Saluki
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Posts posted by Saluki
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Added a little more to SWBI and TV.
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18 minutes ago, jfan said:
thanks for the link. I assume the last part was particularly polarizing.
I haven't yet read that book, but have been working through A Noble Function - How Uhaul Moved America. This one is more about the initial early years of the company's founding.
A Noble Function helps understand the founding of the company. It was authorized by the family, so there is no mention of the dysfunctional family dynamics in there. It's helpful to understand how they pulled ahead of all their mom and pop competitors making moving trailers like their in the post war era. It also goes into that weird lending club thing, if I remember correctly. Basically, they couldn't get bank financing because of all the existing debt so they were being lent money by the franchisees who understood the business and some were getting like 15% returns or something.
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On 2/9/2023 at 3:50 PM, CorpRaider said:
Nah, just Kyosaki. I like the first few chapters of RD,PD and CF-Q. Listened to the UHAL and EQC calls recently too, could be relevant. EQC likes self storage and SFH. Variant perception there.
Uhaul is a great company with an impressive moat, but I passed on it when I looked at it a few years ago because I don't trust the family.
This book is fascinating, by the way:
https://www.amazon.com/Birthright-Murder-U-Haul-Family-Dynasty/dp/0688112552
The founder was a genius, but it looks like one of those things where it skips a generation. He's a got more kids than you can count on both sets of fingers from several wives and they were all forming coalitions and trying to get control of the company. After you read how they treated minority share holders in their own family, it doesn't give you a lot of confidence.
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Bought the last bit of VTS that I wanted to buy for a full position size. Added a little more to SWBI and TV (can't get to full position size unless I sell something else).
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Added a little more SWBI on the dip. Currently only 1/2 a position for me, but my cash is fully deployed
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1 hour ago, gfp said:
As an individual investor I don't think it is going to be super helpful to try to force a bunch of super specific industry chatter into your head just because the guys at Berkshire do it. They have businesses in these fields and have read these publications for decades, so a quick skim when something comes in the mail is enough.
There is also a lot of value in having a network of friends and colleagues that send you articles they think you will find value in. It used to be clippings in the mail, today it is probably web links or PDFs most of the time. If Greg Abel or Bill Gates or Charlie sends Warren an article I'm sure he will at least skim it.There is no trade press that I consistently read anymore. When I was in private practice I used to read Cablefax Daily (which in 2000 used to literally be faxed to our law firm) and a Natural Gas publication whose name I forget because it was relevant to work and it was a half an hour a day that I can bill to the firm (only 7.5 more billables to go for the day!). When I have a position in something (or am researching) they can be very helpful and very specialized. During one of the bird flu scares I invested and did well with Pilgrims Pride and Sanderson Farms, but only after reading several issues of Poultry Times (yes, that's a real magazine) that had discussions about bird flu, bio security and stuff like that. I think as a part time investor with a day job it would be hard to do anything close to Buffett's level of reading, so if you are looking at a stock or industry it might be better to read stuff "just in time" rather than "just in case".
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Added some TV and SWBI on the dip. Placed a limit order for Fairfax India in my retirement account this morning, but it hasn't been filled
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New Prem Interview. A few interesting tidbits about his first meeting Buffett and Francis Chu.
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I have family in PB County and have been going there once or twice a year since the 90s. I don't know any professional who has moved there and regretted it (3 friends from law school, my sister (Ph.D) and my best friend since HS (CPA). I think it's harder to make a go of it as a working class person because lower salaries go along with cheaper house prices (compared to the Northeast), but a professional salary that would make you middle class in NYC is baller money in a place like Tampa or Jacksonville. I hope JOE land gets to be a popular place to live, not just vacation, in the future.
In isolation that club membership sounds like a lot, but a partner at my old law firm pays more than that for a Golf course membership and it's only warm enough to golf here 8 months of the year.
That pool looks small, but if you were to install something like that, it might be small enough for one of those endless pools where you can swim against the current and never have to turn around. Something to consider, there's no law that says you can't have a club membership AND your own pool
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Trimmed a little Meta on the massive 23% pop today. Still a good sized position for me, but I see some cheaper things that aren't in tech right now and I'm already fully invested.
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9 minutes ago, Gregmal said:
Housing secured.
If you ever do a COBF happy hour or weekend BBQ, let me know
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Added a little SWBI.
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This was a good interview. I wish there was more out there on Todd, Ted , and Greg (or alums Tracy and Sokol). I did hear that Alice Schroeder has been working for a few years on an investing book. It took a long time to finish Snowball, but worth the wait.
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Inflation is a notoriously tough thing to measure. When I was a law student I did some research for a professor who wrote articles on that. The number is hard to pin down because a computer today does more than a computer 10 years ago, and does it for a smaller price, so that's deflationary. But before the 1980s no one had a home computer, so if you are trying to measure inflation over long periods of time, you can track the price of gold back to roman times, but not for other things that are a bigger part of our lives. Houses cost more now, but they are bigger and more energy efficient. A car costs more now than it did 100 years ago, but a Ford Focus is nothing comparable to a Ford Model T. And if there is, say a sudden spike in beef prices, it looks like food costs went up for everyone, but consumers faced with 2x the cost of beef will probably buy pork or chicken instead, so if the amount they spend on food didn't increase did they suffer from inflation? Also, policy makers like to talk about core inflation when deciding policy, which doesn't include energy or food prices, which isn't useful unless you are person who doesn't eat or require heat/A/C in your home and don't drive a car.
A book I'm reading now, The Price of Money, warned that metrics "imitate science but resemble faith". I've seen that housing prices shot up 50% last year in the part of Florida where my parents live. But where I live on the mid-atlantic, Zillow says my house is down 10% from last year.
I think with regard to making financial decisions, whether stocks or real estate, we have better outcomes when we do bottom up than top down.
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Trimmed some more NFLX for a small loss. Still think it's a great company, and I still have about half my original position, but I am fully invested and there are a couple of other things I wanted buy so I needed to free up some cash.
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Bought a decent starter position in VTS. I may add more on the dips, but I see it a $0.50 dollar, not a multiyear compounder so I don't want to chase it. Started a small position in TV and SWBI. I'm fully deployed so unless I sell something, everything will be small positions.
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I trimmed a little NFLX on the pop after earnings today. It was in my Retirement account and I sold when it got back to green. Still have the rest of it in my taxable account and despite the almost double from the bottom, I'll still about -15% on it because I tried to catch that falling knife.
My better half complains that I'm late to everything, but when it comes to buying I seem to be early all the time.
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I noticed that big price jump too, but there doesn't seem to be any news on Fairfax India today.
I did see this piece on India, generally:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/19/business/india-economy-world-economic-forum-davos/index.html
If people diversify their supply chains away from China, then India is an obvious beneficiary, but they have been talking about this since 2020, so I don't know if that's it.
It's not a stock with a lot of volume (my brokerage account makes me do 2 step authorization when I want to trade it), and volume looks average today, so maybe it's just a fund that was sloppy about putting a position on.
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Fairfax India Announces the Passing of Board Member Alan Horn
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fairfax-india-announces-passing-board-220200763.html
Sad news. I met several of the Fairfax India people at the Fairfax AGM prior to the pandemic. I don't remember if he was one of them (I'm terrible with names), but they all seemed like nice people.
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Added a little more STNG again today. I've been nibbling when it dips below $50. They've been buying back a lot of stock in the past month and if their average charter stays at what it was in Q4 (no guarantees) they will hit $20 EPS because of the operating leverage according to the conf call. It could go the other way, but with all the disruptions to supply going on in the world I'm willing to roll the dice.
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11 hours ago, Viking said:
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I expect Fairfax to be active in India in 2023. Fairfax India is their preferred vehicle to grow in India. The problem is how do you put a significant chunk of new money into Fairfax India? You can’t raise it in the public markets (with such a low share price).
Perhaps Fairfax will begin investing directly again in new opportunities in India. Perhaps with partners like OMERS etc if the transactions are large.
I think a fair way to do it that benefits the patient shareholders like us is to do a rights offering. That way, you can issue ATM shares if you believe they are undervalued and it won't be newcomers who benefit from the new investments. The only people who won't directly benefit are shareholders who don't want to participate and will get some dilution. But I think it's better for long-term planning to have long term share holders so I think a rights offering is the way to go.
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Bought a little more Fairfax India and some STNG on the dip.
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17 hours ago, backtothebeach said:
I have a Wise card, but it is limiting ATM cash withdrawals and does not reimburse the fees. So the Schwab card, if it is available for non-US residents would really be nice as a travel card.Honestly, I'm a dinosaur and I just walked into the Schwab office that was a couple of blocks from my office because I wanted to something that I could access overseas and not pay fees and my better half recommended them. I didn't try to optimize, but if I had large cash balances (I'm usually fully invested) or did margin trading (they charge less than Merrill, but still very high) I would chosen something different based on my needs.
I like to keep it simple and I didn't want more than one account anyway, but decided to do it 1) for the no-fee international ATM thing, and 2) I'm a chickensh1t, and I was increasingly uncomfortable with just investing with one broker when the SIPC insurance is $500k per account. I vividly remember Lehman and Bear Stearns and I don't want to be a creditor one day asking for a favor.
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I'm a US person but I like having Schwab in addition to my main account for another reason. Schwab doesn't have many offices so to entice people to join, as you mentioned, they refund ATM fees when you use someone else's ATMs. When I travel internationally my regular bank doesn't have branches abroad and sometimes the ATM fees in other countries are shocking if you only need to take out a small amount of walking around money. I used Schwab a lot for that and have always been reimbursed the foreign ATM fees. This year I opened a Revolut account and used it with no problem (or fees) when I travelled abroad.
I only trade stocks in Merrill account at my desktop b/c I don't like the app, but Schwab has a decent, easy to use mobile app that works well and is intuitive.
what are you selling today?
in General Discussion
Posted
Got rid of the last of NFLX that I bought on the first giant drop. Held it through the second giant drop, and now that it's almost back to even (and I'm not convinced on the free with ads model), I sold out.