mjohn707

I'm in a small group plan at work and we had a 6.5% increase this year. We were actually one of the winners after the Affordable Care Act passed and we got something like a 33% decrease that year.

KaijiNet/Japan Express is the best I know for Japan: http://www.kaijinet.com/jpexpress/Default.aspx

what for? Last minute estate planning?

I plan on checking just the one time, right before I die

Have you ever heard of Maverick by Ricardo Semler? It was about his family company, the Semco Corporation, based in Brazil. It was published around the time that the 3G guys opened their partnership, and Semler talks about how bad the business environment was in Brazil in those days. Semler also started a profit sharing program for his employees which I suppose must also have been unusual for the time

this sounds like how many times income covers fixed charges

I made a list once of all the business history books that I read over the years and it came to 51 titles, at least that I could remember. The top five, not judged by literary merit but by the insight into business that the book provides, are: Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough-This is about the LBO of RJR Nabisco. Burrough describes the personalities of the major players and the stages of the buyout negotiation. The most interesting part is the conclusion where he discusses how drastic post-LBO cost cuts affected the business’s ability to compete against better funded rivals, which has some interesting parallels to private equity today Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt Eichenwald-The collapse of Enron, which is a story of bad accounting, bad incentives, and bad eggs. If you haven’t read anything about Enron, this is worth getting DisneyWar by James B. Stewart-Politics and intrigue in the boardroom of the Disney Corporation. Disney was an extreme case, but I never would have guessed how bad this stuff could get. Stewart changed how I think about big bureaucracies Behind the Arches by John F. Love-Love describes the establishment and development of the McDonald’s burger chain. McDonald’s success was due in large part to two innovations, the concept itself and the less understood financial innovation that fueled the chain’s capital intensive expansionary race for #1 market share. Love also describes the founder Ray Kroc, who was fanatical about the service and cleanliness of his restaurants. Howard Schultz is basically just Ray Kroc reincarnated. This is the single best business history I’ve read based off the criteria I described above Father, Son, & Co: My Life at IBM and Beyond by Thomas Watson Jr.-Written by an IBM CEO who was the son of another IBM CEO. Watson Jr. tells the story of the early days of IBM when his father borrowed from his experience at NCR to develop the unique sales culture of IBM. Watson Jr. also talks about the difficult decisions he faced as a CEO of a technology company as industry conditions changed over his watch. If you don’t understand what people mean when they talk about corporate culture, or if you don’t understand the inflection point dynamic that’s intrinsic to technology companies, this is worth checking out

Anyone else remember this differently? I think Graham mentioned in Security Analysis that unprofitable net-nets often did better than profitable net-nets No need to rely on memory. I have the book and Jurgis is correct. Graham steers investors towards net-nets that are decent companies as an example of an egregious mis-valuation. Now I hate to argue with someone who's publicly stated that they've read Security Analysis four times, but I don't believe Graham had any problems with money-losing net-nets. I remember that one of the examples he gave in the liquidation value chapter was a net-net that had loss years but a history of profitability. I'd agree that he suggests decent companies and he even gives a list of characteristics that the companies might have, but I don't believe an earning history without a loss year was a problem-he would be more concerned if a company had a big reduction in liquidation value instead. We might just be disagreeing about what money-losing means, if it's just one bad year or a bad earnings record over a number of years.

Anyone else remember this differently? I think Graham mentioned in Security Analysis that unprofitable net-nets often did better than profitable net-nets

It wouldn't shock me if it came out that they were using bait and switch tactics, but it's a lot harder to do in the mortgage area than with vehicle loans or something because mortgage lenders have to deliver a reliable estimate of loan costs well ahead of the mortgage closing. To bait and switch it seems like Clayton would be violating federal respa laws which seems crazy. My understanding of federal laws is that this practice would not be allowed except in the case of a 2nd home or a rental property. Your personal residence should be protected by the federal repo rules even if you lived in a title vehicle or a boat The points seem on the high side, but 11-15% contract rates doesn't seem excessive to me for the level of risk based off the credit scores they're talking about

I didn't read the seattle times article, but I don't think the public integrity article makes much sense. It seems like they're accusing clayton of deliberately writing loans so that they could later repossess the borrowers' homes. I think it would be unlikely that clayton wants repossessions because they're generally pretty unprofitable. Is this what everyone else is getting from the article?

[amazonsearch]The Rise and Fall of the House of Barneys[/amazonsearch] Barney Pressman was a hard-boiled type who, according to family legend, pawned his wife’s engagement ring to raise the money to start his business. He opened Barney’s Clothes in 1923 as a retailer of used men’s suits. Even by the cutthroat standards of the New York garment trade Barney was considered an aggressive operator. He used to brag about a coup from his early career where he procured a collection of suits for free from a recent widow, and he was not above using sly sales tactics if it made him an extra sale or two. He even once hired a group of models to walk up and down Seventh Avenue handing out his flyers wearing nothing but wooden barrels. Despite his rough edges, Barney was a good businessman. He liked to remind his salesmen that they were selling his store first and his product second. His employees respected him, his suppliers knew that once the bargaining finally stopped he paid invoices promptly, and he never allowed a customer to leave the store unhappy with a purchase. As the business grew, Barney became one of the first people involved in discount retailing. At the time suit manufacturers were very powerful and refused to sell to anyone involved in discounting. Barney was unusually persistent however, and managed to locate enough grey market goods to become a thorn in the side of his upmarket New York competitors. Because of careful buying and tightly controlled costs he could make money on a gross sales margin of 30% while his competitors required margins of 36%. His store did well enough that some manufacturers quietly broke rank and began to sell directly to him, occasionally even with the stipulation that he remove all the labels that identified their brands. As his sales continued to grow, even the holdouts were forced to open accounts with him, although they complained that he was destroying the industry. With a reliable supply of inventory, his natural gift for self-promotion, and an army of salesmen trained in his own hard selling methods, Barneys Clothes grew sales to over $6 million by the time of his retirement in 1964. Barney was a great success and was finally, as he had advertised for years, the “cut-rate clothing king.” In 1946, after a little convincing, Barney’s son Fred joined the business. Fred had different interests than his father however. While Barney’s strength was sales, Fred was more interested in fashion and merchandising. Fred learned from his father how to haggle when purchasing for the store, but he was also willing to pay more for better quality merchandise. In addition, nothing about the store displays or the products could escape Fred’s eye. Despite his colorblindness, he had unusual talents like the ability to calculate the thickness of a fabric with just a few touches. He would count the number of stiches in the inside seam of a pair of gloves to make sure that their quality was up to his standards, and stay after work experimenting with different arrangements of the store displays. He also demanded a similar attention to detail from all of his buyers and department managers. With Fred in the business, Barney’s began to attract a younger, more style conscious clientele. After Barney’s retirement, Fred realized that the country was changing. In 1951 the first fashion show was held in Florence, and by 1955 the shows came to America. Pierre Cardin, an Italian-born French designer, created his first menswear collection in 1960, and had over 900 outlets selling his styles a few years later. The success of Cardin’s licensing strategy began a structural change in the industry towards the separation of manufacturing and design. Fred recognized this change and knew he needed to update his merchandise to keep the store competitive, but his suppliers were producing the same designs that they had made for decades. He tried suggesting changes to his best suppliers, but they were hamstrung by union work rules and insisted that his ideas would drive manufacturing costs to uneconomical levels. Unable to get what he wanted from America, Fred turned instead to Italy. In the 1960s the manufactured suit business in Italy was undeveloped. Although Italian men purchased a new suit once every two years on average, seventy percent were still being hand sewn by over 100,000 Italian tailors. As Italy rebuilt after the war, these tailors gave Italian factories the advantage of producing superior cloth. In addition, tailors in Rome had begun to experiment with slimmer fitting designs and unusual colors. Fred worked with Italian fashion designers to edit their styles for the American market. Satisfied with the designs, he then signed exclusive distribution deals for the New York City area and arranged the manufacturing by Italian textile mills himself. The result was that he could source an Italian suit for about $100, and the suit would sell for $300 or more in America. In 1970 Fred spent $3.4 million on an expansion of the store. He called the expansion International House, and filled the space with an inventory of 4,000 imported Italian suits. Fred’s gamble paid off, and by 1975 sales in the store increased to $34 million, up almost six times in a decade. He was turning over inventory between 3 ½ and 4 times a year while his competitors turned inventory once a year, and his gross margin were 55%-60%, exceptionally high in the industry. Faced with new competition, American suit manufactures began to fail in large numbers. In the 1960s there were about 1200 manufacturers doing between $10 and $100 million in sales each. By the end of the 1970s, there were only 200 firms left in business and over one-third of the suits sold in America were imported. The industry’s financial trouble did not affect Barney’s however, and by the early 1980s the store was earning between $5 and $6 million a year in profit. Fred’s son Gene joined the business in the early 70s, and by 1986 he and his brother Bob were in control of company. Under their direction Barney’s began series of complicated business deals that would lead the company to declare bankruptcy in January 1996, crushed by the weight of $320 million in debt and lawsuits from their Japanese partner. In the bankruptcy the Pressmans lost control of the store they had run for 73 years. More than half of Levine’s book is devoted to explaining how the third generation’s overconfidence and inattention, combined with borrowed money and bad accounting wrecked the work of the first two generations, despite the significant momentum the business enjoyed. Levine is a talented writer and the book is well researched. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of retailing and family business.

I think I might be confusing it with the millionaire next door. I didn't actually read rich dad but I bet just from the title that taleb's criticism would still apply. That reminds me of a herman hesse quote: "History's third dimension is always fiction." And he was talking about serious history, so it can get a lot worse than that

I think some people (Taleb) criticize it because it might be describing cases of survivorship bias

Do you update all of the prices by hand periodically?

but at least the accounting is exciting, right?

I think you'd find Seneca Foods (SENEA) interesting, it's sort of a net-net low P/E situation, and right around the 300M mkt cap you're looking for

Well. Originality & personally educational. Have you ever noticed that you've learned more from the bad investment ideas than from the good ones?

Is it supposed to be a good investment, or an investment that has lots to talk about?

Yeah nothing makes foreign affairs more interesting than a little skin in the game

Yeah I agree it wasn't any good, don't even think I finished it.

Am I seeing these used prices on amazon correctly? I can't believe I threw my copy of this away a few years ago :(

I'm getting it too and the ads really seem like they don't fit the demographic of this board ;)

Has anyone looked at thessaloniki water (eyaps)? It's 75% owned by the greek state and it seems to be trading at about 60% of book value and a PE of 7

I must be an even worse investor than you, because I don't think I could put together a super safe portfolio of 5 names that were all at a 50% discount ;) I think it's possible to put together 30 relatively safe names at a 30-40% discount however