Parsad

They have a ton of retail experience...I'm guessing this is going to be another Bill Gregson turnaround project. My nephew and niece are going to love the fact that I know the owner of Toys R Us now! Cheers!

I do Sudoku every night in the bathroom during my bed-time evacuation. I do enough so that I start to get tired, rather than stimulated mentally. So usually the legs start to get numb! ;D Cheers!

Hi All, Fairfax has put together a special package through Thomas Cook India for Fairfax or Fairfax India investors that incorporates an 8-day/7-night India visit with daily guided excursions to see Fairfax-related companies and historical/cultural sites of India. The dates of the itinerary are January 12th to 19th, 2019. I've seen the itinerary, which is quite expansive, and you would be basically staying at 5-star hotels in various cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Agra, Jaipur and Bengaluru. Breakfast, lunch and dinner is also included each day...with visits to dine at historical hotels, sites, etc. All transfers are also included. The package has a set price for single or double occupancy. You would also have to pay for your flight to and from India, but Fairfax is working with Air Canada to get some deals on flights as well. If I don't win the silent auction prize for the trip to India, then I will be going on this one. It would be a very good way to see some of India, while being able to learn about Fairfax's India investments...all in a great deal of comfort...especially for the first-time visitor like myself! If you would like more information on this, please email me at cornerofberkshireandfairfax@gmail.com and I can forward you the itinerary. Cheers! Sanjeev

Online and dinner ($200) ticket sales end Thursday (19th) folks! If you plan on joining us for the our last annual dinner...you've got a couple of days left to get your tickets. Thanks to all of you who are attending and to those that have attended in the past! Cheers!

Online and dinner ($200) ticket sales end Thursday (19th) folks! If you plan on joining us for the our last annual dinner...you've got a couple of days left to get your tickets. Cheers!

Hi Folks, This is our 13th dinner and probably last one in its current format...as support is clearly waning from year to year. We've raised $160,000 in memory of JoAnn Butler, Prem's executive assistant and our friend who passed away from colon cancer in 2009. Everything has its time, and we are very happy we were able to do this for as long as we have. I don't know exactly what next year's event will look like, as the week is so full of other wonderful events, it has relegated ours to one where attendance is decreasing year to year. The most likely conversion will be from a dinner to a simple networking event, with Fairfax coming in around 9pm with their panel. We will probably retain the silent auction, and continue to raise money for Crohn's & Colitis Canada, but we will get rid of the dinner and reduce the price to attend to something nominal to cover the rental of the room and space. So, I'm encouraging all of our supporters, old and new, to join us for our last such dinner. We have some great speakers lined up, including our usual Fairfax panel moderated by Jeff Stacey...and of course, Francis Chou answering questions till 11pm or later! Truly looking forward to seeing you there...one last hurrah! Get your tickets below and check out our event PDF that is attached. https://www.pdh-inc.com/2018-premier-fairfax-conference.html Sanjeev 2018_PDH_FFH_Dinner.pdf

Hi Folks, This is our 13th dinner and probably last one in its current format. I'm encouraging all of our supporters, older and newer, to join us for our last such dinner. Please get your tickets before April 18th, as we have to finalize numbers after that. We have some great speakers lined up, including our usual Fairfax panel moderated by Jeff Stacey...and of course, Francis Chou answering questions till 11pm or later! Truly looking forward to seeing you there...and remember, we are raising funds for Crohn's & Colitis Canada in memory of JoAnn Butler! Get your tickets below and check out our event PDF that is attached! https://www.pdh-inc.com/2018-premier-fairfax-conference.html Sanjeev 2018_PDH_FFH_Dinner.pdf

In most professions, you still create value for your employees, even if you underperform. An underperforming waitress will still serve customers, an underperforming engineer will still do some engineering work for the company etc. An underperforming money manager however will be measured against the easily obtainable index standard and if he doesn’t beat that or worse underperforms by a wide margin, he does not create any value of hits customers, in fact he costs his customers money. His customers would have been better off, if they had never heard or met this persons, that’s the harsh truth. Wasn't this the harsh reality from 1996 to February 2000? And again, from 2003 to 2008? And now you have one of the most prolonged bull markets, with unimaginable manipulation of monetary and fiscal policy, from 2009 to 2018. Value investors looked stupid until February 2000, and then again until October 2008. Unwinding of bonds, increasing interest rates, huge expansion and growth related to a massive tax cut stimulus, and don't forget that sovereign debt relative to GDP hasn't decreased for almost any developed nation over this expansion period. Bubble, bubble toil and trouble! On the positive side, money mangement is one of the few professions where you can underperform and still become filthy rich. Alnesh and I just closed our Canadian Fund after a decade of relative underperformance. The fund was just too small, and operating expenses far too high...we had no fixed fee, only an incentive fee above a 6% hurdle. We didn't become filthy rich, and we made sure all of our partners left the fund with at least the capital they put in or more...four partners who came in during the last couple of years were made 100% whole from our own funds. The Chou Funds might not work quite like that, but at least Francis is one of the few managers in the world who tries hard to be accountable. Cheers!

Value Investor Conference is holding a couple of events Berkshire weekend: Morningstar CEO - Kunal Kapoor on May 3rd Brookfield CEO - Bruce Flatt on May 4th See details below: http://www.valueinvestorconference.com/valueinvestorregister.html#OVD2

Post only if 100% ok with Ben and Allan...otherwise it will be removed and the poster banned. Cheers!

Hi All, We are getting closer to the event date. Please get your tickets at the link above. If you need anything, please contact my assistant Nicole Chin. We have some great presentations again this year...including one from our own Keith Smith and his Bonhoeffer Fund! And of course, our guests from Fairfax Financial who will be running their usual Q&A! Important note: The event is at the Sheraton Toronto Centre this year, as there was some construction at the Royal York...and all of the events were moved there. We will be back at the Royal York next year if things continue. Speaking of next year and continuing...that will be dependent on ticket sales and we will decide how things progress going forward. We may downsize or possibly eliminate the event altogether. It's been a great run, and hopefully we can continue it, but it will come down to participation. Thanks for your support over the years and we look forward to seeing you all at least once more this year! Sanjeev

Who knows what will happen, but I have a feeling Joe Average hasn't even started selling yet. Buying and ultimately selling bitcoin, isn't as easy as the advocates would have you believe. So there is a lag between when the larger players sell, and the small average investor's get to sell. The smaller players, especially the ones buying last at the higher valuations, will be left holding the bag. Cheers!

Thanks everyone...in particular rbkbabang for updating the images! The logo looks much better now. Cheers!

Mad genius or just plain mad...obvious where I stand on this one, from the first time I heard about him and saw his written crap on TheStreet.con! Cheers! https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meet-man-behind-bitcoin-genius-ads-internet-134441715.html

Eye of the beholder! When it was designed, I thought the bars showed incremental growth...no cannabis or bit-coin...nice 12-15% annual returns. The plane and planet are simply to show that there are investors on here from all over the world, and no matter where you fly, you'll find value investment ideas and value investors. Cheers!

++ simple fix! How about to grab this JPEG file named "cropped-cropped-Handover-Corner-Of-Berkshire-Fairfax-JPG-e1516151433460" from the site, fix it and send it to Sanjeev for a reinstall on the CoBF webserver installation? [ ; - ) ] -I have forgotten how to do [read: manipulate] this in i.e. Photoshop, and nobody has asked me to document my investment returns here on CoBF so far, so I've had no need to refresh my memory! Thanks everyone! I figured the site isn't going anywhere, and it was time to make it a bit more permanent and recognizable. John, I can send you the different JPEGS if you know what to do...I'm not particularly tech savvie. I believe doing a clear version wouldn't be that difficult if you know what you are doing. Cheers!

Which is essentially paying $18,800/year for 5 years (or about 100k) for your Canadian citizenship. For US healthcare, it's crazy expensive if you're not on an employer-sponsored plan. It's absolutely ridiculous. If I was retired or whatnot, and not wealthy, I would not be living here. I always ask, who is getting rich from all this? Is it the doctors? I don't think so. The government? Doubtful. Insurance/Pharma? Now we're getting warm... I have my own plan this year. To keep things updated, for a family of six in the US: $960/mo for coverage, with a $3800 deductible and $14k total out of pocket. I think there's a 20% co-insurance or so. This isn't terrible at all. When I was able to buy through a group it was $200 a month, plus a $5k deductible and the company paid $1000 a month on my behalf. I was able to find something better on my own. But all of that said. If you're tapping out on health care that $18k a year is cheap. Also worth noting. I've since done some research into this. The investor visa is ONLY available in Quebec. Canada suspended it, but Quebec still has it. For $1.2m USD you can become Canadian and live in Quebec. Worth considering at least... I can't believe how high insurance premiums are in the U.S. I feel for you guys! Regarding the investor visa program...the loophole everyone is exploiting is that you can still enter the Quebec program, but you don't have to live in Quebec...you can go anywhere. Alot of people have been taking advantage of the loophole to move to BC, Alberta or Ontario. They have not closed that loophole yet...even though they should! Quebec gets the $1.2M, but other provinces end up footing the bill for the participant. Cheers!

Hi All, It's that time of year again. This year's dinner is on April 25, 2018, the night before the Fairfax AGM. Tickets and details can be found below: https://www.pdh-inc.com/2018-premier-fairfax-conference.html If you have any issues or queries, please contact Nicole at nchin@pdh-inc.com. We'll be updating the event page regularly as we finalize speakers, menu, etc. Also, if anyone is interested in sponsorships, donations for the silent auction, etc., please contact Nicole as well. Thanks very much and look forward to seeing you there! Sanjeev

Happy New Year all! Cheers!

Merry Christmas all! Thank you for your contributions and friendship...wishing you all a wonderful 2018 as well! Cheers! “Every time a bell rings, Berkshire’s stock goes up a thousand dollars!” - a Berkshire shareholder’s Wonderful Life

No, that's not what I meant at all. I was trying to point out that PDH made up such a huge component of the fund at one point. We have no control over PDH's stock price...intrinsic value will be ultimately decided by the amount of cash that comes out of the business...that has a longer time frame than the more traditional public-company or fixed-income assets in the fund. When we invest in the fund, the ideas we put capital into are undervalued by the market and take anywhere from 6 months to 3 years to get back closer to intrinsic value as the market revalues. The businesses within PDH may take years as they scale up before they are reflected in PDH's intrinsic value. Cheers!

Depends on the time frame you examine...if you measured at the beginning of the bull market we were destroying the index. If you measured half way through this bull market, we were beating it by close to 6% annually. If you measure in totality after one of the longer bull markets in history, we are modestly ahead. We haven't gotten any dumber, and the non-PDH and non-cash portion has averaged something like 70% over the last two years...chances are with PDH making up a smaller percentage of the fund now, we are going to outperform dramatically again in the next decade. But for all intents and purposes you are correct! It is worth noting that our 11 year results were done with an average of nearly 35% cash in the fund over those 11 years. When the S&P500 drops again by 20-30%, our clients will sleep well at night knowing we are taking advantage of circumstances...and they didn't pay us a cent in those down years. For our clients in IRA's...they are doing better than the index with all of the benefits of their non-IRA partners...and that small 2% advantage will be greatly to their benefit after 20-30 years. Cheers!

+1! Especially since no hockey is scheduled. Cheers!

Or you could say..."I'm thankful for not being Al Franken...Sad! Cheers!