rranjan

There is difference between taxing warren more and taxing warren at least at the same level as some one who works in mines or cleans toilets. I don't have fixed opinion on rich getting taxed lot higher but I do strongly feel that rich should not pay less than regular Joe. And if we extend your logic of money is better off with rich guys then why not have zero tax rate for anyone having net worth over a $100 Million. That will not next logical step.

I feel that we should take the seriousness of words based purely on arguments presented. It should not matter a bit if someone is managing 100 billion or 2 million or his personal money. We can hear the logic. We can agree or disagree after hearing the logic. How much money is managed by anyone does not make the arguments weak or strong. Same person might have different perspective when managing others money as compared to his own. So I agree that knowing the situation helps sometime but does not change the arguments presented. It should left to members what they want to disclose. I don't know about the SumZero but ValueInvestorsClub might not have same quality now days so being a member does not tell you much. If you take aggregate returns of all authors there then total returns will be very average. Writing there does force you to present your ideas in fancy way. Having said that, I do read it but don't participate.

I think we should calm down a bit with language. I guess goals of different people are different so they will see everything from their perspective. I think, looking at market level is good thing but if you find enough bargains then why worry too much about the market as long as you are not managing money for others or don't need to access your money for 5-10 years. If you find businesses selling at 3-4 times of FCF without much leverage then why get worried about getting them priced even cheaper for a while. I personally never pay any attention to market. It can be cheap or expensive. I simply buy when I find something cheap and sell it back when they become fully priced. yaah, no surprise that it is easier to find cheap stuff when whole market is cheap as well. Also, sometime things get cheaper for short duration if market drops a lot after my purchase. But Over all, focusing on buying cheap and selling full priced works fine. I think, sometime we focus too much on things over we have no control. I feel only thing we have control over is to buy cheap and sell as they become full priced. We can all benefit from looking over whole market level or other things but main focus should be still individual securities unless you are an index investor. Moor_capital54, In my opinion, we should keep out dollar figures from our discussions. Using percentage figures does the job. Even percentage figure is more meaningful when looked at how it was achieved. Everyone starts at different age with different starting money as a base. I also feel Paulson or anyone else having high net worth does not tell us much about how good they are as an investor. Only thing it tells us that they were successful in their business. Their long term investment record and how it was achieved should be only two factors to judge their investment skills.

Well Greece might be a small economy but we are so interlinked that it's difficult to say what will be total impact.

On other hands, producers of hard-disk drive manufacturing equipment like XRTX, IVAC might benefit for next few quarters. XRTX will be involved in fixing stuff for WDC in Thailand but I suspect that companies will be adding capacity outside of Thailand first to add the capacity quickly. In my opinion, 35-40% of the capacity getting affected due to flooding is very huge.

About 60% of the board readership is U.S., so that wet dream may just be reality! ;D Cheers! If we take whole US population then these people, who are member of this board or think in similar way, will be in tiny minority. Just being on this board and talking to each other might give us illusion that there are lot's of people with same mentality but in reality I don't find too many in my day to day interactions.

It is a good book

Well said Hester. Dividens does force management to work with less capital going forward and force them to use it little bit wisely but as you pointed out some companies are abusing this mindset by paying more than they earn. Anyway, I don't need income neither I see dividend as very efficient means to return money. I do see the point but don't see benefits outweighing the negetives most of the time.

There were $3.3 billion in other one-time charges not mentioned in this zerohedge piece (besides the $2.2 billion loss on private equity investments they do acknowledge). Intelligent individuals can have a debate on the true "one-timeness" of these charges, but it seems that if they discount all the one-time gains, they should at least mention all the one-time losses. http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2011/10/18/bank-of-america-earnings-very-messy/?mod=yahoo_hs I really don't follow zerohedge but as a rule if I spot someone projecting only one side of story consistently then I don't take them seriously due to clearly having their own agenda. You can still read to get one side of the story though.

Even though I don't do it personally, I do understand the argument for investing in companies with dividend. My main point was that I don't see any logic in looking at current yield on original cost basis. It is good to use as an example to convince people to hold stock for long term( not the crowd here rather an average Joe) but I don't see any reason why original cost basis should come into the picture when thinking about investment merit. At times, I have seen people quoting dividend yield based on original cost basis earlier also but never understood the reason. I thought, I might be missing something so raised the quetion. I perfectly understand all points you wrote about investing in divident paying stocks.

It might feel good to imagine that after many years, you can get 30% or 50% of original investment as dividend but I don't see the point. Bottom line is, whats the return going forward on your current holdings? If current total expected returns are 7-10% then thats the only relevent figure. Why should I feel good about the fact that 20 years ago I put $100 in some stock and now it gives 50% divident on my original investment even if total expected returns going forward might be low? Unless you need income or you are close to retirement, I fail to see the logic. Yes, getting some cash from the holdings allows you to buy stuff if things are cheap but I don't see why anyone should be excited with scenario of 50% dividend on original investment. Am I missing something here?

Good interview. Thanks for posting it here.

Myth--on this, we can totally agree. If I was your age, I would be fleeing the country as well.... Speaking of....did you see that in NZ, they do a physical on you, blood work, BMI, etc. , and if you don't make the cut, you can't immigrate and become a citizen. That's brilliant! If the government is going to provide your health care, you only get to come in if you are healthy. How much would that save our government if we implemented that here in the USA before you got Medicare/Medicaid. Situation is not good right now but I don't agree with the notion that it's bad enough to consider fleeing or whatever you want to call. USA has so much of inbuilt advantage due to system in place that it will overcome the problems. By system I don't mean this bickering of two parties. I meant over all USA still attracts best minds from outside due to obvious reasons and it allows people to do many things if they are upto it. I went to one of the best schools in India for undergrad and I never heard anyone planning to migrate or go for higher studies to Australia or UK or any other country. May be it was just due to tradition but thats what I saw. Many students go to other contries but most of them are not from the best schools in India. Just my observations and I might be wrong in deducing anything based on that. I think USA has lots of advantage which will make it good place for long time. I might be off target here but I feel that people who grew up here don't really see some of the advantages.

I don't wear any hat as far as left or right is concerned but higher unemployment has absolutely nothing to do with Obama. Problem was created over several years and Obama or anyone else does not have any magic to fix it quickly. Unimployment will go down only after housing starts improves because that's the biggest contributor. It should happen in next 1-3 years and meanwhile any policy proposed by either parties are not going to do much to make any huge difference in quick time. In my opinion, throwing incentive is not going to push businesses to start hiring. They will hire only when they need to hire.

He has not said anything new though.

I think they own the loan but I might be wrong.

I had very different experience with Wells though. I was looking for new loan roughly 15 months ago. I got much higher quote from Wells than some smaller bank. I took loan from smaller bank and then they sold the loan to Wells. Now I wanted to see if refinance rates will be lower by decent margin. I called same smaller bank again. They offered me rate one point lower. I called Wells, they offered me rate not much lower than what I have right now. I explained to them that smaller bank is offering lower rate and last time wells ended up buying the loan from them so why can't they at least match it. There is good chance that they will sell the loan to Wells again. I got explanation about having volume discount etc but if they could match then it will have better returns than buying from smaller bank because smaller bank is going to take their margin. I don't have any idea about Wells general practice . Just sharing my personal experience.

Thanks for posting it.

Neither you are wrong nor equities in general are extremely cheap :) I am sure you don't buy the whole market and there are many individual bargains present to be picked up.

Schloss took investment courses taught by Graham at the New York Stock Exchange Institute. He used to hold diversified porfolio of cheap stocks and did 15% annulized returns over a very long period ( I think 50 years or so) . He was not much of a Fisher style investor rather simply bought cheap stocks. So Walter Schloss type means a small holding in someones portfolio.

Author has an eye catching title but without any substance.

I think we should not have gold discussion in this thread. We should have it in gold or currency related threads. That way all related things will be together.

+1 This might be more usefull for wider audience than section like events. If adding section makes it undesirable in main page then may be having a sub section somewhere migth be a good idea. We can keep it as thread but it won't be visible all the time. Just to throw an idea, We can have Other/something else heading in main page replacing Events and Books . Then we can have Events, books and Videos/Interviews as sub section. That makes the main page clutter free and still everything is neatly organized and accessible in sub sections.

I have found setting up bulk of time for specific task and just start doing it the best way. Not for only investment but for all other things which I keep putting for next week or month. As pointed out earlier , it becomes easier if you happens to enjoy something a lot but I still find setting up time with right priority makes it easier. I need to improve on that but it had worked for me many times. I went to a undergraduate school where they don't teach you computer programming even if you are attending computer science degree. They expected us to learn ourselves and use it for solving problems. Focus was on solving problems and not teaching a programming language. It was easy situation for someone having exposure to programming but a person like me, who used a computer first time in life after joining the undergraduate school( don't start laughing, I grew up in pretty weird places), setting aside 2-3 weeks of time did do the trick. More I understood easier it got and more I was able to enjoy it. Having said that, I agree that if you are really passionate about something you do everything you can to make it happen. I had a roommate in first year of undergraduate. He also never used a computer. He used to spend 18 hours with computers. He designed and wrote best computer game in interschool competition. Finally he did his MS+PHD from top school in USA within 3 and half years. He was simply much more passionate about computers than me. Having that kind of passion makes it easier.

No doubt that humans will always have limitation with how much information they can process. I do use them for identifying some oppurtunities but I prefer making the final call myself. Personally for me, I can use any computer based model if I conviced with the inbuilt logic to screen some new oppurtunities but I will not feel comfortable with model making the call on my behalf. Thats just me and it does not mean others can't use for making final call.