roundball100

broxburnboy - congrats. I hope you are doing this as a full-time activity. I would be a shame for you to be wasting time working for someone else (and if you are doing this part-time, even more humbling to the rest of us who can only dream of these returns on a consistent basis).

Myth - thanks for the details. Hard to counter-argue. So then the old metric of about 6 to 1 (oil to gas for equivalent heating value) is out the window ... is there a new "norm" for that ratio?

Darn, they should have raised it - even by a cent - just to stay on the radar of dividend growth investors. Oh well. That's probably why they left if at exactly $10 ... to avoid attracting new investors. Who wants more investors? New investors make it harder for the older investors to accumulate additional shares at good prices.

Myth - what do you make of those who claim that the new gas supplies (based on frac) deplete very fast, for example 50% over the first year or two, and that ultimately their cost of extraction per energy recovered is much greater than is currently being estimated? I have read many suggestions that nat. gas prices are likely to stay low because of the fundamental changes in extraction methods, but not everyone seems to agree. As a contrarian, I tend to give some credibility to those with the minority opinion ... but this seems pure speculation as well.

Best wishes in the new year, and thanks to everyone for the high value discussion on this board.

nobnub - yes (thanks for the earlier response), but no (I did not try buying shares directly on Helsinki). I prefer to avoid yet another set of statements just to own shares in one company, and might guess that the commissions are not so cheap (not even sure how I would go about it - through which broker?) I was hoping for a better answer, such as: fill out such and such papers for an exemption, and send the paperwork in to my existing broker so that there is no with-holding from the Fin side. Still hoping ... sorry for not acknowledging your earlier response.

Ben - reclamation between Canada and Finland? As a Cdn, I have NOK shares (ADR) and get double-taxed (with-holdings both by Finland, and then the U.S. by way of the ADR) that I haven't been able to figure out how to avoid. The U.S. with-holding is not so critical, since I get tax credit for that. But is there some way of getting back, or preventing, the Finnish with-holding? RBC Direct Investing (through which the shares are held) claim it is out of there hands ... but I'm skeptical.

Another worth considering is Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street (recently revised again), and I found early parts (more than later parts) of The Four Pillars of Investing useful, especially for historical perspective. After a few of these you start to see the same messages, which is not a bad thing (e.g., for index investing, Bogle's Little Book of Common Sense Investing). For fun, and long-standing lessons, a very quick read is the old classic, The Richest Man in Babylon.

ValueCarl - just a guess: FFH may be under different constraints than ordinary investors, due to insurance regulator rules. So, for normal longs, if a stock goes down, holding until it comes back up and rises above is fine - but FFH may be required to maintain certain ratios of available cash or equivalents. I expect others on the board can explain this better, or correct this guess.

Tech doesn't fit in with the approach of many on this board, and few can be evaluated by the normal metrics used for companies that endure for 30-100 years. But in terms of near-to-medium term, it is hard to ignore techs with solid track records, no debt, large cash, and credible near-term market opportunities. You can't buy and forget them - essentially all need constant re-evaluation - but for some of these, if the market were to crash near-term, I would not be upset being stuck holding them through a cycle. I don't believe companies like GOOG or CSCO will disappear in the next few years. MSFT and INTC (at present valuations) are tempting, though perhaps not long-term holds. Some others (RIMM, NOK) have higher risk-return profiles, and people will look like fools or geniuses in hindsight but we don't yet know which, as this depends on the unpredictable future success of specific tech products.

Munger - by aggressive, do you mean, make sure you have margin of safety, or are you arguing against investing large % of net worth in general? While reflation extends the pain, there are still some stocks (often discussed on this board) that remain fairly valued for investment, no?

Cash trapped outside the U.S. is supposedly also the reason that MSFT is raising additional funds, for dividends or buy-backs, despite the huge cash asset on the balance sheet. They put asterisks in the sports books to denote when world records in running are wind-assisted - maybe here we need footnotes to denote how much balance sheet cash is inaccessible for various reasons ... or how much it should be discounted to compensate for taxes due if it were repatriated at current rates.

Is anyone else having trouble avoiding excessive foreign with-holding taxes on U.S. dividends, in non-registered accounts? The usual 15% is fine (since you get credit for foreign taxes with-held), but I have some Nokia ADR in a non-registered account, and RBC tells me that it is Nokia (Finland) that is with-holding the 28% tax on dividends. I think it's just that RBC's back-end brokers that handle the ADR don't knowing what papers need signing in order to reduce the 28% to 15%. (15% is what the Canadian-Finland tax treaties have agreed should be with-held.) Any other Canadian holders of NOK, or similar situations (probably Swiss stocks would be the same)?

Munger - I don't post much, but really enjoy all the thoughfulness and intelligence displayed by those on this board. You seem to be really wrapped up in your opinion here, which is fine. But please at least take the time to properly spell the name of the man kind enough to facilitate this whole board.

There are indeed many alarming signs around us. But the P/E's on some of our favorite quality large-caps are getting quite reasonable, and these are for company's generating large cash flows and/or incomes, and that none of us believe are going to disappear tomorrow. From an investment point of view, I'm not sure that hard times for the U.S. necessarily imply a lack of current investment opportunities. For stocks whose prices are the same as 10 years ago, where the underlying companies have incomes that are double that of 10 years ago, it seems there is value to be had ... despite alarming signs in the general environment, no?

It is hard for a company likely Microsoft, which (perhaps incorrectly) sees itself as an innovation leader and a technology leader, to vacate entire markets like wireless (smartphones, tablets) which appear to be the future of the Internet. It's also hard to separate cloud computing from platform: soon more than 50% of the devices connected to the Internet will be wireless, and if you don't control that platform, you don't control the applications or OS (IE, Microsoft Office, Windows). I'm not saying that I believe Microsoft will be successful in the wireless area, but I can understand why it is so hard for them to give it up to their competitors.

How social services are handled is certainly different (healthcare, school taxes, etc.), but what I hear fellow Canadians complain about most is income tax (compared to low-tax U.S. states), and lack of the U.S. tax incentives related to housing (interest on mortgages tax deductible).

I haven't seen anything, but offshore (and particularly deepwater) natural gas is less and less important with the growth in shale-gas production in the US. At this point even hurricanes that shut down production in the gulf don't have much of an effect on natural gas prices, and Lousiana has become a net importer of gas due to the decline in Gulf production (although the Haynesville shale will change that over time). I'm not sure of the exact number, but I believe Gulf production is 10-15% of total US gas production at this point. Down from 25-30% ten years ago. Sorry for the lack of clarity - I was thinking more about onshore nat. gas. As noted by tiddman, since "oil and coal are very hard to displace as energy sources for many reasons", it's unreasonable to expect that the gulf disaster will change usage habits. But for those who want to invest in oil and gas, I guess it more likely that this could cause a movement of investment $, and corresponding valuations, from offshore to onshore (more than from oil to gas companies).

Has there been any discussion on this thread of what the impact, if any, there will be on nat. gas companies, as a consequence of the whole BP/gulf situation?

Okay, I guess this makes sense for a subset of industries/companies, which happen to line up well with the types of stocks (industries) that Buffet has traditionally been interested in (very predictable, long-standing businesses).

I can't understand why 40 to 50 year data on a particular company could really be that useful. (On the other hand, 40 to 50 year data, or 200 year data, on the overall market, for that I could see some value.) For any specific company, aren't there so many different variables, between management and the market opportunity and so on, that this data would simply be useful only to predict the past, rather than the future?

BeerBaron - that seems more like a tactical error on behalf of the local government, and a government-specific issue, rather than anything equal in weight to bigger issues. IMHO.

Sharper, DynamicPerception - at what level will you get back into FFH? That is the tough question and why I have trouble selling FFH common. Though I view FFH as a long-term hold and believe it's still well below IV, the rumors of a worse-than-normal storm season have scared me, together with seeing FFH's trading pattern over the past 4 summers (I don't like to look at patterns either but ... the pattern is there, presumably resulting from human emotion and short-term traders, and these seem to control short-term prices). So against better judgment, I sold some FFH for the first time in 10 years, parting with half my position in the past few days (though making sure not to sell the same day as Myth :-). Perhaps I will regret it and not be able to buy them back, though I still hold half for that reason.

rohitc99 - thanks for the detailed write-up on JNJ. It sounds like the future remains promising and that sooner or later, price will follow value.

Definitely more growth with GILD (smaller company - higher risk/reward). They also have lots of cash presently. P/E (current and forward) lower than JNJ. I currently hold JNJ and ABT (plus small bit of PFE bought long ago ... thus way under water). The size of JNJ and ABT limits their growth (moreso JNJ than ABT), but also should limit the downside.