EricSchleien

Think it's worth going to. I've spent quite a bit of time around management, and have also gotten to know some of their employees as well. I sold most of my position a few years ago but overall their product is very good. My dog, Peanut is covered under Trupanion. I'll probably be at the Q&A again this year. There's a few shorts that have done covered the company quite extensively on Twitter, I'd encourage you to read their work as well in case you wanted to ask some questions about some of those points at the meeting. Happy to chat more in person if you'll be there. Best, Eric

Does anyone remember a well known net-net stock, Lazare Kaplan (LKI)? Stock was halted around 10 years ago over some missing diamonds. Seems like the stock never traded again. Any idea the mechanics behind this? Would shareholders still have some kind of security in their brokerage account?

The issue with this kind of stuff like the majority of low-level self-help out there which Americans have an addiction to, is that knowing this stuff makes literally no difference. The access to getting this stuff is not through the epistemological domain.

Haha yes. And I don't remember.

Sold out of Think Childcare tonight. 100%+ in 4 months. Bought after the company had received two prelim takeover proposals. 2020 was the year of the overbid special situations!

Yeah, he's great! I had certainly pre-judged him as a bit of a righteous asshole and he was literally anything but. Def a more open and approachable demenaor. He even thanked me for being a Berkshire shareholder. The guy truly gets partnership.

Called Charlie Munger's office once and he picked up the phone. We spent nearly an hour talking and he listened to me like what I had to share with him was the most important thing in the world. Lots of questions, lots of curiosity. He understood very complex things rather quickly. I wrote a letter to Warren Buffett and he shared with me about his terrible Texas Holdem Poker skills in his letter back to me. At one annual meeting - I met Bill Gates at a bar. I asked him if he was into sports and he goes "no but my friend owns the Mariners" (there was a Mariners / Twins game in the background). Then I asked him if he owned an iPod. He goes, "no I have a Zune"" LOL!

Sold some more GME 5 and 5.5 Puts

My Account for 2020 +56.68% TWR +66.12% MWR Biggest Winners: Trupanion Liberated Syndication Game Account Network Bragg Gaming Facebook Amazon Conic Metals AerCap SandRidge Mississippian Trust I Manning & Napier Support.com Affymax Myrexis TSR Yowie Wilson Learning Worldwide Clean Seas Tuna Brookfield Property CDR NTT System SA Alaska Communications Think Childcare Link Administration Holdings St. Joe Corp Griffin Industrial Hingham Institution for Savings

Happy New Year CoBF fam Wishing you all creating an amazing 2021. Here to support you all however I can - do not ever hesitate to make any huge requests of me, ever - no matter how unreasonable they may appear. Warmly, Eric

I'm really confused. I thought your "tribal leadership" coaching was transformational and works really quickly. Why don't you just tribally transform them in to a high achieving organization? Wouldn't that be faster and easier? Especially for someone with a lot of coaching experience and little real estate experience? I would be more than happy to put you in touch with Glen Esnard who started the Private Client Group at CBRE who built it from scratch and took it to $100 million in revenue from 0 in 4 years while the rest of the company was in decline. He also was the former head of Colliers International in North America and pretty reputable in the world of commercial real estate. So he's worked with many brokers on just this. I have also attached a case study I wrote up on the CBRE culture story which delves a bit deeper into this. https://www.proxyactivism.com/articles/cb-richard-ellis-amp-tribal-leadership-a-case-study?fbclid=IwAR3eHbgxwiFakZV3uw5_X346S-Wzv8VZg0nmPThPdeLZgSlwupBUEqGuwjE For more general understanding of how this kind of stuff works and how you can't "use" it on someone, I'd recommend three books: 1) Three Laws of Performance by Steve Zaffron 2) Tribal Leadership by John King (full disclosure, John is one of my partners so I am biased because I love that man like he's my own grandfather) 3) Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block Best, Eric

Read The Footnotes - I would assert you probably look at thousands of different things every year. Some of them will intuitively stand out to you and you'll later regret not buying them due to the run up in price. There will be others that also seem interesting and in hindsight if you had bought, it would have led to a lousy return over time. So statistically, there should always be ideas you had that you "sucked your thumb" on and later regret it. The way I've dealt with that for myself, is that is just an inevitable part of the game. If I look at enough stuff, there will always be things I wish I bought in hindsight. At the same time, there are stocks I have bought and I think to myself, "Yeah I'm very glad I bought that." So I'm not sure if the problem is anything actually there to fix. If you look at lots of stuff, it WILL happen. I'd just be with the fact that it comes with the territory of looking at lots of companies. I've done it plenty of times and will continue to do it over the next few decades as an investor. In fact, I'd say if you don't have the experience of ever sucking your thumb, you've probably stopped looking at a large amount of securities every year. That can also be fine. Perhaps just index or buy stock in Berkshire or a basket of a few world class companies that you believe will outperform, even slightly, over the next few decades and then just buy stock automatically without thinking about it. You'll avoid the experience of "thumb sucking" by not looking at other investments and you'll probably perform investment wise quite well.

What type of Real Estate are you "doing" ? GFP - We're looking at a everything from single family homes to large buildings with one big tenant and everything in between. My call yesterday was with a broker in Mexico looking at some properties out there. If the cap rates are there, we are interested. And to answer the other person's question about Tribal Leadership, I can't tell if that's a genuine question or if you're simply trying to nit pick to be a jerk. However, like any kind of transformational body of work, you can't "use" it on someone. It's an inquiry. So there's nothing to "use" on people otherwise it would just degrade into a management technique or tactic. Yesterday's insight becomes tomorrow dogma. And my job when interacting with brokers is not to train and develop them or coach them. It took about 8 years of training to acquire that skill, and it was pretty brutal work. However, one thing I am very clear about is that it's a very voluntary conversation. It's an invitation to engage in that dialogue, not a demand nor even a request. One has to have ears to hear and to engage in a conversation at that level, which is not most people. Nothing wrong with that - it's just not for most people. And there's no amount of convincing, persuading, or showing people data, that will "get" people to change their mind. Then once they are in the conversation, I can't make anyone do the work and at this point in my life, I'm really only interested in working with smart people. Sure, could I in theory spend hundreds of hours building a relationship with one of these brokers who I'm not too pleased with, start sharing them ideas and asking insightful questions, and then perhaps in 6 months to a year they'll want me to spend a few full days with them. Sure. However, that's a lot of time invested for one person, and would not have the bandwidth for that. Rather just focus on people who are already interested in that discipline. It's no different than trying to talk to a day-trader about value investing. Their eyes may just glaze over at first no matter what you say to them :) Anyway, I am happy to chat offline or there are plenty of very smart people who do this work around the world who I could put you in touch with. However, I do invite everyone to keep the topic of the thread to my question about brokers and not get off topic.

This is really great, TY!

Hi All, So last week I was doing a one on one training with the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and he must have brought up Charlie Munger at least 5 different times over the course of the 10 hours I spent working with him. Then two days later, I am doing some work with a group of protesters from Beirut and they also bring up Charlie Munger. So for whatever reason Charlie Munger is in my space and I'm rollin' with it! On Saturday I am again doing some work with protesters in Lebanon and on Sunday I am leading an all day leadership program for about 2,000 people both in Beirut and in the Middle East. Some of these people are pretty powerful world leaders that I am working with and up to some extraordinary things. Unfortunately, I have pretty strict confidentiality agreements otherwise I'd be raving madly about some of the amazing things these human beings are up to in the world. A lot of them really admire Charlie Munger interestingly enough, and, am looking for any good speeches/lectures from Charlie that you'd recommend someone already pretty sophisticated in the world of business and also leadership/making a difference to listen to. I am most likely going to use a few clips or passages to support the training if I deem it necessary to go there this weekend. There is no rush - I lead programs around the world all the time, it's just another thing in my arsenal to use. However, what I really do admire about Charlie is his ability to synthesize principles from different fields and cross polinate them. One of my partners John does that with grace and ease and it's truly an incredible learning experience to be in a conversation for 4-5 hours at a time with someone operating from that space. However, I would love to hear what your favorite Charlie Speeches or Lectures are. Would make a different for me and will spend the day tomorrow (as well as next week) reading through what you guys recommend. Thank you all in advanced for your contributions, it make a huge difference for me. Warmly, Eric