rb

I sure as hell am not short anything. I have no idea where this thing goes. I'm just sitting back and enjoying the show. The prices are very weird and I don't know whether anyone knows what they're doing. I bought CNQ when it was at 30 and oil was at 90 and everyone was saying that it was a bad idea. Sold that at 45 when I couldn't see what the point was anymore. Now oil is close to 40 (WCS oil is less than that) and CNQ is at 33. And a lot of people are saying it may be a good time to buy in. What up with that?

RR is totally not obvious to me. ;) well you do have to squint a bit

I'm curious, may I ask why you've sold out of MSFT? I've pared back as well over the past couple of years based on valuation. By why sell out if you don't need cash? Just valuation or do you have something about the business you don't like?

Well RR is a pretty obvious buy. I'm not sure that WMT is that obvious but I think it's on the cheaper side right now. I'm not so keen on FFH. But yes BRK is somewhere around reasonably priced. It's a bit trickier for me to buy more cause it's already above 10% of the portfolio. But what's so wrong about buying a company like BRK around a reasonable valuation? Especially in an environment like this when you have many iffy companies trading at lofty multiples. Now, over 5 years maybe it will outperform an index or maybe not. If it doesn't I don't think it will be a terrible underperformance. One thing I'm pretty sure of is that it'll make a lot of money over the next 5 years, it'll be worth more after 5 years and it'll definitely outperform cash. Oh, and I think one will sleep pretty good owning BRK over the next 5 years. I think that's probably worth something too.

Different people here will have different views on the subject. I'll just give you mine. Yes, things go better with the clients when I'm making money. And yes, I don't like loosing money. But it doesn't really stress me out. I think I have a pretty good approach and framework to investing and I stick to it no matter what the market does. What I do when I have names that are going down is go over my thesis again carefully to make sure that I haven't made a mistake. If I didn't I stick with it or buy more. If I made a mistake I sell. To address another one of your points, I think it's stupid to change what you're doing in relation to what the market is doing. Such as get more aggressive because the market is down in order to catch up. If it was smart to be more aggressive then you would have done it all along. Then when you do stupid things you loose more money and you're worse off. If you loose money not because of the market but because you made a mistake it is my opinion that the best thing to do is be upfront with the clients and tell them you've cocked up on that one. Mistakes will happen and they're ok, just try not to make them too often. What stresses me out are times like these, when there's not much to buy out there and I have a high cash position. I know it may be the right thing to do, but these people hired me to invest money for them not to hold cash. So I feel like I'm failing at my job. This is especially bad with new clients with whom I don't have a long relationship and also don't have legacy positions and thus carry a higher cash %. I always picture myself getting fired at our next meeting. That doesn't really happen (well not much) but it still stresses me out.

Sorry I misunderstood your point. I though you meant if one of the pipe's customers goes bust. Yes, if you can't get people to commit to ship through the pipe. Then no build.

In the midstream world, proposed projects are not constructed without firm commitments. Those firm commitments, in almost every case, take the form of take-or-pay contracts that last 15-20 years. So the comments that volumes may not materialize is quite irrelevant. And yes, I realize that ETP's yield is almot 9%...I specifically stated that in my earlier post. And if those firm commitments do not materialize? They replace them. Since pipe is the cheapest way of transporting oil. The only way that the pipe does not make money is if the end market stops consuming oil or if the producing area stops producing.

Stuff like that is what keeps me from buying FFH. It's not really cheaper than BRK and BRK has better insurance companies imo and doesn't do blunders like that. So I always end up buying BRK instead of FFH. The only thing I see with FFH is that it's much smaller and maybe has a longer runway.

The selling continues today... but all the names still look pretty expensive with the exception of Viacom seems like the weakest one.

Hello President Palin

Is there anybody who's a linguist with a flare for value investing around here? I think he or she may be able to help.

So out of all of that all you got is that your ideas are still correct and nothing else matters. No matter what actually happened. No matter what actually the people that designed these systems actually intended and how they intended for them to work. And you have no other ideas about how to improve our current societies besides that you should pay lower taxes. I rest my case.

Bring back Ballmer! I second that!

You are splitting hairs here in so many ways, I don't even know where to start. But in devotion to this fine board I'm going to give it one last shot. Not that I have any great expectations about it. First of all, as other people here have mentioned, you haven't the faintest idea of what communism is or was. Just because you want to make your own definitions of it or pull some root words about it doesn't make it true. There is no communist continuum. It was an absolute thing. All the productive assets were owned by the public. There was no place that was more "communistic" than another. They were either communist or they were not. Nothing in between. Another thing you get wrong is that in a "communistic" society the taxes collected or the profits of capital were not divided equally by any measure. Your salary depended on the job you did and how good you were at it. You would not get a pro rata share just like everyone else. A teacher made significantly more than a shop floor labourer, etc. There were also very strong personal property laws under communism. But just for personal use. So you could own your house and you had probably better protections for that than even in the US. But you could not own three houses. There were also savings accounts on which you could get interest - which very "uncommunistically" was tax free. There was also no inheritance tax and you could leave as inheritance as much as you wanted. :o The idealism behind the whole system was to eliminate the capital owning class basically monopolistic companies that subjugated workers through asymmetrical powers of negotiation. In essence implementing something along the lines of EMT or perfect competition. You cannot earn excess return on capital. Now nobody can tell exactly why communism didn't work, but there are some leading theories. One is that communism was designed for an industrialized society (namely England and Germany) but was implemented in mainly agrarian societies: Russia, China, and Cuba. To the other places it was mostly exported. Another one is that by eliminating all the forces of the market it leads to bad capital allocation hurting the economies through the supply side. Another one, and this is the really nasty one, is that communism lends itself to dictatorships whom want to stay in power perpetually and have committed horrendous atrocities towards that end. My feeling is that the failure of the system is really a mixture of those three. You will notice that when I speak about these things I actually provide facts, not just pull a root word out of a dictionary to justify I point of view. When you compare California to communism you denigrate everyone who has suffered under the atrocities committed by those regimes. If you want to have a constructive conversation about these things you could go through the details of history and form a more informed opinion beyond the dictionary. Now over time it was determined that unbridled capitalism doesn't work (that's you have the anti-trust act) and that communism doesn't work. The world has come up with another form called the social democracy (that is a spectrum) which is a combination between unbridled capitalism and communism delivered through progressive taxation. That is the most successful social and economic system we have developed to date and all of the developed economies are social democracies, including the US though they lately are at the lower end of the spectrum. Also, as a P.S. throwing in California and their taxes without much behind it is not much to say about anything. We could compare California and Kansas which are at opposite ends. Yes California has higher taxes and Kansas believes in basically no taxes, or wish they had them or whatever. One cannot really move from California to Kansas because one don't like California's tax rate because one basically cannot find the job one had in California in Kansas. And for some weird reason the places where one can practice one's California job have progressive taxation systems with high top tax rates. Hmm... Just food for though

What's your point?

No it's not. Inglation is increase in the money supply. Change is prices is a poor ptoxy for that at best (and very manipulatable). Oh and to be clear I'm talking M3/M4 here, not M0. Ugh! Nevermind ::)

Well inflation is measured by the change in prices not other metrics. Btw, between beginning on 2012 and present money supply in US increased by about 20%. I thought we were talking based on facts.

So if the interest rates are kept artificially low by the central banks where is overheating economy and inflation that would occur in such a scenario?

Is it really necessary to explain to people on an investing board how savings contributes to available capital in a capitalist economy? Unless you stuff it into your mattress, your $100 in savings can have a multiplier effect that benefits the world far more than the poor person's $100 spent on groceries. Like most socialists you suffer from shallow 1st order thinking. Well I identify myself as a right wing conservative but that doesn't mean I can't think on my own. Other people can call me what they want I guess. It does seem that I have to explain how savings works in an economy since some people do not understand. See when you have regressive taxation that leads to inequality which crimps demand. When you have a deficiency of demand then nobody needs your extra $100 in savings because they don't need the extra capital. See current interest rates.

Communism is not a continuum but a single state where all of the productive assets in the economy are publicly owned. What you're thinking of are social democracies. You know those awful places like France, Germany, and Sweden that have longer life expectancy, higher quality of life, and higher worker productivity than the US.

I agree with you 100%. Part of my hesitation of buying DIS was that ESPN was such a large part of the business and I don't see it as such high quality as other parts of Disney. I am pretty sure 50 years from now a parent will buy a copy of snow white for his kid. It'll cost Disney basically nothing for that print. ESPN's business is not as visible in the future and is so expensive already. Lots of stuff can happen, sports teams taking back more money, they can run out of pricing power, new media doing something we can't even imagine. So yea, ESPN in DIS is a little scary.

I read up on the thread and I think it got a bit sidetracked. It started up on how the tax code should be reformed and it ended up in a discussion on how wealthier people are persecuted by the inheritance tax. The way I see public taxation is that first society has a discussion on what services they want the government to provide: emergency services, public infrastructure, military, education, healthcare, etc. Then you sum up these services and they cost X and you have to collect more or less X in taxes. Then the decision comes how to divvy up the X amongst the people. One thing to keep in mind is that the government is elected by all people and (ideally) its job is to look after the wellbeing of all people. Its job is not to protect the wealth of a select few. Throw in a couple of extra things like in most developed societies you have certain social norms and values - such as we don't let people die on the streets because they are poor and what you get is progressive taxation. I personally agree a lot with progressive taxation despite the fact that I'm the top tax rate. Putting aside my personal political views I also like it because I think it makes good economic sense. I'll get to that in a bit. I also saw there's quite a bit of preference for flat taxes of VATs. Those are highly regressive. The VAT is particularly bad because it's not only regressive but it also discourages consumption. So lower consumption => lower production -> lower sales, lower profits, unemployment, not good. So how is a progressive tax system good for the economy or wealth. Well lets take me. I have everything I need. I buy certain things and my income is higher than my expenses by a significant margin. If you give me $100 I will not put it in the economy. I'll just save it. I don't even get gifts because there's nothing that I need. Now if you take someone that's poor and you give him or her $100 they go and spend it. That works it's way through the economy with a multiplier attached. So you get lower unemployment (which leads to lower govt expense and more revenue btw). However what you get is higher sales and profits for companies which leads to higher stock prices and higher wealth for me. The fact that it leads to more equal societies with less poverty and less crime is a nice bonus too. However the reason the US Tax code should be blown up is that it's been so contorted by special interests that the statutory tax rates don't mean anything anymore. But I think it needs to go deeper than that to a societal change. Because if you start with a brand new code the powers that be will contort it back in no time. My personal opinion is that the US citizens need to become less partisan. Too many people identify themselves as republican or democrat and stick with the heard through thick and thin. I head from conservatives a lot of talk about social Darwinism. Why shouldn't that apply to politicians. How can you expect congressmen to behave properly if they do not fear for their positions. If one of them doesn't behave, break with the heard and vote for the other guy. I have a feeling that will improve things a lot. Sorry for the essay

I think DIS is the best name out of all of them. They have a lot of incredible assets that will keep generating a lot of money for a long time. I don't think that the current price is cheap though. I wanted to buy it about 3 years ago when I thought it was really cheap but the greedy bastard in me wanted to wait to get a bit cheaper and now I kick myself for that.

Kmart's leases were bought by HBC the parent of Zellers, Walmart wasn't involved at all. I worked at Kmart at that time. It was a similar situation as Target buying Zellers leases...................then Canadian Tire and Lowes buying Target leases. My apologies. You are correct. Wal-Mart took out Woolworth when they came here. Well I guess I don't shop at K-mart after all.

Any other stores that permanently stopped sales of guns and ammunition? I need a list of stores to support. American obsession with guns is horrifying. +1 I was going to say something to the same effect but I didn't want to start a gun debate. I'm sure that there were a lot of Americans that were happy that after a tragedy like 9/11 you didn't have a whole bunch of well armed people looking to set things right on their own. Can you imagine the possibilities of what could have happened?? I hate to break it to you, but the US is already filled with a bunch of well armed people. Well I kinda still shop at K-mart. I live in Canada and K-Mart here was taken over by Wal-Mart in the 1990s. We also don't have guns and we somehow manage to do ok.