Parsad

Went to the mall and while there saw a Rocky Mountain Chocolate location. Bought 6 pieces that I planned to devour over the next 24-48 hours. The lady working the counter put them in the bag and rang them up. I figured maybe $15-18 plus tax...which is what it would have been over the last 5 years. $31!!!! 6 small pieces...$31!! If it was Teuscher Chocolate or some place in Zurich, yeah sure. I know the price of Callebaut chocolate prices are up, as is sugar and other commodities, but really? $31...roughly 50% price hike from the last 5 years? They were already in the bag, so I paid for them and begrudgingly ate a couple! They weren't even that good! Cheers!

I've never seen these things. I watched the video and the results were about what I expected too! Cheers!

Highly unlikely we see $200 per barrel. The only oil and gas stock I bought in the last 18 months was XOM around $54 and sold out at $96. Gas prices in Vancouver hit a peak of $2.42 a liter a couple of weeks ago...today down to $2.069 a liter based on recession fears. The recession, or perceived recession, may cool demand enough to keep oil at these levels for a while. Cheers!

Beating the Street by Peter Lynch was the first investing book I read...around late 1994. I went on to lose all of the money I put in the markets between 1995 and 1997! Then in 1998, I read the Annual Letter on Berkshire's site that had just gone live. I went on to meet Buffett, start the original COBF, meet Prem and Francis, start my own fund, take over PDH and become financially independent. Thus I'm extremely partial to one. Neither Beating the Street, nor One Up on Wall Street, sit on my bookshelf! Cheers!

Isn't that the truth! I remember in February 2009, I was fully invested wishing I had more cash, selling 7-8 PE stocks to buy 3-4 PE stocks...winding up the spring for the rebound. Low and behold, the rebound came! It always does at some point. This time I've been more disciplined, so I've still got a modest amount of cash left, when I normally would be completely out. From my intrinsic value calculations, the stuff I own is discounted anywhere from 40% to 200%...so I'm looking forward to the rebound when it eventually does come again. And if it takes longer to show up and prices keep falling, well we'll wind the spring once more! Cheers!

Again, I wouldn't touch the currencies, but certainly would look at the infrastructure companies in blockchain and crypto. Look at Overstock.com, which I own a lot of now and will keep buying if it goes down further. $1.1B market cap, profitable retail business, $450M in cash on the books, $2.5B in revenues, virtually no debt...essentially you are buying the company for $600M...a quarter of revenues...and that doesn't even include their huge blockchain investment in Medici Ventures LP...which could be worth $1B or $20B! If that Medici option ever kicks in, it could be the cheapest stock on the market right now. In the mean time, just the retail business itself is worth 2-3x what it trades for right now. https://pelionvp.com/ Cheers!

Spek, we were at $3T: https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/ $3T that easily could go to zero. In comparison, total subprime exposure during the GFC was only $1.4T. Yes, MBS and the leverage involved exacerbated the situation back then, but if things had gotten further along where crypto became mainstream and adopted by more nation states, it could have been as ugly. Cheers!

I have a feeling it is going to be a sideways market for a few years with upside and downside volatility...so buy them low, sell them high...and keep averaging in new cash. Cheers!

Well let me clarify that...I haven't gambled in 20+ years! Cheers!

What are pull tabs? I don't gamble, so I have no clue. Cheers!

If government regulations had allowed it and financial institutions then allowed investors to margin their brokerage accounts and buy crypto directly, it would have been as bad as GFC. Fortunately that didn't happen! There still could be some impact on margin accounts since some brokerages like Schwab allowed investment in crypto trusts and futures. If there's money to be made, people will do the stupidest things to try and get some! Cheers!

The strategy this lady uses would never have occurred to my tiny brain! She looks at State lottery tickets that have been on sale for a long time, but most of the large cash prizes have not been won. Still extremely hard to win, but I would say it probably improves her chances immensely than the conventional lottery player. Cheers! https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/02/us/maryland-lottery-winner-strategy-trnd/index.html

Great chart! I'm stealing that! Cheers!

Cathy Woods...This era's Abbie Joseph Cohen! How does Woods still get inflows of capital into ARKK? Cheers!

You are comparing apples to oranges. Lynch ran a fund. Now if you compare apples to apples: The original Buffett Partnership over 12 years compounded at 31.6% annualized with no down year...the S&P500 did only 9.1% annualized during the same period. Buffett handily beat the S&P500 in each of those 12 years. http://warrenbuffettoninvestment.com/buffett-partnership-performance/ Not to discount Lynch's performance, as it was nearly as extraordinary. But he compounded at a lower rate and was outperformed by the S&P500 in 2 of the 13 years he ran the Magellan Fund. Lynch was also extremely stressed out when he left the fund...Buffett is as fresh as a baby 60 years later! Cheers!

Crypto is worse than the internet bubble in 2000. I went to my pharmacy on Tuesday to get a prescription filled...the pharmacist asked me what I do, and then started asking about the stock market. I told her as long as she wasn't into cryptocurrencies it was a good time to buy stocks, and if she had stocks, don't sell...ride through the storm. She then started listing her holdings from her phone, as she didn't know them all and her brother had put her into these "stocks". As soon as I heard them, I said those are all cryptocurrencies or related stocks. "If I was an advisor, your volatility rating would be on the extremely aggressive side...where you could lose all of your money." She was down 60% so far, and I told her don't put any more money into this stuff. She said her brother told her to hold on and in few years it will be worth 10-100 times what it is today. She was confident that she would make a fantastic return on it. I knew I was talking to someone who had no idea what their brother got them into. So unfortunately, my prescription wasn't ready and I said I would come back Saturday. I went in right now and picked up my prescription. The two other people working there started talking to me. They were also invested in crypto and most of their friends. Most of them had put in anywhere from $10K to a couple hundred thousand, and we're talking about people here who are struggling to buy their first home in Vancouver, young single or couples, most with kids. This is far more prevalent than what I remember during the internet bubble...in terms of how many small investors had bought into internet or internet-related stocks. This is comparable to the stupidity of ARM loans during the housing crisis. That type of nuclear bomb! Fortunately, the financial system isn't really correlated to crypto and has little if any exposure. I can't believe how many people I heard from who wanted to know about crypto in the last 18 months to how many people are now asking about should they hold on to their crypto in the last 2 months! I can't see how most of these people don't lose most/all of their money. Crazy! Cheers!

Yeah, but so does any position of power. I know a lot of broke ass politicians who have too much influence on society one way or the other...including some dumbass Supreme Court Judges. The only part I agree with is money or power amplifies impact...good or bad...Buffett or Jeffrey Epstein! Cheers!

Any moron could get ten coin flips correct? Show me people who have gotten the coin flip correct 35 times, let alone nearly 70 times! Geez, I've gotten it right 15 out of 20 years in my personal portfolio, and I should be considered mentally handicapped compared to Buffett. Even show me the people who got ten years of better results than Buffett without using leverage...with no down years...and at least 30% compounded annually. I've looked at this deeply over the years, and the only one that comes anywhere near Buffett is James Simons of Renaissance Technologies and his Medallion Fund...but he used huge amounts of leverage. Here's a good article where the author talks about the greats and then lays out Buffett's case: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2019/08/who-has-the-most-impressive-investment-track-record/ The consistency, the transparency, the results and the sheer amount of capital...no one even close. No quants, no one other than him, not even a calculator! And the use of float rather than other forms of leverage...sheer genius! Cheers!

How the country would have been impacted? Let's try the world: Probably tens of thousands of people who are now financially independent because of him, his examples and teachings...me being one of them! There may not have been a Google as we know it. They modelled the culture of their business on Berkshire. They were heavily influenced by Buffett & Berkshire. There probably would not be a Gates Foundation...$60B donated and $38B in assets with probably 3 times those numbers to come. There probably would not be a Giving Pledge...$600B in committed assets to be given away...so far! Probably no Geico...no one might have heard of Jack Byrne. Probably Salomon brothers would have failed. Without Buffett...no one might know Charlie Munger or Li Lu. Arguably restored credibility to AXP during the salad oil scandal. Saved the Washington Post. Saved GenRe by acquiring it and ending the thousands of derivatives contracts it had...would have been exactly like AIG if he didn't acquire it...the U.S. would not have looked the way it does if it had experienced the implosions of Bear Stearns and Lehman, plus AIG and a possible GenRe. Was lender of last resort to GE, GS, USG and HOG during GFC...all four probably would have gone under. Without Buffett...Bank of America may have failed and caused a run on U.S. banks. Without Buffett...no Lou Simpson, no Ted and Todd, no Wally Weitz, no Markels, no White Mountain, no Mohnish Pabrai, probably not the same Ajit Jain, no Michael Burry, no Prem Watsa, no Francis Chou...you see where I'm going with this...no Sanjeev Parsad, no COBF! There's probably a shitload I'm missing, but hey with no me and COBF, isn't that enough! Cheers!

Not sure that's fair. Vanderbilt didn't create anything original...he owned steamships, railroads, ocean liners, etc. Same with Rockefeller who owned oil fields and companies. Great is great! Cheers!

How about from the horse's mouth: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2014/10/02/we-dont-look-at-macro-factors-buffett.html It's not that they ignore macro outright...but it doesn't play a role in their decision making when they are investing. They pay attention to it to see how their businesses might behave or react with macro changes, but not when it comes to investing. Even Buffett's silver bet was made based on supply/demand and the ratio between gold and silver...it was not a macro bet on inflation or where gold was headed. Cheers!

No, there really isn't! He's the best. No one has gone through so many secular bull/bear markets, catastrophes, wars, financial crises (Nifty Fifties, OPEC Oil Embargo, 80's inflation, Black Monday, tech bubble, GFC, Covid, etc) with such a record...20% plus compounded over nearly 70 years...with so few down years. Then to take his hedge fund and turn it into Berkshire Hathaway, acquire a multitude of businesses, teach millions of people, distribute 99% of his wealth to non-profits and still live such a humble life. Nope, no one even close...no one can ever be like him...he's singularly the best and would/should stand next to U.S. giants like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, etc. You might put Gates and Sam Walton in there too at the end of the day...and possibly Elon Musk and Bezos in that category as well, but we'll have to see what else Musk and Bezos do. Cheers!

Regarding Buffett's so-called "freeze" during the pandemic, I don't think he was paralyzed. I think he wanted to keep a significant amount of cash on hand in case the pandemic lasted 5 years instead of 2. What if there was an earthquake in LA and a F5 hurricane in the Gulf Coast. On a $300B loss, Berkshire would probably eat about $30-50B of that. If half his cash is gone and the pandemic lasts 5 years...Berkshire might not be the last one standing as we've always expected! While he has bought into Munger and Phil Fisher's pay more for quality objective, deep down Buffett is still a Ben Graham, margin of safety, investor. That's why he never paid up for Walmart, Amazon or Costco, yet he knew those businesses inside out. And why he worries about the absolute worst case scenario before committing capital. Cheers!

I agree! I don't think Buffett or Munger give two s**ts about macro. They may make certain investments based on the direction that industry is moving (clean energy, oil & gas, electric batteries/cars, etc), but they don't care about macro. Cheers!

To my Canadian boardmember brethren...Happy Canada Day! To our U.S. counterparts...Happy 4th of July on Monday! Cheers!