Spooky

Ya I'm not a fan of the CCP. Not sure what the right policy is with respect to China but both parties need some give and take.

I hope you are right. I've been reading a lot of commentary that the two countries are not communicating at the highest levels.

+1. I agree. China and the US as the two largest and most powerful countries need to figure out a way to co-exist and co-operate. Otherwise it will be terrible for the world.

So your argument is that the US has been the best at increasing productivity and because of this others shouldn't criticize it when it shoots itself in the foot and puts its economic dominance at risk?

It's a good question. In more recent versions of Siegel's stocks for the long run he looks at foreign jurisdictions. In Germany / Japan, Europe holders of government bonds and bills didn't do so well because of WWII. The interesting thing, however, is that holders of stocks ended up doing well on a real basis over the long run (not as well as the US obviously but still positive real returns). China / Russia are different stories. They do not have rule of law and investor protections available to the traditional developed market economies.

Nice!

I've put figuring out the Canadian housing market in the too hard pile. It mostly comes down to estimating supply and demand which are both increasingly political issues. Will the federal government restrict the number of new people coming into the country? Will there truly be an infrastructure project to build millions of homes?

Haha I am.

This chart is from Li Lu’s paper on value investing in China but the source is from Jeremy Siegel

+1. Martin is the man.

Just voted in the Canadian federal election

I love Buffett's thought experiment if you owned all the gold in the world - it would be a cube that would fill the inside of a baseball diamond. The cube of gold will produce nothing in the next hundred years (or, for that matter, thousands of years). The cube of gold will not pay you interest or dividends, and it won't grow earnings. You can fondle the cube, but it won't respond.

Over the last 200+ years you would have been better off holding t-bills than gold if you are looking at real returns.

Picked up some more shares of AXP.

Thanks for this, really interesting and inspiring. The manager I look up to the most is Sir Alex Ferguson, former manager of Manchester United and possibly the greatest soccer / football manager of all time. I believe he had a similar approach where he was able to get the best out of each player on the team and built up the structures for them to succeed. He has a great book on leadership which I highly recommend. The first chapter is all about listening, he always knew what the players were thinking and what was going on in the dressing room.

Does Li Lu specify a minimum investment? Probably too high for a pleb like me.

Are you talking about Gov. Shapiro? I just heard about that... so crazy.

Thanks for sharing... hopefully they don't go this route. Another factor pointing to a lower allocation to US equities.

Thought the memo by Howard was excellent. The example about Japanese companies getting the edge in auto manufacturing but the US economy growing significantly more rapidly was interesting. Also, he is right about the behaviour of the U.S. in the post-World War II period as “generosity toward the rest of the world stemming from enlightened self-interest".

Inflation is a risk for BRK just like most other stocks - it is a tapeworm that eats wealth. Check out Buffett's 1977 article in Fortune “How Inflation Swindles the Equity Investor”. Basically, in the 1970s, the performance of BRK only matched that of gold despite all the work they were doing at the company. Inflation-Swindles-the-Equity-Investor.pdf

I wish some / more hedge funds blew up. We were starting to get some good deals with all the forced selling.

Can you elaborate on this? Was there anything in the functioning of the bond market other than yields rising?

That's interesting, around Toronto gas prices have fallen a decent amount.

Can't tell if you are being sarcastic

The right time to buy is when you can buy a business for less than intrinsic value (with a margin of safety). The rest is noise.