Santayana

Vivan

More FRFHF at $695.

Looks like Mr. Market is back to it's old ways of not reacting to earnings the next day. I expect there will be a nice little pop next week. I'm tempted to add even though I'm already quite overweight.

As easy as it is to point to the equity hedges as a cause of underperformance, I have to wonder if they would have been as comfortable with the aggressive acquisitions if those hedges hadn't been in place.

Wow, when Prem said "material impact" he wasn't kidding. Will be interesting to see how other insurers are impacted.

1 year ago.

Last month my daughter had a 10% rent increase on her apartment in Seattle. So there's at least one place. I just looked at the breakdown of the numbers more closely, and the one that really stands out to me is the claim of a ~10% decrease in health insurance cost. Now that's the one where I want to know what universe these clowns live in.

If gas prices follow history and rise into the summer, then yes I think inflation stays at least at these levels. Anecdotally, every bar and restaurant in my area has raised prices over the last month or 2, and both the cost of goods and shipping costs I pay for merchandise at my store keeps climbing as well. Just paid $1200 freight on a delivery that was $900 last summer.

Thanks, that makes sense. However, I looked at them a bit more and found that while they can't add new stocks, they can re-weight existing holdings, and they can sell. They sold C in 2009. I'm not saying survivorship bias will have a huge effect on what you're saying, but I do think it's wrong to discount it entirely, especially when discussing periods of high inflation which is when the weakest companies will the most likely to struggle.

How does BRK.B have a 13% weighting in Voya if they haven't changed their stock holdings since 1935?

Not really, they generally get dropped from the index when they start to underperform or have their market cap drop below a certain level, they don't stay in the index all the way to the point of going out of business. By their very nature the indexes are subject to survivorship bias. Now if you buy an index fund and let the index rebalance your holding for you, then yes you will generally see earning growth over time that outpaces inflation. I didn't realize that's what you meant in your original statement,

Right, but market returns are very much affected by survivorship bias. Lots of companies fail, get dropped from indexes, and then we don't see their poor results in the historical record. Look at a list of Dow Jones components from 50-60 years ago, many of those companies clearly didn't have earnings that have outpaced inflation or they would still be with us today.

How much does survivorship bias affect that statement?

But they have been extending duration, maybe not as much as you'd like, but it definitely went up from YE 2021 to 2022. It also might be a bit premature to say they've missed the opportunity to keep extending just because there's been some market turmoil over the last week. I still believe that Powell has been very clear that rates aren't coming down anytime soon, higher for longer has been his mantra, and the 2 things that drive the Fed, inflation and jobs, aren't giving signs that they should reverse course.

Fairfax

Are there other TSX listed companies that do all their financial reporting in USD? Since that's what they report, it makes sense they'd use the USD number in the report, and it would seem a little strange to use the FRFHF price instead of the FFH price.

I notice no mention of Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or any of the other many states where minimum wage is $7.25 and full-time work will get you guess how much per year....

Did you even read the link? I made the statement that most people on SNAP have jobs, and you asked what I based that assertion on. Your original statement implied that anyone who receives SNAP benefits must be unemployed, and I pointed out that that is simply not true. Talk about not being intellectually honest. You were wrong, it's OK to admit it. Whether or not the program is a good idea is a separate discussion, but that debate should at least use objective facts.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/07/most-families-that-received-snap-benefits-in-2018-had-at-least-one-person-working.html The Federal minimum wage is still only $7.25. Having a job doesn't necessarily mean it's full-time.

The majority of people on food stamps do have jobs. If you haven't been there it can be really hard to understand how challenging it is to make ends meet on $15k/year.

Well the market seems to like to the results, and didn't even give the customary 3 day waiting period we're used to. On duration, it seems like they are taking Powell at his word that rates will stay higher longer, and don't think he's just jawboning.

If you're in the industry, it's not uncommon to have trading restrictions on all of your accounts.

Half that if I'm lucky.

$400M here and $400M there, pretty soon we'll be talking about some real money.

+9.4% USD. FRFHF, JNJ, SU, and BHP were the biggest positives.