chrispy

Great videos, thank you for sharing. And yes voodooking, he still says the same things... It really reinforces how his way of doing business has never and will never stop producing good results. The hard part is to follow it. I thought it was also interesting that Templeton also prefers investing while not physically being in NYC.

Looking forward to reading those articles once I am done work today. I much prefer cash and not shorting after the short equities fiasco

Looks very good with the transparency

I was very surprised to see Montgomery County, DC, and northern VA as well. They are all on the DC metro (Moco may be a few minutes from the metro in Maryland)

What are all of the Greek investments?

I am very happy about it as I was able to pickup shares but is there any reason why ffxdf plummeted going into Dec 31 and then took off?

One way to think of this is, what does an investor get that bought in over the past 1-2 years? Very low equity prices in nearly all the major holdings and profitable insurance businesses

It seems very difficult to know the right time to sell the bonds but it seems even more difficult to know when to buy back into them. Any thoughts on that dazel/viking?

As discussed in another thread, the major stock holdings are doing well. I quickly put this together but need to head off to work. Only need the share count: Ticker Shares 11/2/2017 1/10/2018 % increase Increase in BV BB 96,700,000 $10.78 $14.40 33.58% $350,054,000.00 RFP TBD $5.85 $11.10 89.74% EGFEY TBD $0.44 $0.52 18.88% KW TBD $19.55 $17.75 -9.21% IPI TBD $3.91 $4.22 7.93% USG TBD $34.45 $39.90 15.82%

2015: -3.3% 2016: 2% 2017: 13.5% Still learning but hoping my returns extrapolate linearly into the future ;) Sold MKL and bought FFH when it bottomed out for a nice boost. A small position in UBNT was a big gain that offset my losses in OBE. I must say that my envy of the FELP results in the 2016 thread caused me to buy OBE at the exactly wrong time like it was a lotto ticket... Luckily it only cost me about 260bps by year end. Lesson learned, hopefully... My long term goals will be met with 12%+ every year but now I need to beat the S&P.

PWE/OBE It feels like brighter days are ahead though...

Both seem reasonable. From my short experience relative to most on this board, FRFHF seems to zig while others zag... There was the hedges, then hurricane losses, and now they are sitting in a fat pile of cash on the sidelines with zero benefit in tax reform. The cash makes me sleep better at night but a lot of folks are waiting to see how and when they can put it to use. I think that each quarterly report and maybe the annual letter will cause some boost to the price. We are about to receive $$ from the First Capital sale, buybacks are happening at a low P/BV, and we have lots of cash to deploy. In this expensive market I am planning on buying more.

Between the first capital sale, 15k buybacks a day possibly, and the current share price it looks like we are back near 1.1BV. Am I missing anything?

Is there a transcript to the q3 earnings call?

Dazel, I was able to double down near the bottom and feel very comfortable having a large position in FFH... Your posts and the subsequent discussions have been very useful to me. Very interested to see how they deploy all of this capital and hoping its not in RFP like investments. Do you think they would ever give a small amount of money to someone like Brookfield for stable returns from real assets?

The BPY investor presentation transcripts provide a pretty good discussion on retail and they also own a good bit of GGP. https://bpy.brookfield.com/en/events-and-presentations/

I am getting close to putting an offer down on my first home and have learned about all of the transaction fees associated with buying AND selling a property. It surprises me that ~3% buyers fees are reasonable to buy a home. How does paperwork and title changes cost $3k for a $100k house but than costs $18k for a $600k house? Than there are fees associated with selling a home that exceed this ~3% from what I have been told. It really has me wondering how someone would buy a home knowing they will sell it in roughly 5 years and expect to make much of a profit. Unless you are in Seattle, San Fran, NY, DC, etc. it does not seem like the appreciation would exceed the fees so then you are depending on your mortgage payment going towards your principle. This would require a hefty down payment to make happen. I am very naive in this area so please fill me in on the flaws with this thinking.

You may want to look at this a little differently. What if the 6% is in the last 2% of the 'bell curve' of returns? and the mean is actually closer to 4.5% (but unknown)? Pay 1.5%, and most of the time you will be giving up 33.33% (1.5/4.5) of your annual return. For what? And if the portfolio is 1M (500K equity + 500K margin), that 1.5% is now also 15K and not 7.5K. For what? If you did nothing more than annually commission an advisor to review your position and write you a report, a 2-5K fee would be very generous . Thereafter it's simply a low-cost self-directed execution of the reports recommendations, that you could easily do yourself. So what additional value-add are you getting for your 1.5%? and is it enough for what you are paying? Different strokes, but questions that have to be answered. You're the person paying the bill. SD When talking to financial advisers, the recommendation is typically fee based and not % of assets. Interesting that when it comes to funds, it becomes % of AUM...

Thank you for the post and I also agree that the future is bright. Following your Citigroup train of thought, that is what they are doing with the Westaim, Altius, etc. preferred share deals with ~5% interest, right? I believe that in the letter to shareholders he mentioned wanting to do more of these deals.

Do you think the Allied World shareholders would have enough weight to make the share price decrease like this? I assumed that it was still negative sentiment because of what transpired last year and the years before... Hoping the switch will flip over the next year.

Great thread and I need to read a few of these books. It does seem like the ability to look past the price (past/present/future) and into the actual metrics of a company and what you are paying for the company is what differentiates between the best and the rest. When you read the stories on Buffett's key investments they make sooo much sense because he is looking past the price and focusing on the look through earnings, moat, growth, and lastly the price you pay for all of that. Fascinating.

EDIT (was pretty out of it this morning): Patient investor, that is a another 1.5%. The stock has only traded lower this quarter. Will be a nice earnings report at the end of the month. I may pick up a few more shares.

Rough calc on the BBRY shares ($7.75 price at end of March and $11.11 price as of last week), and ICICI numbers from the other thread, Tembec numbers from above: Increase in USD/share from end of Q1 BBRY 7.03 ICICI Lombard 19.5 Tembec 1.08 Total 27.61 With book value at end of March 2017 at 348.97USD, that is ~8% increase in book value with just these three investments.

Thanks Dr. Malone!

Earnings call transcript: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4066806-fairfax-financial-holdings-frfhf-ceo-prem-watsa-q1-2017-results-earnings-call-transcript