffett, Romney, and many others. Here's a fairly insightful article from a man who knows him well: http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/10/opinions/donald-trump-biography-michael-dantonio/index.html Roy introduced him around New York. He got him access to the private clubs, and he became Donald's lawyer and mentor, so much of what Donald practices today in terms of politics, and you can see it in the way that he tries to flip issues. A good example is if I say something racially insensitive and people start calling me a racist, I'll try to flip the issue around and say, "Oh, no, you're the ones who are racist for raising the issue, for noticing that I said something." This is classic Roy Cohn doublespeak and it's the way that he operated, and this fellow was Donald's mentor. In fact, he was the mentor for Roger Stone, who is now Donald's friend and has advised him in politics since the 1980s. There's a whole crew of people who were attached to Roy Cohn, attached to, actually, Richard Nixon and his campaign, including Paul Manafort, one of Trump's top aides now. All of these people worked together, understood each other, and understood a way of doing politics that was incredibly aggressive and no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoner approach to politics, and it's Joe McCarthy to Roy Cohn to Donald Trump. You can see him doing this every day almost...
  5. Problem is with ss loading. When I first load SS it has #N/A ex: =Substitute(importXML("http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AAPL170120C00110000","//span[@class=time_rtq_ticker]/span[1]"),"*","") if I manually change xpath to: =Substitute(importXML("http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AAPL170120C00110000","//span[@class=time_rtq_ticker]/span[ 1]"),"*","") notice extra " " after "span[" it updates and get the value! (or vice versa...) so it's just not getting stuff on load.. very annoying... I suggest you click Help menu, and report problem to google.. I have...
  6. Is anybody having problems importing warrants and options from Yahoo finance into their Google spreadsheet? For the last week or so warrants have been kind of sketchy, and yesterday the options stopped working altogether. I'm using import XML and it looks like there's an error. I haven't really debugged it yet but just thought I would ask to see if anybody else is having a similar issue
  7. bargainman

    VISA

    Um Google has 1.4B? I assume you mean Android has 1.4B != Google. Google Play has 1B. Google does not control all Android users.
  8. You should also look at the flip side risk which is what is resilient about Berkshire? To me the structure is very resilient. Buffett has talked about this in the past, but basically he left the companies run themselves and any leftover capital he is able to allocate either to other companies within Berkshire, the stock market, buying back shares, or private companies. What this means is that as parts of business decline, whoever is allocating capital at the top will be able to take that cash flow and reallocate it to a business with greater potential. In addition whoever is on top is also to be highly focused on wide moat companies.
  9. It takes a thief to know one. So, few discuss the merits (or lack of them) in Winters' concerns about KO. Was he potentially right or not? It seems that Buffett and everyone else attacked the messenger - in the end successfully so. what do u mean? there was plenty of discussion at the time.. basically he took the number of shares the options were on and claimed that as the percentage dilution, which was wrong since he didn't account for the strike price! basically it was an obvious publicity stunt. plus it didn't make his fund perform any better! the only reason to go all activist is to perform! It's not a goal to be activist in and of itself!
  10. Can I ask what the stock is? Purely out of curiosity. It's a monster... literally :-) I've held it for a decade give or take.. Sold a 3rd the first time it tripled so it's all 'house money'.. dumb move :-)
  11. Also could pick a target date fund, they are the target for 'set and forget' investing...
  12. wow.. just watched this.. He seems desperate given his recent outflows. amazing the hypocrisy.. don't pay the managers, they take the shareholders for a ride. but pay him 2% annually cause he's worth it! 6% vs 15% for the index... amazing Morningstar went from ranking him a silver fund to not covering him at all! one more thing... He comes up with the refrain that index funds are low fee but high cost! really?
  13. This is a great conversation and great to hear everybody's thoughts. I have certainly struggled with this through the years as well. I remember years ago seeing my portfolio fluctuate by a couple of thousand dollars a day sometimes, while on the other hand I would deny myself buying a new laptop for example for a year or two or more (or decide to buy the cheaper option at lunch which might save me $2 to $5). Making the connection between what you do in your portfolio and how much that really buys in the real world has always been a bit tough psychologically. I don't think I have much advice to provide on top of what people have already sent, but I will share a few experiences. Strangely, I actually feel like I am less risk-averse than I used to be even though I am older. Basically after you have a certain cash cushion, say, a few years worth of living expenses, even if you took a 50% loss, hopefully temporarily, is basically has next to zero impact on your near to middle future. One day I looked at my portfolio and I realized that I had double as much money as I had a few years ago, but my lifestyle really hadn't changed and other than an added sense of security, that much money, which was several years worth of living expenses/ annual salary, was having next zero impact on my day to day life. One of the other things that you also start to appreciate is the power of compounding, and inertia. I put a small amount of money into a high growth compounder about 15 years ago, and now it's one of my biggest positions. Even though it may not be the correct financial thing to do, I find it's easier to hold stocks and not sell, when you acquire them for a pittance of their current value. So basically in some areas inertia has taken hold, and I just don't touch anything so I don't have to worry about the problem. I'm not sure if that helps much. :)
  14. Exactly. He treated the company as his toy and the fact that shareholders got great return had nothing to do with his "owner's" attitude. People are just trying to shoehorn every success story into "owner operator" box. He treated Apple as his toy? Are you serious? It would be more accurate to say that he treated Apple as his life's work and masterpiece. One of his stated reasons for doing a biography was that he wanted his children to know why he was not there so often because his work through Apple was so important he believed. With regards to the Gulfstream, it was gifted to him by the recommendation of Larry Ellison who was on apples board at the time. The Gulfstream apparently cost about $90 million. At the time Steve Jobs was shuttling back and forth since he was CEO of Apple and Pixar at the same time. Given the many many billions of dollars of worth that he created both Apple and Pixar, and his subsequent impending death, hence his limited time, I don't think that the $90 million was a bad investment in fact it was probably an immensely good one. My guess is that if you with some numbers on the amount of money that his time generated, And the amount of time that that Gulfstream saved him, You would come up with a pretty darn good ROI. He didn't think in terms of generating money for shareholders, he thought in terms of creating amazing beautiful products that combined the best in design and technology. He saw the company structure as a way for him to fulfill that vision.
  15. anyone tried this? https://www.headspace.com/how-it-works
  16. Well one of the consequences intended or unintended is more indexing or rather different indexing. It all started as someone pointed out with the equal weight indexes, which recently have outperformed, but primarily because they hold more mid-cap stocks than anything else. I believe there is also all the research by French and Fama and the creation of Dimensional financial advisor funds. The recent craze seems to be smart beta? Take a look at the creation of all the fundamentally weighted indexes that wisdom tree MorningStar and others have put together. Not to mention Joel Greenblatt. Basically because active managers have not been able to beat the index people are now trying to find flaws in the construction of the standard market capitalization indexes. Of course it all makes sense in theory, the big question will be what the practice going forward will look like. It's easy to back test theories and make them look good, but it will be interesting to see how they pan out going forward especially taking into account taxes and fees. A market cap weighted index as some have pointed out is incredibly tax efficient, and if you add on the impressively low fees, it's a pretty tough bogie to beat.
  17. I don't really buy the volatility argument and I'll tell you why. Many years ago, before Bruce started under performing, one of the main draws of his fund was the fact that it had very low volatility. It is interesting always to note how marketing changes when the facts change. Back in the day when the fund was a low volatility fund, Bruce Berkowitz would always say things touting the funds low volatility and the fact that he basically cared about quotational lost because as far as he was concerned it was a real loss. But all of this changed after the financial crisis at which point he's basically got himself into a relatively high volatility situation over and over again. I don't know if I've ever heard him try to just explain away the volatility, but I certainly heard others do so. I remember spending some time analyzing the fund back in the day to try and understand how and why it was able to achieve such good returns with such Low volatility. My conclusion was that it was a combination of factors. First of all good stock picking. Second of all he always seemed to carry a nice cash cushion of about 20% which obviously let him take advantage of good deals as they arose. And third of all just plain luck. By that I mean that he always seem to have some stock that cratered or didn't quite so well but it was always offset by enough Stocks that did do quite well. But then the financial crisis hit and his style seems to have been all over the map. Although actually his style drifted probably once he started getting a massive amount of assets so perhaps that was before the financial crisis. I forgot the details but I remember he hired that guy who was either a merger or lawyer or turnaround specialist and did some big special deal with several billions of dollars I believe it was with Ackman? I want to say that the guys name was Charlie Fernandez or something like that, there was this big article about how he basically bought the house next to his in Miami to move the guy in. Then after that the assets in his mutual fund took a dive, and he basically fired the guy. Anyway as someone who has a reasonable chunk of money with Bruce and unfortunately put a lot of that in after he started underperforming, I'm trying to assess if its worth waiting things out. He has a lot of money in situations that to me seem like they've had a lot of opportunity cost. The obvious examples are st. Joe and Sears. But one can make a case for Bank of America and Aig as well as well as the recent preferreds. I am all for taking a longer term perspective, but on the other hand, you absolutely need to also take into account the opportunity cost of money while you wait for those situations to materialize. This is obviously the case in Sears. It is also likely that a reasonable amount of his under performance has been bad luck, especially considering the massive bull market we've had in the last few years. it is certainly not unheard of for value investors and stock pickers to underperform in a raging bull market. Anyway I'm always open to hearing other thoughts and opinions from those who have analyzed him and his funds over the years.
  18. Agreed, it just happens to be that his record has taken a dive the last 10, 5, 3 years. Shortly after he won the manager of the decade award or whatever it was from MorningStar.. I am certainly rooting for him to make a comeback. I don't know, it seems like a lot of his investments lately have had a lot to do with government and in particular legal outcomes settled in court or otherwise. Is this different from his investment style the previous 10 years and before that when he ran his brokerage?
  19. well BG did erect his famous bachelor pad before the foundation.. http://www.businessinsider.com/19-crazy-facts-about-bill-gates-house-2014-11 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates's_house
  20. wow http://performance.morningstar.com/fund/performance-return.action?t=FAIRX&region=usa&culture=en-US been sucking wind for the last 1,3,5, 10 years... maybe too big? changed his approach?
  21. The data is probably pulled after the pages actually loaded into the browser using some sort of script. In this case it will probably be pretty tough to get it into Google spreadsheet. For example this is actual URL worth of data is downloaded http://financials.morningstar.com/financials/getFinancePart.html?&callback=jQuery19107273107280489057_1415250879327&t=XNAS:MSFT&region=usa&culture=en-US&cur=&order=asc&_=1415250879328 I was able to get the JSON this way: http://financials.morningstar.com/financials/getFinancePart.html?&t=XNAS:MSFT&region=usa&culture=en-US&cur=&order=asc Good luck
  22. the Yahoo finance is quoting me a 10% drop in FAAFX. is anyone else seeing this ? 11.89 Down 1.44(10.80%) Oct 1 the underlying stocks don't look that bad so I'm not sure what's going on.
  23. It's for publicity.. Net assets peaked years ago at 1,494, now at 1,177
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