beerbaron

FFH is NOT cash. There is significantly more risk owning FFH then owning Cash. the stock is uncorrelated to the general market but it does not mean it is cash equivalent. What if the guys had Utilities in it's portfolio, should he account for those a virtually cash? BeerBaron

What you mean the 0.01% annual cost for the headoffice? BRK and FFH are the worst examples to try to discount their HQ costs, they are so decentralized that they can run as slim. I don't think the Conglomerate discount applies to those companies. BeerBaron

Smallest is 67M$, largest is 180B$. Liquidity is not a big issue when you run a tiny portfolio like mine. BeerBaron

Let's make a game. Who predicted IBM as Buffett's last pick? BeerBaron

How about Swiss Re?

Parsad, why did you make it an open discussion? BeerBaron

Yes, sadly some people look at div yield as a metric... if only those poor Yellow Media shareholder would have looked at the cash flow instead of the div yield. 0.01$ dividend is so useless that they should cut it to 0.00$ . At least it would send the message that the problem is understood by management. BeerBaron

Yes, they should not spend a penny (literally) on dividend, they probably need all the capital they could get their hands on. BeerBaron

Bank of America Declares Quarterly Dividends http://www.google.com/reader/view/#stream/feed%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Ffinance%2Fcompany_news%3Fq%3DNYSE%3ABAC%26output%3Drss Why oh why are they wasting any money in dividends if they are also considering issuing shares at 1/4 of BV? BeerBaron

Where did the Kraft share go, did he do a total return swap on them? BeerBaron

At about 500$ per transaction and 1M$ per day that means he is making 500$ in revenues that is ridiculously small. I am affraid it's pricing is too low to support it's idea. Great entrepreneur tough! BeerBaron

Where is the rest...? BeerBaron

My first contact with a Buffett letter was maybe 4 years ago, I did not know anything about the man nor value investing. The only thing I knew was that he was the world's richest man and that he built it's fortune from scratch; which I highly admired. Since then, I have read most of it's life-story, investments thesis and political ideas. But every time I red what he said I went: "I wish I would be able to express my ideas as clearly as he does". It's not it's fortune that makes me sick but the way he is able to transform a complex subject into a childish example that makes perfect sense. I've listened to leadership class, great rhetoric professors or even Dale Carnegie but none of them could give me the tools to express myself as fluently as Buffett does. Did anybody else on this forum try something similar, and what helped them accomplish their goal? BeerBaron

Spock teleport me to the past pronto!

They are somewhat doing it already, as they are stacking layers over layers on a wafer. Of course, not as efficient as a real 3D. I'm very doubtfull about Moore's law going forward, first it was the MHz that reached a plateau, soon the transistor count and after that the treatment capacity. 50 years of a law being proven right does not make it true for the next 50 years. I would rather bet on the games being held on the phone and the XBox being some kind of post processor, giving the raw CPU power needed. Maybe even TVs will come out with the XBox compatible input where all you would do is plug and play. But all the CPU power on the phone by 2015...nah. BeerBaron

It won't happen. In order to put the hardware equivalent of XBox-360 into the iPhone, the transistor size would need to also be reduced 10 times. Current best IC technologies use 30nm and the limit is about 16nm. Passed 16nm the transistors stop being transistors. Which means ICs can be reduced by 2x and then no more raw CPU power. It's going to be tweaking of bits and pieces but Moore's law won't apply anymore. It the same thing with SSD, it won't replace HDD for raw storage because of the same physical law. It's funny because people believe in gravity but not that transistors size could stop shrinking... go figure! BeerBaron

That is sweet for the consumer but I have trouble understanding how they will not impact their book business. I wish Kobo would do this! BeerBaron

Correction, reading ELF is a good way to fall asleep faster then I can write this pos.........zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Just go with Questrade for your registered accounts and IB for unregistered ones! BeerBaron

Banks are undercapitalized and a failure would mean 2008 x2. Nobody wants it to happen and it's costly in terms of moral damage and a drag on the economy. BeerBaron

just ask Russian investors their return on capital after the Bolshevik Revolution! As Ben Graham might caution, beware the difference between the loss on capital (a drop in price, from which we can recover) and a loss of capital (100% loss, from which we cannot). Russia’s stock market wasn’t alone in the 20th century as three additional top 15 markets in 1900—Egypt, Argentina, and China—suffered a 100% loss of capital while Germany (twice) and Japan (once) came very close. So what bondholder in Russia did not get wiped out after the Bolchevic revolution? BeerBaron

I would not touch life insurers. Their liabilities have not changed but the bonds have been hovering around 1% and will probably be there for a while. Japan's life insurers got hit pretty hard in the 90s. I had shares in NWLI last year but moved out because of it. BeerBaron

Flat -0.7% overall. My long term holdings that I don't intend to trade were slightly pricey at the beginning of the year and dropped more then the market. RIM certainly did not help too! BRK, FFH, BAC all helped to bring back the portfolio to breakeven. BeerBaron

Jobs, Gate, Zuckerberg etc... are all notable exceptions but please keep in mind that they were all very technically advanced on their own. Some people can learn by themselves but most 18 year old do not have that drive yet. I believe a good technical background gives them a solid base to build on. Innovation is a totally different animal. You can't teach it. Ericopoly, my eng program had 98% guys. Guess why my nick name is BeerBaron! BeerBaron

Sdev, there are probably only two or three board members here who have continuously held ffh as long as me: 14 years. Lol, are you break-even now on your original price? BeerBaron