rb

Corporate bonds trade mostly OTC. Therefore many of the requirements that apply to equities do not apply to bonds. No NBBO, no reg NMS, no nine-bond rule, etc. It's very opaque. Your best public source for information on bonds is the Finra data.

Well "you" basically can't. Bonds are a very cloudy market and the brokers like it that way. Really the easiest way would be to get access to a Bloomberg terminal.

In probably nowhere near that bad. I highly doubt that in reality 50% of people do not pay the required reimbursement. The stat is probably flawed by a peculiarity of the HBP. You have to make the payment by Dec 31. Whereas you can make RRSP deposits until the first business day in March. A lot of people make their RRSP deposits in Jan and Feb and probably miss the deadline. It's really not that big of a deal. There's no tax impact. All that happens is that they get dinged a little on their RRSP limit but they probably have plenty to spare. So no biggie.

If that's the case and you feel so confident then why don't you just go and buy a shitload of Brazilian bonds instead?

I totally agree. I also have been outbid by fractions of a penny. I think a small tax that introduces enough friction costs for them to go away would help some more. I agree. A transaction tax will blow away the cockroaches. I'm in favour of even more than 0.1%. Do you want to incentivize investment or speculation?

Well it's human nature meets incentives right? Kinda what you'd expect when you put the fox in charge of the hen house. The unions may have negotiated the deals but they were not in charge of their pension funds. In the private sector where the executives are in charge of their pension plans the plans are fully funded. It's not rocket science lol. Up here in Canada we have some unions that are in charge of their pension plans. Care to guess their funding status?

This is nonsense. The reason why unfunded pension liabilities exist is because they weren't funded. Basically you've cut a deal (how much you'll pay) and then you didn't keep your end of the bargain (i.e. you didn't pay). The reason you didn't pay is because you we're selfish. You gave yourself a tax cut. Then in order to reneg you try to deflect and obfuscate. You get on your righteous horse and start bloviate: those damn pensioners, those damned unions, teachers... watch out. But really the reason why the situation exists is because you were a selfish deuce and you didn't pay what you owed. Just in case it's not clear when I say "you" I don't refer to you personally, but to certain groups. When you look at the private sector you have a similar situation where most of the pension plans are underfunded. The principle is the same. It's also greed. You've underfunded the pensions to show better financials. This in turn led to higher bonuses, and gains on stock options from higher valuations. However virtually all the companies that have unfunded pension plans for employees have fully funded pension plans for executives. Funny how that works no? GE is probably the worst private offender on pensions, but I know for a fact that in 2011 the executive pension plan at GE was overfunded. So workers and teachers should watch out but God forbid that Jack Welch should pay for light bulbs and toilet paper.

Strictly speaking, this is NOT Detroit, but a close in suburb. Detroit is getting wild & woolly. A section of the city that a few years ago had science fiction movies filming in (as the area looked like a dystopian nightmare) it, now has houses that are $300k or even $400k. 10 years ago, this neighborhood's property value truly would have been negligible. Now every neck bearded hipster wants in. Heck, Ford Motor Company is spending something like $700mm on the abandoned train station! As to why somebody would want to be here? With all the problems comes opportunity for somebody who is sharp & willing to hustle. Heck, I bought perfectly "functional" office buildings for $11-$12 a square foot. Property can be cheap here, along with the cost of living. Detroit & Michigan has electricity, interwebs, mail & package delivery, telephones (most of the time), partially paved roads, streets & highways, tasty food & such. If you can make $40k a year, you'll have a good lifestyle. If you make $100k a year, you are living large...If you are making $150k+ a year, it is "models & bottles". There are plenty of stupid people here too unfortunately! LOL! Maybe the hipsters will make Detroit great again. Then you won't have to worry about Detroit or your town covering their pension liabilities. Growth and revenue cure all ills. It could happen but somehow I doubt it.

I haven't tried webull. I will. I think out of the free websites Yahoo is the best today which is ironic. I've noticed investing.com actually has good data. But it's very trading oriented which is annoying to me. I don't know if anyone here uses it. I have a watchlist setup in IB. But I'd prefer to use a free website for it because I don't like being logged in all the time.

yes there is http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/what-are-you-selling-today/new/?topicseen#new

I think that the problem with thorium back then was that this stuff was/is extremely corrosive so for practical purposes it would have needed some serious spend to find new materials. Whereas water cooled solid fuel reactors were ready to be built. Now, I don't know if we're there yet, but I know that we've made some serious advances in materials science since the 60s so we're definitely a lot closer. Promising.

Even without the pension liabilities, why would anyone want to buy a house in Detroit? I think most people living there do so because they can't afford to leave.

What you call the romantic/religious aisle of environmental movement I call boneheads. And it's not like they're a small fringe either. The fossil fuel guys are easy to understand. they're trying to kill a competing product. So they're working toward their goal. The boneheads are working against their goal (presumably zero emission energy). As such they're doing more damage to climate change than the fossil fuel guys on this issue. For the people that haven't looked into or don't understand nuclear, well they can easily understand the fossil fuel guys' self interest. But when they see the clean energy people also rail against it, they'll think, whoa! there must be something really wrong with this stuff.

Yep, it's a pretty sad state of affairs. The tree huggers hate it because it's not solar, the rednecks hate it because it's not coal.

Not gonna happen. Berkshire doesn't need more currency or flexibility to do deals. They have plenty of both. So why go through the trouble of having a bunch of publicly listed subs. Plus isn't one of BRK's acquisition selling points that if you sell to us you won't have to be public anymore? Regarding valuation, it could very well be that once Warren decided that I'm gonna buy back a crapload of my own stock that he doesn't care if he gets a fair valuation or not. Once he makes up his mind on something he can be very ruthless at making money off of it.

No matter what the case is, I have a feeling that an HR manager at Shaw is in process of getting fired.

Yea it's an intial estimate and it was a 2.9% print for 2018.

Banks can actually be great investments and very profitable companies. But I've kinda figured out that dumpster diving doesn't work with financial institutions. If you're gonna dumpster dive you're just gonna get garbage. Best way to do it is to get good stuff when the stock prices are lower due to market fluctuations.

You hit some good points. But some of them tell you why such mergers are no gos. For example they would be no gos from a political perspective. Yea governments and central banks may impose pain and provide support to the banking system. But if they're doing all the heavy lifting why would they let the benefits accrue to an American bank? Furthermore I think your view of balance sheet quality may be too academic. Yea sure, the bad assets run off and get replaced by good assets. But we're 11 years from the gfc and their assets still really suck. The process may take way too long, if it really gets there at all. Then there's the derivative books of some of these banks.... oh boy! On top of all of that you have existential risks related to the EU. Personally I don't think anything will happen to the EU. But it is a non-zero risk. If it happens you have a bunch of banks with assets in Liras and liabilities in Deutch Marks and Guilders. That's insta-bankruptcy. There's also the practical matter of size not just financial consideration. The US deals you've mentioned were all larger banks eating up smaller ones. In the case of BB&T trying to eat up an Unicredit or a SocGen would be akin to a dolphin trying to polish off a blue whale. At best it will get a bad case of indigestion. At worst it would be completely ripped apart by the bigger entity. Think Phibro and their acquisition of Salomon Brothers. It didn't work out very well for Phibro.

All those European banks you mentioned have HUGE balance sheets that are all big dumpster fires. So if you're BB&T sure you may have enough equity to buy their equity. But do you have the capital to fight/contain the dumpster fires? That's a no. I don't think this was a great move because SunTrust is quite a basket case as well. But it's small enough that maybe you can deal with the fire because it's more of a sidewalk trash can instead of a toxic waste dump.

Well he hasn't done that much open market stuff until lately. So you barely have anything to pick. I guess he just wanted to go on safari. The open market taps have only recently opened with Apple and more banks.

It is a bit of a mystery. I'd say that Buffett generally doesn't like to sell. There was the mia culpa about not selling Coke in 97/98 when it went insanely high. But then a few years ago he went huge into Exxon and was out just as quickly. Then there was IBM. In my opinion it probably has to do with taxes. In the 90s they were sitting on huge unrealized gains in coke (still are). So if there are large unrealized gains he's less likely to exit. With KHC there may also be a handshake deal with 3g that he's not gonna bail and leave them in the lurch. I don't buy the liquidity argument as much. They have moved out of large stakes they've had in the past. Including Kraft. So it's not like they don't have the ability.

Must have been some elephant if he stopped buying while sitting on 100+ billion in cash.

That's precisely correct. It's the IBM strategy. IBM's been doing it for yeeeears across all their products. It will make a good chunk of change. But in the end it is a loosing strategy. Look at where IBM is today compared to say Microsoft (who has been feasting at Oracles's DB trough). Since you've brought up office suites, when I was buying Microsoft back in 2011 I noticed that IBM still had close to a 10% market share is office suites with Lotus. So it was still milking it. But when one thought office suite, no one thought IBM or Lotus.

It's been happening for a while now. Look at Oracle's DB sales, esp unit sales. They suck. Oracle's basically a dinosaur in the DB space. All they do now is try to monetize the hell out of their installed base. That's why I was shocked when I saw Oracle pop up on BRK's 13f. Glad it went away.