Jurgis

There were couple of articles on real HFT (collocated variety) in Communications of ACM recently. I only found one online: http://www.cs.rit.edu/~rlc/Courses/ProComm/Research/onlineTrading.pdf In case anyone is interested.

But this board is not about Graham-like businesses. ;) It's about Buffett-like businesses and this definitely qualifies. It has had ROE over 15% since 2008. Great results like netnet says. My partial excuse of not seeing this earlier is that it's Canadian. Before coming to this board, I missed the Northern Exposure. 8) Edit: Actually after some digging I found that I have looked at CSU in 2012. I did not have any context on it though and I did not spend more than 20 minutes on it from what I see. Doh. :(

Was/is available. I've had WWF credit card (World Wildlife Fund - what did you guys think? ;) ). Very tough to make this so it does exactly the right things for people. What works for you, won't work for me, etc. :)

We already had big argument about chalk and blackboard in another thread. I'd rather not resurrect that. ;)

Oddball: I completely agree with the points you made. :) My point to boilermaker75 was different from what you are talking about. It was about the fact that having content available beforehand makes it easier to take quality notes. If you have the slideset or prepared notes or 10K or whatever before you listen to the talk, you can just comment/note/scribble on a particular point that you have thoughts/questions/insights/opinions about. You don't need to try keep up with the speaker writing what they are talking about. :) Peace.

Hah, I think we gonna disagree again. :) IMO note taking during the lecture is a waste of time. Trying to follow and understand is much better than trying to cram the notes. If you have pre-printed notes, just adding your comments on them during the class is much better than trying to write the notes wholesale.

How is that better than automatic bill payment services that are available?

I've been invested in CSU for a while and it's my second biggest position, I just don't discuss all my investments. My #1 position has also never been mentioned here and it's 20% of my portfolio. Maybe someday I'll post about it. The problem with "discovering the next one early" is that when someone posts about it, people say it doesn't have the track record yet, and it's likely to look expensive anyway if it's growing very fast when small. Maybe the next one is already posted on the investment forum in a thread with no or few replies, buried on page 18... That's how it works. By the time there's the track record to convince people, many will say that it's too late. First of all congrats that you have discovered CSU early. You can still post how/why you discovered it. Might be useful. Regarding the second part of your message: yes, I think you might be right. There might be a company posted in 18 pages that will do as well as CSU and people will wonder how they missed it. There are definitely some candidates. :) And you are right that it's tough to have conviction to put a large part of your portfolio in such smaller "unproven" ideas. Not to put CSU enthusiasts on the spot, but there is also a success-bias: people like the company/stock/management partially because the return has been so phenomenal. I believe them when they say they like the CEO and his letters, but I wonder if they were so enthusiastic if the stock was languishing... ;) (As aside, I wonder if Biglari or Moynihan would be evaluated much better if their stocks were going up a lot ;) - though of course the stocks going up is somewhat tied to their performance ). Thanks

I first bought this in April 2013 at $135 CAD. Sadly, I did not make it a big position at that time even though I felt it was the best company in Canada. I didn't know how to do a proper valuation on M&A driven firms. I found it by looking at Mawer New Canada's holdings. Mawer has excellent portfolio managers but they don't provide a lot of commentary on their holdings. Later, I found that a portfolio manager named Jason Donville was mentioned in nearly every article about CSU. Donville is very generous about sharing his thoughts in his quarterly letters and on BNN. His writings provided me with a good way to think about M&A driven firms: http://www.donvillekent.com/roe-reporter.php AFAIK, he first mentioned CSU in 2009. Thanks KCLarkin, I'll take a look at Mawer New Canada and Jason Donville. :)

I would like to have an app to remotely detonate somebody's cell phone and blow their head of. 8) On the second thought... ;D

jobyts, There are two radically different opinions about bond market: 1. Rates are going to go up. Then bonds are in the bubble: if yields rise, prices have to drop. They will all crash. High yield may crash less than mainstream, but if there's a rout it's likely gonna affect all bonds. If you believe in this, you keep money in Money Markets or super short term funds or floating rate securities - the last one is still somewhat risky. 2. There's going to be deflation with rates going towards zero or negative. This is totally opposite to case 1. If this is the case, the long term bonds will do best like thepupil said. Unfortunately, you have to pick which camp you are in. Or you can hold something like 50/50 to be in the middle for muddle through... It's not a simple choice I am afraid. :)

...and expect you to complete the task on your smart device right away. Before, you could've said "let me get to my screen and I'll send you something". In time management, key is to separate urgent and important tasks. The crackberry is singularly responsible for the tyranny of the urgent. You guys have bad bosses. Change them. 8) If I don't answer boss' email, he knows it's because I am busy on something important (like posting on CoBF :P ). I'm in tech industry and I don't look at email on mobile devices at all. Some of my colleagues are out of reach outside 9 to 5. Of course some are online outside job hours.

+1. Not a shareholder of CSU (unfortunately), but Leonard is incredible. Just skimmed through a few years of annual letters. Wow, WOW, WOW This guy is the real deal. Shockingly good. I have some experience in software and am not easily impressed. He is impressive. (I'm sorry that I did not know about him 10 years ago and that he is looking to reduce his involvement in the company. I had exactly the same opinion. This is how to run a company. OK, so I'm gonna invert and prod people a bit: how come almost nobody from CoBF knew this company and/or invested a significant amount of money into it? If this is the best thing since the second coming of Buffett :D , how come this was mentioned only when it got to 10B market cap? If we missed this one, what other great small companies are we missing right now? What should we do to discover next CSU.to on time and not 10 years (or 2 years - that cost 4x return) too late? Thoughts?

Technology does not... just a moment, I'm gonna answer that IM ... where was I? 8) Seriously, multitasking has been shown to be bad for performance. So, don't do it. (I multitask all the time... don't look at me). Sherry Turkle is known for anti-technology rants. I would take what she says with a huge spoon of salt.

If you expect bond crash, then put money into money market, 401(k) should have it. If you're deflationist, then it's harder: you want long term I guess, but you would have to look at average maturity.

Of course this is ideological argument. You are arguing that government is wrong based on one sided articles. Edit: to clarify: there can be a legal argument that government is wrong - this requires legal expertise. Legal arguments will be resolved in the court eventually (or settled and we'll never know the legal outcome). I have no expertise in legal arguments and I don't take sides in legal argument. IMHO people who don't have legal expertise and who say that government is wrong (based on writeups/articles) are making ideological argument. I have my opinion about ideological argument, but I would rather not discuss it, since it serves very little purpose. People can feel morally right about their position, but that's pretty much it. :) I think that it might be hazardous to invest based on ideological position, but I'm not gonna try to change anyone's mind. That's completely misrepresenting my position. Good luck.

Yes, there are very few turnarounds in tech. One can only hope that this will be one of the few. But that's not a good investment thesis by itself. If I judged Watsa based on BBRY, I'd not invest in Fairfax. :) IMHO, it was not a wise investment. I'll be happy if it works out though, I prefer that over the alternative. :)

I am sorry merkhet, but I disagree. This is a common misconception introduced by "Buffettology" (can I even mention this book on CoBF? ;) :-[ ). The compounding only tends towards ROE if company can reinvest its returns into something producing the same ROE. If you look at KO, the ROE was always in high 20's-30's ( http://www.gurufocus.com/financials.php?symbol=ko ), but the return was only in 13-14% range (if we trust the print). Now, it might be a good study to find out where does the rest of ROE disappear... :) Common suspects are mediocre/bad investments and share repurchases at high premium, but there might be more.

Color me skeptical about: I don't know India. But I know corrupt societies. And corruption does not disappear in a year even with best people working for change. Maybe Watsa is just promoting a positive message. I hope I am wrong and he's right. That would be great. :)

Couple random thoughts after looking briefly at the print: - How would one hold a stock for 50 years when it's tough to hold stock for 1 year ;) - Smallish outperformance vs S&P500 in last 10 (and 20) years - The annualized returns of Buffett's big stock positions: KO, WPO, AXP - are pretty much in 13-14% annualized range. Considering these are great companies purchased by Buffett cheap, it seems to indicate that it's very hard to expect >15% returns from any company long term. WFC returned 17% and Geico returned more before it was bought out, so it's possible, but hard. (Caveat: the returns are from first batch purchase date; Buffett may have added more at cheaper prices.)

Do you guys think Lending Club and similar lenders will survive the next downturn? It seems there are at least two risks: - the lenders will implode because they currently don't price the loans for downturn - the regulators will step in once unsophisticated lenders get hurt.

Thanks. Now I feel stupid for not checking on Amazon.

I want to frame the 50-year BRK Wall Print ( http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/berkshire-hathaway/50-years-of-brk-wall-print-%28new-letters-book%29/ ). Any ideas how to do this without paying $300 or so for custom frame? This is in USA, MA if it matters. I think I'd rather buy 2 shares of BRK than $300 custom frame. ;D Or maybe I'm just framing the discussion incorrectly. :P

No.

+1