Bog

Thanks for the link. I am starting to warm up to Fairfax India as well. I do not know a lot about individual companies in India, so i think the Fairfax option is a good way to go.

That was a great song back in the day...:)

This is terrible if this is true. What is the point of having this account then?

I was looking to fill some tfsa room the other year and my brokerage account would not let me sell my Fairfax shares in my non registered and buy the same amount in my TFSA as they considered this front running. I was able to buy the Fairfax shares the next day at a few dollars higher then what i sold in my non reg account. This year i was moving some non reg money into the tfsa and i just transferred the shares into my tfsa. So the non reg account was still a disposition as I was moving from non reg to tfsa.....but i did not have to buy and sell the shares. Though i do not know the answer to your question, you may be able to just do a transfer.

Hello Folks, I was curious to see what some of your favourite companies are, that would be considered compounders. I'm also looking at ideas that people would hold for long periods of time. I have a Canada bias and am looking to see what others like in the USA and the rest of the globe. My list is pretty small. Brookfield Infrastructure Partners Alimentation Couche-Tard Canadian National Railway I have owned Fairfax since 2010, but am still undecided if this is a long term hold for me. Thank you, and I look forward to hearing everyone ideas.

Hello folks, I was wondering if anyone knows of any companies that have a business model similar to Brookfield Infrstructure that you know of. I live in Canada and my knowledge of markets is mostly Canadian. I like the business model of the company and I cannot seem to find other companies that are similar to this one. Here is a blurb from their site. Brookfield Infrastructure Partners L.P. operates high quality, long-life assets that generate stable cash flows, require relatively minimal maintenance capital expenditures and, by virtue of barriers to entry and other characteristics, tend to appreciate in value over time. Our current business consists of the ownership and operation of premier utilities, transport, energy and communications infrastructure assets in North and South America, Australia, and Europe. Brookfield Infrastructure also seeks acquisition opportunities in other infrastructure sectors with similar attributes.

All very good points. I have not sold a FFH share for 6 years. Though i am less comfortable with the company now vs back then. I am astounded at how many recent investments have seemed to have lost all their value. I would love to hear management say we have learned some lessons in this area that we will not make again. It still puzzles me that with Fairfax India they want to partner with the best companies and management. With FFH it seems to be the opposite. Can anyone explain why they appear to have two different strategies? I am slow to change and will still hold my shares, but it is getting harder....:)

Thanks for this book link. I didn't know about this and it will go on the to buy list. valuefinder, BRK is a quite complicated group of companies, so it takes a lot of time to study up on the different parts of it, to get some kind of feeling of it as an investment. Personally, I would suggest to start reading the financial statements available at the BRK website, including the yearly shareholder letters written by Mr. Buffett himself. It's very informative, but also an entertaining read, though quite time consuming. Max Olson [Max Program on this board] has created a compilation of the shareholder letters since 1965, the first one issued in 2013, a 50 years edition i 2015, and a later reprint available here : http://www.lulu.com/shop/warren-buffett/berkshire-hathaway-letters-to-shareholders/hardcover/product-22445483.html - Enjoy! :-)

I agree with what you say. I also wondering why th quality discrepancy between fairfax investments and fairfax India. With India they have basically said from what I recall is we will buy great businesses with great management. Yet fairfax (outside of some good aquisitions) buys cigar butt investments.

I agree with you on this. I think about currency moving the other way and how it impacts Fairfax. I probably think to much about thing like this....i guess time will tell how it works out.

I'm close to Jurgis here.... 1) Fairfax 2) Berkshire 3) Brookfield Infrastructure

I love the Yoda quote :) I'm actually going to copy and save this. That's exactly what I do but I don't know anything. As with Graham's framework for companies there are frameworks that work in global macro and show you where you can find hugely favorable risk/reward ratios for certain macro events. Keep in mind that pure value investors can't know things either. In the end, value investing is all about risk/reward – exactly like global macro is. I certainly agree with you that you should know what you're doing. But a lot of value investors keep arguing that you can know value on the micro level but not on the macro level. I think that's false. And like value guys can point to WEB or Carl Icahn macro guys can point to Soros, Druckenmiller or Ray Dalio. I'm seriously worried, though, that we entered a macro environment in 2007 where strictly applying Buffet's methods maybe won't have the same success rate they had in the 60 years before.

I am not shorting anything. Peter Cundil once said the market goes up 70% of the time. If you short, you better be very sure. To me everything feels like a rigged game. Stimulation, govt debt. Debt eventually has to be repaid (usually).I have a feeling one day things will go pop. Maybe not this time, but sometime.I hope this isn't the case, and this is just my opinion. I think about what happens when the bullets run out? This I part of the reason I own a lot of Fairfax.

I have spent some with with Jeff MO. Not a l of time but enough to believe he will do a good job going forward. I know Martin was not going to retire till he thought Jeff was ready. The beauty of Mawer is the managers essentially all have the same philosophy and follow the same investment process. When Martin to over the Canadian small cap he had a very similar performance to the manager before him. I expect the same from Jeff. Jeff does have a much larger fund to run then Martin initially did, so this will work against him to some extent. Any thoughts on Jeff Mo?

For the equity side my friend Martin ferguson at Mawer. Unfortunately he just retired. His old understudy Paul Moraz runs a global small cap and is very good. Both have obliterated their respective indexes.