rkbabang

And the annual average temperature there is well below zero centigrade, about the same as atop Mount Washington, Maine, the windiest place in the world, and one of the coldest. Does the tenant pay the utilities? This could be a good investment if they bought property near a bottom. Did they? But there may be agency risk, political risk etc. Mt Washington is in New Hampshire.

Even though BAC is my largest holding, I do my banking with a small local credit union. Triangle Credit Union. I agree with your observations that you can find better deals at credit unions than at the big banks.

I agree. Tesla and Solar City aside, oil is going to be with us for a long time and the price will only increase (long term). This is more of a "hmm that's interesting" than a "WTF?" purchase. I think it will work out well. It's not like he's buying a failed handset maker or a textile mill in New Bedford or something.

After seeing XOM was the secret stock, I took a quick look this morning and it does seem expensive. An enterprise value of $392B with a TTM FCF of $12.6B. Capital expenditures seem to eat a lot of the operating earnings each year. FCF was $40B in 2008, but the highest it has been since then was $24.4B in 2011. I'm sure it will be a home run for Buffett, but I don't know why. I understand why he would want to own XOM, I'm just not sure why he is buying it now. He's getting a great company at a fair price, I'd rather see him get a great company at a great price. But then again, in 20 years it won't matter if BRK bought it at $60 or $100, it will be still be a great investment. I may own some amount of BRK for 20 years, but I don't usually hold my other stocks very long. Once they are fairly valued I start looking elsewhere. I suppose it is different if you are managing many $Billions.

Interesting. I bought XOM in 2010 for $59 then sold a little more than a year ago for $88. Unlike the market in general it hasn't done much in the last year. It doesn't look undervalued to me right now the way it did in 2010. I'd rather own BRK than follow him back into XOM.

Not this Ford. Archie was a lot of things, but he wasn't on crack.

Ahh, democracy. You've got to love it. So few people can even run their own lives very well, yet feel perfectly empowered with the "right" to choose who will run yours. In Toronto this is who they choose. 39 Breathtaking Photos of North America's Most Photogenic Mayor

A good book to read is Nassim Taleb's Antifragile, he goes into a lot of detail on why most attempts to stabilize complex mega-variable systems end in disaster.

Yes but the fact that things are never equal is really really important! In addition, context matters a lot! I doubt that you ever use such a generalized approach when you look at stocks All true. But ask yourself, has the fed been acting more like BRK (almost never issuing stock, only on a rare occasion to make a large accreditive acquisition) or more like some penny stock company run by a scam artist? I'd argue that they've acted as expected. BRK's job is to increase economic earnings power on a per share basis. The fed's job is the dual mandate, and they use CPI (targeted around 2%) and unemployment (targeted at 5%). It is your job to trade accordingly. If you wish to buy gold and ammo, or stocks and housing, or long or short the USD, that is a personal choice... but the fed has been pretty crystal clear about what they will do. It hardly seems like a scam to me. An older person on a fixed income doesn't have a lot of those choices. I think its main (only?) job, if it has a job at all, should be to protect the value of the dollar. A dollar today is worth less than what five cents was worth the day the fed was created. Inflation, the way it is used by the government is just a tax on savings. Since they are never up front about this, your average person has no idea what they are doing or why, compared with other forms of tax increases. In this sense it is a scam.

Can't I have a third option? :) Sure. Of course the truth is always somewhere in the middle, but I believe it is much closer to one extreme than the other.

Yes but the fact that things are never equal is really really important! In addition, context matters a lot! I doubt that you ever use such a generalized approach when you look at stocks All true. But ask yourself, has the fed been acting more like BRK (almost never issuing stock, only on a rare occasion to make a large accreditive acquisition) or more like some penny stock company run by a scam artist?

If you define inflation, the way the Austrian economist do, as an increase in the money supply, then there is no question that there has been a lot of inflation. And while it is impossible to calculate exactly how much this has led to an increase in prices, due to the impossibility of calculating the effects of productivity changes, technology changes, consumer behavior changes, supply and demand changes, etc. It is easy to know that it does have some effect and that all else being equal (even if they never are) prices would be lower in its absence. Consider what happens in general to the price of a stock when a company issues a lot of shares vs. when it buys them back.

Global Income Inequality by the Numbers: In History and Now "The period between 1988 and 2008 witnessed the first decline in global income inequality since the Industrial Revolution..."

Universities With the Largest Financial Endowments Harvard Salaries by the Numbers

+1 I was going to write almost exactly what you did. I wouldn't leave my wife if she wanted to go back to school and accumulate debt, but if I was single I'd steer clear of that situation. There is no need to saddle yourself with someone elses baggage.

It isn't about "worth" or "respect". I respect janitors, but they usually don't make 100K/yr. I don't respect many professional athletes yet they make much. What is a teacher worth? Just like with any other job, you are worth whatever the market will pay for your skills.

Not to argue that too much money is spent on foreign entanglements (as it is)...BUT there is a LOT more money spent on education in this country than is spent on the military. Think about all the property taxes, all the lottery money, all the private tuition, all the student loans going towards education, and you will see that it is MORE than what is spent on the military. It is an easy number to miss, as most of the money is spent at the city and county level and is very dispersed. As for national defense, almost all of that is spent by the federal government, not states, counties or cities. I agree, which is why I put that first and listed the military as an after-thought. The entire house of cards rests on the mistaken notions that government (i.e. violence) is somehow necessary to educate children, protect us from crime, protect us from foreign invasion, print money, build roads, and fight fires. In that order. Education is the biggest by far.

That is awesome. Many times when I suggest to people that schooling is too important to be left to government they come back with things like "the poor kids won't get as good an education as the wealthier kids". Where as the way it is now, poor kids get little to no education at all, and with a few exceptions the wealthier a district is the better the educational opportunities there are available to the kids. Under the current system you and I get to send kids to top notch schools, while poor kids get sent to these hell holes where they don't learn anything and their lives are in danger everyday just being there. The rich, middle class, and poor alike would all be better off than now if the government just stayed out of it altogether, with the rich and upper middle class benefiting the least, because they already do quite well.

A sugar and grain based diet. A better question would be how can you be that poor and not be obese?

I will add, that every community may handle things differently. I could see the parents in my town starting a non-profit org to keep the current schools, which are excellent (Forbes recently rated them #2 in the country) open. Other communities you might have a lot of home schooling and a few private schools of all costs. The only reason you don't see low cost private schools now is because there is no demand for them. You pay a ton of taxes whether you send your kid to public school or not, so only the rich can also pay for private schools. Therefore the only private schools that can exist in this environment cater to the wealthy.

Every unionized "business" with a government backed monopoly operates this way. I spent a summer as a splice technician for NYNEX when I was in college. Anything goes and anything is acceptable...except doing your job well, doing your job quickly, or being honest about the number of hours you worked. You really want a "solution" to this? 1) Close every public school in the US. 2) Immediately reduce the property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes, and any other taxes which went to paying for the public school system. 3) Do nothing else, and see what the market comes up with. 3.5) It would help tremendously to get rid of taxes that currently support the United States foreign empire/wars to help people pay for the education of their children on the free market.

What about turnarounds and distressed opportunities? Lot of upside there. Turnarounds rarely turn.

I was wondering should single value investors try to pick women the way they do stocks? Low cost, good cash flow, good capital allocation ... How many dates before you can ask to take a peak at the books?

Hey Gio, I don't want to give you any advice, because I haven't been on a first date since the first date with my wife when I was 17 years old, so what the hell do I know? But I want to wish you good luck!

B