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Agreed. Thriftbooks is a GREAT resource and frequently I get a better deal than AMZN. I usually buy used-very good, or used-like new, and often get books between $4-$10 with free shipping on orders over $10. Plus my first few orders had a discount code, and they have a rewards program. I think my best order was 5 nearly brand new books delivered to my door for $21 or so. (Is Thriftbooks a for-profit business?) Of course, the longer the book has been around and the more copies have been printed (i.e., the more popular it's been), the cheaper you'll find copies.

Chuck Feeney...a great, great inspiration. Wonderful story.

Can you explain the procedure? Thank you.

Value investing hasn’t changed or been invalidated at all. The modern value investing deans have made a lot of mistakes. That’s it. Sears was a bad bet. GM spends almost all of it “earnings”, leaving no cash. Too many people are letting these guys fool them by arguing something “doesn’t work” just because they have made a lot of miscalculations. Nothing has invalidated the idea of buying a business cheaply relative to its future distributable earning power. The whole net working capital stock thing worked because either: (A) the company would liquidate (cash in your pocket) (B) the company would develop real earning power (cash) © the company would be acquired (presumably the new owner would liquidate or fix it like dempster mill ) There’s no difference between that and buying Apple at a $500B market cap which will produce $50-60B of free cash flow. Price, and cash flow. The opportunity can come in many forms. It’s strange that this is argued over so much. Tesla is worth zero if it doesn’t develop distributable cash some day in excess of its losses. It’s called “speculative” because there hasn’t been any yet and the business they’re in is monstrously competitive.

If you really needed to do that, you’d use something of this grade: https://www.dfinsolutions.com/products/edgar-online

Very interesting observations. I asked because it gets to the heart of what makes these things valuable in the first place.

Looks good. Is there any plan to get financial data back before 2004? What is the plan for pricing? Thanks!

Just out of curiosity - WSJ speculating that a US company could buy TikTok without its algorithm, and "rebuild it using TikTok's user data". "Withholding the core algorithm wouldn’t necessarily spell the end of TikTok’s U.S. operations, as software engineers could still rebuild it using TikTok’s user data as a current training data set, according to Mr. Wei. But that process might take time and could lead the app to lose users to rivals, he said." As a neophyte, how sane or insane is this plan?

Perry Mason on HBO. Really, really liked it. First episode is a little dark etc. - keep going.

2020 Form ADV: https://reports.adviserinfo.sec.gov/reports/ADV/157594/PDF/157594.pdf $13.9 billion AUM Wow. He's gotten big. Thanks!

I think that entire 13F is less than 10% of what Himalaya manages. Yes, they own it. But not to the degree of concentration that the 13F may lead you to. Do have a source for Himalaya being >$10b?

Akre is a wonderful money manager who has been performing well since 1989 - and has a repeatable, scalable process. I don't feel he's anything like Ken Heebner, who went all in on energy stocks and tanked. The problem with Akre are problems faced with all good money managers: (1) I believe he's in his late 70s, so you ought to believe his team is as good as he's been. Sequoia shows how tough that can be (not to knock them - for all I know that team is brilliant - just commenting on histoy) (2) He's managing over $15 billion now, orders of magnitude harder than $500M, or $1 or $2 billion he built his reputation with. (3) The stocks he built his reputation on were growing at 15-20% and trading at 10-20x earnings. These now trade at 30-50x earnings. AMT, MA/V, CSGP, ADBE, ROP, CSU, etc. Wonderful companies, which will keep him from blowing up, but all high priced. (Not his fault - simply what the environment has on tap). The probability of getting future returns of 15-20% simply must be nil. But you might get 10% and that's pretty good. Giverny is great - Francois should keep doing well. He ought not to be reporting performance figures from his personal accounts in the 90s but even when you scrub that away his edge is still there. And it's scalable. The worst problem will be if he takes too much money, which so many eventually do. Ackman is a genius who can't seem to remember his limits. That would always scare me.

Thanks. These are the "hard" qualities and make sense to me. However, I cannot find any reference to this logic in Buffett's literature. In fact I have never seen the logic explained other than that "even if he invested billions of dollars to create a cola that competes with Coca Cola, he would not be able to do it." This said, if the true value of Coke lies in the distribution system, and if its executives recognize this too, then it is only logical for them to leverage this same distribution system to create other products. They could create an array of soda products, with some tweaks on the formula. But they didn't? I counted nearly dozen varieties on Coke and Diet Coke (itself a variety) in my local shop a few months ago. Cherry, orange, vanilla, all available as Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, plus the originals, plus caffeine free of original and diet. Coke has more than 500 individual brands. Its best selling product in Japan is Georgia Coffee. Yes, enormous market power to create demand with advertising and long term habits, and always available distribution. Ever been to Venice? Coke available at every location. Imagine being a convenience store or grocery or warehouse or fast food restaurant without Coke or Pepsi products. And of course, Coke creams off the top because they own the syrup making - the bottlers do the tough part. (Though Coke and Pepsi buy and sell these from time to time to fix them up, consolidate, etc.) See’s sells holiday, valentine, and birthday presents for $20/lb, and millions of people are happy to pay. They make money one month a year when the stores are swamped and the internet business is rocking. Fabulous moat. No one in California sends Lindt to their family on Christmas. See’s is right sized to the area where it has dense demand. It would not earn great returns elsewhere because those habits don’t exist and the density isn’t there.

I think people fundamentally have a hard time understanding how prices work as signals - that people use X amount of something at one price and X+25% at another price. If you were to push down the price of water bottles by 75% you’d get all kinds of waste you don’t get now and vice versa. That said, people are not dumb, they’re people.

One thing I'd like to point out is that almost all of the recommendations and predictions coming out of this thread - summarized above - are simply extrapolations of what's currently happening. More people working from home, education done virtually, stock market declining further, shares of well insulated companies staying high, more government spending, more supply chain insourcing, etc etc. Don't mean to denigrate it but basically this is how all thought processes tend to happen in the middle of a panic. I'm sure some of it will undoubtedly be true.

Chanos has done a great job with his main fund. And to the biases on this particular forum, if history had broken slightly differently he would have nailed Fairfax as well. He's been short almost all of the major frauds and even the ones he's been burned on, he's been mostly right in the long run (i.e. AOL). I see no reason not to have total respect and pay total attention when he speaks on specific companies. You're free to disagree but he's usually got a point. I recall Ackman being 100% certain Chanos was dead wrong on Valeant - and Ackman was the one caught dead wrong. Happens to all of us - but it was a good reminder that Chanos' work is usually pretty solid - Ackman works pretty hard and still missed it. Value investors specifically need to pay attention to Chanos because as a group we've missed a lot over the years and he's caught many of them.

What makes you say that? Curious. Thx.

One of the greatest wartime reads ever!! So few know about it. Read it, then give it to your favorite Marine... Follow that one up with Antony Beevor "Stalingrad" and "The Fall of Berlin" I listened to Sledge's book as an audiobook. Haunting. Hard to get through.

No. This is absurd. Absence of evidence =/= evidence of absence. Where would we be at if dozens or hundreds of more cases were seeded elsewhere? This complacency AIDS the spread of the virus. China-style lockdown stopped it in its tracks.

Berkshire, almost certainly.

I'm confused.

I'm with the crowd that says the news will get worse. But the market will bottom -- wherever that may be -- when everyone thinks there is further worse news ahead. That is just how it works. It's impossible to know that point. Market timing won't work this time any more the prior times. I recall quite well the discussions portfolios managers were having in 08, 09, 10 about waiting for certain things to happen before they bought, how much worse it was going to get, etc. And they missed the opportunities. Of course, it also could have gotten worse - history only gets run once but didn't have to happen that way. FWIW, I don't know where the bottom is any better than a man on the street. It's a hard game. But I think at the very least, it's helpful to accept that you won't be the smartest person in a room full of millions trying to outguess each other.

no I am saying your estimates of these variables are garbage in. what is your expertise? the street gets these numbers wrong all of the time (mainly because they suck up to management all the time to create their projections). there is a false certainty to numbers that you dont appreciate, because you are asking someone/something to tell you what to do, and numbers are all too suggestive of wisdom. capiche? How would you know what price is reasonable or unreasonable if you refuse to think about what rate the company will grow or shrink into the future? With that line of thought, since "everything is GIGO" as you say, then tell me how you know Visa is a good buy at $120 and not at $240? (Or whatever you choose.) One can estimate without knowing precisely. This board should not let itself be watered down.

Can you walk us through your math there? Do you believe Visa's earnings will always be $17 billion?

I would be careful assuming there is an “appropriate multiple” for a certain type of company simply based on a classification you give it (ie “compounder”). The question as always is (A) How long will it grow and at what rate? (B) How much capital will it use to finance its growth? © What kind of business will it be when its growth slows? (D) How much stock does it issue to employees? And so on. In the case of the last one, for example, I know of companies (“high quality compounders” in your lingo) which issue so much stock that their real earnings may be 70% or less than what’s reported. So the multiple should be a lot lower. And in some cases, almost all growth is acquired - again, that lowers the multiple a great deal. The temporary problems of now affect all of this a bit, but assuming the company will make it through, all kinds of different companies should end up with all kinds of different multiples. I would go case by case.