Xerxes

The Economist on Occidental. Blomstran also alluded to the potential carbon capture business with OXY

was there last august. I personally enjoyed Garibaldi hike couple of hours drive from the city. If you are into hiking, highly recommend.

Apologies if already posted. About BYD

See attached piece about the passing of a titan in India. See the last paragraph. Conviction is inversely correlated to your geographical distance from the promise land. We are in North America so we see FIH as boring, boring, boring

I have done the volcano in Sicily, walking on ashes is not fun. Patagonia is however interesting.

Is there a major economical distinction between say (1) Allied World itself directly doing a buyback using its own equity to buy the minority (thereby making FFH full owner) and (2) FFH using its balance sheet to buyout the minority thereby making FFH full owner directly. One is a buyback at a subsidiary level while another is buyout at the group level.

Didnt Buffett already blew off CVX when he invested in the preferred in Occidental, (i.e. thereby giving Oxy firepower to take over Anadarko

House of Dragon was pretty good ! They really did a good job of showing who is who in the Taygaran familly & give full context in the span of one hour. Not an easy feat.

Thanks @Viking @glider3834 Cheers

Game of Thrones : Warsaw, Moscow, Constantinople, Kiev and Crimea. Same locations as today but several hundred years ago.

Thanks Viking, I must have misunderstood your earlier comment, few pages back. I thought you were making an argument that over time FFH will start to be valued on an earning multiple (P/E) as the earning grows and not be based on book value (P/B). So my last comment was really an answer to that

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China: Kaufman, Jonathan: 9780735224438: Books - Amazon.ca First heard about this book, in the book recommendation section of The Economist. In fact there were two books but the second one i don t really remember, but will look for it. Just bought this paperbook and am a good one third through. I was always fascinated by Hong Kong, trade, opuim wars, China etc and more or less that region of the world and this is superb book that covers a lot of it. I highly recommend this book, it follows the story of two merchant famillies from Baghdad, who end up establishing themselves in east Asia and built their commercial enterprises. Their commercial dynaties end with the Communist take over in 1949. The one dark cloud in this otherwise successfull establishment (Sassons) was their wholesale participation in the opuim trade and the immense profits they made of it.

Great read: Vladimir Putin is in thrall to a distinctive brand of Russian fascism | The Economist

First time i see an article from the Western media that is so appropritly titled. The lingering collapse of the Soviet Union with its half a dozen frozen and not to frozen conflict. Well done Bloomberg. "Yet empires don’t die quickly: Their collapse, historian Serhii Plokhy wrote, is a “process rather than an event.” When a vast entity once held together by the iron discipline of the metropole gives way, don’t expect a new, stable status quo overnight." Russia's War in Ukraine Is How the Soviet Union Finally Ends - Bloomberg

@Viking Wouldn't an earning multiple be more appropriate for a business that does not have "lumpy" returns. And Fairfax's lumpy returns at that, happen to have a wide variety of "quality". Perhaps in a distant future it will be like that, but for now its valuation will remain anchored based on sum of the parts (i.e. BV). What do you think ?

The reality is Prem is not sharing the canvas he has in mind. It all makes sense to him and his team, I am sure, but no narrative is being communicated to the shareholder base. At a certain price you get the deep value guys in, that is all fine and well. But at a certain point to bring the long term buy-and-hold you need to build and clearly communicate a narrative. even in the shareholder letters you are being dragged into the rabbit hole of some back story, which while fine and educational does not tell the would be buy-and-hold crowd where that canvas is going. Contrast that to Markel simplicity when it comes to communication to shareholders. For clarity we are not talking the merit of one capital allocator to another. But the effectiveness of their communication. That being said, looks like Greg is jumping in with both feet !!! (Or soon)

One of my all time interesting spy story is the tale of Reilly. The TV shows was filmed in the early 1980s and covers the era around Russian revolution (before and after) and great power rivalry. really story and a fascinating character. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reilly,_Ace_of_Spies

@Parsad hahha I don’t own ETFs or mutual funds. Haven’t bought any mutual fund in the 5+ years. Never owned any ETF if I remember correctly. I own only common stocks. And some insignificant crypto through WealthSimple

Does the fact that he is adding to Apple, an already large position, is an indication that he is implicitly thinking that the 10-year T-bonds have peaked.

I think secretly Prem Watsa likes the fact that FFH is an orphan stock. It keeps it undervalued while letting him complete his canvas. If he was all gung-ho about closing the gap, he would be cleaving off the parts he didnt like faster while communicating a clear narrative to the shareholder base and would be . His narrative has been in the past 5 years: "we made mistakes, we will re-earn your trust, stock is cheap" so pleading patience, while continuing empire building. I am ok with that, as the name is only one component of my portfolio and offers a very powerfull source of diversification of thoughts. He is my Anti-ARK and I like that,

That is very far-fetched Viking. Fairfax's equity portfolio has two buckets: (1) the big longs and (2) the rest of portfolio The (2) portion broadly follows the market, are trading positions and are really not Prem specific. I dont think he even manages those. The bulk of weight is in the (1) bucket, and those are #neversell like deep value or quasi deep value names. I am personally am in Fairfax for its (1), and like it the way it is, and could not care less about (2).

Isn't interesting that Prem Watsa so far that we know did not use the 2022 bear market to buy the dip on what everyone defines as quality here [big tech and other well known names] { (13F are coming soon), I dont expect needle moving changes on those publically traded names that don't have that much weighing to beging with. He stuck to the name he knows best. Fine, I guess, since that is the purpose of being invested in him as a "mind-diversifier".

Does this go to the sell thread

Very likely if Sokol is the lead on this. Prem never suggested that FFH should get in on this directly. Literally all of his comments in the past several years had been what a great asset this is for FFH to own. So if this is Sokol led venture, than not sure what Prem is doing wrong.