bizaro86

Great call on the Artis prefs!

It is. I've added some here (offset with a few very far out of the money covered calls) anyway. Every time I've bought a truly great business at an "almost" reasonable price I've been happy I did so. Their multiple is very high, but this is a business with huge growth and huge pricing power. I rent on airbnb and the market there is so much better than their competitors I'd pay 3x what they currently charge me for fees and still feel I was getting good value. I am still disappointed about the IPO allocation. They gave hosts with enough transactions (I would have qualified) access to a $50k allotment at the IPO price. I tried to subscribe but it was US residents only.

Related to this topic: I've always been a SAGD guy, so I know an unreasonably large amount about that process. But very little about mining. What I don't understand is WHY the miners have such high greenhouse gas emissions? SAGD requires burning gas to heat water to make steam, and the giant steam generators produce a lot of CO2. Where are the emissions at the mines? Tailpipe emissions from their giant equipment? Or is it somewhere in the process part of the operation?

Yeah, if you owned this business and those numbers were real why on earth would you go public? Shining a light on how profitable you are just invites both regulatory scrutiny and competition, and you don't need the extra capital anyway.

It probably is illusory. I can't imagine CN and KSU (with parallel North-South networks) would be allowed to merge. Some of that premium comes from potentially increased market power. As a thought experiment, what would Union Pacific pay for BNSF? The answer is a huge number because of the giant synergies and monopoly power the combined entity would have. But that doesn't matter, because the government would never let the two merge. So that value is entirely hypothetical.

I think wage inflation is a definite possibility. All the small business owners I know are having a hard time getting staff. Some of that is likely pandemic related, but there are also many businesses who have less staff because of the pandemic, which is at least a partial offset.

My father-in-law is selling his house in Edmonton. Got an offer after a bunch of showings the first day, full list price. Which he had moved up about 10-15% from what we thought he'd be able to list at. Buyers do inspection, but their financing falls through, they don't waive conditions. Back on market. Lots of showings the next day. Two offers, ends up getting another 10k more the second time. But its Alberta, so the fact that its probably up 10% in the last 30 days still only takes his 3 bedroom bungalow to like 3.5x median family income.

I checked and this setting was the default. Looks like I was clicking on the number for the last page out of habit as opposed to the thread title. So this did fix it. This works too. So basically user error - although I'm glad I said something as having it graciously corrected for me makes the site a lot more useable.

I'd love it if when opening a new thread it went to the first unread post.

BRK, ROST, COST. I would expect 15 year returns to be about 8-10%, maybe a tad lower if you get some big multiple compression.

Actually Jack Ma is an interesting case where a founder created a cooperative culture from the get go. Alibaba created several billionaires while AMZN only created one (Jeff Bezos). There are some interesting articles pertaining to how Jack Ma ran Alibaba early on. He never was the all controlling operator , he was more like a leader why deputized most of the operations to a core group (who all become very rich) with him being the face until 2 years ago, https://hbr.org/2014/06/the-secret-to-alibabas-culture-is-jack-mas-apartment Sorry, I wasn't trying to say that BABA had a bad culture. More that a Jack Ma discount could be an opportunity if you think the culture is good.

The market seems to think Jack Ma's relationship with the CCP is a very large liability for BABA right now. As for Musk, I think it's obvious the "Musk premium" at Tesla is bigger than the WEB premium at BRK.

How permanent is your move, and what is the reasoning? Where do you live now? If you're sure you're going to like it and live there forever you could maybe justify buying. Its seemed like a bubble for a long time, it could keep going. If you plan to be in the market for 30+ years maybe the entry point isn't that important anyway. I bought a house in Calgary 12 years ago, and its been worth more than I paid for it for about 3 weeks the entire time I've owned it. Happily those are the most recent three weeks. I would have absolutely been financially better off renting over that time, but owning has had other benefits (stability, can customize, etc). I think it depends how big a portion of your net worth the house will be as well. If this is going to be your main asset, having it depreciate significantly and then needing to sell would be disappointing.

Thats something I've never thought about. Does anyone know how much of BRK net worth is in the insurance subs and how much is at the holdco?

I would be pissed if I was a policyholder of a firm and their regulator let them mark privately held equity to a public comp. Where's the line there? Maybe with NI and BNS its fine, but what about a little lifeco that has a venture investment in a meal delivery service. Should that get marked to Door Dash EV/sales for the purpose of determining if they have enough capital to write your Grandma an annuity? Book value at a discount, imo.

F*cking hilarious. The reversal of the ticket in the reverse card, and shaking the 8-ball 4 times to get the answer he wanted, is amazing! I know he's having fun with this, but I also have to wonder if this is what he did with GME Lol. Maybe I should replace my screener.co subscription with my kids banagrams.

FRPH has royalties on aggregate mines. ALS.TO is a big royalty firm mostly metals. Both have a thread on this board.

You made a put position 5% of your capital? The combined basket of puts was 5% of my capital. Not at my computer so don't have exact numbers, but SPAK puts were the largest thing in the bucket at about 1.5% of capital. They were about 3x, and everything else was up dramatically that day as well. So my 5% position became a 10% position, and I sold a bunch down.

IBKR won't do some of the less prominent Canadian registered accounts. For instance, RESP and LIRA are both a no-go. I'm about to move my RRSP there out of general dissatisfaction with my existing Canadian big bank broker.

Yeah, the amount of A shares that seem to be available at even a slight premium to the Bs is pretty significant. The $22 billion I mentioned above would only be ~250 shares per day for a year.

I agree they might get 15% on a few year stretch (and maybe this upcoming one if they monetize investments into the bubble and capitalize on the hard market), but think 15% long term (10+ years) even from here is basically a pipe dream.

Nobody who owns Fairfax over any period except since inception has experienced 15% book value growth. 10 yr: 2.4% 20 year: 6.0% 30 year: 12.3% Even starting from the end of their second year in 1986 until present the bvps compounding is (slightly) under 15%. But yes, if you include the tripling in BVPS between 1985 and 1986 then they have been close to 18%. I should have re-worded my post, my apologies. I guess I wonder what is more indicative of future results - a tripling of book value from a distressed beginning in one year in the 80s or the couple of decade long period of recent underperformance. YMMV, obviously.

I think using their stated plan of 15% compounding for anything is very aggressive. They haven't come close to that in the past, while constantly reiterating it. If you have your own growth forecast worked out that's great, but using that one is awfully trusting where trust hasn't been earned, imo.

Except after WEB converts his A to B, the voting control of the remaining A becomes even more pronounced. At that point with current share prices, a 10% voting stake would only be ~$22 billion. That isn't spare change, but I bet Ackman could raise that, and might want to. Especially if he/the market thought BRK was being mismanaged/undervalued.

That's not even remotely the case. Bruce went deep in the trenches with his DD. He was over concentrated and stubborn and that has been his undoing but Chamath barely does any DD, has lots of positions and doesn't have anywhere close to the same conviction as Bruce did. He is the polar opposite Not BargainValueHunter, but there are some similarities. Bruce B outperformed dramatically, got famous and then underperformed dramatically. Chamath P has outperformed dramatically and got famous. I think the third step is pretty likely to occur, unless he keeps selling out (eg recent sale of SPCE) although if he does that i think it will eventually damage his reputation among his followers.