Nelson

What about Intact on the TSX (TSX:IFC)? Excellent long-term performance with consistently solid underwriting numbers.

Anybody plan to go to the annual meeting in June?

For me, investing in junk bonds is a pretty simple exercise. You buy when the spread over better bonds hits a high and sell when it hits a low. These days the spread is the lowest it's been in over a decade. Thus, I'm out. The St. Louis Fed website has a nice chart that tracks the spread for you. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAMLH0A0HYM2

Bought a little Laurentian Bank (TSX:LB) today at just under $44/share. The stock is beaten down for a couple of reasons. They had a small mortgage scandal that's pretty much dealt with. The company bought back ~$140 million in loans that had been sold to third parties. Management also did a through review of mortgage origination practices, which makes me confident the problem won't come back again in the future. Results have also been disappointing. Both revenue and earnings missed analyst targets by about 5%. The good news? The valuation is fantastic, with shares trading at less than book value and 8x earnings. A recent acquisition should help boost the bottom line. It doesn't have much exposure to Toronto or Vancouver real estate either. It could easily end up 20-30% higher if it gets valued even close to its peers that trade at 11-13x earnings. And the 5.8% to wait is the biggest dividend in the sector in Canada.

I think poking holes in an investment thesis is fair game. Accusing somebody of perpetuating a pump and dump is not cool, IMO. I also think the more appropriate spot for your concerns is the blog post's comment section, not this forum. Personally, I'm grateful for every author who takes the time to post their thoughts on a company. Sure, it's important not to miss things. I'm sure the author doesn't want to miss stuff either. But it happens. Remember that specific piece of research cost you nothing but a couple of minutes of your time. I intentionally keep my expectations low and get my socks blown off regularly from authors who do good work. This attitude allows me to easily shrug and move on when they put out the occasional dud.

We feed our cat a combination of dry food and table scraps. She loves just about every kind of meat except for stuff heavily seasoned. Not entirely sure if it's an ideal combination, but I like the idea of giving her extra protein and we think it's cute when she begs for food while we're eating.

Bryson is fantastic. He's probably my favorite author. I'd like to add One Summer, which is a collection of important historical stories that all happened in the U.S. in 1927.

The article given is from a blogger well known for stretching the truth in search for pageviews. I take everything he says with a massive grain of salt.

Why people who say they don't care about politics continue to click on topics that are pretty clearly political is beyond me. And this is coming from a guy who tries to avoid any political discussion.

I rent a small office inside a building that may be closing. A local commercial Realtor decided I needed to move into some space he had for lease (his dad owns it, FWIW). We went back and forth a little but the deal fizzled out. The reason? I told him to come see me at my existing office to discuss additional terms and he still hasn't shown up. The whole deal up to that point was exclusively done using text messages. As I said to a friend, "at least try to kiss my ass a little."

I think the old Ben Graham/Walter Schloss/Buffett Partners version of value investing is basically dead. On life support, anyway. Trying to sell the idea of buying ultra-cheap companies with very visible problems to the masses was never going to be popular, but I'm even seeing the idea of it die out even among value investors. It has evolved into a flight to quality. Everybody thinks paying a reasonable valuation for compounders is the new definition of value investing. That's certainly one way to go about it, but I'm not sure that's value investing. I consider it more just "investing."

I know at least one person who's doing this in the small town where I live on places that are only worth $250-$300k. She's a real estate agent so she saves on commissions, but if she can make money doing this at $300k then it's probably not that hard to do it at $1M+.

My favorite part about the Trump haters is how they concede he's smart enough to build up a billion dollar real estate empire, but he's dumb enough to get us all killed.

I'm curious if Premfan is referring to the many Seeking Alpha newsletters, or if there's something else out there. The newsletter business is fascinating to me. If you do it right, it's pretty much a license to print money. It's easy to scale, there are millions of potential customers, and advertising it online isn't terribly expensive. Each incremental subscriber becomes almost 100% profit (assuming the cost base is low, of course). It seems like the kind of business we all want to invest in. I know Scott can't talk much about his experiences with the newsletter business, but can he point to anything online that would give me some insight on how the business works?

Also people should keep in mind that these websites all have pages hidden somewhere called "terms of use" or "privacy policy" or whatever that pretty clearly state in legalese that none of the advice is specific for anyone and that anyone who blindly follows a Seeking Alpha article into a stock is dumb (I'm paraphrasing, of course). These pages have been proven to hold up in court. Keep in mind that for insurance guys, the solution to any problem will always be more insurance. It's like asking your barber if you need a haircut.