Uccmal

You know whats really sick about this. We all know what a Tractor Beam looks like. Truly, where else except a Star Trek convention would everyone know what that looked like. A bunch of Nerd hosers, eh.

I figure the trigger that raises prices will come from the mid-east as usual. The Saudi's talk tough but they have a huge populace that needs to be placated. The same goes for the other mideast players. The Russians are a different bird. People there will suffer, for mother Russia, as they always do.

Even if alternatives rise rapidly the cost is still forced to be above a certain level. Price swings in O&G are pretty normal and the cycle is tight, unlike other commodities. Pennwest has indicated they will shut in supply if it comes to that. I haven't followed other companies but I am guessing they will do the same. The effects will be felt first at highly levered juniors. They just go out of business. They cant drill just to keep the lights on. Pennwest, Suncor, Exxon, and others have more leeway. Shut the oil in, lay people off, and sit tight. The price will rise in months. If you have ever seen a drilling operation you begin to appreciate the huge capital costs involved in most areas. There is only so much you can cut with technological advancement. You still need reams of super strong pipe, with robot controls inside to direct it horizontally. And you still need highly trained technicians working the rigs. Aside from The mid-east where you drill a few hundreds of feet into reservoirs straight down, everywhere else is much more expensive and much less accessible. 5000 feet of hose, pumping from a 2000 foot deep well in the Ocean cannot become much cheaper no matter how much technology advances. Its funny. I was arguing the opposite end of this when oil was really high in the mid 2000s; on this board. Everyone was on about peak oil and I made some comment to the effect that the entire planet had loads of untapped oil underneath it. After all, the whole planet was covered by vegetation for hundreds of millions of years. You just need the right technology to get at it.

Dude is the anti-Buffett. Holy sociopathic, Batman.

You might appreciate this: cheers

Pennwest also has insider buying, reported yesterday. CEO and Chairman, and others. Rick George added 30000 shares - 140,000 dollars - to add to his 7 million spent so far.

Sure has been. Kind of like shoving a hot poker up my **s! Pwe/pwt is worth 30% of its alleged BV. Of course if oil prices stay low the book value will shrink to match the stock price eventually.

Well its only been a few days. Dont worry, Sanj. is like Santa Clause or God http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/investment-ideas/pdh-premier-diagnostic-health-services/msg194885/#msg194885

I am glad your "dopping" out of high school worked, and that you had the " nessecary"drive, and "apitutde " . Sorry couldn't resist. We will just assume these are typos. :-) I agree with taking your own path, when you have one. I didn't. Hindsight is 20/20 though. I realize I could have gotten a job anywhere, learned everything I could have, rinsed, repeated, and done very well in the end. I was raised and fixated on having an education. My son is 10 and has realized that most of his learning isn't happening at school.

A decade or so ago there were volumes of articles expounding on the tectonic shift of jobs and entire industries being outsourced to emerging economies such as India, China, etc. Many of the changes indicated therein have come to pass, but the magnitude and impact of the “shift” has been more muted than was spoken of back then. Should the cost of solar power, as indicated in this article, achieve price parity with conventional electricity (and, subsequently, become more cost effective than conventional electricity) then the ramifications would look to be immensely more far reaching than the outsourcing trends noted a decade-plus ago. Major industries will shrink and others will grow. The influence on the world geo-political stage will be massive…a true game-changer. -Crip I concur. Its good to see you here again Crip. The price parity argument is nuts. The externalities of fossil fuel development and use are never taken into account whereas all the costs involved in solar are included. Take this example. A small city in Africa can only be reached by dirt roads, there is no pipeline, no decent fuel tanks, no pumping infrastructure, no transmission wires, and the oil/gas need to be imported. Whats cheaper in that situation? In the developed world we paid for the infrastructure over 3 generations for O&G. I have also read that it takes about a generation for a new energy technology to upset the old paradigm. Solar in PV, and concentrated mirror form has been around since I was kid. We are on the cusp of the point where it will become a much more significant power source very rapidly. That is not to say that other energy sources ever disappear. Wood still exists, as does coal. They just get overtaken by the newer source. Even the oil states are adding solar capacity. What would really work is for government to get out of the way and stop subsidizing the coal, and O&G industries. A good first start would be removing the tax benefits given to E&P companies, and charging coal companies the real cost of use of the infrastructure provided by society.

thanks for posting all of these links! Are you betting on another cold winter? cheers Zorro Obviously, betting on the weather is a mugs game but a cold winter isn't looking promising: http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.html

You are obviously short the stock and don't get what's happening here. Ah shiite, found me out...

Interesting. Hope you no longer work there! The Bay is in competition with Sears for bad service - when I mean bad service I mean lack of cash registers, and lineups for 10 minutes once you find one. I dont even care about floor service. From an investor perspective these companies appear not to want cash as oppose to WMT, or HD.

True Sears Canada stories, after Eddie took over: Trying to buy a bassinet for my newborn daughter - We stood by the floor model, while the employee was looking in the back. She came back and told us they had none in stock. She didn't offer us the floor model at a discount preferring instead to keep it to show others what they could buy if it was in stock - 5 years ago. Going to Sears To try and buy Jeans. Lots of Jeans but no fitting rooms. Then trying to find an open cash. I nearly got fed up enough to walk out with the product in hand, to get some attention. I figure if anyone noticed I would be justified in saying I tried to pay, but no one was around. Sears furniture store - massive anti-customer gift card fiasco. It seems gift cards I had forgot they were gift cards. This was the last time I will ever set foot in a Sears. I had unused points in my account, spent a half hour on the phone getting them reactivated. I was trying to buy a mattress. The last straw was being told I had to buy something small to reactivate my account before I coukd buy the mattress - went to sleep Country instead. The Sears employees tried handling this themselves, while I watched the manager dodge into a back room, and never reappear. No idea Eddie strikes again.

Some things need to be experienced. I'd recommend a trip to a local Kmart followed by a trip to a local Sears. This way the Kmart will make the Sears look good, and when you see how bad the place is the fog will be lifted from your eyes and this thread will make sense. I was trying to be funny. I'll show myself out as well. Yes, show yourself out. Dont bother looking for the cash, its hard to find, and pick up a couple of extra items on your way out. Eddie has taught us that he doesn't care about us, so we dont care about the inventory. In fact I might take home some jeans myself when I leave early today.

Bell and Rogers Sleep Country (mattresses) and everyone else - unfortunately its privately held Canadian banks - not a duopoly but nearly a monopoly. Tim Hortons and everyone else

I hope you were careful. You could have been attacked by someone impersonating a Sears employee (or perhaps a real employee) and no one would have found you for days, maybe never even. I say son thats more dangerous than a Himalayan blizzard.

That clip was totally unrealistic. I mean it showed shoppers at the Sears. No way that happens in real life. Believe it or not, Sears is still an actual company. They have locations and employees (and presumably) some customers. I just don't know what they are going to do when their customer base (over 70, no internet access, still has a rotary dial land line phone with a 25 ft cord and answering machine with a tape as the only way to get in touch with them, and sometimes uses their phones to order from catalogs) dies off? You've seen these people. They are the women with white hair that are always in the grocery store line in front of you trying to pay with a check then take 25 minutes to back out of their parking space in the parking lot. They own K-Mart too, but I think it has been about 10-12 years since I've seen an actual K-Mart store, so I'm not sure if those still exist. You meant the women with blue hair, I think. I saw one lurking about the Nordstrom parking lot, that just opened in the old Sears location. She looked confused.

Someone still has too make the decision. I am fine with everyone else out there letting their software think for them and in many cases trade for them. Everyone is looking for the tech edge. Very few work the fringes and actually ignore the flow. Perversely, this has made the markets strangely more inefficient. Mispricings happen very rapidly. Every time this topic comes up I think of the 'Whale Incident'. This was front page business news. No one needed software to see an awesome buying opportunity. As Oddball says we are bombarded by information. The real skills lie elsewhere. The same old same old... Buffett makes a bucket of money based on his ability to shut the flow of info and quietly make decisions. Sorry JAllen, I am not being very helpful. Thats what you get for allowing a non-tech, non-engineer, non Business degree dude freely post here.....

Be relied upon by other people, and stay out of my way. I feel the same way about technical analysis. As long as I know that other people are using it I gain an inherent advantage by using my temperament.

Sears Stores repurposed as Nursing homes: Complete with that nostalgic feeling.

I respectfully disagree. I mention ten years, not 200 or something. Some of the best investors have held onto investments for close to and occasionally ten years, especially Buffett. Furthermore, and as an aside---feel free to mention some of the qualities that you would look for in a business that you would consider holding for that time frame. David All facetiousness aside. Every example in Buffett's arsenal can only be seen in hindsight. Buffett searches for companies that he can hold for a long time - he never defines the time frame. When the economics change, such as WP, he gets out. He needs markets to sell into. The world is no longer so simple as it was, if it ever was. All companies require management that is competent and capable now. I would think that Philip Morris has the safest moat of all. And look at what is going on there. While they are busy spending hundreds of millions on safer cigarettes part of their lunch is being eaten by upstarts in electronics. Every example that Gio posted above is key man (men) dependent. We have seen over and over that key man is not a reliable premise. Gio is sensible because he has diversified his key men. Look at all the key men we have seen leave or get ousted: Bill Gross, El Erian, Hank Greenberg, Robert Gozuieta, come to mind quickly. With due respect to Prem Watsa, What if he is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, or dementia next week after the markets closed today. (Think that is not possible: Malcolm Young (ACDC) is in a Nursing home near Sydney). In one month there is an earthquake in NYC, and California, and there is a Tsunami that hits the US East Coast. FFh is toast, as is would be MKL, LRE, GLRE, if they lost their key man. The key man in each of these companies is the one with the relationships and skills to raise capital when all the odds are against them. FFH survived in 2005 because Prem had a relationship with The Markels, and Peter Cundill. This is always fodder for a good argument but I for one dont think Berkshire survives Buffett intact, certainly not ten years. Creative destruction is happening at an ever greater pace. 10 years is far too long to commit in the face of this onslaught. My longest holding right now is Seaspan - but it has only been held in hindsight. Basically I have not sold because the story keeps getting better.

No offence, but the premise is ridiculous. Its a little like getting a terminal illness, and having your body put into cryogenic hibernation until a cure is found. You have to trust that a cure will be found, ; that other diseases wont evolve in the meantime that no one thinks to inoculate you from; that your provider pays the power bill; that your freezer company stays in business; that they remember to revive you; that the hill under which you are frozen doesn't get blown up, confiscated, or otherwise taken over; that the software that manages your freeze doesn't get hacked or otherwise glitch up. In this premise you are trying to predict the future which cannot be done, as we all know. Guns, ammo, people I trust, and our own compound, with solar panels, windmills, and heat pumps for power. I thought of a stream for hydro but that can be easily diverted.

Thanks all. I definitely understand it so much better. "Cue smiley face with eyes rolling" Dont actually put the smiley face in because Kraven will remind me of my smiley face quota.

Can someone explain to me the politics of the federal reserve. Bullard comes out today and suggests QE should/could be continued. The markets stop falling, and are maybe rallying. So, Do Bullard's statements mean that the fed is in agreement on this possibility? Is he going counter to Yellen's statements, or is this just a pre agreed upon something or other between him and the others. Yellen"okay James, I will talk about pushing off rate increases but stopping QE. In case that doesn't work, you say sometime next week like 'we could continue with the bond buying'" Bullard "Sounds good, it worked last year before Ben stepped down." Obviously I am baffle gabbed by Orwellian doublespeak.