nodnub

Locutus, if this happened to both you and your neighbor I wonder if someone is stealing mail in your neighborhood for identity theft... Have you missed receiving any of your credit card bills? Do you have a locked mailbox? To combat this, credit card companies are moving to chip-based cards which include a smart chip and you use a PIN code instead of signing for the transaction. I think they offer lower transaction fees to merchants for these PIN transactions because there is less chance of fraud? (or they will institute higher fees for those that don't switch to the new smart chip reader terminals). This transition is happening right now in Canada.

I think there are reasons beyond fragility to adopt SSDs. They make computers boot up and access programs/files on the hard drive at much faster rates. Friends with SSD drives can turn on the computer and be surfing the internet in just 10 seconds. Tariq, of course, you are correct. but those advantages were already described by Ross in the first post. I should have said that I think the other big advantage is less fragile technology and that this means people will choose first and foremost to use these on laptops and mobile devices. I have an old fashioned 5400rpm hard drive in my laptop and I can resume from a hibernate state in 15 seconds. (Hibernate is a power state that does not require any power at all and preserves all open windows on your desktop). I agree that most people will find SSD performance a lot better, but I don't think it is currently worth it for most consumer or business desktops. The current price versus capacity means that it is still something that only appeals to power users and early adopters. Capacity is also an issue. Many of these SSD drives at a reasonable price point are only 120GB capacity, while most of my friends are already filling up much larger capacity drives in their current laptops and desktops. A lot of folks I know have 50GB of music, 60GB of downloaded movies, lot of hi res digital photos and movies. I shoot at lower resolution and never take video and I have about 10GB of personal photos over the last couple years. So right now, at the current price, I think it appeals to niche users that are willing to pay a premium for performance and are willing to sacrifice drive space. I think this would be executive level employees and some computer afficionados (early adopters). Also remember that NAND and flash memory has a finite number of write cycles before it fails (something between 30,000 to 100,000 write cycles per block). Peer to peer software like bittorrent that is constantly reading and writing to the hard drive will chew through this. The jury is still out on how reliable these will be for a base OS install over a period of several years. I think hybrid drives are more likely to take off. Or maybe some variation like small capacity SSD drives that are built onto the motherboard to quickly load key operating system files and main applications (maybe 30 GB), and then you would still have a normal internal hard drive for data as well.

The big advantage of SSD is in mobile uses because there are no moving parts and are much less fragile than normal hard drives. So you will see them in a lot of netbook computers, laptops, tablet computers like iPad, some phones, etc. I think this segment is tied pretty heavily to consumer spending. Desktop computers at home and at work will be much slower to migrate to SSDs, as these are commodity products with low price as the major concern (top-level performance and shock damage protection are not major concerns here). I think it will depend on how well the retail consumer spends.

ross, thanks for taking the time to post this and share your thoughts. myth and beerbaron, you are right, and in fact there is already "Hybrid" hard drives in the market. (eg. 500GB standard drive with 4GB NAND memory (SSD) included on the hard drive. http://www2.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=53491 )

I always got the impression that most of their ideas were odd-lot tender offers. This is profitable, but it only moves the needle if you have a small portfolio.

http://www.google.com/alerts

Aberhound, your comments jogs my memory. I recall that it seemed that way to me at the time too. My recall of the details was clouded by nostalgia and hindsight.

That was a great trade. Now here is a question, even with hindsight. What have been a reasonable amount of one's portfolio to put in the trade. Given that the position could have gone to zero. Personally, I would think it would be 0.5 to a 1% position, maybe 2%. I just can't see putting more than that in options. Thoughts? Without knowing anything about the company... I would agree. however, there was lots of discussion about the hedge funds short manipulation of the company on the old MSN Board. A lot of the manipulation was confirmed when the lawsuit against the hedges was filed in late July 2006. I don't recall the option premiums immediately after that but the shares were still at a low point. For those that read the lawsuit and trusted Prem's version of events, it was a confirmation of a lot of what was suspected. A lot of the bad hedgie behaviour was finally laid out in black and white. Although, it had been widely discussed on here prior to the lawsuit (there was the short-lived website attacking Prem Watsa etc, etc).

blackberry has some great features but most of their phones are clunky. Almost every new blackberry I see is larger than 3 year old Nokia e71, but the BB's still have slower processor and slower app and camera performance. The nokia e71/72 are for sale for less than half the BB price as well. I have a nokia. It has a nice hardware design and runs Symbian OS. It has pretty good apps available --- but I agree that it would be much better if it ran Android and could take advantage of all Android applications. Nokia has not created the best software or best phone operating system. Software is not their strong suit. The risk Nokia faces in moving to Android OS is that their hardware design would be their only differentiating factor and this might give their product more severe competition from manufacturers like HTC.

agreed, but they may lose some of that advantage in EMEA in coming years.

jb85, I was looking at the WFC options on those days in early march 2009. I don't believe the WFC options ever reached odds as favourable as FFH options in 2006. Back in 2006, I think we suspected that the FFH options became really cheap because hedge funds that had trouble locating a borrow to go short... instead they went and created short positions via options which distorted the option market for FFH. Ericopoly might chime in with a more accurate recollection.

hahaha, maybe it's time for me to get rid of my single monitor. my returns could approach infinity. ;D

Globe and Mail articles generally show up in Google News. You can set Google Alerts to mail you a summary of newspaper articles, blog posts, et al matching keywords like "fairfax financial". The results can be sent to your email on daily or weekly basis, etc. If interested, you could set a news article alert for each company you follow.

I agree. I think Alice is being disingenuous for the sake of getting eyeballs on her article. If more large banks had failed I believe the instability in the system would have caused many fundamentally sound banks and other institutions to fail. It would have been obvious to the public that the FDIC would not be able to insure all deposits. No one wants to wait for the FDIC or the govt to eventually pay them their deposits back. They would tranfer it out of that bank immediately at the first sign of trouble. There would have been a panic and bank runs would have spread (since it's electronic now, it can happen within hours without lineups in the street). In my opinion not much that Alice says these days is worth discussing or listening to. I wish my Internet connection came with a "minus Alice" filter.

here is a longer article with more details from the Globe and Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/flush-with-cash-fairfax-lands-royal-deal/article1715626/ “The beauty of the region is that insurance in that part of the world has a very low penetration,” Mr. Watsa said. “The current penetration is primarily through the automobile insurance products. This will expand to houses and into more commercial areas, such as commercial buildings, factories. There’s lots of petrochemical plants.

Vinod1, Thanks for your last posts. I agree. If anyone thinks indexing is a bad suggestion for the average investor (or even for the average reader of The Intelligent Investor) please consider the following: Try to remember that the "average" investor does not even read the financial section of the newspaper (they own mutual funds pushed on them by bank salespeople and sales commission based financial advisors). Of the few people that have an interest in investing and do try to educate themselves a little bit... most of them still do not "get it". They get sidetracked by momentum or technical trading, etc. Most of these people still never learn to value a company (this includes 9 out of 10 typical people that take an interest in Buffett). Many take an interest in Buffett and the idea of value... but they never actually "get it" and start applying it themselves. A small subset can "get it" and start to buy companies at a price that is comfortably below an estimate of the true value. An even smaller subset also learns emotional control so they have the stomach to seize the opportunities when the markets are in turmoil and so-called investors are panicking. As a percentage of the investing public.. there are very few that can do this.

Is anyone else having trouble avoiding excessive foreign with-holding taxes on U.S. dividends, in non-registered accounts? The usual 15% is fine (since you get credit for foreign taxes with-held), but I have some Nokia ADR in a non-registered account, and RBC tells me that it is Nokia (Finland) that is with-holding the 28% tax on dividends. I think it's just that RBC's back-end brokers that handle the ADR don't knowing what papers need signing in order to reduce the 28% to 15%. (15% is what the Canadian-Finland tax treaties have agreed should be with-held.) Any other Canadian holders of NOK, or similar situations (probably Swiss stocks would be the same)? roundball, I believe the 28% is correct. It is a function of investing through the US ADR. I think it works like this. $1.00 dividend -0.15 (15% Finland tax withholding) ----------------------------------- $0.85 = Dividend paid to US ADR -0.13 (15% of $0.85) US Tax withholding. ------------------------------------------ $0.72 = dividend payable to Canadian Shareholders of US ADR. I think you can avoid this double withholding tax if you bought the NOK stock directly on the Helsinki exchange. Then you would pay only the 15% tax to Finland. Cheers!

I will have to disagree with you on that part. If someone is earning $250,000 and all they can "save" is $50,000, something is wrong. Ive saved $50,000 a few years without making close to that- there are alot of opportunities for deductions and deferrals. This is not directed at you but its funny, it kind of reminds me of the basketball player who turned down a multi-million dollar contract and the rationale he communicated to the media was "how am I supposed to feed my family on that?". Haha, funny guys those bb players! ;D Smazz, don't forget that basketball players are different from the rest of us. He might be paying child support to 5 different women. ;D

I agree that there is little or no switching cost but people tend to stick with what they are used to. I am using the same gillette razor type that I started shaving on: Sensor Excel. I have tried Mach 3 etc but I prefer the Sensor series. I have tried other brands, Wilkinson Sword or Schick (received free handle/razor pack once or twice). I didn't like it as much and ended up throwing it away after a while. I think most guys stick with the same brand, and within that, stay with the same razor model, for many years. Even though the economic switching cost is almost zero.

as predicted earlier... Odyssey is redeeming it's A and B preferred shares. http://www.tradingmarkets.com/news/press-release/orh_the_odysseyre-announces-redemption-of-preferred-stock-1171222.html

is watsa_is_a_randian_hero really that confusing with watsa? my handle is a tribute to him - I am saying he is akin to a randian hero for the battle he has gone through the last decade with hedge funds. I dont think its that hard for people to copy the full name when referring to me - or do something like hero - i've seen that. Either way, I don't really care, if Parsad wants me to change it I will. I'd rather devote time/energy/discussion to things that matter... No, it is not confusing. I explicitly used your name as an example of one that is suitable, I guess you missed that :) I was merely suggesting that userids like "Munger" were inappropriate because everyone that refers to this poster ends up writing something like this... Munger (the user, not the 86 year old sidekick to W.E.B.) The problem is that there is nothing else in the username to help people keep it distinct when making reference to the poster. Your username solves this problem by being obviously distinct.

Does anyone have arguments against the proposal that they would like to share?

I have a modest proposal for usernames on this board. On this board we often refer to the real personages associated with names Munger, Watsa, Buffett etc. I find it tiresome to constantly include disclaimers in brackets to differentiate between posters that choose a username that is the exact unaltered name of the original person. I propose that users of this board not choose usernames that are verbatim copies of first or last names of famous people often discussed here. such as Warren Buffet, WEB, Buffett, Munger, Charlie Munger, Prem Watsa, Seth Klarman etc. Variations on these names that differentiate the post author from the REAL person would be fine. (accepted examples would be "mungerville", "watsa_is_randian_hero", "buffettologist", etc) Cheers, nodnub

garmin have released a phone in conjunction with tmobile (and maybe others - I know I have seen it on the tmobile site). Thats a tough market to break into. I have a tom tom that I purchased a couple of years ago and found it to be pretty good. I did buy further updates for it - for when I travelled to England and wanted the gps there. I do now have a gps enabled smartphone - I have it hooked up to the speakers and play music and podcasts on it as I'm driving - I've used the gps app on the phone a few times and found it to be fairly accurate - plus it cuts off the music and delivers the directions over the speakers. I don;t find the need to be looking at the screen (apart from my ocd tendencies to want to know exactly where I am and how far to the next exit). Given the quality of the gps service on the phone and automatic upgrades etc (plus the ability to search for a place and just click to get directions) I can't see me buying another gps device. the only issues that I would consider is that I don;t want to be using my phone abroad dueto the costs of the data service and that once you are out of the main coverage ares its possible that the phone (and therefore the gps) can drop out of coverage and it would probably then be as clueless as I am as to my location). I think garmin need to develop a partnership with a major carrier and expand their influence that way. I have a nokia smartphone. I can download free worldwide maps from the nokia website and put them on my phone. The GPS functions fine without a data plan. The GPS reciever receives GPS satellite signals for free, and depending on the phone, it can receive additional assistance from cell phone tower triangulation (this does not add any usage to your data plan). I don't even have a data plan and this work fine. -- GPS will work anywhere that there is line of sight to the sky (that's where the GPS satellites are) so long as it can see more than a couple satellites (to triangulate your position in 2D)