PatientCheetah

I think the consensus is that the market is fairly priced. There are still cheap stocks but it is very hard to find bargains from obvious superior U.S. businesses. From reading CoBF and various quarterly letters, investors increasingly are looking abroad for relative bargains. Europe is probably 12-18 months behind U.S. in terms of valuations.

I had to learn this lesson the hard way. It's much better to wait for temporary breaks in higher quality names. If you want to go down the quality spectrum, you need to be sure that the company's prospect is improving and is likely to stay this way for the duration of the investment.

https://www.streetaccount.com/FileLinkHandler.axd?filename=STORYID1475487_Greenlight%20Capital%201Q14%20letter.pdf Very interesting letter - Einhorn is a good example where an investor is flexible enough to exit his position right away when his thesis does not play out.

Anyone has experience with BI Research or The Turnaround Letter? Want to know if they are worth the time.

Will there be transcript or webcast? Very interesting group of panelists.

Another Greenwald book. The best qualitative books that I have read - it focuses on competitive dynamics/strategy implications, the qualitative aspects that you can't get from quantitative analysis or any type of screeners http://www.amazon.com/Competition-Demystified-Radically-Simplified-Approach/dp/1591841801

I think its a very rudimentary book. If you have a year or more experience in investing and have read a few books on accounting and value investing, it offers very little value.

I guess when most of the customers are women, well, they are fickle. The right playbook for retailers should be watching beaten down names to show signs of stabilization, get in when positive trends are becoming evident, let momentum tells you when to get out - not exactly value investing.

I understand the bifurcated recovery idea - recovery is primarily concentrated in high paying jobs/people with large amount of assets; high ends are doing extremely well and the low/mid ends are not seeing much recovery. I think this has been the case for the last several years. What exactly had changed that made the second half of 2013 so terrible for the low/mid end retailers? I want to hear everyone's opinion. If the reason is not a long term trend, there are many opportunities.

Thank everyone for your advice, I better get started!

I am new to CBF. Who are some of the smartest CBF members (e.g. Packer16)? I want to learn from their old posts. My apology if this topic has been done before.

Market is fairly but not overvalued only if we reach the same euphoria that we did back in 2000 and 2007. Do you have the number from 1998? I think the current macro condition is more similar to 1998 than 2000 - Russian/Asian crisis, low interest rate, etc.

if a foreign company is growing steadily in terms of its local currency, most of the earnings volatility is due to exchange rate translation. Should we value the company in its local currency and then take a mean-reversion approach to currency translation, making the bet that its exchange rate will revert to long term average? Are there other sensible approaches?