Jurgis

Sell the appt, buy a house next to Buffett in Omaha. Problem solved. 8) Although you might have complaints about McDs food wrappers being tossed on the sidewalk. And crowds of starry eyed fans once a year. ::)

For US based investors, there are two questions: 1. Is foreign dividend qualified? 2. Is foreign tax withheld? Based on the answers to these questions, the best you can do: 1. No 2. No. - hold in tax deferred account. Holding in regular account will result in US marginal tax rate. 1. Yes 2. No. - hold in tax deferred account. Holding in regular account will result in US qualified dividend tax rate. 1. No 2. Yes. - hold in taxable account if withholding rate is > marginal tax rate (unlikely?); you pay (lose) marginal tax rate. Otherwise hold in tax deferred account; you pay (lose) withholding rate. 1. Yes 2. Yes. - hold in taxable account if withholding rate is > qualified dividend tax rate (likely); you pay qualified dividend tax rate. Otherwise hold in tax deferred account; you pay (lose) withholding rate. However, since OP is not based in US, this does not help them. It will depend on the laws of their country, which can have all kind of special situations/treatments. In general, you just account for the tax you have to pay and invest accordingly. Also like Writser says unless you are relying on income from divvies, the tax slippage might not be large to be concerned about. Yeah, I have held securities with 1. Yes 2. Yes in tax deferred accounts and lost >20% withholding tax to foreign withholding. However, let's say you have a stock that you might sell at 50% realized gain that also pays 6% divvie. So even at long term realized gain tax rate, you will lose more by holding this in taxable account and paying tax on realized gain than what you lose by foreign country withholding 20% of the divvie. So... 8) Yeah, I know, things get complicated if you hold long, you lose divvie withholding every year, but would not sell the stock for 20 years, etc. Honestly, though the bigger loss might be from holding losing stock in tax deferred account and not being able to take tax loss on its sale... but then you should not buy stocks that go down... 8)

IMO Writser is currently the best investor on CoBF. 8) - He is consistently outperforming. - He has a clear repeatable process. - He posts his ideas with clear exposition of pros/cons. - He is mostly open about his picks/buys/sells even though some of them are low liquidity. - It is possible to follow his process without missing significant parts of his portfolio. - It is clear why his process and his picks can/should outperform. - His picks are not market correlated and not momo or hedge-fund or value-investing hotels. - His portfolio is diversified and not concentrated into few picks that can blow up. If I was forced to read posts of one person only, I'd pick Writser. Even though I don't invest like him and I don't buy >90% of his picks. ::)

Oh boy. People think the Politics section is bad... No kidding. Somehow I don't think "buy low, sell high" is the optimal mental model for family members... I did not realize you could sell family members. Where do I sign up? How do you determine cost basis? How do you add the ongoing expenses to the cost basis to lower realized gains? Is the person sold treated as a capital asset or as a collectible? So many questions...

Announced here: http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-teaching-manifesto-invitation-to-my.html Classes are online and free. You can also get NYU certificate by paying and doing the coursework/exams. The classes look interesting. I'm not sure if I'll have time to follow any of them. If there are people taking/following these classes, we could create threads per class for discussion.

If only they were. I cannot sell or buy ASFI anymore even though I just hold 100 shares worth $1000 .. Admittedly I had a larger position in the past but even then I wasn’t close to owning 1% which would be 65k shares - a position worth a few hundred k and three weeks of trading volume .. A bunch of CoBF people have previously tried to persuade me that IB is the best thing since the sliced bread. Now I'm gonna gloat and say "I told you so". 8) No, I'm gonna say: "Sorry you guys are having these issues". :'(

Rich investor problems, pffft. :P

https://smile.amazon.com/Good-Economics-Times-Abhijit-Banerjee-ebook/dp/B07PCQLKSS/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1RKDMPAS35SJS&keywords=good+economics+for+hard+times&qid=1578265963&smid=A1GIOTVGZB41OC&sprefix=good+eco%2Caps%2C181&sr=8-1 A book by 2019 Economics Nobel Prize winners. I read through the intro chapters and bought it. Kindle version on sale for $4.99 today.

Kindle version on sale for $3.99 today.

Kindle version on sale $5.99 today.

I think risk adjusted return is much more important for comparison than absolute return over one year. I could have levered up and gone 120% long SPY and sold puts on the SPY and generated "alpha" but I took on considerable risk. Maybe somebody generated 20% but had 30% in cash or hedged. You are right on the general level. But IMO apart from very clear situations of straight levering or holding cash it's pretty impossible to say how much risk someone is taking and how to adjust the return for that risk. Edit: Actually, I'd say that even in clear situation of holding cash, "risk adjusted return" is somewhat misleading. Ultimately, investor cannot eat "risk adjusted return". Whatever return they lost due to holding cash is lost. Yeah, they might have reasons to hold cash to improve future returns or to sleep well at night, but I think they have to careful not to think that high "risk adjusted return" is somehow real return.

For anyone with multiple accounts and a lot of adding/subtracting you pretty much have to use Quicken. But that's heavyweight and not worth it unless you use it to track all your finances. On the positive side though, you can have results for 10+ years and then do a lot of analyses (per account, per securities, etc.). I have ~25 years of financial info in Quicken. For people who don't do much adding/subtracting, you can do it by hand in Excel or Google Sheets or whatever spreadsheet you use. You can also do stuff in various programming languages/packages for programming inclined who might be slurping data in from some source.

Who the heck discards a book worth >$1K? (I know it's not discarding, it's exchange, but still... ??? )

I wonder if this is going to close down without delivering much (or anything).

With Buffett's and Munger's views on healthcare in US, I would be surprised if they would buy anything healthcare related.

I think BRK should buy Canada. 8) There's definitely a match in terms of culture. ;)

Hilti used to be a public company and traded on the Swiss exchange. Trumpf is a Family owned business with a very long term focus. They developed their own photonics Technology for their lasers (the modules are build in NJ/US) in order to control the whole value chain. I don’t think they are likely to sell out. Well, BRK could buy IPGP. ;) Yes, that would be a great company for Buffet to look at. I am guessing there are folks within Berkshire’s operations that understand IPGP’s market position and moat. I have no idea if IPGP’s board would entertain a sale - the company is still founder driven to some extent. They won't sell at current valuation I'd think, while Buffett won't pay a large premium. And maybe the company is a bit too tech for Buffett.

I like his approach. I looked at his fund's portfolio after his talk at Fairfax event. And AMT looked expensive. And now it looks very expensive too. So I look at this and I think, would I really want 11+% of my portfolio be in AMT? Not really. (Although similar argument could have been made couple years ago and here we are with AMT and Akre performing well.) I guess that's the issue of buying even well performing funds.

Hilti used to be a public company and traded on the Swiss exchange. Trumpf is a Family owned business with a very long term focus. They developed their own photonics Technology for their lasers (the modules are build in NJ/US) in order to control the whole value chain. I don’t think they are likely to sell out. Well, BRK could buy IPGP. ;)

It looks like Akre did a clean transition from FBR to Akre: He left FBR fund in September 2009 ( https://www.marketwatch.com/story/top-manager-quits-mutual-fund-2009-08-05 ) and Akre fund was started in August 2009, so you can't blame him of hiding out without fund during crisis. FBR 2008 results are bad, but not horrible: https://archive.fortune.com/2009/05/13/pf/funds/fbr_focus_fund_akre.fortune/index.htm Interestingly, he owned AMT and ORLY for years before Akre Fund. So he has held AMT for ~17 years and ORLY for ~12 years now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_T._Akre answers some questions about pre-2009 history and performance. Not all questions though.

Akre Focus Fund ( https://www.akrefund.com/ ) has good returns. They also have good business selection and holding criteria. However, their inception date is 8/31/2009, so there is a question how they will perform through next serious crash/downturn. They answer this in the article 8) : Not that these criteria are easy to handle properly, as the discussion above regarding DIS shows. You could also put on an objective-backward-looking hat and wonder how this philosophy would have handled Microsoft (would Ballmer time be "adverse change in management"? would losing mobile phone market be "competitive advantage impaired"? was "Peak PC" indication of "no longer growing at an above-average rate"? Selling at the time when Microsoft was losing mobile, at Peak PC, before Ballmer left was the worst time to sell... Akre apparently managed to side-step Valeant disaster that killed Sequoia performance. They are quite concentrated in cell tower stocks. I wonder if that area could have some event that kills stocks across the bow before Akre gets out. Overall though, they have performed better than a lot of known investors. One could have done well buying the fund after Chuck's talk at Fairfax Lollapalooza couple years ago.

Was speaking to an executive at a major airline. He's convinced that the hold up is purely regulatory cover-your-a.. politics. The issue was fixed almost immediately, but nobody wants to sign-off. Boeing is a huge employer, politics will eventually shift. I love how human lives are treated as regulatory cover-your-a.. politics. Yeah, let's fly and kill some more people cause executives are missing their bonuses and investors are missing their stock pop. Cause clearly Boeing can do no wrong. Maybe that executive can sign a pledge to fly only 737 Max for all their trips for a year. 8)

You can start a 3/5/10 year return poll. ;) My previous simplified polls: https://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/performance-vs-index-5-years/msg260236/#msg260236 https://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/performance-vs-index/

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies Kindle Edition by Reid Hoffman (Author), Chris Yeh (Author), I haven't read the full book yet, though I bought it. The excerpt I read talks about some of the usual suspects: AirBnB, Rocket Internet, Kinnevik, etc., so the whole thing might be worth reading. On sale on Amazon for $2.99 today: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0791239V7/?coliid=I1T9ZLPJBAPAO5&colid=22BZEZ4H8JQEA&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it