DooDiligence

Apparently Warren & Charlie don't have enough faith in Lee to simply cough up some pocket change to buy them & put the papers in their charge.

20.8% in brokerage 22.4% in 401K I thought I'd get to keep my worthless reminder of misplaced trust in Eike Batista, but those shares finally disappeared. Should've gotten a paper certificate to frame.

:o The nuclear option! This would be a good name for a Rick's Cabaret microbrew.

You could also escalate the conflict with this. www.liquidass.com ;D I'd forgo the conflict & use a nice incense instead.

Institutional interests wax & wane over time & across sectors. http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/dataarchived.html#corpgov It seems like just yesterday that we were going to run out of oil soon, and then we were awash in the stuff. Predicting supply & demand is like predicting hurricane tracks. Better to just say there will be hurricanes. Energy will go down & it will go up, and down & up, and down & up... I like my chances with VDE. I was an idiot for buying CLB.

Exactly. It's largely because we're worried about making a mistake & disappointing an audience. When a player focuses instead on the enjoyment of the game, their performance will flow & they'll easily adapt when mistakes are made. Few people in the audience will even notice small errors. --- edit: do it for your own enjoyment & anyone watching will come along for the ride. I'm going to watch this video again this afternoon.

Thanks for a nice reinforcement of a skill I've been working on recently. I've found that memory can be superficial or it can be deep. I can usually memorize a musical piece fairly quickly but have found that when I play it in a performance environment, recital or jury, there are issues with recall. I've been focusing on learning things quickly instead of learning them deeply. Fortunately, I've been able to develop enough composure to play through mistakes while maintaining tempo. Over the semester break, I read a book called the Musicians Way & the author spent time discussing the subject of superficial vs deep learning. It's just as your video outlines. --- Goal - Play a piece from memory under stressful conditions. Focus - Learn a phrase at a time. For difficult passages, concentrate on a single measure at a time within the piece. Feedback - Get instructor guidance on articulation & making improvements in dynamics & expression. Comfort zone - gradually increase the tempo & try to read while playing instead of just playing from memory. --- I highly recommend music, and specifically performance, to anyone interested in improving memory skills. Performance can be simply playing for / with family & friends & it adds stress which tests your memory.

I really like Vanguard's dilapidated look (though sometimes I get the updated screen edition and it looks worse). I keep my core holdings there and the interface is so clunky it pains me to even think about trading on it. This is probably the reason why I haven't had many sell transactions on Vanguard over the years and that portfolio has been outperforming my actively managed account by a wide margin. I guess, I'm glad that the fees are now 0. :) I like the way you think.

Yes, as long as you don't overpay for something that breaks down on you.

Is it soapy with exaggerated overacting? I've recently watched, again, Ken Burns' The Civil War. Fantastic, as always. The Expansion season 4 and The Witcher are coming soon, looking forward to both. I don’t think “The Crown” has any overacting, I found the acting exquisite. It’s a bit like Downton Abbey in a way, except all the characters and events are real. The season 1 was slow at times and I almost thought I would skip and look for something else, but Season 2 and especially Season 3 got better and better. Speaking of the UK, I just finished watching all 3 seasons of "Harlots" on Hulu. Good show. If you like UK stuff I would highly recommend "Endeavor" and "Inspector Lewis." Excellent acting, great character development. Endeavor tends to have a little bit too complicated plots, but the best characters and acting. Fleabag is great too, on Amazon Prime Video. Fleabag is friggin' hilarious. Not at all what I expected.

I just watched the 5 Takeaways of the Intelligent Investor. Very well done and I really like the "5 Takeaways" format. The bar hopping / Russian roulette analogy is brilliant. Next up, Poor Charlie's Almanck. Thanks

Thanks to Spek for bumping this. I needed a laugh & have found another virtual kindred.

Thanks, I'll check that one out. I had Sling for a month last year & it came with Bloomberg & CNBC. I found CNBC to be mostly a bunch of chest beating nonsense. Bloomberg was full of informative stories & interviews. I can see how CNBC would be more popular in todays world.

I've missed Paul Kangas for a while now & noticed that since CNBC took over production, NBR has not been on point. I also miss Louis Rukeyser.

Nice, a 1st/1st. No recent comp sales on eBay but there are a few listed (mostly 1st later printings). I'd keep it.

I bought Core Labs based entirely on historical ROIC's, thinking that I'd picked a bottom on price & industry activity. To compound the error, I averaged down a bit on the initial drop last year. I've successfully resisted the urge to BTFD since the dividend cut. CLB had been on my watchlist for a long time, much like NVO had been, and I was attracted to their stellar historical ROE's & ROIC's. The big difference is that CLB's market is a basket case whereas NVO's is growing albeit with potential problems regarding governmental interventions. I've owned VDE since 2016 & added when it dipped in 2019. I'm not in it for a quick gain but if it were to pop on some earth shattering news event, I'd sell & watch for another drop.

Let BRK subs do the sleuthing, negotiating & closings. I'm sure many of them have wish lists. --- At 1st I thought you were suggesting he buy Greenland :o

Those 3 are challenging but the results are well worth the effort. Sometimes I'm good at it & sometimes not. It takes conscious effort. I feel lucky to be able to virtually associate with so many people on CoBF, like yourself, who are constantly improving themselves.

I've always written New Years resolutions but for the past 3 years I've documented them in Pages. On 1 January I print them & throughout the year I make handwritten notes on progress. On New Years eve I use a colored pencil to grade progress. The new resolutions are official now. Tests from the universe, big & small. --- edit: I really like your idea of an annual letter. It's a great way to celebrate the investments you've made in life. New_Years_Resolutions_2020.pdf

I second that. http://www.tunawish.com/images/castanza.gif

www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/berkshire-hathaway/berkshire-ability-to-use-cash/msg324055/#msg324055

Yesterday

Happy Christmas everyone, felt elf hat's are fun. Light up for Hanukkah, with a cool crocheted yarmulke. It'll warm up soon for Ramadan, hope there's no need for taqiyah. The previous prose, has a quirky sounding flow, but eventually it'll rhyme, just give it some time.

-----)side note vs above I've looked briefly at EW a few times (including after some comments of yours). It makes sense that this company has done very well over the long term (that's easy to say now) and it is reasonable to expect that the future will look like the past. The Fogarty and the Swan Ganz catheters were landmarks and they seem to be a the right place with their newer valves (really fascinating stuff). I understand that they had developed peripheral blood vessel stent technology which they sold to Bard and that ended up eventually in BDX's portfolio. It seems that management felt that they had not achieved sufficient scale for profitability. Some could say that this looks now like a nifty-fifty stock after such growth and such recognition of growth. Obviously, the best time to buy these kinds of stocks is during downturns but that's obvious mostly in hindsight. If you have a long term mindset, if your return objectives are relatively reasonable and if the future ends up similar to the past, a PE of 61.1 can make sense. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/EW/edwards-lifesciences/pe-ratio http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/valuing-growth-stocks-revisiting-the-nifty-fifty.pdf Congratulations for this pick and good luck for the future. -----)Back to a better health... I bought this in 2013 when they were fighting a patent infringement lawsuit over TAVR with Medtronic. www.dicardiology.com/article/us-jury-finds-medtronic-corevalve-infringes-edwards-transcatheter-valve-patent I was working in Brasil at the time & spent a month reading up on heart function & watching youtube videos on valve replacement. There was also a group of attorneys trying to find a lead plaintiff for a shareholder lawsuit against Edwards, claiming they had overstated the potential for TAVR. I thought this was bogus as Mussalem had clearly stated that the product was indicated for at risk patients only, who couldn't tolerate having their chests cracked open for a traditional valve replacement, and that the procedure would add upwards to 2 years to their lives. I also guessed correctly that TAVR would slowly get expanded indications. They spent considerably less than MDT to get into this space. www.statnews.com/2019/03/19/the-astounding-19-year-journey-to-a-sea-change-for-heart-patients/ I felt like I understood it well enough & bought in. No lead plaintiff was found in the shareholder suit & they prevailed over MDT. As I said before, the LEAP Calls zoomed up within a year of purchase & I sold them to reduce cost basis in the equity to nearly nothing. Since then, I've sold off some shares to reduce the position & what's left is still many times over what I initially paid. I acknowledge the role of luck. --- The moral of the story: My mistake with MO was a direct result of the success with the EW LEAPS. I had waited for years in search of a similar setup & thought I'd found one. Amateur speculator. --- I hope for just one more plate of acorns over the next decade (maybe BRK). --- Sorry for the thread highjack but I get so few occasions to outline a successful investment which was truly based on a measure of due diligence (instead of doo doo diligence). To actually wing another one for a future gain & share it here (before the gain) would be rewarding.

An interesting aspect is that all attempts aiming for cost containment that have been tried have not been successful so far. A strategy would be to try more of the same with an expected different result, another strategy would be to reframe the foundations which is basically not possible. Still, using the heart stent example below, it appears that the system may be ready for some significant (and constructive) changes. If you play with the link provided by Spekulatius, you can find that the cost to insert heart stents (cost of procedure and estimated cost of stent) is a large multiple compared to other countries. Because of innovation, it is understandable that the cost may be superior but clearly not enough to be a multiple. Also, it is becoming increasingly clear (evidence-based, multiple references available upon request including a large international study just published last November) that stents mostly do not result in significant benefits in chronic and stable heart disease. Despite this, in all countries but especially in the US (by a large margin), stents continue to be inserted without any restraint. Finally, some groups, who are aligning incentives, are designing ingenious protocols to replace invasive procedures and expensive drugs. We are only at the forefront of this wave but it is coming. If I'm right, you may want to adjust sales and profitability for those involved in the stent market: Medtronic (MDT), Cardinal Health (CAH), Abbott (ABT), Boston Scientific (BSX), Becton Dickinson (BDX), Terumo and MicroPort Scientific on the OTC market. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-08/kp-kpr082719.php I thought you had left Edwards Lifesciences out in order to spare me any angst, so I did some digging & when I couldn't find anything conclusive, I sent an email to investor relations asking if they were still producing the LifeStent line. I was told that they sold that line to Bard in 2007 & do not have any material revenue from stents. That reinforces my opinion of EW management. I look forward to owning this indefinitely.