learner

@vinod1 - what have been your learnings in terms of picking the right index? I just buy S&P. I had tried looking into others but realized that it is simpler to use S&P

Has anyone looked at how Ted & Todd's picks would've performed in a tax shielded account? It looked like they've both been behind S&P500 on an after-tax basis

Hi, if I may ask, how did you manage to pick BRK in 1975 and hold onto it over the years?

How much do you lever up your portfolios usually?

There was another post about an investor that invested in S&P500 and just traded in and out of BRK in a tax shielded account. Made high teens return

Great, thanks. Also, do you happen to know his criteria for entering and exiting BRK?

Hi @dealraker- do you know how your friend enters and exits BRK? I have tried to follow their buybacks or ~1.3x BV

Does anyone know what Munger referring to in terms of inflated real estate sub-class? “Well, it’s not easy to handle accumulated money in the current environment when these stocks are so high and partials of real estate of certain kinds are also very inflated.”

In one of the AGMs, Buffett had made the comment that they should’ve purchased a pharma basket in 90s and could’ve made a lot of money

Marcellus capital has created such a list and explain their process. They have a blog and several YouTube videos

Excellent response! Given the two constraints (1) all you money and (2) rest of your life, hands down index funds would be the only choice. Any other choice is going to be vastly inferior from a risk/reward perspective. When looking at 30+ years, markets are likely to go through many changes as economy evolves. The managers you are going to select now are all going to have terrific current long term records. As they go through tough times you would be faced with a decision whether to stick with them or change. To evaluate active fund managers you need be as good at picking stocks as them to make that decision. So picking active managers means being active to some extent and it cannot be a pick and forget. I have been tracking 20 mutual fund managers since 2001. It is partly to know my ability to identify superior managers and partly to invest in them as a portion of my portfolio is restricted to mutual funds. My intent is to jump into the underperforming managers from this select set of to get some additional alpha. On the whole it has been a small net positive and that too with benefit from a bit of luck. If I had just stuck with my initial subset of those 20, it would have been a significant underperformance. Vinod

Givenry Capital

POAGX Givenry capital

I had a follow-up question regarding investing in FIH. Indian equity markets have generated ~15% return over the last 15 years or so. Because of the hefty fee structure, FIH has to generate an alpha of 5% just to get market return. Because of the large fund size of FIH, I think it is fairly difficult to do that. How have you guys gotten comfortable with the fee structure?

Very similar to the above question - Mohnish Pabrai had mentioned that Buffett is a great banking analyst but a not-so-great retail analyst; he goes on to mention that Buffett has a 100% success with investing in bank stocks. Who does he think are best fund managers by sector (telecom, energy, etc.)?

Thanks for sharing.

I recently found out about this Bank of America offer and thought I’d mention it here. Bank of America’s Preferred Rewards Program offers great benefits for customers with $50,000 of combined balances across savings, checking and brokerage accounts (IRAs excl.). The main benefits are: 1. 30 free trades per month 2. 50% kicker on credit card rewards. For someone with the Bank of America Cash Rewards credit card (1% on all purchases, 2% on groceries, 3% on gas), the kicker would result in cash back rewards of 1.5% on all purchases, 3% on groceries, 4.5% on gas. I think this is industry leading. For accounts with $100,000 in combined balances, this kicker is revised up to 75%. All details can be found at: https://www.bankofamerica.com/preferred-rewards/details.go

This is a pretty good website for credit card offers: http://www.nerdwallet.com/zero-percent-credit-cards Chase Slate currently offers 0% for 15 months. It is also the only card that has a 0% balance transfer fee (typically ~2-3% for all other cards). Citi Diamond Preferred and Simplicity are offering 18 month promo; the offers gets bumped to 21 months every few months, so that might be another offer worth scouting. Both Chase and Citi will grant someone with good credit score a $15-20k line. Note: All these are consumer credit cards and not business credit cards. I wasn't sure which one you were looking for.

In India, shareholders holding more than 1% of shares are required to report. See below a link showing this info for Jammu and Kashmir Bank, which lists Pabrai Funds are a major shareholder: http://www.moneycontrol.com/bse/shareholding/shp_public_shares.php?sc_dispid=JKB#JKB

GIC Housing Finance and South Indian Bank are the other two positions.

Thanks for finding this, PJM. This position might actually be bigger, ~4% position. Based on http://www.moneycontrol.com/bse/shareholding/shp_public_shares.php?sc_dispid=JKB#JKB Pabrai funds owns 2.56% of the Rs. 6,220 cr bank. This translates to ~$26MM or 4% of $700MM Pabrai funds.

I didnt notice this question earlier, but I dont know of any good way to track selling activity. That said, any 'bulk' exchange (buy/sell) of Indian stocks seems to be reported here ('bulk deals' under 'shareholding' on the left panel): See http://www.moneycontrol.com/stocks/marketstats/blockdeals_query.php?sc_id=SIB&post_flg=1&myexchg=Both#SIB Hope this helps.

Congrats Sanjeev!

The link (http://www.scribd.com/doc//Pershing-Sqr-1Q-2Q-2014-Investor-Letter-1-1) doesnt seem to be working. Do you mind reposting the link?

Speaking of Klarman, has anyone ever backtested the performance of his US-equity portfolio - the 13F reported positions? Most sources seem to mention the overall performance of Baupost, which includes the investments in distressed debt, real estate, etc. The article (http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/24/enzon-facet-nws-markets-intelligent-investing-seth-klarman.html) mentions that a portfolio of equally weighted top 20 positions returned 14.23% during 2000-2010; however, I wanted to know returns for the portfolio which weights the holdings just as Baupost does.