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.

Has anyone mentioned Francis Chou yet? He's one of my favorites.

The insurance is backed (90%) by the government, but not MIC itself (i.e., the gov't doesn't pay until MIC is out of capital). This has been central to my thesis as well -- to my mind, MIC shouldn't exist. There's no reason to go there unless CMHC won't insure. The buyers don't care one way or the other, and the lenders/banks prefer CMHC because it gets a lower risk weighting on their books. It's been a while since I used to be a mortgage broker (I quit in 2010), but when I was in the business quite a few lenders were using MIC because they were known to be more lax than CMHC. Most of the difference came via valuation. CMHC would approve deals, but at a lesser value. Say the buyer pays $400k, CMHC would come back and approve it, but only up to $380k. If you were putting down $100k, this wasn't a problem. But most people only put down $20-$40k. MIC tended to approve these loans at the price offered. (Keep in mind that this was back in 2009, and these houses are now worth ~50% more. So in MIC's defense, the strategy worked, and worked well.)

Agreed he's skating where the puck was rather than where it will be. I think we have to remember that the managing money business is a fickle one. You'd think all investors care about is returns, but I think people look at their fund's annual report and care about the companies the fund owns. If it's all deep value cigar butt trash, there are probably investors who will withdraw money, especially when returns haven't been there over the last few years.

The TRUE cost of a wedding is whatever you and your spouse decide to pay. Averages are useless because they're brought up by people like Oddball's college buddy who spend $100k. If you want to spend $30k on a giant party that's up to you. My wife and I didn't so we spent $1,500 going to Vegas and doing it there.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't net-nets and other "cigar butt" strategies still outperform? Everything I've seen indicates buying net-nets is still pretty easy way to beat the market. Granted, ABC Funds have been around for a while and probably have a billion or two in AUM, so it might not be a feasible strategy for their funds. I sort of view the definition of value investing like that of retirement. I know full-time bloggers who say they're retired. I know 65-year old guys who still work part-time who say they're retired. I even know a stay at home parent who says they're retired. The point is there's no one true definition of the word retired just like there's no one definition of value investing.

I booked my hotel in February. Five nights at something called Value Place in Council Bluffs. Cost approximately $75 (CDN) per night. I got the cost down by booking Thursday through Sunday. Just booked my flight yesterday, $550 (again, CDN) return from Calgary to Omaha. Connect through Dallas/Ft. Worth on the way there (ugh) and through Chicago on the way back. Wednesday flight out, Monday flight back. Staying a couple of extra days isn't a big deal for me, since I can work from my hotel room. Once my buddy rents a car for us I'm looking at a cost of under $1000 for the trip, which isn't too bad.

I'm confused... at the end of The Big Short, it said he's focused on investing in water. I'm not seeing any water stocks.

We use Tangerine here in Canada. Getting 2.4% on a "high interest" savings account. Usually have to complain after the grace period is up to get them to extend the rate, but they always say yes. EQ Bank (part of Equitable Group, a subprime mortgage lender that trades on the TSX) is offering 3% as a promo. Both are guaranteed by the government up to $100k. I'm not a big enough baller to get above that.

If you guys think people are bearish on the U.S. market, come on up to Canada. We have: 1. An economy dependent on oil and natural resources. It it's a commodity that matters, it's down and down hard. 2. A gigantic housing bubble which nobody denies. The only argument is how bad the carnage will be when it pops. 3. U.S. hedge funds are so bearish on our economy that "short Canada" was basically a meme. 4. A banking system people are convinced is going to collapse. (See #3) 5. A currency that's off ~25% over the last year. And so on.

I'm looking closely at the Canaccord Genuity series A prefs (CF.PR.A). Yield resets in mid-2016 at the five year bond rate plus 3.21%. That works out to $0.9775 per share annually, an 11.2% yield as of today. The Dundee prefs which have been mentioned on another thread have similar yields. I own the Dundee ones and will probably be buying the Canaccord ones soon.