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volunteer work and charity. Some of the best wealthy people I know show up for each other when there is a cause, fundraiser, political appointment, church work, etc. If you're not wealthy, I don't know how you could find the time or receive an invite.

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.

Compare to these for reference... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/BYD-Assembly-Line-Worker-Salaries-E41020_D_KO4,24.htm

Russia offers to swap frozen assets with the west https://www.ft.com/content/a5598c9d-99f5-45c3-98eb-2f797f2cc85b the comments on this article are almost unanimously against this proposal.

My youngest had laryngitis as an infant so we couldn't hear her when she cried at night. Of our three kids, that was the best sleep training I ever experienced.

I did the in-person version of this course several years ago when Bruce Greenwald was still teaching it. It was a week long and covered all the material he does in his semester long course for MBAs. I liked it. These types of things are very expensive and it's difficult to tell whether they are worth the money, but I've done a few of them at Columbia, HBS, NYU for continuing education stuff and to bring a few people on my team up to speed on specific subjects. For me it's better to dedicate a few days to take the course seriously rather than peruse it at my leisure. Going through the exercises during and between lectures and then getting interrogated by Bruce crystalized the principles in place better than reading his books did for me. It was also really helpful to meet ~100 value-oriented investors in my cohort for networking etc.

I'm no activist either, but if the management CAN and SHOULD be changed, then someone might get involved and do the work for me. If management CANNOT be changed and they're doing a poor job, then I'm probably hosed as a retail investor.

Great points. I remember Bruce Greenwald saying that if you have a lot of asset value and small or negative cash flow, immediately go to the proxy statement to see how you can replace management. If you can't, just move on to something else. That seems about right to me.

Thanks for finding the reference Spekulatious. It takes a lot of confidence to make an individual stock selection and a lot of humility to put guardrails on that decision, but those two things together dramatically improve the chances of getting satisfactory results.

Ben Graham used a different approach to avoid sitting in value traps. He just gave each position a certain amount of time to appreciate and then he would sell it no matter what. I think a couple of years if memory serves. Some things are cheap for ages whether it comes down to an analytical mistake, market madness, or being early. The momentum overlay seems to work really well if you are doing statistical value.

I keep a copy of this on my desk. My CPA gets a kick out of it every time she picks it up. It's a great blend of comedy and timeless wisdom.