twacowfca

Yeah. But what a class act. :)

Didn't it turn out that they had some recent reserving issues or something unfavorable?

What's the name of the publication, please?

Thanks for this post. You mentioned that you had looked at some of the lines of business that LRE writes and determined that they had very low loss ratios in general, not just in LRE's experience. Would you be so kind to share your source for this most interesting information? Thanks, in advance. :)

I was impressed by your post. Thank you for the education! I second Fan's compliment. It's good to hear that people are generally as happy with modest means in retirement or more so than people with great wealth. :)

Here's the latest. The rise in the WSBase for the last few weeks seems to coincide with the official start of QE2. It's logical to think this may continue. If so, this may be supportive of market advances in 2011. :)

14 days left! Conversions of regular IRA's (or 401K's if you are 59_ or older) to ROTH IRA's are even more compelling with the passage of the US tax bill yesterday. Taxes won't be rising. Therefore, it makes sense to defer the taxes on the conversion as allowed by law 50:50 to be assessed in the 2011 and 2012 tax years. If something unexpected should happen before October 31, 2011, the conversion can be undone without penalty, and the account will revert back to a regular IRA. :)

Their phone number is listed. First, check their website :Do make sure that the company meets BRK 's criteria for acquisition. Second, see if the price is cheap enough. If the company plans to shop around for the highest bidder, forget it. Finally, WEB doesn't generally pay a commission. I assume you are planning to do this gratis. :D

What, exactly, were you disagreeing with? I can't understand your point here, since it seems like you're actually agreeing somewhat with your quote. But doesn't a double negative make positive?

Ain't gonna be deflation. Why? Cause The Fed and The Treasury have been goosing the money supply (M2) since last June at a 6% annual rate, up from about a 2.5% annual rate in the preceding 18 months. They plan to keep doing this for another 6 months. There is a lag of about 18 months on average until the full force of M2 expansion hits the economy. By this time next year, the thought of deflation will be a distant memory.

No way! A weight division below that. The university? U of O.

Web had @ 80% of the investments of his insurance companies in stocks in the mid 70's. ;)

http://www.tradershuddle.com/20101214133024/Press-Releases/Validus-Holdings-Ltd.-Announces-Final-Results-of-Tender-Offer-to-Purchase-Common-Shares.html

Met an interesting couple last summer. She was a NZ hippie expat in Cambodia in the 1980's. He was a US Army Intelligence Officer who spent most of his time leading expeditions to locate the remains of MIA US servicemen in the jungles of SE Asia. She had a house and servants and whatever that cost next to nothing and ran marathons. He and she got married, had kids, retired in the US. They bought a horse farm and Bed and Breakfast in the middle of nowhere. Remodeled the house, converted the huge old barn into living quarters, and now spend their days cooking meals and cleaning rooms for other people. :)

Isn't APR kind of meaningless here? Imagine that I bought BRK and sold it one day later for a 1% real gain. The effective APR gain is 3678% Perhaps you did not mean to refer to APR? Nope. The total gain compounded for both round trips was a little less than 30%, but both holding periods added up to about a quarter.

Our biggest hit with > 100% APR was: (Drum roll please) BRK! We were in it with most of our available cash just before it became official that BRK would become part of the S&P500, and then out quickly. We did an encore just before their admission to the Russell indexes with another quick exit. Our biggest flop was selling Delticom too early for a small, quick gain by failing to understand it fully. This is especially regrettable because I did understand their business. The problem was failing to understand what a private buyer (Amazon) might be willing to pay to take them out. I sold based on conventional value investing metrics getting a little out of the margin of safety zone. However, Amazon's acquisition of diapers.com should have trumped that. That type of possible interest should have allowed for a wider margin of safety. Our potentially best idea for 2011 is also the potentially worst idea: a potential ten bagger that could also be a big loser, even a zero. In my subjective opinion, the probability of a big gain is greater than a big loss, but the probability of a big loss is not insignificant. It's slow to accumulate, so we'll announce what the prize (or the booby prize) is in about two or three weeks. It 's not a microcap or even a smallcap, so there should still be enough available then for some of the smaller portfolios that may be interested because it seems to be off the radar.

What FFH is doing is similar to what WEB did, beginning in the 1960's. I think he hints about that perhaps in his Jan 1965 letter without giving details. Alice quotes him saying that he and Charlie somewhat later went to universities and borrowed their stocks to short as a market basket approximation for a hedge when the market got frothy. WEB said that hedging may have helped reduce their volatility, but the effect was not major, and they ended the practice.

thanks, BVH. Always good to review the basics.

Could be. 100 shares is the typical front running amount for basic computer trades. Maybe a retail customer thought he would get a better price breaking up a few hundred shares to be purchased into 100 share blocks. Then the computer may have dumbly pushed ahead in the line. Both the retail customer and the computer traider evidently took a haircut. ??? What may work on a highly liquid stock may boomerang on a $400 lightly traded stock.

"When the one great scorer comes to mark against your name, it matters not who won or lost, But how you played the game." -- G. R.

That's a very good one! :D

Fan, we did buy a relative small amount, but I'm embarrassed to say, we sold it in the high thirty dollar range. Thank you for your excellent recommendation.

Exactly. Well said!

Alice gives a full account of the match in Snowball. After giving Warren a few lessons about high level play Sharon asked him on the spur of the moment to be her partner in a big tournament. Warren played way above his level and felt increasing anxiety as they somehow advanced in the championship tournament and reached the final. I know just how he felt because something similar happened to me in college. I had transferred to a major university that had nationaly ranked athletic teams. I entered the off season intramural wrestling tournament, even though I had not wrestled competitively in high school or even seen a real wrestling match. I was a quick study and advanced through the first three rounds, even though I knew nothing about wrestling, other than what I had seen at the tournament. In the fourth round, the opponent nearly broke my arm, but somehow I won on points. Then I found out that some members of the university's wrestling team had entered the tournament. I really didn't want to advance to the semifinals, but there I was, facing a scholarship freshman wrestler. That opponent was much stronger and more skilled than any of the others. I was delighted to lose that match by no more than a couple of points. The last thing I wanted was to have won that match and advanced to the finals on a stage with a big audience to face the winner of the other flight who as it turned out was an NCAA champion. In the finals, the champion toyed with the wrestler who beat me. Took him down like a rag doll and let him up half a dozen times before pinning him. Facing the prospect of a similar situation with no margin of safety to prevent an embarassing loss, it's no wonder Warren forfited the final bridge match.

My point was that the inverse of this has already happened. The new fracking techniques have doubled the actual or potential gas reserves in the USA. :o >:(