NormR

Or maybe it is? He runs funds, has AUM, earns a living with terrible performance. In some ways he proves the point, if you can tell a good story and pull on those value heart strings performance doesn't matter. The long term numbers for his Canadian flagship fund remain very good. He also helped make FFH a pot-load of money on the CDS position in 2008. That and he has been extraordinarily good to the FFH community. He is well liked for very good reasons.

Mr. Chou is a remarkable man.

I enjoyed reading this year's Jealousy List 2015 from Bloomberg of articles they wished they had published. http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-jealousy-list/ Which articles and books would be on your list? (They don't have to be business related.)

Like quality value? Check out ...

Personally, I'd snap up a self-driving car that's fairly affordable and safer that a human-driven one. Unlike most people, I count myself as a below average driver. :)

Any thoughts on the impact of driverless cars on the auto insurance business?

Happy Birthday! Cheers!

In an effort to combat confirmation bias, please let me know how, where, and why value investors are wrong. I'm most interested in themes and patterns rather than specific examples of the form "company XYZ is a bad bet due to ABC". What is the best evidence against the efficacy of value investing in general?

The details are interesting. I look forward to reading the filing - it doesn't seem to be as bad as I first had feared.

I love the Fairfax guys, but can someone explain why this isn't a bad thing for shareholders?

I'm such a Luddite that I don't have one. Might you suggest a model?

I like to put a collection of books together before heading to the cottage. So, I'm looking for a few recommendations. What would you suggest?

Some coverage ... Tough times in a market impervious to valuation

Notes from the Meeting Dr. George Athanassakos and Ivey MBA and HBA students had with Mr. Warren Buffett ... http://www.bengrahaminvesting.ca/Resources/Interviews_Notes/Buffett_2015.pdf

How to put a slant on the numbers ... In other words, 70 percent of the time the appraisal was higher. :o

Indulging in a few items from http://www.somachocolate.com/ today. Stop by when you're in Toronto for the FFH annual and grab some deadly goodness ;D

Ouch!

I didn't see a thread for Bloomberg related questions. So, here's one :) I started playing with Bloomberg's backtester. But I'd like to know what's wrong with it. i.e. where does it fail or come up short. For instance, I already know the available time period is too short for very serious work - at least in Canada. But I imagine a few other issues might trap the unwary. Aside from the basic data mining problem, of course.

Ho Ho Ho!

Alpha Pro Tech (APT) and buy a subscription ;)

The all-time high is $610 according to yahoo...

Who'll be the first to pick up a few shares at a new all time high for FFH? We're only a few dollars away from it...

Thanks opihiman2, I hope it has worked well for you. We have a bit of a minority opinion around these parts. But there is always something to learn too :)

I might also caution west on the micro-cap end of things. The data might be good and yet result in rather over optimistic return estimates due to bid-ask spread / trading volume effects. I'm not against investing in small fry, but many studies run into real trouble there. I'd also say that the ranking of the "best ratio" to use has a habit of varying over time. Nonetheless, I'm rather fond of several simple quant strategies.

I missed this post. From everything I've seen, using a normalized EBITDA value underperforms using a TTM value. However, I'm still in denial about this fact since it just doesn't make any sense to me. So, until I collect more data, I'm just going to assume nothing about EV/TTM EBITDA versus EV/Normalized EBITDA :) Seems that price to normalized book value works fairly well. (I'm still trying to think that one through.)