rogermunibond

As some on this board have been warning about for a few years... http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203335504578088821389676846.html?mg=reno64-wsj VANCOUVER, British Columbia—After a blistering, multiyear run that saw ramshackle bungalows fetch seven-figure sums, one of the hottest real-estate markets in North America seems to be cooling, damped in part by government changes meant to deflate what many policy makers saw as the start of a bubble. While many U.S. markets are just now showing signs of recovery from a housing crash, Canada has been enjoying a real-estate boom in recent years. Nowhere was that more pronounced than in Vancouver, a market where land long has been in short supply, hemmed in by mountains to the east and the ocean to the west. The city frequently ranks among the most livable in the world and for decades has attracted waves of wealthy Chinese and Asian immigrants.

http://www.celtichealthcare.com/about/ Interesting since some of the IT components to Celtic are key parts to their efforts to decrease costs by allowing/facilitating care at home. i'd guess that the VirtualCare division is what entices WaPo.

I think you guys might have taken the wrong tack with this book. After reading it, I immediately started looking at what Mr. Schulich owned and thus stumbled on New Gold, at the time a small junior gold producer that both Schulich and Pierre Lassonde owned a lot of. New Gold has undertaken a rather amazing series of value generating deals, and returned nearly 7x for me. Of course Schulich is also a big holder in a loser, Birchcliff Energy, which because of its gas focus I was able to avoid.

Thanks for posting the link!

Dodge and Cox is the big SF value shop.

Einhorn had a weird move with XRX where he bought, sold shortly after on Euroland weakness fears and then bought back in maybe a few quarters later. It's entirely possible he could do the same with DELL.

Baupost exited Targacept after their second failed P3 trial.

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12444 Writer of the Vanity Fair piece on MSFT's lost decade talking with Charlie Rose.

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer VF doing a piece on MSFT in the Aug issue. Full article require subscription. I love the line " they've become the thing they despised"

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/oral-history/financial-crisis/tags/tarp/ Kovacevich in the Frontline series said that he had no objection to liquidity to stave off a bank run, obviously Citi, BAC ML, Goldman, and MS might have needed this. But JPM, Wells, BONY, and State were okay and so were USB and PNC. Forcing them all to take capital made the market doubt everything. I think we forget that between TARP and the stress tests in May 2009, the markets tanked much, much farther down. It was really the stress tests that broke the panic, not TARP. Even Sheila Bair disagreed with TARP but she went along as a team player because that is what Paulson and Bernanke were pushing.

Dell bought Perot Systems, HP bought EDS, Xerox bought ACS, then there CSC. All have chunks of the government business process outsourcing market. Dell has hardly cornered the market on govt contracts for services.

Sean Egan

Sequoia Fund held their 2012 Investor Day on May 23rd, was anyone from the board attending and kind enough to post their notes from the event? Thanks.

Those assets are highly tangible, in the non accounting way!

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1549575/000154692712000017/dalal13f3312012.txt

Would make sense for Chouinard to sell to REI. Although that could hurt their relationship with other outdoor retailers.

Thanks for posting. Really good article on Sears.

Ubuy - yes very much agree with you. My one caveat is that many of the simpler decisions we make in day to day life are the system I kind. And by and large fast thinking serves us well there. But with our modern complex and more numerate world, system I fails us.

My take from his book is that we were mostly wired to make fast choices in an environment and complexity level that changed dramatically from our evolutionary past to now.

Given fear of neo-colonialism in India and China, and fears that large western corporations will create entrenched positions that stifle local companies, I can totally understand reasons for both countries to restrict western investment. But these restrictions will create bifurcation of world trade and less integration. And it's not exactly in India's interest to have it capital account deficit funded by China is it? I would think India would much rather have investors from the US/Canada, western Europe, Australia, and Japan. And yes, despite all its problems the Indian stock market will probably do very well for saavy domestic Indian investors, such as some members of this board, but many of us are outside of India. Open markets are not just something foreign investors should want!

Craftsman tools are made by Danaher and others. Is that a similar situation for SBD? Don't they do their own tool manufacturing.

FT did an analysis recently of India's lamentable infrastructure. Dearth of foreign investment among many ills. India has the opposite disease as China. If only the two could balance their over and under investment strategies. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5e880566-6d08-11e1-a7c7-00144feab49a.html#axzz1pxoOHDsR

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-21/buffett-seizes-lead-in-bet-on-stocks-beating-hedge-funds.html Sorry for the repost. Parsad can you remove this duplicate topic? Thx.

Unlike American industrialists, Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc. most billionaires in Russia, India, and China and really even Brazil are not the true rags to riches examples of social mobility that marked the US industrial rise. Heck the example of Japan's Morita and Toyoda are better examples of true social mobility than anything in the Brics. The reason it matters is principally because all these Brics still lack the entrepreneurial, innovation, and capital allocating aspects of the US system. They do it by diktat, or by cronyism, or by outright theft and corruption. Obviously I'm over generalizing, but these are things that bug me about the Brics. Seshnath --- you are missing the point. If Papa Ambani left only a small trust to his sons would either of them be billionaires?

http://www.coalpowermag.com/plant_design/Natural-Gas-Conversions-of-Existing-Coal-Fired-Boilers_338.html Interesting article on conversion of coal-fired boilers SharperD - do the newer pulverized/fluidized bed coal plants have lower SO2/NOX, fly ash, and mercury emissions? In other words, are the newer coal plants advantaged over NG generation as well as older base load coal that cannot meet the higher EPA emission rules in 2013-14? Which of the merchant and regulated utes have the newet coal fleets? FE, AYE, MIR