zarley

Ah, thanks for the reminder dcollon; I managed to forget BRK was reporting today. At first glance, it looks like a nice quarter -- buyback price is now close to $123,000 / A and $82 / B. I'm sure Q4 will bring those back down a bit, due to Sandy, but Q3 was good.

Thanks for sharing. I own a bit of GOODX in a retirement account. It's a good proxy for my own approach/positions.

Wow, that looks fantastic. Won't be able to get to reading it in full for a little bit, but thanks for sharing.

I tend not to think of BRK in terms of what is an appropriate BV multiple. Using a modified version of the two column approach, my current IV estimate for BRK is around $165,000 per A share. As a multiple of BV that is somewhere near 1.5x.

Is Jon Bon Jovi a billionaire? :o That seems to be implied, but that can't be right. Can it? Seriously. Bon Jovi billionaire?

I agree. But that does raise the question of how/why did they build a significant position and then change course. I haven't looked at the timing, but perhaps related to the IBM purchase? It's not a red flag for me at this point, but there has been more turnover in the portfolio this past year than we're used to. It may settle down once Combs and Wechler have been around for a while. Or, it may be the new normal given the new guys are recent hedge fund managers and less inclined to hold indefinitely.

Does Lifetime Member mean I can never leave? :D

The interview is from last year, so whatever he said about hedges is likely out of date. A good interview, of course, so it's worth taking a look at if you missed it the first time.

If licensing QNX as the #4 mobile smartphone platform and hoping it catches on in other areas is the plan then I think RIM bulls are a little crazy. Transitioning from being a global leader in handsets and infrastructure to a niche OS developer is no small thing. How the hell do you value that? It may work out. But, how to you know what the addressable market is or what kind of license fees you might be able to demand? I'd guess they'd still be competing with android in that market anyway. It is a huge roll of the dice. Now, Prem may be smart enough and understand RIM well enough to know that the combination of QNX and the blackberry server business have enough value that current prices reflect a significant discount to intrinsic value. But I don't think for a second that that was the vision when he was buying at $50 or $30 or $20. Buying/holding at $8 on that kind of speculative outlook may make sense, but not if you're buying at $50. In the end, I like Fairfax enough and respect track record for the guys at Hamblin Watsa enough, to keep holding Fairfax even if I don't understand or agree with their view on RIM.

This is pretty much my perspective as well. I think there's a pretty good chance that RIM is a deadman walking; but, I trust Prem and the team at Fairfax -- they get the benefit of the doubt. And, I could be wrong anyway.

I own more RIM via Fairfax than I'd like. Otherwise, no position.

Great read. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks racemize. I messed around with some Yahoo Finance work arounds for about 10-15 minutes. Must have gotten some of the syntax wrong, because I didn't get that working right either. Modifying your scripts a little bit got me what I needed. Thanks

Hmmmm . . . thanks Liberty. I guess it's good news that it seems to be a general bug. Hopefully it will get fixed soon enough. A couple days with a broken spreadsheet has been oddly irritating. How am I supposed to go about my day if I don't know my year to date relative out-performance to the second decimal? :)

I've been using a Google spreadsheet to track my portfolio for several years. It's nice because it will automatically update prices and position sizes and my relative performance. But, I've noticed a problem with getting price data for Fairfax over the past few days. It apparently won't fetch fairfax price data, returning N/A instead of price. Obviously, this screws up my whole spreadsheet. Questions: Anyone else using a google spreadsheet in this way? If so, have you experienced this problem with Fairfax or any other security? Any workarounds for this? Are the other options for this sort of thing? Thanks in advance,

A little more info from the WSJ: http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/07/19/hedge-fund-t2-splits-tilson-sells-repurchases-berkshire-stake/ Goes on to say Tilson will keep a lower public profile. Yeah, we'll see about that.

Muddy Waters reports: New Oriental Mojo Not Workin' -- 8)

I saw that link to zero hedge. I tend to avoid that place whenever possible. As for the bashing of his use of calls, in this case a lot of it was BRK calls which he probably made decent money on (particularly if he still holds them now).

Looks like Whitney Tilson is parting ways with Glenn and T2 Partners. His bio at the VII conference site now references Kase Capital. http://www.valueinvestorinsight.com/behindvii/whitneytilson I'm pretty ambivalent about Tilson; he seems like more of a (self)promoter than an investor. But I do wonder what, if anything, happened with T2 to make the split.

While it's true that the book does contain a lot of excerpts from his client letters, it is organized with an overall narrative in mind and includes other relevant materials and thoughts that aren't in the letters. Sure, it might be better if there were fewer or shorter excerpts and more fresh writing. But, to dismiss the book as little more than a collection of his letters would be a mistake.

The Most Important Thing is very good. If you haven't read it; it is absolutely worth the time. It's not overly technical; instead focusing on how to approach thinking about investing and risk. That second edition sounds really interesting.

What is the alternative to Office? My exposure to Open Office is a couple years old. But, at the time it struck me as not quite ready for prime time. It was sluggish and file compatibility with Office wasn't 100%. At the time I was considering going 100% open source on one of my home PC's (Ubuntu, Open Office, etc.) and after months of fiddling and finding work-arounds decided it wasn't worth the trouble. I could do 95% of what I needed with open source, but that other 5% needed windows. So, even though I still dual-boot with Linux Mint from time to time, I need windows to get all the functionality I want/need from my desktop (although I acknowledge that won't necessarily be the case for everyone). Google Docs is fine for simple, non-sensitive document sharing, but it isn't IMO a replacement for Office. In justifying your Windows and Office licenses, what was the final result? Did you organisation change or continue using MSFT?

MSFT's enterprise stickiness has a few layers. Losing desktop OS share is a threat, but it isn't everything. MSFT still has Office and the various server platforms on the back end (SQL server, Outlook, general networking, Sharepoint). Combined, the desktop and back office stuff will be very hard to displace -- not impossible, but very strongly entrenched. How many billions of dollars have been spent on installation and training for Office and MSFT's enterprise systems? Inertia indeed. The old legacy software is either a problem or an opportunity for MSFT. Yes, it could be long time MSFT users' opportunity to look elsewhere, or it could be a huge windows upgrade cycle waiting to happen. My own work desktop just recently got upgraded from XP to Win7. As the support for XP disappears, migrating to Win7 should be the path of least resistance for most users.

JSArbitrage, you raise good points. We certainly need to be forward looking when thinking about MSFT. They do face real competitive threats, even to the OS and Office franchises that mint most of their money. But, MSFT is so entrenched at the enterprise level that those two pieces will be incredibly difficult to dislodge. IMO, they will continue to mint money there for the foreseeable future. There real problems are (and really always have been) at the consumer level, and their misses in the phone and tablet space have hurt them. But, I think Win8 has the potential to really compete well. And, they are potentially the best positioned to provide a seamless linkage of PC/mobile/tablet/TV systems. They'll be able to offer a competitive OS on all those systems that is integrated and full featured. But, they need to execute, which they haven't really been able to do well enough historically. But, I think they have a lot of potential that gets written off because they're Microsoft and not as sexy as Apple. At the risk of projecting my own experience as being representative of the general experience, let me say that I have an ipad, 2 windows PCs, one windows laptop, 3 ipods, an xbox 360, and an android smart phone. If forced to choose, I'd say you can take away everything but my windows PCs and my phone. The ipad is a great piece of consumer electronics, but to me it isn't all that useful for anything but media consumption and web surfing. From my experience windows is very nearly irreplaceable to me as a consumer. I won't be editing pictures and videos, running my media server, or storing all my files on my ipad. I think the common perception is that MSFT has been left behind and/or is dying (how could it not be, given the lost decade) and that is reflected in the price. MSFT isn't perfect, but at current prices they don't need to be.

Hehe, I choked a bit when I heard that part as well. The part about MSFT not being cash rich anymore was another bit of blatant stupidity. His whole thesis is that MSFT isn't cool and so they're just irrelevant and doomed to some undescribed awful demise. Yes, MSFT missed opportunities in mobile and tablets. Yes, MSFT needs to get those right quickly to regain footing in mobile computing and offset that threat to their core businesses. And, yes, as a large organisation they are imperfect and probably suffer from ineffective bureaucracy. But, to call the last ten years at MSFT a lost decade requires you to just ignore the facts of their actual performance. But if tripling revenues per share and quintupling earnings per share over ten years is somehow a lost decade, please serve me up another one just like it. The idea that since the stock price has been stuck at or under $30 for the last decade, so the MSFT business must suck is another common bit of nonsense he threw out. It's clear to me that in that time the business went from wildly overvalued to quite undervalued. But, that notion just never seems to occur to some critics. MSFT's peak market cap was something like $600 billion at the peak of the tech bubble. The current market cap is $250 billion. I think both of those numbers get it wrong, but $600 billion is nuts for the MSFT of more than ten years ago. I do agree with his point that breaking down the structure of MSFT may be beneficial. I might not go so far as to break it up into separate public companies, but more of a holding company approach might allow certain businesses to be more competitive. Hell with all the cash they have and all that they throw off, Microsoft Hathaway might be a cool model to contemplate. Disclosure -- long MSFT