HubbadaPow

I hope you have success cleaning up the company and their reporting. Also their refusal to disclose reasonable information to owners is frustrating.

Devil's Advocate opinion: I've seen some really great founders driven out of companies because the accountants get uptight about some petty stuff. Imagine being worth 9 figures plus and having some intern quibble over a few thousand dollars of compensation. These guys sometimes just decide it's not worth the aggravation and retire. While I agree in principle that compensation should all be above board, it would not be productive to drive out Buffett over his personal use of his jet, even though that's a lot of money.

Thanks for the response. You're probably right. Although I am often surprised when I get talking to people running larger businesses and learn how many of their decisions are regulatory-driven.

I've had them for years as well, but just got the audiobooks a few weeks ago and find it much easier to power through the details while driving to and from the office. It's one of the most interesting family businesses in history.

I've been thinking about Buffett's preference for wholly-owned businesses, and I wonder if that preference is simply to avoid being deemed an investment company by regulators. Does anyone here have any insights into that?

I'm reading Niall Ferguson's "House of Rothschild" at the moment. It's striking to me that during the 18th and early 19th centuries the Zionist movement was apparently mostly pushed by the British, German, French, and Austrians (non-Jews) who wanted to push the Jews out of Europe and into their ancestral homeland. I mean, at some point you have to ask yourself what they're supposed to do to make the world happy.

Yes...unfortunately politics matter a lot. I remember running up to the 2020 election talking to a state pension manager and I asked him what he's looking at. He told me the most valuable thing he could know was who would be the next president. He was terrified of a Bernie, Harris, Biden result. In hindsight, I'm impressed with how resilient the global economy has been, but risks abound.

Thanks for the feedback. I've been carrying a ~20% position in tbills for a couple of years since selling some properties and it's been a painless way to wait. I own individual bonds so I can avoid the worst tax treatment and also occasionally harvest some losses, but I'm just trying to earn some safe income and avoid risk with this portion of my assets. I expect I will always have SOME bonds in the mix.

A friend at Morgan Stanley told me yesterday that markets are forecasting 99% odds of lower interest rates. Is anyone here locking in some sweet 4-5% yield?

Lots of great material on this thread. Here are some of mine: Capital Returns Investing Against the Tide - Anthony Bolton Competition Demystified - Bruce Greenwald

I spent a few years doing something like this, but with valueline (small/mid/and large). Flipping through the pages looking at the statistics and estimating what I thought the company was worth, then comparing to the market price. If there was a big difference, then I would dig in and see if I had missed something important. The universe I was following was a few thousand companies, with very few outside the USA. It took a lot of time. But it was useful for a few reasons: Looking at lots of companies in each industry helped me get an idea of what margins/cyclicality/capital requirements should be There are very few special companies that can generate high ROIC through the cycle while growing the business It raised my cost of capital by identifying plenty of good, but not great, stocks The print copies allow you to quickly flip past pages that are obviously bad at a glance. Not even software is that fast I replaced most of my time reading news and social media with this, and I found myself better informed about the economy VL was a useful first cut to remove bad businesses from my search. Surprising to many is that tons of small cap companies have never earned any money. I hope it's a useful experience for you. Best of luck.

Currently reading Mark Twain's Joan of Arc, which is based entirely on the official testimonies recorded during her two trials, but it's made compelling and humorous by Twain's style. https://a.co/d/aEn7tQe I recently finished Isaacson's biography of Henry Kissinger. He was a main character during the 1960s and 70s, and like it or not, shaped a lot of our modern world. The biggest surprise to me was that the press spoke about Nixon and Reagan in exactly the same way they currently do about Donald Trump. Maybe politics isn't any more polarized than it always was. https://a.co/d/3cFSIcU

T Bills have retained their purchasing power over the past century, but not more than that. One consideration is taxes, as I believe the chart below assumes reinvestment of the entire coupon, but generally TBills have kept pace with inflation. I like them while I'm between deals

The recommendation I regularly send to value line is to add a "next" button to their website. Just let me flip through them like my print edition and the online portal would be much more valuable. Looking at each member of an industry is an important attribute of the product.

One litmus test I've used for "unloved" is when I start describing an opportunity to an intelligent person and they start laughing. If it doesn't feel a little bit terrible to consider buying it, then it's probably not unloved. One example was Oil/Gas in mid-2020. I made some calls to operators to discuss putting some money to work and they had just been through like 7 years of nightmares and couldn't contemplate buying anything at any price. Since then, the industry has done pretty well.