Parsad

I thought I would get it out early, as many of you will probably head out for vacation soon. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Kwanzaa and Joyeux Ramadan...there, I've gotten them all in. For those that will be away for a while, have a Happy New Year and we'll see you in 2013! Cheers and thanks for all of your contributions! Sanjeev

Is that how much your portfolio moved today? ;D Cheers!

Well, actually all the credit belongs to my ability to move stock prices by eating lunch out of the office. I'll get you guys over $11 pretty soon...can't promise $12 before Christmas, but will do my best. I plan on making it snow in Vancouver for a White Christmas using the same method over the next week as well. Cheers!

Sounds worse than the Tenderloin! It's a shame. I kind of know how the Tenderloin got started out (*part* of it actually happened due to a public policy decision - we were bringing homeless and mentally ill people to the city to help them, and then allowing them to camp out without prosecution while simultaneously paying them), but I am curious how neighborhoods in general start to degrade. I'm sure that almost none of them besides the tenderloin are shitty due to some old, weird public policy decision like we had here. It was actually worse than the Tenderloin. Dan Rather was here for CBS a few years ago, so was Diane Sawyer...doing exclusive stories on how one of the most socially-developed cities in North America could allow its citizens, including single mom's and their children, to live in such squalor and a traumatic environment. Believe it or not, the area started to deteriorate after one of the city's historical department stores, Woodwards, went downhill and eventually out of business. That area used to be the main shopping district of the city for the previous 80 years, but when Woodward's disappeared, foot traffic decreased significantly and other businesses went out of business. Much of the shopping moved to the famous Robson Street area or to the suburbs, and you suddenly had alot of people living on social assistance moving into the area. It just kept going downhill with virtually no government intervention. Finally, a few years ago, you had a mix of public and private development reinvigorate the area...ironically it started by turning the old shell of the Woodward's department store into a mix of condo units and street-level retail, as well as Simon Fraser University expanding their downtown campus into the new development. From there you slowly had gentrification of the area, and now it is becoming one of the hippest areas of the city to live in, with new bistros and shops opening everywhere. Sadly forcing some of the poor out of the area and creating problems down the road for other neighbourhoods! C'est la vie! But before I moved out of the Burnaby area of Vancouver a few months ago, my daily commute to the office downtown went through the Hasting & Main area every day, and I could not believe what I saw. Most tourists who came to the city and saw the area couldn't believe it existed in Vancouver. Seriously, every three doors you saw someone shooting up in plain view, and guaranteed that every block had at least one person completely passed out and just lying there on the street...not knowing if they were sleeping, drunk or dying of a drug overdose. Take a look at the picture below. This was what it looked like on virtually every block of that six square block area. Picturesque and liberal Vancouver...what a fu**ing mess it was! I'm ashamed my city allowed that to happen to people! Cheers! http://www.nowpublic.com/health/east-hastings-0

Should the government ever need to be overthrown, I'll be in Australia on the beach somewhere. Unless it's Australia's government that gets overthrown, and your guns are locked up back in Washington! ;D You can always catch a flight to Fiji in that case I guess, but then there is a coup there every 5 years. Cheers!

That's probably part of the issue, but for example in this case, there weren't obvious indications that this lunatic was loony. So how do you lock him up, when you have no clue? One option is to not give him the opportunity to inflict mass casualties. He was denied a gun of his own a few weeks earlier, yet simply just took his mother's available guns instead. Cheers!

I live in San Francisco and spend a lot of time in (but do not live in, thankfully) the Tenderloin area, where there are a *lot* of sketchy people wandering the street. Ditto with Oakland. I wasn't just talking in hypotheticals. I know that while there are a lot of places in the US (and Canada, of course) where the "crackhead" argument *is* "bullshit", there are a lot of other places, such as the Tenderloin or Oakland, where it does apply. We do seem to have more social problems perhaps. Unwillingness to treat the homeless/and/or/addicted. Our prisons are an issue. Plus we've had a lot of racial related social problems that perhaps some Western countries suffer less from. The social issues could make our society more violent to begin with. The 6 square block area of Hastings & Main in Vancouver is considered the poorest and most down-trodden zip code in all of North America. At least it was until about 4 years ago, when alot of capital and social stimulus programs began providing more social housing and support. Once the main shopping area of downtown Vancouver, about 25 years ago it began an unprecedented downward spiral. Shopping areas were replaced with crack houses, skid-row housing, rampant prostitution and unbelievable squalor and poverty. For a city where the average house price is over one million dollars and the average family income is over $125,000 annually! There were crackheads and drug addicts shooting up in plain view, with police officers walking by and ambulances carrying overdose victims away on an hourly basis. In fact, one of the worst serial killers in North American history, Willie Pickton, managed to lure away some 50 homeless or vulnerable women to his farm, where they were raped, killed, butchered and fed to his pigs. Yet in this putrid environment, an area that Vancouverites should be ashamed to have ever allowed to happen, there was very little gun violence relative to the rest of the city. So, the fear of crackheads breaking into homes and shooting up victims is a fallacy. It's rich, upper-class, mostly white, right-wing suburbanites that perpetuate this theory of protecting their homes with guns, so that crackheads don't break in and rape your wife or young daughters while the husband is helplessly tied to a chair...damn you raping crackheads who take buses to gated communities, walk past security posts, and then break into homes with alarm systems! Used to be black slaves 200 years ago, now it's crackheads! ;D Cheers!

They haven't gone up in large metropolitan cities in Canada. We have plenty of crackheads and drug addicts here. We have a few burglars, serial killers and just plain psychopaths too. Cheers!

In different situations where there is a crazy shooter like this, has the right to bear a gun really helped someone? I would bet that as many times as a weapon has helped someone defend themselves, there have been at least equal, if not more, times were the weapon ended up being used against the victim, or even forcing the perpetrator to shoot the victim...think about how many security guards have been killed while trying to draw down on a perp. How about how many people have been shot by guys like Zimmerman as well? Cheers!

Seeing that the handguns were owned by the mother, I wonder how secure they were in the house? I imagine they should have been locked up, but I know gun philosophy is different between Canada and the US. I read that CT has some of the tighter gun laws in the US. So was the kid just really screwed up and had easy access to the guns that weren't locked up? In CT, you only have to secure your weapons if there are children 16 and under in the home. The mother was a gun collector. She had several other weapons as well...you notice I call them weapons. Cheers!

Mohnish and Guy wrote a Forbes column. Cheers! Forbes_-_Guy__Mohnish_-_December_2012.pdf

Very funny...and very accurate. I couldn't agree more. Cheers!

Parsad - a big fat MINUS for, once again, starting a thread which has NOTHING to do with value investing, BRK, or Fairfax! Sometimes there are more important things than investing...like today for those parents. If we have a debate about something other than investing once in a while, I don't think it lessens the board in any manner. Just ask Buffett about tax rates or Prem about his faith and family. Cheers!

Al, compare the per capita number of gun-related injuries or deaths in the United States to any other developed nation...including Canada. The number is shockingly disproportionate. If you had a small nuclear detonation in the United States maim or kill nearly 100,000 people, what would your reaction be? Probably the same as even those proponents of gun control...need to get nukes secure and make sure no one else ever gets their hands on a nuke. Yet, you have 100,000 people suffer from gun-related injuries or deaths in the United States every single year! Per capita data for deaths is below...even the nutjob, right-wing Australians have a rate one-ninth the United States. Canada, the most similar nation to the United States and pretty much a brother in arms has half the rate...and we have plenty of nutjobs here like you stated. Cheers! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

They had also just fought a war against the British, so they needed to maintain a militia to protect their interests. I don't think that has been a concern for the last 125 years, so the average citizen isn't going to need to go all "Red Dawn" on an invading China or North Korea...let alone try and overthrow their government by being armed. Of all the dictators who have been overthrown in the last 50 years, it didn't come from the citizens having weapons, but the fact that the generals in power under the dictator actually turned to support the general populace. As Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mandela, Walesa and so many others have shown...the human spirit eventually takes care of tyrants and injustices. Cheers!

Well there is Frances Burke and there is Francis Chou. It could be one, it could be both. ;D Cheers!

The problem is the gun control crowd can't wait to make this political. They have the legislation written and laying in wait for events like this. This is like Christmas come early to the gun-control lobbyist. Or like 9/11 to the military industrial complex. People who want to take away freedom always need tragedy, they wait for it, they feed off of it. Should everyone be allowed to build their own nuclear weapons as well? Let's not confuse freedom of speech, liberty and choice with gun laws. Cheers!

So let's not make it political. Make it near impossible for 20-year old retards to obtain any sort of gun, so fewer parents have to go through what these people are now going through. Not only those parents but that entire community will never be the same for at least a generation. I can't imagine anything worse than a parent finding out their child died a horrific death, and not having the opportunity to protect them, console them and say good-bye!

No, I don't want to make this political, but when the hell is the U.S. going to join the rest of the civilized world and implement gun control for it's citizens? 18 kids dead today...nuts! NRA will be in damage control for the next week and pulling up the second amendment. Cheers!

There are six main people who make up HWIC's investment committee, with Prem having final say out of that committee. They are allocated significant capital to put into their ideas, but over a certain threshold, it goes through the committee. The analysts provide many of the ideas and do a lot of the grunt work. They are given capital to allocate as well, but much smaller. Most of the usual suspects are on that committee (Prem, Brian, Roger, Sam, Paul, Chandran), but there is also one additional person that you would not normally expect. Cheers!

He's got permanent captive capital...he can do anything he wants with no worries. Cheers!

PS If you are against naked short selling: you should have lended out your shares in Fairfax or Overstock! Naked short selling is the act of selling a security short without borrowing it first! Actually what was happening was that the actual legitimate shares were being lent out repeatedly by brokers before the shares were ever delivered to any of the institutions. By lending out the shares, I would just add to the quantity of shares being bandied around...then multiplied by 5-10 times because they were never delivered on time to any of the institutions. "A" lends to the institution who lends to the client borrowing, but the shares are lent out again by the institution to "B", "C", "D", etc, before they even hit the clearing house. You then watch as these shares fail to deliver for up to several months, but because the legitimate shares are being swapped around. Eventually you have them cleared, but in the mean time the naked short sellers leverage their ability to manipulate the stock price. Cheers!

Most likely! And a nice public advertisement to any other large blocks of stock who now know they can lock in a 15% rate on a lifetime's worth of appreciation at 13x,000/share with a call to Omaha. I hope there are more in the next few weeks. this is a one off imo. in fact the media is going to roast buffett for doing this to help a friend avoid paying higher taxes. he doesn't want to buy back a lot of stock at these levels. this is a token amount. The optics don't look particularly good, but at the same time, if he can't find better investments than his own company, then you can't fault him. I just think the timing wasn't great. He could have bought the same 9,200 shares on the market for less...no reporting, nothing. The fact that there is tax savings for a long-time investor, after Buffett so adamantly stated that taxes for the super-rich should rise, is kind of hypocritical. Cheers! I almost never disagree with you Parsad. With this I do. It is highly unlikely Warren could have purchased 9000 a shares at a lower price. This is one months volume for the A shares. The optics are fine he is signalling to the mkt he thinks his company is cheap so cheap he is willing to retire shares. I think every one wins here. Even the Warren haters because they can now say he is a hipocite. LOL Sure he could have. Take a look at the NYSE chart for BRK-A in the last month. Thousands and thousands of shares traded below $132K: http://www.nyse.com/about/listed/lcddata.html?ticker=brka&fq=D&ezd=1M&index=3 Also, the economic interest is the same whether he buys A's or B's. He could have bought hundreds of thousands of B's in the open market for less than the equivalent of $89 each, retiring tons of shares in the process. I almost never disagree with Buffett...this time I think he was doing a shareholder a favor, as well as other remaining shareholders, and the optics and timing weren't appropriate relative to his comments about taxation. Cheers! Just because shares traded below that value doesn't mean that WB would have been able to buy them at that price. Before he could execute transactions on the public market he would have to communicate the change in the buy back policy, just as BRK did yesterday, and shares almost directly jumped to a higher level. That goes back to what I said earlier that the buyback policy was silly to begin with, because it set the floor and also set the fact they would have to publically declare any changes in the policy. I know Buffett doesn't want to take advantage of any shareholders, but he is doing exactly that when he's buying large investments in public companies at discount prices...why should Berkshire be any different. If shareholders sell, then Berkshire should be able to buy stock at the right price on the open market without having to worry. For God's sake, the man's done enough over the years to enlighten his shareholder base. There's not much more he can do. It would also prevent situations like this were the optics become fuzzy because of his political views as well. Cheers!

I agree with you. That's exactly his stance. That doesn't make it right. Again, this is my personal opinion viewing his actions on this matter, and TO ME (emphasis is me), it doesn't seem right to be taking a position on a rule, and then watching/assisting someone take advantage of that rule because it hasn't changed. If I was against backdating stock options, but the rules had not changed, should I take advantage of that and backdate options while I can? Or in terms of something that happened to me in the past...I was against naked short selling, so I would not lend out my shares to short-sellers in Fairfax or Overstock when they were being heavily shorted. I could have made a fat buck, but ethically it didn't seem right based on the position I took on the matter, so I chose not to. In those terms of ethics, his action did not seem correct to me here. Not unethical per se, but the optics were fuzzy. Cheers!

Most likely! And a nice public advertisement to any other large blocks of stock who now know they can lock in a 15% rate on a lifetime's worth of appreciation at 13x,000/share with a call to Omaha. I hope there are more in the next few weeks. this is a one off imo. in fact the media is going to roast buffett for doing this to help a friend avoid paying higher taxes. he doesn't want to buy back a lot of stock at these levels. this is a token amount. The optics don't look particularly good, but at the same time, if he can't find better investments than his own company, then you can't fault him. I just think the timing wasn't great. He could have bought the same 9,200 shares on the market for less...no reporting, nothing. The fact that there is tax savings for a long-time investor, after Buffett so adamantly stated that taxes for the super-rich should rise, is kind of hypocritical. Cheers! I almost never disagree with you Parsad. With this I do. It is highly unlikely Warren could have purchased 9000 a shares at a lower price. This is one months volume for the A shares. The optics are fine he is signalling to the mkt he thinks his company is cheap so cheap he is willing to retire shares. I think every one wins here. Even the Warren haters because they can now say he is a hipocite. LOL Sure he could have. Take a look at the NYSE chart for BRK-A in the last month. Thousands and thousands of shares traded below $132K: http://www.nyse.com/about/listed/lcddata.html?ticker=brka&fq=D&ezd=1M&index=3 Also, the economic interest is the same whether he buys A's or B's. He could have bought hundreds of thousands of B's in the open market for less than the equivalent of $89 each, retiring tons of shares in the process. I almost never disagree with Buffett...this time I think he was doing a shareholder a favor, as well as other remaining shareholders, and the optics and timing weren't appropriate relative to his comments about taxation. Cheers!