ATLValue

It's official now. Time for more dilution courtesy of Supreme Leader Watsa and his superior voting power.

1) trader is a great movie 2) i think you're asking the wrong forum 3) im not sure where you could find this info without paying for it but try looking at http://www.elliottwave.com/ -

thanks for the heads up!

If your logic was sound than why doesn't every single company just issue shares all the time? Companies don't do this because for an issuance to be a neutral event you're assuming that Fairfax can earn an ROE that it is consistent with previous results (even though it has just increased equity)... More importantly IMO, this action continues to reduce the voting power of those existing shareholders who don't participate in the offering

good luck shorting volatility, that strategy always works our great ... until it doesn't

Not my opinion but definitely a divergent view from most everyone on this board: "Buffett is a charlatan precisely because he hides his secrets behind his Barnum act of public-spiritedness. One secret has been pretty well outed by now, both here on the site and elsewhere– namely, the man is the Capablanca of the tax code. The other secret is the one he hides in plain sight. He gets extraordinary earnings out of his headcount. For a sane company that avoids stupid leverage on its balance sheet, the employees are the liability that matters most; and the Oregano manages that liability with the same skill that the 19th century Titans did. BRK-A's known earnings (the average of the current year's report and the consensus prediction for the next 12 months) are roughly $65K/employee. GM has known earnings/employee of $28.5K. As a number, known earnings/employee may seem bizarre but it is the best predictor of how consistently a company can continue to generate profit. We have used the same kind of benchmark in our own assessment of our private businesses; and it has never failed. We have, every time we have gone away from it in the name of "investing in growth", etc. We don't actually know if this really is Buffett's secret sauce; this is likely pure vanity on our part. But, if, like him, you invest by buying stakes in public companies as if they were private businesses" http://www.dailyspeculations.com/wordpress/?p=10542

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-28/buffett-to-join-ballmer-alba-on-nbc-s-celebrity-apprentice-

thanks for posting

We missed tickets by a few minutes from someone selling on Facebook. (a friend of a friend) Cancel cable and watch almost anything, including live sports through your internet connection on your TV. Any good links to share about this? How is it different from Roku / Apple TV?

Garmin Fenix 2 watch for $200

I think moats and good management teams are much much much rarer than people on this board seem to believe

I think the whole 40 year "mega bubble" point that Pabrai is trying to make is completely wrong. There are tons of industries that flare up every few years, 3D printing, marijuana stocks, savings & loans, commodities, shale, biotech .... He gives good examples but the fact that one happens to be right in the middle of the two others doesn't really mean anything.

In 2013 as an owner of Quest Diagnostics I began digging into Theranos. Given the big splash that Theranos was making at the time we wanted to see if the Company poised a threat to lab testing industry. I had two questions that I was looking to solve through my research, 1) could their smaller machine that they developed displace the established large lab duopoly (Quest and LabCorp) and 2) how much different were the prices from traditional competitors. 1) At the time I had no reason to doubt that their proprietary Edison machines functioned the way that they seemed to be claiming. Now we know that the machine does not work for the vast majority of tests. It remains to be determined if they can get the machine to work before their funding runs out. 2) If you compare Theranos's price points with the price of tests AFTER insurance discounts they were really just about the same. I took a sample of the Theranos listed prices and compared them to an Aetna price list which included insurer negotiated discounts and the difference was about 3% lower for Theranos, far different from the drastic price differences that they claimed on their website. Theranos is a business that seems to have skirted the line of the truth. I don't think they committed outright fraud but they certainly didn't do anything to dampen the media excitement that was building around their business and proprietary technology....Then again I don't have any idea what they were telling investors during their last funding round.

Thanks everyone! Great weekend reading material

Hey everyone, does anyone have any good primers or recommended books to help a beginner understand how to analyze a bank?