Parsad

Underwriting process in Canada is stronger than U.S...thus why we avoided the GFC scenario. You have to put 5% minimum down and then pay for mortgage insurance, other wise minimum 20% down. Only 35% of your gross income can be used for mortgage payments...including utilities and property taxes. This is all from interest rates and people taking out the maximum mortgage they could afford when rates were low. Cheers!

That was pretty funny! Cheers!

Well, contrary to what the banks are saying and many others, I'm expecting things to get tough next year in Canada for two reasons: Read a story today about many people taking large, short-term mortgages out while supply is low because they are expecting rates to fall next year...so in other words, they are paying inflated prices and taking on massive mortgages, and expecting their payments to go down next year. My brother who works for TD told me that today, they sent out 125,000 trigger letters to mortgagees. Meaning, their variable rate mortgages are now only covering interest or less. Their options, pay a lump sum to bring the mortgage payments in line with where they were, extend their amortization, or pay off their mortgage (meaning sell or borrow from friends/family). That's for all of Canada, but just for this week alone! I would imagine RBC, CIBC and BMO are in similar straits...so you can imagine close to 500K mortgages may be covering only interest payments! If rates rise further over the next few months, that is going to trigger another avalanche of trigger letters. Cheers!

Another interesting stat on borrower rejection rate being higher than application rate! Cheers! https://finance.yahoo.com/news/more-americans-getting-turned-down-175230617.html

Equally interesting story on what is happening to CRE prices and holdings. Cheers! https://finance.yahoo.com/news/definitely-think-office-sector-crashing-154940388.html

Very interesting Barron's article feeding into what Greg has been espousing that consumers and corporations are in better shape than markets/media are letting on. https://www.barrons.com/articles/americans-have-quietly-deleveraged-it-may-explain-the-economys-resilience-1896f8e0?siteid=yhoof2 Let's see what happens in the next 12-24 months...market perception seems as divided as politics these days. Cheers!

+1! Cheers!

+1! Cheers!

This Magnificent Seven won't die, but probably will get beaten up! Cheers!

Didn't say it was as expensive as 2000. Just that tech stocks were greatly overvalued and you've had 10+ consecutive increases in interest rates. I can easily see a 30-40% correction. Cheers!

What do they say...history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme! This whole setup is starting to look familiar to 2000. Now let's see what happens. Cheers!

Inflation was not a problem in 2000 when the dot-com bust happened. You also had a correction in the broad market, but many value stocks actually did well like BRK, KO, etc that had become undervalued relative to the broad market. What actually would be more comparable to the last 12 months is 1999 to early 2000 when rates rose relatively dramatically and tech stocks grew into a massive bubble. Sound familiar? Cheers!

What Europeans Think Americans From Every State Look Like...created by AI! Some are pretty damn funny, some are spot on! Cheers! https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/asked-ai-europeans-think-americans-201700212.html

About friggin' time! Not sure why this was never implemented in the beginning. Cheers! https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/10/business/bank-regulation-fed-barr/index.html

+1! Cheers!

Even 50 Cent is worried about LA after no-bail policy comes into effect! Cheers! https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/50-cent-says-los-angeles-193321781.html

In actuality, very few managers (probably around 5% or less) hold any significant amount of cash (more than 10%). So I'm not sure how many geniuses are out there with their ramblings. Most of the geniuses are the Cathy Woods type with negligible cash and buying up every momentum stock they can find. Cheers!

+1! Also, I would add that Buffett always had cash coming in from operating businesses. For many, they are at the stage where income flowing into the portfolio is low or negligible now...compared to when they were younger and adding lots and lots of cash each year. And one other response to the Buffett rarely held cash notion is that he's frickin' Warren Buffett. His circle of competence is probably wider than anyone else who has ever managed a portfolio, including Peter Lynch who was sifting through thousands of stocks during his Magellan days. The active average investor's universe may be 100-200 stocks. Cheers!

This is my short-hand version of Buffett's equity bond yield calculation. I don't run the spreadsheet 10 years out including growth in earnings. I just take current earnings yield and add the dividend yield...it's a loose interpretation of what the annual growth in earnings would be by doing that. It works pretty well...try it over various periods. When the equity yield is at least 2% higher than the risk-free return, usually stocks will do better. When the risk free rate is on par or higher...stay away from the broad index. If the equity yield is double the risk free rate...load up on stocks! Cheers!

Yup, sitting on close to 55% cash in short-term T-bills earning 4-4.25%. Markets aren't stupid expensive, but certainly aren't cheap either. Am finding very small pockets of cheap stocks, but the broad market seems more than fairly valued...especially considering we haven't reached the peak of the increases in the risk-free rate and we've seen it rise from like 1.5% to 5% in less than 12 months. I have a universe of 300-350 stocks that I know very well. At this point in my life, I just wait for mispricing in a few of them every year, and then buy one or two in significant amounts. Not much is popping up right now...certainly not worth the risk relative to the risk free rate available. At 22-23 times earnings...you are getting a 3.25% yield from the S&P500 plus like 1.5% in dividends...so around 4.75%. The 2-year treasury risk free rate is slightly above that and should be closer to 5.5% in the next few months. Cheers!

Dino has no idea what he's talking about. Knows little actually about underwriting or what type of policies FFH is underwriting. 17 years of 100% or better CR isn't an indication if they are pricing premiums appropriately?! If FFH doesn't write good business, how did they know that other insurers were writing shit business on several occasions in the last 35 years? You don't write crappy business while calling out your competitors underwriting. They've also run surpluses on claims for a couple of decades...that isn't an indicator of appropriate pricing or risk management? Go back and read the annual reports...which I bet Dino has not done! Cheers!

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinese-developer-1-8-billion-024446847.html 20% below appraisal value! Appraisal value is worth less than the paper it's written on in China! Cheers!

Yup, and they've delayed the amount of the headsets due to production issues...now only planning 400,000 units through 2023. All of the big tech stocks are expensive...GOOGL might be the cheapest actually now. At 5% risk free rate...30 times earnings or more for these stocks...hmmm! Cheers!

Just reading about crazy mortgage loans being granted got me scared...then I started to get all this information from Fairfax on what they were doing with CDS...and just from my own analysis, banks were at 18-1, 20-1 asset to equity leverage and you knew there was at least some more shit on their books. No idea some exposure at brokers, mortgage companies were closer to 80-100 to 1 until the dominoes slowly started falling in very early 2008...and then I started reading stuff about Fannie and Freddie, as well as mortgage insurers like PMI, etc. There was no way you could have missed it...as plain as it was in 1999, but this time much scarier since these were huge institutions with massive leverage. If you weren't starting to get worried in 2007, you should have been by early-2008. For those that remember and went through it, we were as close as we've ever been to the Great Depression. Without government intervention, it really would have been right up there...maybe even worse on a global basis! Pandemic was financially painful and unusual for business operators, but nothing like the GFC. Cheap valuations during the Pandemic were a gift...during GFC...you were really betting on government intervention and thankfully it came! Cheers!

Yes. I don't use it for anything, but I thought if a great opportunity came my way...and the HELOC is only about 15% of my entire portfolio. So it was minimal leverage, but still the first time I used leverage...probably the last time as well! Just don't need it. Cheers!