bizaro86

I found Danny Meyer's book "Setting the Table" very interesting for thinking about the restaurant business. He has obviously been very successful. He notes in one place that a great lease is a big key to a successful restaurant. He suggested aiming for 1 days average sales for monthly rent as a goal. That suggests to me your 3-4% is probably in the ballpark of being very good.

Management change happened approx. 2 years ago. As Petec says, the NAV has objectively been hardening. The risk lies in their pivot back toward the resource sector and their ultimate reliance on commodity prices. And management skill in making investments in a crappy industry. If the hardened NAV was likely to get paid out to shareholders thatd be one thing. But they're going to invest it in a portfolio of junior miners. Imo that deserves a discount to nav, as it's likely a value destructive strategy.

One business characteristic I think is interesting is something where you build a valuable passive asset as a sidebar to the primary business. This gives potential for a huge capital gain of you succeed, and offsets losses if you fail. I'll provide some examples. Car dealerships are an ok business, but owning large real estate parcels in the path of growth of big cities where the business makes the payments is attractive. Even if everyone goes Tesla I bet 10 acres off the interstate has value. The real estate is incidental to the business but a potential source of large profits. Similarly, many tech companies generate patents in the course of their business that have the potential to provide a bit of a soft landing from licensing. Wi-Lan is an example here. I was aware of a firm that bought a gas field that came with infrastructure. The gas was a terrible business, but they put 3rd party volumes through the plant and made out well with the ancillary business.

If you think the management change will mean that shareholders realize anything close to NAV (ie things are different this time) then this is absolutely a great deal.

If you put $1 MM in cash in a box and then lit the box on fire, I think you'd have a hard time getting someone to pay you NAV of $1 MM for the box. This has been cheap on a nav basis for years, and management keeps incinerating money. Implicit in any thesis that this is cheap seems to be the assumption that "this time it's different." Maybe it is different this time, but that's not a bet I would make.

While this isn't directed to me, I doubt the previous poster meant bid 49.98/ask 49.99 for bid-ask spreads. If Buffett wants to buy a full company away from the stock market, he probably needs to pay a premium, maybe in the 30% range. The ask for the whole firm being greater than the ask for a single share. Similarly, if he takes a big position in something, once disclosed (either quarterly or at 5% of target) that has the potential to increase the price making the remainder of the position more expensive. Oh, spare me. I apologize if my post offended you.

While this isn't directed to me, I doubt the previous poster meant bid 49.98/ask 49.99 for bid-ask spreads. If Buffett wants to buy a full company away from the stock market, he probably needs to pay a premium, maybe in the 30% range. The ask for the whole firm being greater than the ask for a single share. Similarly, if he takes a big position in something, once disclosed (either quarterly or at 5% of target) that has the potential to increase the price making the remainder of the position more expensive.

I had a number of Mawer funds in a DC pension plan at my former employer. The performance was strong in both up and down markets, and the stock selection seemed rational and well done whenever I reviewed their holdings and quarterly buy/sells. I would recommend them.

I really like the mental model of a good (or at least decent) business that is undergoing market dislocation of some kind as a potential compounder. Less has to go right, and multiple expansion can improve things materially. One that might fit that narrative right now is Ulta Beauty. Growing, strong economics, but concerns about everyone switching to ecommerce and missed earnings have brought the stock down quite a bit.

I think I gun manufacturers would be a bad short for your basket. If a staunchly pro gun control president is elected, the second order effect is that those who fear gun control will go out and buy a bunch of guns prior to any enactment. So there will be big profits in the short term that the market will react to.

Charter and comcast aren't really a duopoly imo, they are more like non-overlapping local monopolies. Barriers to entry are huge. I think that is the answer to your question actually - barriers to entry. Oil a d gas is fragmented because there are no barriers to entry. I could start an O&G co pretty easily. By comparison, starting a plane manufacturer has huge barriers to entry. Even if you succeed designing and manufacturing a great airplane (hard!) Without worldwide support it's hard to sell. (Eg Bombarider cseries didn't succeed until it became the A220 with Airbus support)

You're probably actively hurting the environment. Alberta has stringent regulations on venting and flaring associated natural gas production. Many places don't, and vented methane is a way worse greenhouse gas than CO2.

Calls on HGV. Speculation, obviously, but I think the chances of a deal getting announced are relatively good. Blackstone knows the economics well and will be attracted to the ability to put significant capital to work at high returns, and Apollo being in the mix pushes the price up.

What composition of natural gas are you assuming here? The natural gas in most distribution pipelines is something like 98% methane. They have dew point requirements that require it to be so.

Thanks! This should make the "new posts" feature much more relevant for me. As a related note - is anyone aware of a way to "ignore" individual threads? While I don't want to ignore the general board entirely, there is one thread I'd like to ignore as it isn't relevant to me and clogs up the "new posts" list sometimes.

I can't see WEB wanting to own fox news. Economically, you'd have to leave the political perspective (or you'd lose your customers). But I'm not sure, "owner of Fox News" plays well for him socially.

You can't use it for real estate equity. You can use it for real estate debt (ie write mortgages). You can do this through a MIC or directly through a trustee that allows it (Olympia Trust is the biggest player in that market. Some more info here: https://revnyou.com/rrsp-in-real-estate/ Whether that's a good idea or not is something up to you. As far as I know the only way to own real estate in an RRSP is to foreclose on a mortgage it held. And there is a limit on how long your rrsp can hold it iirc, which is risky because you could be a forced seller.

I'm not familiar with this company whatsoever, but is it actually down by ~90% today? What service is showing it as being down that much? I've checked several and only Seeking Alpha is showing down by ~90%. Thanks! I saw it on the SA biggest losers list, pulled up the 10-Q and checked the P/B and whether it was actually bankrupt and bought a few hundred shares. The $13MM in trust preferreds that haven't been paid for years is a pretty significant factor in the current valuation that I also missed. I though this was an illiquid fat finger type deal, and it wasn't, so I've sold. Thanks to you both for helping keep my loss on carelessness <$100.

Bought a bit of CARV this AM. Small NYC bank that is down 90% today. Released (not very good) earnings yesterday, but capital ratios still look reasonable and I couldn't find any enforcement actions or anything.

Most likely options to succeed are to get a different lender or wait 6 months and try again. I have had success in the past by offering to pay for a 2nd appraisal. The bank picked a second appraiser of their approved list and gave me the loan based on the new (higher) appraisal. I met them at the property and provided comps that I thought were reasonable. Making it easier for them to give me the answer I wanted.

I suppose if they were willing to give up their Bank charter. And if they weren't a bank, it would free up Berkshire to acquire Delta without worrying about the Fed fretting over a very material commercial relationship... Good point. Also, Amex probably wouldn't need it's bank charter to attract funds if it was part of Berkshire.

One of the airlines seems plausible. I'd prefer they buy Aercap, but they don't seem interested in airplane leasing. On that I'd love to see in the next downturn would be DIS. At $250B market cap it would be big enough to move the needle, and the parks/hotels/cruise ships have plenty of opportunity to deploy capital at attractive returns

I have a screener.co subscription. Not free, but at ~$25/month it's not Bloomberg territory either.

If long term investors are capitulating, I hope WEB is buying their shares today on all our behalf.

Sold some BRK.B puts - added to IBKR with the proceeds+