rogermunibond

Cumming is 70; Steinberg is 67.

Mild screw over. He wrote up the value of TTT's Wabush iron ore royalty and undervalued MFC for the exchange. But if you used the sell off opportunity prior to the acquistion to buy MFC cheap, you did okay.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703515504576142092863219826.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsTop I found this piece on the Indian education system pretty shocking. Paying teachers/examiners for grades is much worse than any kind of cheating that goes on in the US.

Parsad - is there any way to correct the thread subject from Davis to David? It's driving me nutty. If not I will just pound my head on my computer monitor. TIA.

Thanks for posting the link. Very interesting story indeed.

The HNR thesis has played out pretty well. Following the company's success in Utah, they have sold out to Newfield. Exploration plays in Indonesia, Gabon, and Oman still to play out. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/22/harvestnatural-newfield-idUSL3E7EM1U820110322

Interesting that Colombia licenses there TLD.

Costco also has the cheapest gas around. So you can save $3-4 bucks on gas, which is the cost of the trip for me.

http://www.cnbc.com/us_news/41872903 After a pause... part 3

Tiddman. In that vein, I like Harry Long. Cheery consensus is for the birds.

http://www.unctad.org/infocomm/anglais/cocoa/companies.htm Besides Nestle and Cadbury/Kraft and the agricultural congos like ADM, Cargill, etc.... Two on the SIX Swiss exchange Barry Callebaut - BARN Lindt and Sprungli - LISN

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/96223/000009622311000005/lnc2010form10k.htm Reversed the tax valuation allowance to the tune of $1.16B.

Take a look at comparable standalone REITS - BEE, SHO, LHO, AHT. Compare $/room after netting out holdco debt, preferreds, etc. Or go to Globest or costar website and look at comparable recent hotel sales and look at REVPAR/room and $/room for those sales. IIRC, Loews hotels are mostly luxury/5-star properties,, so BEE and SHO might be the best comparators.

"what specialty stores, does anyone know?" I think they are opening Sears Outlet stores. For unsold appliances and Lands End gear.

There are a number of businesses that are part of significant market share duopolies here in NA. Construction equipment auction - Ritchie Brothers (RBA) vs Iron Planet (private) Salvage yard auto parts - Copart (CPRT) vs private competitor Organic foods distribution - United Natural Foods (UNFI) vs Natures Best (private) A number of businesses have natural moats similar to landfills, for example, gravel, sand, limestone quarries - MLM and VMC The pricing power of MLM and VMC may be debatable given a much lower demand level, but overall they have still retained pricing power in certain markets (North Carolina, Los Angeles, Texas).

Thank you Sanj! Any time you're in Baltimore, let me buy you a beverage of your choice!

You can't be sure that all luxury brands are made where they say they are... http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/opinion/23thomas.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120673913731872739.html http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/02/02/pm_made_in_china/ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704240004575085502462249586.html

Well WEB uses the See's Candy example. Every year he jacks up the price by xx cents and the sales keep chugging. See's doesn't introduce a See's Lite brand at a lower price point to fight off Russell Stover and others. They just offer one price level. Notwithstanding our disagreement on pricing power, congrats on your TPX buy. They are a much lower cost mattress company compared to their peers and their spend in marketing allows them to maintain a powerful brand. With regard to pricing though, when was the last time you shopped for mattresses? There are Serta, Sealy, and Simmons memory foam mattresses which are fairly close in price (couple hundred $) to TPX products and top of the line 3S foam mattresses overlap the TPX mid-line mattresses. I was thinking that ARM Holdings has some fairly strong pricing power with their royalty rate. But it's not absolute. They have been raising their royalty rate but if they jacked it up too high then chipmakers would probably balk. But since their operating margins are robust, most of that royalty rate drops to the bottom.

I'm not convinced. They may raise the price of their top of the line products every year, but in order to compete with others they have introduced mid-priced mattresses so they can continue to differentiate the market. Creating pricing tiers and maintaining/raising prices in the luxury tier, while creating lower priced tiers to fight off competitors doesn't strike me as pricing power.

How do they keep pricing power when every other mattress company out there has some sort of memory foam bed - Sealy, Serta, Simmons, Spring Air, and SCSS? I'll grant that they are pricier, but I just figured that they took the high-end luxury part of the market like like what Callaway does in golf clubs or Lacoste in shirts.

How would you rate that book? Worth reading? Well written? Good story? The man's life definitely seems interesting, but that doesn't mean that a book about it will be, so I'd love your feedback (and if anyone else has read it, I'd love to hear your thoughts)... The book is basically a play by play of what Singleton did at Teledyne. It's recounted by one of his colleagues at the company. Not a great story, not particularly well written, but accurate details. So good for understanding what he did. Plus, there's a CD with the financials included. At least the copy that I bought had it.

I guess everyone just skips over the obvious choice -- Carlos Slim Helu. Not many know his story, I guess, being south of the border.

Very true. Eddie takes $0 in paid compensation as Chairman of Sears Holdings.

I don't think it's likely. Probably Eddies just likes the value proposition of GPS, similar to Autozone or AutoNation. GPS has a market cap of $13+B and SHLD is is $9.7B. I don't think any kind of acquisition is possible.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1067983/000095012311013623/v58511e13fvhr.txt Almost all the Lou Simpson picks are gone.