Munger_Disciple

Can you get option quotes inside a Google Spreadsheet using Googlefinance function or any other function?

Truly a sad day. The greatest tech leader, visionary & CEO of our lifetime. A perfectionist. He will be dearly missed.

augustabound, I disabled all the extensions to Chrome, and it seems to work much faster now. I need to try this during the work week when the web sites have heavier traffic to see if this is indeed the problem or not. If it still works during the week, I will try to enable these extensions one by one and see which one is the culprit. Thanks for your suggestions. Smazz, it looks like your question about History button was already answered by others.

augustabound, I tried your setting, but it did nothing for me interms of speed with www.businessinsider.com. By the way, schwab.com is also very slow with Chrome. Smazz, you can find the setting under the wrench button, preference, under the hood.

I have recently switched Chrome on my Mac and it is in general way faster than my previous browser firefox. However, I have noticed that some sites seem to load more slowly in Chrome. www.businessinsider.com is one site that loads very slowly. Have others seen this problem with some web sites?

The article points out that Ireland just imposed a tax on personal pension plans, thus reneging on past promises. It may be unlikely in the US, but not impossible.

http://www.businessinsider.com/will-congress-raid-your-roth-iras-2011-5 An interesting article on the possibility of government taxing Roth IRAs. There were a lot of discussions about the tax efficiency of Roth vs. regular IRA in the past on this board.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-22/berkshire-board-would-support-reinsurance-head-jain-for-ceo-buffett-says.html?cmpid=yhoo Buffett says Ajit can be the CEO if he wants the job! Wow! This it the first time he said it so openly even though he hinted at it many times in the AR.

I agree completely. I think Maboussin adds almost nothing new to the topic of dividends & buybacks. What he says is obvious and I don't know why spends so many pages saying it. Is his job at Legg Mason just writing articles?

In my previous post, I meant Berkshire sold a portion of Coke holding thru' the Genre transaction.

Actually, Buffett did "sell" large cap stocks like Coke, Amex, and others in 1998 by acquiring Gen Re for all stock transaction when Berkshire shares were trading at a significant premium to book. In other words, he sold ownership in Coke to Gen Re shareholders while receiving their bond portfolio in exchange in a tax free manner. Pure genius! It is the opposite of idiotic Kraft transaction with the Pizza business sale. An unintended consequence however of the Genre transaction is that Berkshire also inherited Genre underwriting problems which were eventually fixed. Regarding the Fairfax conference call, I thought Watsa punted a very good question from Jaideep. It is very disappointing. Can you imagine Buffett ever not answering such a question when the whole purpose of the call is to answer shareholder questions?

CFO Atkins retiring. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Wells-Fargo-Announces-CFO-bw-3804984180.html?x=0&.v=1

Correcting spelling: Never in my life I have seen more people I respect holding so much cash.

I was at the meeting & this is not what Munger said. From my recollection, he said something to the effect of: Never in my life I have seen more people I respect holding so much cas.

I think that generally betting on Black Swans by purchasing out of money options is a losing bet. It is possible that occasionally when the market is at a cyclical peak and is dominated greed as opposed to fear, you may (or may not) be able to purchase cheap puts as insurance. But I think doing it day in and day out is a losing proposition as illustrated by the previous expected value calculation & due to the fact that this insurance is priced mostly right.

Not true at all. Option market makers are quite sophisticated. You can observe "volatility smile" and "volatility skew". Volatility smile means that implied volatility is higher for out of money options than at the money options. And volatility skew means that the implied volatility is higher on one side of the strike price than the other side. This is completely contrary to log normal distribution.

jb85 & widemoat, The correct math assuming a 10% drop in the index is as follows: Expected value of the bet = prob of winning* winning take - (1-prob. of winning)*price paid Thus equals $40*1.6%-98.4%*$7.70 = -$6.94 Therefore this is a losing bet and should not be placed. It will be interestng to work out the odds for a 30% drop in the market.

Prior to 2008-2009 crisis, Buffett wanted a minimum cash of $10B to satisfy insurance related obligations. But I think his view on this changed as a result of the crisis. Now he says he wants a minimum of $20B cash to handle insurance payments at any point in time. I think this is the main reason he chose to borrow the money to pay for BNI purchase. I think this implies that there will not be any dividend or share buyback anytime soon.

I have decided to go the Mac route with Open Office even though it is not optimal from a pure cost standpoint. My decision is mainly based on the fact that the rest of my family (wife & son) loves Macs, and it makes sense to have just one OS in the house (easier to organize backups, have a server play music, pictures in the house, etc). I am now trying to decide among the plethora of options, iMac, Mac Mini, Mac book pro, or Mac Book Air. Thank you all for your valuable feedback.

For the last 20 years, I have always used a PC. Recently my 6-year old windows XP pc crashed and I need to get a new machine. The two options I am considering are getting a Windows 7 machine or an iMac. Hardware wise, you can get way better processor, memory and hard drive for 50% of the cost of a Mac. However, I have heard that Mac is way cooler OS wise even though I have personally not used a Mac before. I will be using Office software (word, excel, ppt, etc) heavily, and some analysis tools like Matlab in addition to usual web & email programs. I really appreciate feedback from members. TIA.

I also don't understand the ethical issue with buyback. However, if Warren is really worried about closing out partners, Berkshire could always buy back the donated shares to Gates Foundation. Since Gates Foundation is required to spend the money, there would be no ethical problem.

I meant buy back stock if the shares are reasonably valued (at a discount to IV).

Bronco, I agree that the buyback is not presently on the cards as my previous post implies. In the future if capital cannot be efficiently reinvested inside Berkshire by Buffett or his successor at decent rates of return due to ever increasing asset base, Berkshire should buy back stock in stead of issuing a dividend.

Berkshire can also buy back its own stock which is more tax-efficient than a dividend. I assume that Buffett looked at all the capital allocation alternatives and decided to buy preferreds and the railroad. Berkshire needs to keep a portion of its portfolio in fixed income securities due to insurance liabilities, so preferreds are an alternative to low yielding bonds.

Parsad, The media definitely seem to think Sokol is the heir apparent. But, don't forget that everyone assumed Li Lu would be joining Berkshire very soon, only to be proven wrong. I for one would not be so sure who the next CEO of Berkshire will be. Please share your thoughts on why you think Sokol would be the best choice for CEO given that the fountain from which all the funds flow for Berkshire is insurance.