Uccmal

I would say Abitibi holds all the cards at the moment. Since they announced the proposed transaction I am betting they have been buying stock hand over fist as well. I think that's legal as long as they dont low ball the offer going forward. I bet that ABH holds the majority of shares now, or within a coupke of weeks if you count FFH and Pabrai's holdings as well. Management is out. Its too late to do anything. No one else is going to want this. Abitibi is the supplier of wood chips to FBk at the PQ mills. That will present excellemt synergies for ABH. The fact that no other pulp companies had any change in stock price indicates to me that there is minimal interest out there at the moment. Lots of companies could afford to beat this offer including Merc, cfx, tembec...no one is interested. I no longer have any shares. I sold the very last yesterday and bought some JPM with the proceeds. Whevener I am tempted by turnarounds at commodity based companies I am going to red flag it after this experience. I am introducing into my checklist process the necessity to be paying a dividend now, not at some future date, for commodity based enterprises. I jave had a similar experience with PD which has decided to increase their fleet rather than pay out to shareholders. I have similarly dumped it completely, and am apparently not the only one - the stock is moribund.

ballinvarosig, Sorry, wasn't meant to be sarcastic. As per being fully invested, I am. Ffh is not the hedge that cash is. It may just be better, but I dont know that, obviously. The Spy hedges I have added as I have increased my 2014 Leap positions and they are by no means 100%. There are awesome values out there during this latest crisis. To put things in context, in the summer od 2007 through to early 2008, many of us on thie predecessor board couldn't find anything decent that had value. I, for one, had moved way down the quality curve with garbage like torstar, and sfk pulp, and liquidation world littering my portfolio. Now, we have high quality large caps trading at 5-8 times earnings. It wont likely ever get better than this. I mean, there are US companies with moats pulling in billions per year in earnings on generational sales.

I got news for you. We are in the next crisis. This is what its all about. I am not suggesting anyone be fully Invested but to use the macro as your guide is madness. I am fully invested and have been for 15 years straight. There are times like the summer of 2007 when i downside protect with Spy puts. I have a few Well out of the money Spy puts right now that I bought recently on up days like yesterday. To complete the hedge I hold around 40% ffh. If there is a great EU unravel in the days or weeks ahead I will sell the puts and watch FFH go up, while my Us financials tank, and I buy more of them. Madness to buy jpm, wfc, bby, ssw, even ffh at multi-generation lows, indeed.

I am with you mostly, although I trade 15% or so into the rallies, and buy back in on the dips.

Augustabound, Weredating ourselves a little. When I had to do Christmas shopping as a teen I would do a circuit of Eatons, Robinsons, woolworths, and Kresge, all around King and James area.

Now, now, dont feed the trolls please :P Did your 4s run out of juice, just when you needed it? Me and my Ipad2 have been inseparable for weeks now. So far I have used it as a GPS, e-mail, e-reader, Video player for my daughter, skyping a pal in Manilla, checking and trading stocks, typing this, stargazing in real time, reading dozens of financial rpts... But Aapl is still too high a price for me. Re: brands - those in Canada might recall Kresge's - k-mart, eatons, robinsons, sam the record man.

I just picked up some cfx this morning. Cheap, cheap, cheap Cardboard: jpm,bac,wfc in that order....perhaps. Dont know c enough to rank it.

There is really no way to compare fbk to ABH. This is just a tiny bolt on for ABH. Ffh and Pabrai must have been looking for an exit.

Its a real crappy deal for fibrek shareholders. I still hold 6000 shares in my wifes account. If i held at my peak levels up toward 100k shares I would be mighty pissed. You all should get on the message boards and convince other shareholdedrs to hold out for way more than this.

I have a USD account with TDWaterhouse. I buy nearly all my US stocks in this account. There is no conversion involved until the day sometime in the distant future when I close the accounts. They make up a slight majority of my total. The canadian positions being mostly FFH, and a few 3-5 percenters. There have been much better deals in the US in the last couple of years. I dont really worry about currency much. I figure it will mostly work itself out over time. I think there is sort of a balance now. I have noticed that every "shock" results in a flight to safety and it isn't the CDN dollar that goes up. The US dollar rises compared to everything else. As the shock wears off the US dollar backs off, US treasury yields rise, and the CDN dollar goes up. What happens in Canada has little relevance to the relative value of our currency to the USD. What is beneficial to me is the rise of the US/CDN currency to the €\£. We will be spending a couple of weeks in GB this coming spring.

I have trouble with the logic as well. It only applies if Apple can continue to outdo everyone else with tech, quality, and marketing. Relying on device sales wont last forever hence the Icloud.

Maybe so Cardboard. I dont think lifecos are going out of business. However, I think they have further to fall before I become interested again. I need a black box premium for these companies. They are far harder to get a grasp on than any bank due to the extremely long tail liabilities.

Article about Sunlife: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-ideas/streetwise/sun-life-to-cut-dividend/article2251861/ It is also looking like the Bank of Canada may slash short term rates soon as well. Pure speculation, not mine.

That's rich Biaggio... You might have done a little better with IGM itself. Lol. I might add to my above comments that the worlds central bankers are moving things along, despite the politicians. Especially those in the States. One Bernanke, or Henry Paulson, seems to get more done then a room full of Reps and Dems.

I am not inherently bullish by any means but I have a good grasp of market behaviour. I think it is instructive for me at least to review the comments of Buffett, Baruch, Livermore, and others from time to time. When there is blood in the streets etc, etc, etc. I too have been creamed this year - guessing about 30% drop right now and headed for my first down year in about 8. Nearly all my losses are related to Leaps at the moment so they can rebound quickly. I get tired by the constant macro investment topics on the board to the extent I dont much read them anymore. It seems people are looking for the perfect value investment. Well, they dont exist. To paraphrase Francis Chou: sometimes we go into some real stinky places to find our investments. Francis has a significant position in BAC which he has held for 1.5 years via warrants. Do you think he fully understands BACs derivatives, EU exposures, etc. Unless he is psychic I truly doubt it. For one thing, not all info is available to the public. When your value investing one needs to accept that there are a certain amount of things we dont know and will never know. What we know about BAC is that it has a huge cash generating franchise, one of the two or three top investment banks in the world, a lot of measurable legal and mortgage liability, and is interlinked throughout the world with derivatives and CDs. Not an ideal situation, I will agree. But that is the nature of value investing. It is also insanely cheap. The same applies to a lesser degree to Jpm, and wfc. Best buy generates nearly 1 b per year in FREE cash flow. Yet its stock has been pummeled. The perception is that their stores are too big, their earnings aren't sustainable, there is a depression coming, blah,blah,blah. The stock is dirt cheap and cash is still pouring in.

Yes, and I think this is saying after Lehman and 2009 TARP preferred/equity infusions, no bondholder in JPM, C, BAC, WFC is ever going to have to take a haircut. Equity on the other hand... Well, fwiw, I think the equity markets are wrong about wfc, jpm, and BAC now. Someone mentioned lawsuits earlier. I think you will find that nearly all large public companies continuously have lawsuits against them. To a point it is part of business and modern complexity. I mean Apple and Samsung are suing one another constantly, and Samsung is a major supplier to Apple. Now, if that isn't sick, I don't know what is. The size of lawsuits against BAC may seem greater but they have the ability to drag them out and mitigate them in various ways. Also, many of them were filed this fall, just at the end of the statute of limitations for the mortgage claims.

Not a good investment. But then no one can predict interest rates?

The fixed income market is pricing in a minor risk premium with BAC. Tells a very different store then the equity markets.

Viking, alot of topics in one thread :P? Re: Canadian banks - having dealt with TD to get a Heloc for renovations just over a year ago, I can attest to the strictness of their review process. Maxed me at 80% with the mortgage by a third party added on. Conservatively estimated the home value, pre reno. Wanted to see our pay stubs going back at least a month. I don't think they would suffer more than a modicum of damage from any housing downturn. The mortgage companies were the ones writing underwater mortgages three years ago, such as Xceed, and already got crushed. Plus, excepting the west, we have been in mild recession already for over 2 years. WFC and JPM are relatively cheaper. Not a bad bet for an RRSP. Power financial/power Corp-very well managed - main asset is GWO which is expanding at a measured clip. I don't know enough about GWO to comment directly on it's bond or equip exposure but on the surface it seems less than MFC or SLF. I recently sold power financial out of my margin accounts, still have some in RRSPs. Other large lifecos. The low interest rates are bad news for them. I would wait for MFC and SLF to settle. Should give you a couple of years to review their balance sheets and follow their earnings. All in all, I figure that WFC or JPM offer similar but much better deals than the Canadian Banks or Lifecos.

Ragnar, I don't think that is what is happening here. If you got a full response from all board members the numbers would be quite different. Those not interested in BAC probably aren't responding. Also, the market is against us and they make up the vast majority. I don't think I personally am overly affected by the boards opinion. I have never held Lvlt, SD, and could never understand the appeal of either. Some of my best ideas come fro here, some come from elsewhere. Some come as a result of grilling members here on why they might hold something so trashy: I.e. I have been converted. I also recognize that members will generally sell prior to announcing their selling much like FFH dumping SD, without telling other shareholders. I think the board recognizes in BAC a rare opportunity where a company has mostly turned and the stock is not reflecting it yet.

It has been a very trying year. Ytd, I have only a handful of stocks that are up at all: ffh, bby... And a couple of minor positions. Macro events are dictating everything right now, putting the voting machine into full swing. That, ironically includes FFH which is up mostly due to it's downside protection. I can run through the portfolio and see no fundamental reason why anything should be down, except perhaps rim. I am heavy on financials but not extremely concentrated. Names: ssw, BAC, jpm, wfc, rbs preferreds, bby, ylo preferreds (up), mtl, rim, ge, cfx. When the macro shifts there will be rocket fuel under this. On the plus side I have alot of tax losses already harvested which I can push back or use forward.

I think it already has. Bac at all time lows. Nowhere to go but up, in theory at least.

What's new under the sun? Observationally, very few managers do buybacks well. One current example of a good buybacks is Bestbuy. Generally though I think managers have an inflated sense of their own abilities. This made me think of Potash Corp. The insiders were all buying stock right at the commodities peak. The stock price dropped shortly after and has not recovered for 3 years. Alot of companies report buybacks in their headline but don't report share dilution with the same vigor. It ends up netting out to zero change in the end. Alot of BS.

I think Moynihan said as much during the let conferece call, or during the BB interview. Since he likely talks to his regulators frequently I am certain he is going to keep saying no dividend until he hears otherwise. I polled number one even though I am not really shocked and hold enough BAC today. I added some Jpm recently - 2014 leaps. WFC, JPM, BAC are all equally cheap relative to their risks.

Thanks dorsia1, That made more sense than about 5 other def'ns I read.