Saluki

I've been listening to several videos by this guy. Very thought provoking. Besides being a performance psychologist for many of the top golfers, he also works for a very well known fund.

More TV and OXY

A little more OXY and TV on the dip. I still like SWBI at this price, but I have as much as I'm comfortable owning (it would be higher but gun companies, like tobacco, don't make sympathetic defendants and civil suits are always a looming threat that is not quantifiable).

No difference really, but the FFXDF is less liquid because it's a small cap Canadian company trading on a US exchange. Sometimes I don't see a resting bid/ask at all on FFXDF so make sure you put a limit order, not a market order. Some US brokerages won't let you trade on the foreign exchanges. At my brokerage I have to buy FFXDF, not FIH but because it's not very liquid it makes me do two-factor authorization and I have to do it as a limit order.

Just finished Crunk on Earth. It's a mockumentary interview format like Sasha Baron Cohen, but without any physical humor. Very funny!

Bought a little OXY and Fairfax India on the dip. Added a little more to TV and SWBI.

Are you suggesting that the market is inefficient? Keep talking like that and you'll get rich, but you'll never get tenure and a key to the faculty lounge.

Just an FYI, the Seagrams Bronfmanns are the branch with the crazy sisters who were in the NXIUM sex cult in NY. The Brookfield Bronfmanns were the branch of the family that was squeezed out of the liquor business and went into real estate and became Brascan, which became the basis for Brookfield. "The Brass Ring" is a book that has that story and is excellent. It's out of print but I have a copy sitting in my office somewhere. If I go in person anytime soon, I'd be happy to mail it to whoever wants it or bring it to the Omaha for the Woodstock for Capitalists meeting.

I bought too early (2017 after my first Toronto trip) and those buys have underperformed, but the additions after the pandemic rout in 2020 have made up for that. At this point, the business keeps growing and they are not doing things like making market calls with swaps and instead using that money and brainpower to grow the insurance business and make opportunistic investments, so I don't plan on selling any shares. The only FFH shares I have sold have been this year in my retirement account and I moved that over to Fairfax India, which I also like and is a bargain comparatively, IMHO. I have no idea how the market doesn't value FF India like it values the companies on the Sensex. During the pandemic, the P/E of the Sensex reached 36, and FFI is still trading below book for some world class assets that are getting more valuable. FFH has less moving parts than BRK but it's still difficult for me to follow all the pieces. Still, the important stuff (record premiums, record profits, combined ratio under 100, opportunistically buying assets then selling them for multi baggers a few years later) seem to be providing consistent steady growth. Still holding and collecting the dividends

Added to TV and SWBI using some money from stuff I trimmed yesterday. Added a small amount to NETI, which was down 6% today on no news (I plan to double it this year on the dips, then sell the half that I bought back when it was Scorpio Bulkers, to harvest the tax loss before year end while keeping the same position size).

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.

Added a little more to SWBI and TV.

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.

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.

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).

Added a little more SWBI on the dip. Currently only 1/2 a position for me, but my cash is fully deployed

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".

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

New Prem Interview. A few interesting tidbits about his first meeting Buffett and Francis Chu.

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

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.

If you ever do a COBF happy hour or weekend BBQ, let me know

Added a little SWBI.

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.

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.