Jurgis

ajc has makings of good John Oliver replacement.

So a person who had great long-term orientation, good business experience, picked and held at least 3 great companies and great stocks that everyone would have loved to pick from their IPOs, still possibly (likely) underperformed SP500. I'm sure there's a lesson in this. But probably not for CoBF crowd. 8)

It's surprising that crappy brands have value. 8) TAP has a bunch of brands that I have not tried, so above is just generic rejoinder. 8)

It's not genetic component. It's good drugs. Where's ScottHall when we need him.

Thanks. My edit was correct then. 8)

I don't see how you link explains the change in brokers not allowing to trade Fairfax India anymore. It doesn't. It does however explain why Fairfax is not the right organization to contact regarding this matter. The ADR's are unsponsored. Yes, and? Not all unsponsored ADRs are prohibited from trading by brokers. I'm pretty sure the line drawn is based on what the company issuing shares does (in this case Fairfax India) rather than what the unsponsored ADR issuer does. BTW, from the posts in thread it appears that brokers prohibit buying Canadian listed shares of Fairfax India too. These are not ADRs. And again the responsibility for lifting the prohibition lies with the issuer: Fairfax India. Edit: actually I reread the thread and it's not clear whether buying FIH.U (rather than FFXDF) is blocked or not. So I'm scratching my last paragraph.

I don't see how you link explains the change in brokers not allowing to trade Fairfax India anymore.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. 9/10 might as well mention In Bruges 9/10.

A professor at the University was giving a lecture on Paranormal Studies. To get a feel for his audience, he asks, 'How many people here believe in ghosts?' About 90 students raise their hands. Well, that's a good start. Out of those who believe in ghosts, do any of you think you have seen a ghost?' About 40 students raise their hands. That's really good. I'm really glad you take this seriously. Has anyone here ever talked to a ghost?' About 15 students raise their hand. Has anyone here ever touched a ghost?' Three students raise their hands. That's fantastic. Now let me ask you one question further...Have any of you ever made love to a ghost?' Way in the back, a student raises his hand. The professor takes off his glasses and says 'Son, all the years I've been giving this lecture, no one has ever claimed to have made love to a ghost. You've got to come up here and tell us about your experience.' The student shuffles up to the podium. When he reached the front of the room, the professor asks, 'So, dear, tell us what it's like to have sex with a ghost?' The student replied, "Oh no, from back there I thought you said "Goats."

+1 8)

I really don't want to get into a long discussion of "is it misunderstood or not", but let me cover couple BG2008 and Schwab711 examples briefly. Just to emphasize, I don't know if I'm right and I won't defend my position much. You can make up your own mind. 8) Airlines - I don't care what Buffett did before/now/after. I believe airlines still have issues in terms of competition, pricing, labor, etc. So IMO even though airline stocks seem cheap, I don't think that market/analysts misunderstand them. I'd argue that they do. NFLX - Yes, there is an argument that NFLX is not just lighting cash on fire on the road to hell. But NFLX valuation is huge even if the arguments about their growth-before-cash-flow approach is good and works out. Does market/analysts misunderstand NFLX? IMO no. It could be argued that market misunderstands NFLX by being too optimistic rather than being too pessimistic (bear argument). It could be argued that there is some balance of NFLX being understood/valued based on great growth vs negative cash flow. Hope this helps. Have fun. 8) Nobody's gonna take my ORCL challenge? 8)

Jurgis, I waited a few hours before responding and still can't figure out your argument. You have a way of framing your points that is frankly a bit above my pay grade. Variant perception, what is that? In fear of getting too caught up in semantics like "what is value investing." I'll try to boil it down to simple examples that a fifth grader can understand 1) Before Buffet bought Burlington Northern Santa Fe, everyone thought that railroads were bad capital intensive businesses. After he bought them, everyone realized that there is a ton of pricing power. 2) A few years ago, people thought all the cable companies will die and shareholders will get wiped out. A few people realized that you will still need the connection to the home. 3) A few years ago, there was a 400 post discussion on VIC about whether Amazon will forever be a 1% net margin crappy retailer. I think we all know that the reality is very different from that. Amazon was a large cap even then and there were thousands of people looking at the name. 4) I neglected to mentioned that WWE's stock crashed because Vince tried to get a TV deal that would pay WWE live sport kind of money. The TV people balked at them and told Vince that wrestling is scripted. So Vince said "to hell with these guys, I'm going over the top." The strategy was risky and no one knows if they will ever go above breakeven which I believe is about 1 mm subscribers. So there was a time when you could have followed WWE closely and see how close they were getting to break even. The subscription at $10 or $12 was a great value for its fans. If you bought 2 pay per views a year, that was your annual subscription. From a content perspective, it also means that your stars can focus on the product and not try to promote the buying of pay per views which can get very tiring. 5) Buffet denounces airlines for a long time. Then he invested in them after they have been consolidated to four big players. Maybe we can call whatever I am trying to find something different and exotic, but the key here is to identify situations where people think 1) An industry is terminal, yet it has tremendous growth and pricing power, i.e. Cable companies 2) Business is capital intensive and will forever earn a bad return, in reality the industry has consolidated and has much better economics 3) Low ROIC is intentional and the company is being greedy for the long run, i.e. Amazon and a lot of the tech companies 4) Not sure how I can frame WWE into this framework, but there is some misperception in that the capital allocators don't understand the lifestyle of the poor and trashy population. I think what Jurgis is implying in addition to what he actually wrote is that not only are good novel ideas (variant perception) rare, but that accurately recognizing them is also quite rare. People are posting 'novel' ideas relatively frequently on cobf and elsewhere. Folks like ajc here (or @emilio_gold on twitter) are arguing for Long SPOT, which I don't understand at all. @emilio_gold has some novel arguements with regards to NFLX, which I also don't get. Picasso pushed certain coal companies/ideas when the industry was all but dead. But it didn't actually die. I suppose that's close to what you are looking for. I didn't understand the idea until it worked and neither did many others. I remember at YYX that year, a few coal companies were pitched with little interest. The ideas you are looking for have probably already been written up here, on twitter, on VIC, or elsewhere. They are being written by the people that sound crazy or possibly sound like they don't understand the basics of the industry or finance analysis. Most are as crazy they sound. Some, though, are exactly what you are looking for. Great elaboration and examples Schwab711! 8) I like your examples more than BG2008's. 8) At least partially because for some of them we don't know the outcome yet. 8) Although I might argue that some of your examples are also not misunderstood. 8) Anyway +1 on your post. 8)

Fair enough. I disagree with your examples and your reasoning that they were (are) misunderstood, but I guess that's what makes the market forum. 8) Good luck.

I listened to the TED talk and I read the study she references: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3374921/ IMO the study does not show that your beliefs about stress cause the health issues. Much simpler explanation is that people who see that they have health issues and see that they have stress then believe that stress causes health issues. And voila these people have worse mortality than people who do not have health issues and therefore do not believe that stress causes health issues. This leaves the question of whether stress causes health issues or not open. It's possible that some specific stress does. It's possible that stress doesn't. It's also possible that her claim is true and beliefs are what cause health issues. But at least from this study it's impossible to say. FWIW.

Good posts WayWardCloud and rb

Is ORCL going through this transition and is it hugely undervalued and misunderstood then? I don't know. I've had this question pop up every time I look at ORCL, but I am not sure I can answer it.

Yes, but is it really misunderstood? 8) Just kidding. Carry on. 8)

I think you are conflating a bunch of unrelated things in regards to WWE. You seem to be claiming that you understand the company/industry while Wall Street doesn't. Yet your memories (understanding) are 20 years old. Lots of things have changed since then, so investing based on 20 year old memories may be dangerous. Also it seems that your more recent evaluation of the company is negative (perhaps correctly). Compare that with the fact that the stock went nowhere for years and then exploded upwards a year ago. So I'd question whether you have a better understanding of the company than Wall Street does (did). What you did with WWE in your post is what most of people do: you built a story. Now, it's a nice story, but IMO that's pretty much what it is. Hope you don't take above negatively. 8) To generalize: 1. There are thousands of people evaluating various companies every day. Some of them "don't understand" the company, some of them do. 2. Genuine variant perception is extremely rare. Almost nonexistent. 3. What you are asking is not really genuine variant perception. I think what you are looking for is more of a "at this point in time company is valued differently than me and a bunch of folks on CoBF would value it (also known as "The Real Intrinsic Value" ).". 4. The point 3 approach is not a bad way to invest. However, note that I kinda added the "valued at" part (although you do imply it in some places of your post). If we change this to "at this point I and a bunch of folks think X about company, while Wall Street (who?) thinks Y" without attaching "valued at", then it's less interesting. 5. Corollary of 1,3,4: there are always people both on CoBF and Wall Street and media that think about company X and value it at $XX; there are always people on CoBF and Wall Street and media that think about the same company Y and value it at $YY. 6. It is very hard to evaluate percentages of people who think/value X/$XX vs. Y/$YY (which you need to do if you want to call it misunderstood without referring to current market price). You can compare $XX and $YY to current market price $ZZ to call it misunderstood in regards to market price. But you don't know whether market thinks X, Y or some Z. 7. The fact that you and some people think X does not necessarily mean that X is indeed what is happening/will happen. tl;dr: what you are trying to do might be good, but not simple. I could argue why I think CACC, CMPR, cable cos, etc. are not "misunderstood", but I doubt these arguments are interesting. BTW, another wrinkle is that as Howard Marks said "More things can happen than will happen". So even post factum evaluation of whether something was/was not understood is fraught with biases. Good luck, have fun 8)

Pre-cancer detection: https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2019-01-10/ai-beats-humans-at-detecting-cervical-precancers

Here goes (part of) Starcraft II: https://www.pcmag.com/news/366177/ai-dominates-human-professional-players-in-starcraft-ii?amp=1

I think rb is too pessimistic. I completely agree that it might be best for kids to have loving, kind, attentive, and yet strict parents who are great in raising them. However, I think that current generation over lionizes past parents and their parenting. Maybe (parts of) 20th century were golden times of parenting, but overall the past parents were not as ideal as current generation imagines. If you look longer time back, the whole notion of loving, kind, attentive parents who spend time raising their kids is pretty much a fairy tale. On the side of aristocracy and richer parents, kids were raised by nannies and hired teachers. On the side of poor, kids were afterthought and free servants who did the chores and went to (grueling) work once grown a bit. If you read biographies from the past, see how many people grew up in families that you'd call (close to) ideal. Even the ones that are written as good possibly are made more positive than they were in reality. IMO the good thing about current time is that the pressure to have kids has gone down. (The same as the pressure to marry). Which means that only people who really want kids ideally should have them. Yeah, I know there's still too many unwanted pregnancies, pressured children, and even parents who-think-that-they-want-kids-but-really-have-no-clue-or-no-clue-how-to-raise-them. But possibly fewer than in the past. Other than that, I think generalizations are very hard. I've known kids who were spoiled rotten as kids and grew up great people. I know some modern examples of nannies raising kids that IMO worked better than if parents did it. I've known kids from the same family where one kid was great/easy/perfect and another one was total disaster. With unlimited analysis, you might figure out what exactly went right(wrong), but making the best decisions as life unfolds is very hard. BTW, CoBF members complain a lot about lack of financial education. IMO lack of parenting education is even more prevalent. And it is likely even tougher job than managing your finances. 8) (Obligatory Buffett jab: so Warren should have spent more time with the kids? Screw Berkshire? 8) )

I think you're duplicating yourself: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/morgan-housel-on-what-other-industries-teach-us-about-investing/msg322081/#msg322081 8)

Amazon Kindle sale today $5.99

Cautionary notice: my taste is highly idiosyncratic, so likely my recommendations will do nothing for you. Theoretically all my ratings are publicly available at: https://www.imdb.com/user/ur2779520/ratings?sort=your_rating,desc&ratingFilter=0&mode=detail&ref_=undefined&lastPosition=0 ( if this does not work, this might: https://www.imdb.com/user/ur2779520/ratings?ref_=nv_usr_rt_4 - this is chronological ). No very recent movies at 9 or 10 rating. GLOW is 9: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5770786/?ref_=rt_li_tt Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is 9 There are couple recent movies at 8 rating ( LBJ, Snowden, Rush, Dallas Buyers Club, Fury, Dirty Money, Red Sparrow ). ---------------- I'm definitely gonna watch "The Death of Stalin". 8)

WTFF