Patmo

Patmo, I notice you have TESB listed as TESB.EN rather than TESB.BR so I was wondering if that is just an different exchange? thanks Zorro No, just my mistake.

ITT Tech (ESI) is currently the cheapest I know of. But you have to go by the 2013 FS which are in the process of being restated to consolidate the PEAKS program, a pretty sizeable beast. $215 million senior debt, but the PEAKS trust has an unknown amount of assets (student loans receivable) intended to be used to service this debt. The company estimates that a sizable amount of receivables intended to be applied against the debt is impaired. Anyway, excluding the PEAKS program, ESI trades at 1x EV/EBITDA-allcapex 2013 according to a quick calculation using google finance's statements. Adding in the entire $215mil debt still gives EV/EBITDA-allcapex of 3, still quite cheap.

Personally I don't calculate that crap, I know I spend significantly less than I earn to begin with aka I have a large personal finance margin of safety! I'm reasonably cheap on the big stuff, so that I can live well on the day-to-day. I own a 7yo car paid in cash, rent a room, etc. So I don't think twice if I want to treat a coworker to lunch, go do activities of any kind, buy books on amazon etc. I also only buy stuff when I need/want them rather than chasing bargains for crap I won't use. I enjoy life much more that way than having a brand new car, boat, mortgage, RV, 3D HD plasma TV and stay up all night, calculating every penny to figure out whether I'll make it this month. These toys just won't make me happier enough to justify the cost. Rant over :-X.

I just use Google's... Does the job.

I don't know if you are talking about my post, but my point was the exact opposite of what you may have gleaned from it.

I don't think this is correct. Joel Greenblatt's public track record for the 10 years he had his hedge fund, which did exactly the type of investing he describes in You Can Be a Stock Market Genius, was 50.0% per year gross/40% net of incentive fees. I don't think that Buffett beats this in any 10 year period. Warren Buffet is amazing and his accomplishments are to be respected and studied, but there are better investors out there as well. Nobody is the best in the world at anything for 60 years straight, let alone the most competitive "game" in the world. Joel Greenblatt is probably top shelf, and there are a plethora of others that nobody knows that are really damn solid. When I read or hear people talking Buffet with their "mental model inventory" this and their "wonderful, wonderful" that, citing their favorite Buffet quote as proof that their argument is right, I can't help but think of kids mimicking their favorite sports athlete. Lebron always wears red caps? Man I'm only wearing red caps from now on! Sid Crosby said in an interview that to be good at hockey you need to practice team plays? Man I'm never doing individual drills again! It's like there's no place for individual thought, if you don't go full Buffet you might as well put yourself in the trashcan where you belong.

You said, "The fact that a stock goes up after you decline to buy it doesn't mean your analysis was wrong". Ok, then what shows this analysis is wrong or right? Two points 1) Its antithetical to value investing to believe that market price moves validate or invalidate the research you did. 2) It doesn't really matter if your thesis was incorrect on something you didn't buy. Its almost never worth rehashing it. The reality is that value investing will always miss some great ideas. You have to be comfortable with that. I would never buy AMZN and I can't possibly fathom how someone who calls themselves a value investor as I conceive value investing could buy the shares. But that's ok. Me too, but I'll also have more respect for someone who does their own thinking than a BuffetBitch who takes every word that comes out of our favorite friend's mouth as purer truth than the laws of nature. When you think for yourself, you give yourself a chance to improve. When you follow like a blind sheep, you stay a blind sheep.

Agree 100%. It's also going to happen, but it will take a while. Seems like a generational type of change, where our kids or the kids of our kids will see things in a different light and make smarter choices. A long way down the road people will think we were fumbling idiots for having this stuff criminalized in the first place.

See my post, page 2...

Pretty much all of Buffet's quotes... Not because what he says isn't sensible, but because many peoples take it as gospel, the word of God himself. People even use his word as an argument, as if what he says is pure fact and any deviation in thought is WRONG. Dang...

You're right, and I've been looking at a few recent spinoffs and none seem to be interestingly cheap. It could be that everyone started looking at spinoffs again since everything else was expensive. I don't know if I even want to get in on this, I was just posting because it's pretty interesting and makes for good practice. I'll let the spinoff happen and see what people are going to trade it at.

Well, that makes more sense. The $4.6bil 26% stake in charter, TWC at $400mil plus $3bil tax asset alone come up to $8bil. TruePosition is like a $60mil revenues a year business, so it doesn't seem to matter. I don't know what kind of leverage they intend on putting on broadband, but that initial prospectus seems to be trying hard to spook people into thinking it'll be in debt to the gills. For some reason the pro forma BS on page F-35 doesn't account for the $300mil swap or the $3bil deferred tax asset ($8bil NOLs). At any rate, judging by this piece, debt would be something like $500mil total for broadband. Seems like nothing? I wonder what Charter itself's intrinsinc value really is. Face value EV/EBITDA is about 10. I don't know what assets they are depreciating and how long they'll produce, but it makes up 2/3 of that ebitda. P/oCF is like 7. Doesn't seem terribly over or undervalued at first glance, although it has lots of debt itself.

They probably already were, I doubt this being up on COBF makes a difference...

I'm not great at reading into complex stuff, so I would love to see better investors' inputs on this. What I have so far: -For every 20 share block, you get 5 shares and 4 rights (transferable for a share at about 80% market cost iiuc) of the spinoff. -implied value if exercise: 9/29x16bil total cap (A,B,C)= about $5bilcap for Broadband, 9/29x$47avg pps= $15pps Broadband, excluding the 20ish% discount on rights (tell me if the calcs are on the right track!) -Will borrow $300mil from parent, makes cash payment of $300mil to parent (What's that for?) -Keeps talking about how leveraged the company will be, but is that all there is to it? -I don't know what is par for the course in rights offerings, but upon reading documentation rights appear difficult to exercise. -You get 26% of Charter, 100% of True Position, $3bil in deferred tax assets (vs. about 5bil market cap if every right is exercised?), a small holding in Time Warner Cable, and other unnamed small stuff. -Malone will have at least 45% stake "Charter's primary assets are its equity interests in its subsidiaries. Charter's operating subsidiaries are separate and distinct legal entities and are not obligated to make funds available to their debt issuer holding companies for payments on our notes or other obligations in the form of loans, distributions, or otherwise." -What I get from this is that most of Charter's revs/exps will instead be capitalized on the balance sheet as equity instruments? Additionally, these subs are not under any obligations re: Charter/LibertyBroadband's debt? I don't understand how large a % of Liberty's Broadband this interest is, but behind the prospectus going on and on about how leveraged Broadband will be and this, it looks like a mini version of the spinoff that made Malone famous? Or am I not seeing things correctly?

If you want prices to be irrationally cheap some of the time, you have to have them irrationally expensive some of the time too. It's not like anyone is twisting your hand into buying into those things. Humans are emotional creatures, don't fight it just take advantage of it.

I meant more regarding starting a fund (or other ways to solve the issue) than how to manage the money, but thanks for the suggestion it's not a bad idea. I'm still more comfortable sitting on cash for them, I'm just more comfortable that way, opportunity cost be damned. It's not staying like that forever anyway.

What if you just want to help friends and family without necessarily making a profit? What would the best course of action be? Right now I have 2 family members and 1 friend that asked me to manage part of their money, and I have to meet with them, go into their account together, etc. I'm very prudent with their money and there's not much particularly worth buying or selling so they just have a couple 5% positions and tons of cash right now, so I don't really have to meet with them too often. But it's going to get annoying for me over time, plus they have a life themselves so meeting all the time is just not very practical for any parties. They have each different tax status with their accounts (1 rrsp, 1 tfsa, 1 taxable - in Canada) so I don't know how that would affect anything. Any help would be appreciated, and sorry for kind of taking over.

Short selling is at a low, share repurchases and M&A are at a high, reddit's investing subforum predicts stocks will go up forever... Something somewhere will crap the bed soon, it appears. I sure hope so, I want to load up on some cheap stuff. There's almost nothing that feels like a screaming buy.

Don't come here with your negative energy please. "There is always something to do" as Peter Cundill, a fellow value investor, would say. Please read the above post. YOU TOO can learn to read the market signs. lol, that's what I'm afraid of... :) But can you read the merkhet signs?

The big name gold miners are a joke, last time I checked they were trying to pay themselves fat bonuses for bleeding money. There are a couple picks that I like in the mining space, but from the looks of it nobody gives much of a crap about either of them. To answer no_free_lunch, my personal pick for "best in class" is Mandalay Resources. I made a quick writeup on the company but it didn't generate much interest. Probably because my writeup sucked, lol :-[. I suggest you look into it (the company not the writeup). This company doesn't actually issue equity out their asses to fund their operations/expansion, which puts them on top of 99% of small miners with this one fact alone.

If you hold the eventual spin-offs, probably GOOG.