Gregmal

Ha I think @LearningMachine nailed the KR add. What a savage for detail. Well done. In other news, someone needs to tell Buffett KR is a dud because retail is dead.

Stuff like the MSGE selloff is why investing is really easy if your time horizon is greater than 1-2 quarters. Remember how a year ago covid killed retail for good, NYC REITs were going to zero, the Sphere was going to bankrupt MSGE, and SPG wasn't worth buying at $65.... Fast forward a year and retail is on fire with many names significantly higher than pre covid levels, NYC is still a shithole but you had 50-100% rallies on the back of just mediocre improvements, MSGE went to 120 and then bought $200M a year in FCF with stock, and SPG is crushing it and raising dividends every quarter. Now some idiots are selling because I guess we still think covid is going to put an end to sports and live entertainment(even though we already saw this notion destroyed last year)...... And on that note, tangentially related, rebought a 3%(fully margined) position in JBGS. Free money.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/state-street-firm-behind-wall-streets-fearless-girl-statue-is-vacating-new-york-city-offices-11629106200 See-ya!

Little add to MSGS and doubled my position in Z, now a bit more than 2.5%. Hoping to buy a lot more much cheaper but starting to push myself to stop being a cheapskate and get some more skin in the game.

Its amazing to me how obsessed people are with this crap. Nothing better to do syndrome. Folks are getting slaughtered in Afghanistan because of direct and deliberate American incompetence, 1,000+ people in Haiti are dead overnight but who cares....meanwhile flu+ comes here after ravaging India from February-May and NOW Americans want to pretend like its a game changer and make a big deal about it LOL.

I don't really have an opinion on some sort of crazy variant emerging thats fueled by a vaccine...however all I'd say is look at the incentives. There is so much incentive at every bend that there is ZERO way we ever get the truth if there is dangers from the vaccine to the degree @musclemanmentions. From the bottom all the way to the highest levels of the top, the arrogant, ethic-less, sleezeball pharma companies, the scientists, and politicians all have gone too far, all in on the "vaccine is safe" propaganda. If there's negatives, they've proven they will be censored or buried. So we're all just gonna have to live with never really knowing. When you get to a fork in the road, you have three choices. Left, right, or freeze up and smash into the concrete barrier in the middle. I got the vaccine and so far Ive had no issues and its been the right move so for me there's little reason to worry about it until something presents itself. Everyone needs to just get on with their lives and stop worrying about things they cant control, which includes other people...Its a virus, its here, get over it. The numbers, especially if you are healthy and vaccinated, are on you side. Others have rights and freedoms and ultimately those rights and freedoms, whether I agree or disagree with them, aint my business..nor my problem.

A spac and a shady financial business get together.....do we really need to watch the rest of the story?

Technicals to me are like 5-10% of the equation. The variables are always moving though and nothing is static. Good old fashioned gut feeling is the best trading indicator. Discipline and sizing matter too of course. You can take a starter and lose 100% and if its sized right, who cares? Agree a low $20s re-entry on a partial would be ideal.

tacked on a few BAM @55.6

^I do actually worry about something like that from time to time. Its never actually been explained to my satisfaction what the ramifications of that scenario are. However I ultimately fall back on the fact that I think this would be an unmitigated PR nightmare, and self inflicted, easily avoidable wound for the politicians as MSG is basically a NYC historical landmark and there's few things that NYers are more passionate about, to a non partisan degree, than their sports and entertainment.

Took 30% off CRBU today. Nice little move here.

I actually think this is your edge here. Same for a few other folks. Find your yo-yo/vehicle and turn it into a money tree. This is more an individual skill though. And I think many others who are just relying on aphorisms and cliches may have a rougher go of things. Or maybe they won't. As always, time will tell.

@Viking I dont disagree but a lot of that is externally influenced. Every insurance company(relatively speaking) is in a good place. Markets are at ATHs and even Robinhoods are printing big gains. Record earnings, record book value, big investment gains, it gets redundant, but thats fairly common place right now. So these things get priced in, for better or for worse. You follow Stelco and I follow CLF...do those valuations make sense? There is built in sentiment with most of this stuff and its preceded by sector or company specific expectation. And only until its proven otherwise, do those change. If the steel co's print another 2-4 Q of these numbers, the shares probably double. But again, within the sector, there are those that trade a premium valuations and those that dont. Out of everything you listed, numbers 9 and 10 to me have the potential if there's real follow through, to have a greater impact on improving the multiple. In a vacuum, when you have a great market for the insurance co's you want the company who's either best of breed, or undergoing a major turnaround(insurance just being an example). Anything in between is kind of a waste of time. FFH is not best of breed. And while some are saying theres a turnaround, I just dont see any internal effort. I just see results that are consistent with what everyone else is printing in those spaces and a valuation that is indicative of a deserved discount. Thats what I see as needing to change here. Or put another way, if the above results continue for another 12 months, are there not plenty of other companies who could boast those same type of results but get more credit for it? Or someone who is really undergoing a big time turnaround, IE levered to the tilt but paying it down/new management reinventing the company, etc?

I love it from afar and think its a phenomenal situation. However Ive made a couple attempts to kind of get comfortable understanding that space myself, and then still, run into people who know what theyre talking about there and realize I should just go back to what I understand LOL.

I dont think you have to directly compare it to BRK although it has been done before, but ultimately every investment to me, is really just a risk adjusted expectation of a return. You can buy something super speculative and if you assess your odds of losing 100% at 0, -50% at 20%, and -20% at 50%, while the odds of making +10% to be 90%, 20%-50% to be 40%, and 100%+ to be 10%, I mean those are good odds. When you weigh things, I dont see any advantage in FFH over BRK as a place to put capital. If you are a mandated investor, IE an ETF operator, and your only choices are MKL, FFH, WTM, Y, etc...I get it. But for the average investor, I dont. Its one of the main reasons I hate the fuckers at Korn Ferry, Glass Lewis, etc who do proxy stuff and compensation advisory....WTF do peer groups have to do with an investors options for their capital? Its a hoax to say "well, other companies in our sector sucked so its ok we did too"...especially when you have a large degree of discretion about where you(as an NEO) are investing shareholder resources.

Its not really a statement of "the past has sucked so the future will"...but more so "whats changed?". And when I ask that Im always presented with the outside stuff. Which is great. A securities portfolio thats gone up 35% should have some correspondence maybe minus some liquidation and tax discount or whatever. But with almost every turnaround story I've ever encountered, the change needs to be internal. You can buy BRG because of leverage and Sunbelt MF being on fire and its trades at a big discount to a growing NAV....but its a bad apple with behavior and alignment problems. You can buy APTS who is undergoing a company wide transformation, from the asset focus, to the management, to the capital structure. Guess which one I want? There's a general saying about folks setting themselves up for failure when they disagree with the current state of things yet blame outside factors rather than themselves. Sitting around waiting for all the perceived externals to change is just a poor use of time, especially when the real change can happen much quicker if its acknowledged and implemented internally. The issue with FFH is the bad behavior. Investing is often like gambling. You play 10 blackjack hands and Im sure someone will point to winning 4/5/6 times as evidence of something. But if the process is wrong, thats a problem. Prem has a decade of problems and poor process bogging down the company and rather than take some simple steps to change that, he and many shareholders are banking on external things like "hard insurance market", "crap stocks have rallied"...and you're all just missing the underlying issue and hoping it changes due to the external. And it might, but thats just a tough game to play. Put this side by side with BRK and tell me why it s a better investment? Only angle is because its smaller and may have more upside...which like I suggested earlier, is nullified by just cutting some leverage into BRK with LEAPS.

Me too. Its definitely caught in the current "oh no covid" selling cycle/trading pattern...but whatever. I like playing that game. I'm shocked people are still playing it on the panic sell side, but just remember how it played out last time. Take you time accumulating, make a lot of money once the boogey man fades. Indestructible, world class trophy assets for sure, and the LYV Q2 note was immensely bullish for the space.

The rate thing is one of those market aspects that is so simple that many smart people just cant help but complicate for the sake of giving themselves extra "smart guy" work. But Buffett is right. I have income from my job. I can 1) put it in the bank...0.05% 2) buy bonds ranging from investment grade, to junk...1.5%-4%, or 3) invest in the highest quality basket of equities at a 4% earnings yield with a 2.2% dividend yield and modest growth....hmmm. durrrr. Theres of course a bit more to it, but thats basically the scenario most people face. Bonds and cash are garbage. Especially when you can buy substitutes like Berkshire or JPM and get way more for your money. Or get "speculative" and buy the C/WFC of the world which aint all that much more risky than those bonds but offer much superior return profiles.

My problem with a lot of companies who hand waive about "one-offs" is always having "one-offs" can kind of being a normal occurrence and thus they arent really one-offs. An AC unit on one of my rentals just went and it cost me $5k. If that is it on the AC I should expect to be good for 10-15 years sans the $100 every other year servicing. But if every year Im getting pinched for $5k, its not one off LOL. But nevertheless its been somewhat amazing seeing the arrogance of the FFH shareholder base. Theyre fine and complacent with it all and its all good so who cares? What do you think about these other managers who behave like Prem and their entities trade at massive discounts to NAV? "I dont care about other managers"...Why not make a few really easy and simple changes and rewrite the narrative in a way that will help enhance the multiple? "I'm fine with the narrative!"....How is this different from the past? Unless you are a very short term/speculative trader, FFH has been a really shitty investment for a while now.."I dont care, if it goes lower I'll just buy moar!"... But to answer directly, the result on the non short investment side haven't been great either. But to each their own. I recall my little brother buying Pokemon cards and my Dad saying "you're wasting your money"...now little bro looks good. Maybe there's hope for the FFH-ers but personally think its a no brainer to just look up one thread and go there. Maybe cut BRK at the $200 level on some LEAP calls if you want more torque. But Ive said this all before so maybe I'm just being redundant.

Does anyone remember back in school how randomly it would be announced "we're having a fire drill today"? And Let's say the fire drill was set for 11:30, from 11 on, no one would work. They'd all just sit around, wasting time, just hanging out, getting ready to exit the building when the alarm went off....well investors do the same thing except theres no announcement of the fire drill nor a time that the bell goes off. Yet they sit around doing nothing and wasting time fixated with the drill. What a waste! Personally, Ive found its far better to just invest normally, while having contingency plans for a variety of possible events, however low probability they may be than wasting precious time preparing for something that many not come or prove actionable to a worthwhile degree. Best example was GOOG last year. I remember there was specific debate here in February about how it "wasn't" cheap. And I simply said that given the profile, when you back out the cash, low 20-something times(its then current price) is a reasonable and that a decent pullback is probably a great point to start taking hacks if you didnt own it(this was largely before the market started blowing up, GOOG was at like $1400 a share or so, and myself I even trimmed a bit of my GOOG there to "prepare" for the possible covid craziness)... well when GOOG traded down to 1100 everyone knew their advertising business was busted and many folks who were tepid at 1400 but had previously said they'd buy on a 20% pullback all of a sudden changed their minds and thought it was overvalued at $1100. So the point? Dont let your own psychology get the best of you. You can plan for the pullback but unless you are semi autistic or running pre programmed buy/sell decisions, its often easy to let sentiment ruin you and then all that preparation is for naught....every pullback I've seen in my life has a similar feature...90% of the people who were bearish and waiting for it remained bearish or got more bearish into the teeth of it rather than execute the second leg of the investment process which is to buy. And thats why its so hard to play that game.

I generally agree with this take, at least in terms of the sentiment. However I also think the recession worries are overblown. There were mountains of folks screaming "recession is imminent!" in January 2020, and February, and then "knew it" in March and April 2020...and Buffett didnt even navigate COVID all that well IMO, including being the ultimate contrarian indicator at the AGM and with his bank sales.....and yet, who's laughing now? A good company(which this is) with a conservative management(which this has) and a massive cash hoard(yup there too), with a business that will "earn" in any environment, just to varying degrees, will clean house over time with a consistent buyback...which I think is now the case. It gets too granular IMO saying, well one year of a recession with -15% share performance makes it hard to do 10-12% over time...however what Ive generally found is that during the -15% year if you crank up the buybacks it'll pay you back quite well in the follow years of rebound. I have a hard time seeing how this doesnt do 8-10% from here on out, with relative ease. Should shares pull back "hugely" I would simply adjust my allocation and also accordingly, my expected future return.

This is the best BWAR in the market, period. A term Ive coined for "brain work adjusted returns". You can buy this, and basically go away for 3/6/9/12 months(or years) without a worry or an ounce of due diligence. In line with @wabuffo remarks....the buybacks are the key to unlock market average or better performance. Its a nice spot to be in and much more preferable to something with a high brain work requirement like......eh, I won't go there today but you catch my drift.

Its official, the Old Man has evolved again. He's not gonna outsmart himself with "shares are a buy at 250 but not at 275" type stuff. He's shrinking the count 5% a year or more; the businesses are fool proof and run by people smarter than anyone doing the outside analysis on them.....just put this bad boy away and let it be an easy, no hassle/no worry investment.

I dunno. I think, generally speaking, I have been pretty fortunate(if not very good) at timing stocks and even the market from time to time. And even still, think its a horribly skewed proposition that requires being almost exactly right at too many crucial forks in the road. So as part of my evolution process as an investor, I completely stopped doing the go to cash thing. There's just too much that can go wrong and cash is a total waste of time. Instead, Ive found that utilizing margin to buy puts or put on high leverage downside protecting trades is the best approach. Shorting can work too but theres usually not enough leverage since you need to size things small there. Worst case scenario your hedges go bust but your longs still clean up. On the long side, I almost NEVER base a long on a macro call. I just buy shit I like no different than buying a tangible piece of real estate. If the market goes up, down, or sideways, I still like my house in the Keys the same. I try to look at my equity holdings the same way. But you have to condition yourself to think that way and its not always easy. But its far better IMO than playing red light, green light with risk on/off with the backdrop being predicated on "fighting the Fed" which is a total losers game.

The major issue is that this is not some fringe theory. People have been talking about this for years. IIRC there was a period of tightening under Trump and the market didnt do anything crazy. So the 2 main things in relation to this...1)why does the Fed do this at a pace that it knows will destroy the markets, 2) Do you really think Democrats will allow this to happen into mid terms? It seems to be in everyones interest to keep floating things or allow the status quo.