pricingpower

Are corporates able to see through to beneficial owners for street name shares? I don't think they have any visibility outside of 13G/13D filers. Running through the math only aggregating at the registered shares level a 31% buyback does seem high but is plausible, anything look off? They have 3.6mm shares outstanding across 510 registered holders on 25Mar24 (per 2023 10K) Top 5 holders are like 1.6mm shares so 2mm are spread across remaining 505 registered accounts. That's average of 3.2k shares per account if they were evenly spread (they won't be as some of those accounts are brokers though) A 31% reduction means they expect to buy back 1mm shares which is ~2k shares per registered account. To de-list they'd need to fully take out a minimum of 210 accounts to get below the 300 record holder threshold that retains governance protections. Seems like it's in zone of possible

One aspect I'm not clear on is if shares need to be moved out of street name to be sure to get the cash out treatment... seems like will need to register them pre the record date for the reverse split / subsequent split. Anyone looked into whether the transfer agent has any unexpected fees? Googling a bit seems most brokers are 0-$100 for using the direct registration system but transfer agents also sometimes have additional fees. I feel for the middle office guy somewhere who's about to get a tsunami of 9,999 share registration requests.

Not who I would have guessed would have the "SSD" ticker ha

CVET was main one during covid (a spin-off profitable vet distribution business that reverse morris trust'd with an unprofitable software company) but it got taken private already. LEGH and EWBC I added more recently. Spent a lot of time on some names only to not pull the trigger (Netflix at almost the exact recent lows!) which is the frustrating downside to a concentrated approach. My largest positions are Progressive and Berkshire which I view as semi-permanent.

I listened to it via Audible which was a bit odd in a couple sections as they had a male narrator for the female author, a physical copy of the book would have worked better I think. I came away feeling the entire power space is getting less investable given how deeply mismanaged the regulation is (in New England at least). I think she made a pretty persuasive case that structuring the "policy grid" to run with nobody actually viewing themselves as responsible is going to eventually cause serious problems.

If you're young and doing this on the side Buffett's advise has usually been to mainly focus on your career. I like targeting only making one excellent investment per year's savings that you've deeply researched (read all SEC filings, transcripts, media coverage and know all competitors deeply) and intend to never sell. A high standard is about 500 hours on an investment, at 1-2hrs a day and not investing in everything you look at it's hard to have a know-what-you-own approach and buy more than 1 a year... but as knowledge compounds so does your bandwidth over future years. It's puzzling people look at investing in stocks (large businesses) so massively different than they would approach buying a small business. If you look at Buffett as an example he's probably spent about a quarter million hours at the investment game (=70hr weeks sustained for 70 years?) against maybe <1000 cumulative buy decisions?

If you're not following 13F SEC filings closely would absolutely do that first by picking some small cap growth funds that run a concentrated low turnover book and just looking at what they bought each quarter. Dataroma has some nice curated suggestions. My suspicion is the growth of quant funds has probably made screeners work less well as a filter over recent years. Places that the accounting doesn't reflect reality well are probably the most interesting (a tech company that fully expenses R&D instead of capitalizing, a retailer that is growing stores which shows an earnings loss while creating value, a manufactured housing co with a lending book etc). The End of Accounting is a good book on the topic of how the rise of intangibles since the 70s have made GAAP accounting steadily less predictive of returns (although not going to give much actionable investing advice).

This was a fun book thanks for that, it comes through that this is thousands of hours of thought and lived experience distilled down to a short book. If he was a US based investor this would be a much more popular book. In the audiobook they pronounced the acronym ROCE as "roas" in roast which isn't how I had pronounced it in my head.

Do the Canadian rails trade above a theoretical replacement construction cost? I thought the costs math on short stretches that have been built in more recent times in the US have been prohibitively expensive even setting the political process issues aside. It seems unlikely meaningful new routes will be created in the US before autonomous vehicles challenge the industry much more. I think part of why Berkshire chose to pursue BNSF instead of their other US rail investments (like NSC) was the western rails have a stronger moat vs trucking in the very long term. One of the neater niche renewable energy storage techs is using old rail tracks to move heavy things up a hill to store intermittent power as rail is so efficient.

The Rebuttal to the Foreward is very Munger, it's great. Love how Stripe made the free web release of the third edition have an integrated audiobook defaulting to 1.5x speed too. https://www.stripe.press/poor-charlies-almanack/forewords#charles-t-munger

For listed shares I find it's helpful to use a combination of displayed and non-displayed orders (called "iceberg" at Interactive Brokers and "Reserve" when using directed orders in Fidelity's Active Trader Pro app) so size doesn't move the market as much. Interactive Brokers has nicely flexible tools for doing things like % of volume or a hidden order floating at the middle of the bid/ask "midprice" but their commissions can get expensive. I find myself mostly using the "TV05" or "TV10" directed trade routing on Fidelity for medium liquidity names where an algo tries to execute x% of trading volume.

I particularly liked the super-rational section about calibrating fitness goals by selecting tasks you want to still be able to do at age 90s (hold a baby, put carry-on luggage in overhead bin etc) and then applying typical muscle loss from aging (8% a decade?) to back-solve for minimum you should be capable of at your current age. I also wasn't aware he spent a brief period of his early professional life as a bank regulations consultant, always interesting to see the variety of paths people take after finance careers.

Also the new podcast referenced with GEICO history: https://www.audacy.com/podcast/the-10-k-podcast-2facf/episodes

Came here to recommend Body by Science as well

Looking at a similar question this was a nicely done recent article breaking out today's costs for some specific aspirational lifestyles: https://www.curbed.com/article/cost-of-living-nyc-calculator.html

Progressive’s year over year premiums written were +31% for February with personal policies in force +8%, almost concerningly high growth.

If you have bloomberg you can use the excel plugin to pull in a wide variety of info from a list of tickers to basically create your own one-pagers, finviz is a solid free screener where one of the views gives you corp descriptions

I enjoyed this book, pretty inspiring to see someone push science forward like this for the rest of humanity and to be reminded that bubble valuation times can create some nice positive externalities for society.

Bloomberg terminals have a built in change/blackline function for comparing filings, draftable is a great free tool though.

Allstate had a recent investor presentation on reserve development that was good, logically medical costs are much slower to become clear than the property portion. I keep getting surprised by how hard the state regulators push back on pricing changes in some states when the costs are already apparent. It will be helpful to progressive and geico that others are recognizing they are underpricing, hopefully the days of not growing policy count will come to an end.

I thought it was a nice recap of recent geopolitics but it was a little disappointing when he discussed "peak oil" theory as if he had no history believing/discussing it, I thought that lowered his credibility.

A more generalist book that's good/timeless is The Real Estate Game: The Intelligent Guide To Decisionmaking And Investment by Poorvu who taught it at HBS / was a Baupost founder if I recall

Hopefully a nice aspect of telematics is that it should create a clear incentive for people to drive more safely... if drivers know that sharp turns/not using a turn signal/braking will increase their rate they'll hopefully behave better which benefits everyone

Constitution of Knowledge was a great book, bit surprised it hasn't been a more common recommendation from some of the more wide reading notable investors, it's very Soros/Munger too

He deferred to Charlie on evaluating Diageo’s products