zippy1
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Posts posted by zippy1
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Let's invert. Let's construct the opposite of a great investor.
That investor would be:
1) More likely to be a woman than a man
2) A non reader, especially someone who doesn't often read books, particularly nonfiction books
3) A person who may sometimes test well on standard tests, but who doesn't like to tackle the hard problems, the problems where the answer may be indeterminate and the truth only approximated
4) A spender, not a saver
5) Emotional for the greater part, rather than logical
6) Social rather than contemplative
7) Conformist rather than nonconformist
8) nonquantitative in thinking and reasoning
8) And --- help me out here. :)
I can see why most of these behaviors are not good for your wealth. But why the average investor is a women? ???
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I manage a family fund which exceeds $100M in permanent capital, comprised mostly of my family's net worth. I have built this fund over two decades from single millions by focusing on out of favor companies trading at a deep discount to intrinsic value.
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.
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Andrew Weiss of Weiss management
The people at Chieftain..
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I also forgot to mention the people at First Pacific funds.
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How about:
Chou funds -- Francis Chou
Wintergreen fund --- David Winters
Oakmark funds -- Bill Nygren et al.
Longleaf funds --- Mason Hawkins et. al
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My main point was the money was spent to get a product (a hard chip that the gov't required) that had a demand and the offshoot is what was commercialized. Part of the reason was the state of the art requirements of the cold war that pushed the technology to its limits and the gov't was willing to pay for it to fight the cold war. I do not know of a gov't development project that had developed a commercial product whose end product was a successful commercial product (no defense or other gov't use) which is where alot of the "green" technolgy money is going (subsidies to uneconimic technologies).
Packer
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?
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The one thing about the internet and other "state" inventions though is they were focused on a national defense purpose and thus had a economic reason to exist that was independent of its current use. Thus it had dual uses. First as national defense asset and eventually as a backbone for other services. I was involved in a defense satellite porject that had similar characterisitcs (the waveform was state of the art to protect it from USSR threats and many of the features were later used in cell phones. Not all these projects can be transferred. I worked on another integrated circuit project whose substrate was silicon on sapphine (so the chips could withstand a nucluer event and not short out), the chip was produced for its purpose but no commercail applications are known to date.
I have yet to see a "state" invention that met its intented purpose and created new industries. That is why am skeptical of much of "green" energy project money as it is being influenced by "non-econimic" factors and lobbyists. When you will be better off to hire a lobbyist than to develop a better project or service then the process is in trouble. Much of that money is picking winners in implementation of projects and providing subsidies for uneconomic sources of energy that will someday be found to be obsolete. It is human nature to want to be right and on the cutting edge of new technolgied but no one is smart enough to pick the winners and you are fool if you believe you can. I was re-reading Philip Fischer's "Conservative Investors Sleep Well" and he had a great quote (from the mid to late 1970s - when the market for venture captial was limited) - namely "If this does not happen, all that is left is to try to go ahead with what needs to be done in the way that, both here and abroad, has always proven so costly, wasteful and inefficient then - by government financing, with management under the dead hand of beareaucratic officaildom." People and ideas do not change only those who do not study history are bound to repeat the errors of the past.
Packer
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.
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Since gov't does not produce anything, or invent anything, manufacture anything, or innovate new technologies, etc.
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.
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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.
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I would guess you are right based on the interest rate but I was wondering if they would not call any of them at first opportunity or call just the A shares or call both the A and B shares.
I don't own any A shares but I do own some B shares
SmallCap
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?
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Who thinks that they will call the A shares at the first opportunity?
Who thinks that they will call the B shares at the first opportunity?
SmallCap
Shouldn't they call A shares first before calling B shares?
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Let me know if someone come across the preface online, I don't read Chinese but google translate should do the trick.
Li Lu is on the BOD of this company
I wonder whether this is another way to do the Bloomberg business model?
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I was thinking FPA because I really like Rodriguez.
The Vanguard option is another good one due to the capital being so low. I never considered the closed fund, but that's another good idea, you could potentially get a double discount that way.
Thanks for the quick responses guys, keep em coming if you have additional ideas. I will share them with the person and discuss all of them.
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.
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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.
Undervalued Insurers?
in General Discussion
Posted
Let me guess, AIG?