zippy1

I would like to thank Packer to the pick of VRTS. Truely an interesting situation.

From the above, you must also mean that many other stocks did lose less than 40% and did better?

How do you set up an automatic search string? :-[ TIA cheers Zorro When you do the search on Google News, on the search results, it will put a link for you to set up automatic email alert.

Let me guess, AIG?

I can see why most of these behaviors are not good for your wealth. But why the average investor is a women? ???

If one started with 1 million and compounded to 100M in 20 years, that is 26% CAGR per year. If one started with 3 millions and compunded to 100 M in 20 years, that is 19% CAGR per year. If one started with 5 millions and compunded to 100 M in 20 years, that is 16% CAGR per year. If one started with 1 single million and compunded at 50% CAGR, it is 3.3billion now.

Andrew Weiss of Weiss management The people at Chieftain..

I also forgot to mention the people at First Pacific funds.

How about: Chou funds -- Francis Chou Wintergreen fund --- David Winters Oakmark funds -- Bill Nygren et al. Longleaf funds --- Mason Hawkins et. al

But if some of these "green" energy technology do offer higher cost energy sources, thus uneconomic, wouldn't they also possibly improve US's national security by making US more energy self-sufficient? Under this case would it makes them more or less fitting your criterion of a product of defnese prupose which has potential later being commercialized?

Even though I agree with your large point, I do want to point out that the silicon on saphire work is related to the slicon on insulator (SOI) work. SOI now is used in many IBM alliance based processes and I think that even the XBOX's chip uses SOI. Another example is ion implanation. I used to model ion-implantation, which also benefitted greatly from the defense work of the 1950s and 60s, also.

Yeah, except for the Internet, jets, nuclear power, a large proportion of medical discoveries.... DARPA and NASA are fairly innovative. Governments and universities are largely responsible for most basic research and a huge proportion of the innovation. Without this basic research, the pace of innovation in the US would be much slower. As a semiconductor device engineering manager, foreign born, trained in US, I do have to agree that a great deal of fundamental research in semiconductors was done under the support of the government. I always wonder why my home country did not do as much in fundamental research. USENET certainly is another major innovation with government sponsorship. I still remember back in 1989, I was typing email in ASCII, sending them via USENET and wondering why no one in my home country ever thought of building the same thing.

I use Charles Schwab and own the pink sheet shares. I have not seen my rights in the account. Have anyone who owns pink sheet shares actually received their rights yet? Thanks in advance.

I was in the same boat as you are. I figured that they probably would not get called at $26 so when B shares hit $24 a few months ago, I sold out. I did try to figure out how much it costs for Fairfax to keep ORH-B around with all the associated paper work to regulatory agencies. But I was stuck as I had no contacts in the industry. That was also one of the reason why I sold. The other one is I had bought at mid-teen when it was fairly cheap. I was not so sure whether it still was cheap a few months back when I sold. I know this does not answer your question. But wouldn't GS-PD offers a better opportunity presently?

Shouldn't they call A shares first before calling B shares?

I wonder whether this is another way to do the Bloomberg business model?

Source capital is one of the FPA funds except it is not much marketed, being a closed-end fund. If you get on the FPA fund site, you will notice that they have several load funds and one closed-end fund, source capital. Source capital used to trade at slight premium to NAV, but today trades at ~15% discount. The discount was around 25% during the winter of 2008-2009 if memory serves. So indeed if the discount continues to shrink, there could be an additional kick on top of NAV return.

How about a closed-end fund like source capital (SOR)? The performance is reasonably good and it is trading at a discount below NAV. For a long time, it actually traded at a premium.