beerbaron
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Posts posted by beerbaron
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There are many ways to calculate returns. Accountant will tell you that the only real way is the IRR. Which is partially true, but let's assume the following Scenario.
Board member has 10k in his bank personnal account and 20k in his investment account. March 2008 arrives and the board member invests it's 10k into S&P 500. Did the money really arrive in the trading account on March 2008... that leaves place to discussion...
Personnally, I like to check my return with IRR and by the simplest calculation wich is
(Value Dec 31st)/(Value Jan 1st)-Cash inflows This method discounts all the time value of the added money but it kinds of gets out the problem stated above.
I believe real results on a personnal portfolio are somewhere between both results.
I'm very happy with the results for both metrics tough :)
BeerBaron
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95% Above S&P 500... This is an outlier result.
I wonder if a Technical analisys board would get the same results... lots of people will say they outperform if they adjust X and Y because of reason Z.
BeerBaron
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While WEB states BRK may have been his dumbest stock pick, I wonder what he thinks his biggest business mistake was. My guess is that it was exposing the insurance companies to coverage for WMD attacks. Even though it did not bring down the company, it could have.
He did not expose it's insurance to WMD, it came with National Indemnity's, he actually yelled at the executives to get rid of the terrorist coverage on the twin tower 6 months before the 9/11. Said it was not a risk he was paid for...
BeerBaron
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I'm sure Warren would massively buy gold if the price was attractive enough. Didn't he buy like 50% of the silver in the end of the 90's?
Everybody is right on Gold, it is a fiat currency but it's also the mother of all fiat currencies.
BeerBaron
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For Excel, look for the function
MSNStockQuote()
BeerBaron
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I think he was making a point about the quality of an asset. In another Q&A in a university speech he was saying that it's biggest mistake was US Airways preferred.
BeerBaron
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I don't know why Berkowitz didn't avoid any comment at all. I mean, if he weren't showing confidence, wouldn't that drop the price further?
He can't buy more, so he might as well support the stock now.
BeerBaron
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Anybody has a few good podcasts or good audio books to suggest about finance/economics?
BeerBaron
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Starr investment bought another 1.5 million shares at 9$, which increases their investment from $30million to $43.5million. They certainly don't think it's a fraud.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Greenbergs-Starr-ups-stake-in-apf-1132677641.html?x=0&.v=1
Stock has gone up from $8 to $13, since we first discussed this.
You do know that you are relying on other's analisys to validate your's right? What if they don't know more then you...
BeerBaron
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Investing is a very humbling business where the evaluation of risk is very hard. That is why you need a huge margin of safety.
I had a nice example of this today as my largest holding, EasyHome declared that an employee comitted fraud for 3.4M or about 15% of their loan book. A checklist is one of the most usefull weapon against mistakes but there will always be some unexpected events. I don't even think it's possible to implement employee fraud into a checklist.
I'm still bullish on the stock tough, no long term impairment.
BeerBaron
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WSBASE is up sharply:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?chart_type=line&s[1][id]=WSBASE&s[1][range]=1yr
and M2 as well:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/usfd/page6.pdf
Some what is the process exactly that the FED uses to increase the money supply. Is it only by buying/selling of treasuries, or is there other processes?
BeerBaron
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Are you telling me all those analyst and traders woke up today baffled by this presentation? I can't believe anybody would buy a stock like JOE without asking the few questions like:
-How many acres are in their balance sheet?
-What was the historical selling price of this land?
-How much of this land can they sell per year?
-Is there demand for the land?
So far it looks like a lot of highly paid people on wall street are being tough to do their job. It kinda disgusts me to see that, what a clear lack of due diligence.
BeerBaron
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Do you have a copy of the presentation?
BeerBaron
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Lol, finally Harry can stop making web pages to enhance an insurance company's value!
BeerBaron
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Thanks for the link. I was not aware of possible write downs, will do a much more deeper analysis if it reaches TBV.
Would anyone consider MFC as too big to fail? My guess is "NO DOUBTS"
BeerBaron
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Since it has been a while since we last looked at this, here are the latest figures available....
Date 2010-09-08 2010-09-15 2010-09-22 2010-09-29 2010-10-06
Value 1987.560 1981.602 1928.937 1949.490 1943.934
Anyone looking at adding some hedges at this point, I know I am considering it?
cheers
Zorro
Nope, I would add an hedge if it dropped similarly as the last valley. I'm keeping my eye on this one.
BeerBaron
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One the high quality stocks I own besides FFH and BRK, is RCH.TO. It tanked like all others in 2008 but great companies have a way of making money. It's operated by a very talented owner/manager, has no
What's the ownership for executives with RCH? I tried looking through Sedar, but didn't have much luck.
Canadian Insider information is found on www.sedi.ca
Attached is a PDF of the shares ownership. I also remember seiing a presentation that shoed that 60% of RCH employees own shares.
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"I'm currently keeping a close eye on MFC, this is getting close to my spot price. It would be nice to buy this one under TBV"
I had a look a few weeks ago. Though have not read in detail latest right downs, are you concerned with recurrent right downs recently + coming to market for more debt (though at low rates it might have been a bargain)?
I thought if market had a melt up this would be a good holding.
Well, it's funny how everybody lets Buffet get away with S&P Puts and think he made a great deal but they shoot MFC for not buying those puts. Obviously if it's good deal for Buffett then it's a bad deal for the others. So by not taking buying any overprices hedges MFC might be doing the right thing. Whos cares if their earnings will be lumpy, what counts is the total return. MFC is a great franchise and it should not trade a Graham prices.
As for the debt, they can aford it at the current rates. Again, nobody complained about FFH preferred offering so why would we complain about MFC.
BeerBaron
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I much prefer to find a great company at a good price then a good company at a great price for two reasons:
-I don't have infinite amount of time to spend researching companies. So locking up capital in a great company saves me the reinvestment task.
-It saves me a lot of friction costs as well.
One the high quality stocks I own besides FFH and BRK, is RCH.TO. It tanked like all others in 2008 but great companies have a way of making money. It's operated by a very talented owner/manager, has no debt, ROE in the 15-20%. It's a great consolidator in a very fragmented market so the growing opportunities are vast.
No matter what the quality is, I won't ever pay more then 14 times earnings.
I'm currently keeping a close eye on MFC, this is getting close to my spot price. It would be nice to buy this one under TBV.
BeerBaron
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Anybody here read Adam's Smith "The Money Game"? It sounds familiar and was written in the 60s...
BeerBaron
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Anybody has the pre-2004 chairman letters. I want to read all their letters from the beginning.
BeerBaron
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I have got an Annual Report that has just been restated, there are no changes in the consilidated statements but I would still like to know what changed from the original. Where do I find the list of changes? Or how do I retrieve it?
BeerBaron
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Bonds in insurance companies are usually not market to market under they are classified as held for sale.
Someone maintains a excellent spreadsheet of FFH stock investment portfolio. That would be a nice place to start counting.
BeerBaron
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Very great post. I like the analisys.
On the financial side, my favorite question is: Does the company have a history of generating 1$ of market value for every 1$ invested?
That answer is definitely no: Over the last 129 months (10Y+9M) the company invested about 13B$ in CapEx and generated about 13B$ in operating profits.
On the subjective side my other favorite question is: Does the company have durable a moat?
Technologically, yes. But that moat comes at a very high price in CapEx.
One thing nobody seems to be aware is that there is physical limits for transistor size. Around 5nm tunneling starts to occur in transistors. So even using the best theorical technologies we can only increase the capacity 7 times from those 34nm wafers. SSD will probably never be as cost efficient as a standard hard drive unless the high grade silicon wafers go down drastically in price. My guess is we will have an hybrid as stated earlier.
So Ross, my question to you is:
Does this deal with Intel a complete game changer to increase Micron's return on investment?
What is the market going to look like in 10 years?
BeerBaron
BAM BAM
in General Discussion
Posted
Not if you have a very stable cash flow from these properties.