Santayana

Getting my first dose on Saturday. Our county already has 25% fully vaccinated.

Covid threw a wrench into things for sure, but up until then they had compounded at 12%+ over the prior 3 years including dividends, and that was during a period of time where it seemed they were doing nothing right. Given the starting point at the beginning of this year and all the tailwinds seemingly in place, doing 15% over the next 3 years as Fairfacts suggested just doesn't seem all that unreasonable. I agree that expecting it over the long-term is probably wishful thinking.

Although they haven't achieved it in the recent past, it's a bit of a stretch to say they've never come close to it when they've compounded at close to 18% over the long-term.

Whatever your view of Fairfax's failures over the years. Does anyone really think there is any rational reason at all for them to be trading for less than they were a year ago? Yes they've underperformed the SP500 over the past 20 years, but go back just one year and that was not the case.

What filing was that? In the Q3 report they stated "During the third quarter and first nine months of 2020 the company did not initiate any short equity total return swaps"

Well, I guess they don't have to discuss anything but from very recent examples, Prem gave dollar amounts of gains from General Motors and Lumen which were both mainly from Total Return Swaps, but there is no mention of the loss on Tesla TRS which was much bigger. But Daphne's CDS example is the classic, big example of this. Did I miss something? is it a known fact that they've ever had any exposure to Tesla specifically? I thought it was just conjecture.

Viking mentioned buying after the March selloff, not during March. If for example you bought in May 2020, you've not done poorly. I think Parsad was referring to the opportunity presented by Fairfax's historical volatility when he said investors have had several chances to make money. In terms of long-term buy and hold, he's probably talking about a period of longer than 10 years.

LOL, saw your post and thought it was out early! Tomorrow I think.

The mention of container handling terminals made me wonder what sort of synergies there might be with Seaspan. Then I realized how Stelco could play into that as well.

And if they can take advantage of the current conditions to keep buying back shares, the earnings needed to hit that $100 EPS number will keep falling. But honestly just consistently getting $50/share would do wonders for sentiment.

Is it possible they basically executed a straddle with the index return swaps last Spring?

Good point about wanting to increase the Digit ownership amount. This was the quote that had me thinking that way. "We'll be filing some more, you'll be able to guess them. And we'll be filing them in India, in Fairfax India. Many of them there. And we've got some really good companies and we've developed them over time."

Seemed to me he hinted at a Digit IPO coming soon as well.

If he wanted to say anything publicly about BB it would have been mentioned in the results, so I'm not surprised it's not something he's talking about in the call. I haven't listened yet, but it sounds like he not saying anything, which doesn't mean they necessarily stood pat, or aren't in the middle of something right now.

Maybe today's rise in BB is being caused by Fairfax covering the shorts they put on around $20. Hey, a guy can dream!

Regardless of what they did or didn't do, or whatever the timing. Blackberry is still holding onto price gains on the year worth about $500M to Fairfax, and the Fairfax stock price does not reflect that.

Change the names and it sounds just like the BB/AMZN story. Clearly there's a market for what BB is doing, the question will be what kind of share can they get. Google on one side and Amazon on the other. Should be interesting.

Thanks, Wabuffo. That's a great explanation.

What exactly are they doing that puts them in a position of needing to raise money? Seems to me that if you're a trading platform, and losing money in a time of high volume, something smells fishy.

A friend just sent me a great post they saw on WSB. "We can remain retarded longer than you can remain solvent!"

Nothing to do with Blackberry, but they did file this yesterday, reflecting a transaction from 12/31/20. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/915191/000110465921009510/tm214744d1_sc13g.htm

Maybe someone already pointed this out, but none other than Steve Cohen is part of the GME short crowd.

Seriously though, now that the feeding frenzy has spread to so many different heavily shorted names, I'm a bit nervous not knowing what the exposure is. It's not out of the realm of possibility that Fairfax is short one of these names that's exploded over the last week.

Maybe Prem is using Robinhood and was blocked from trading BB.

His aversion to options didn't stop him from writing index puts back in 2008 though. Who would be on the other side of that trade if no one was allowed to buy them?