beerbaron

Nice catch, on today's price it's about 5.8% it's quite a nice yield for a floating. On the common I would buy GS if I could understand it... I think I just can't. This is goes into the too hard pile. On the preferred tough... I can certainly understand that GS is good for the money. BeerBaron

I have always wondered... why would any companies hire compensation consultants... How hard is it to look at a peer group and determine a good compensation package. Sometimes it looks like the BOD doesn't even want to do it's job. I wish I could be a director, you know.. get paid 5k per meeting, 10 meetings a year. It's the best job on earth. BeerBaron

Take a look at Broadridge Financial Solutions, they make money on the amount of fixed income transactions. I have been taking the last week trying to understand them (quite complex operations). I got the idea from an article from Columbia Business School. If they fit my criterias I will post my thesis. BeerBaron

Why don't you post the recording? BeerBaron

That is such a fun time to be investing, my poor girlfriend will star complaining again that all I'm doing is read financial reports. The desease fear has not taken over to the average investor but soon it will. BeerBaron

I'm about 17% cash in my investments accounts and I don't expect it to raise through selling of securities unless they reach their intrinsic values. I'm a net buyer of securities since I'm always adding cash from my investments. I have bough very little securities in the last 4 months tough so cash is slowly increasing. What I have figured out while reading this post is that about 40-50% part of my portfolio is not directly related to an economy recovery but rather past and future stable cash flows. For the last year I've been investing with the mind that we will probably have 0-1% growth rate for the next 5 year. For example here is my portfolio: FFH 13% (Insurer, somewhat linked to the economy but more linked to outside events) Brk 6% (50% Insurer and 50% Economy related) RCH.TO 20% (Distributor of hardware equipment, fully linked to economy, but no debt, lot of cash and awesome and honest management, won't sell unless it reaches much more then IV) EH.TO 23% (Rent to own operator, moderately linked to the economy their customer base is much less prone to cut spending. Great new EasyFinancial division will generate huge interest revenues but will not require CapEx) XDM.TO 8% (Organizes Not for profit events, not linked to the economy) XIC 13% (I keep this one for my portfolio diversification, it's going down as the portfolio grows) I agree macro matters but instead of selling my stocks and raising cash I have been trying to insulate part of my portfolio to the economy swings. I'm ready to accept the fact that when the earth trembles the correlation between asset classes is 1. BeerBaron

Indeed Good Job Parsad. Sorry it did not turn out as well, must suck to be heavily invested and liquidate. He was fluent in value investing music and a lot of people danced on it. BeerBaron

That probably eliminates Seth Klarman from the group. I doubt Klarman can go 50% down. BeerBaron

Good Job Vinod, it basically clearly explains what I already believed but with mathematical formulas. I personnally like the BV/Share 10Y growth as metric for IV. I've always found that the more we analyze, the more we need to make complex predictions, and the wider the results can be. Focusing too much on details makes us forget that a business like BRK is a very complex organism and we can lose focus because of it. BeerBaron

Read the first years letters with Markel. They state it quite clearly. Oh yes, it's also a nice read. Look at the CR back in the 80s, it's crazy what interests rates do on a CR. BeerBaron

I have watched a video interviewing W.R. Berkley and he was explaining that Sarbanes-Oxley kinda pushes insurances companies to release their reserves faster. I was probably quite a nice incentive for FFH to delist, they cannot claim it publicly but it could make them save a lot of $$$ on taxes. BeerBaron

Isn't the max NPW/SS 2? I remember Prem talking about it in a few letters to shareholder. BeerBaron

Was mono-mode (fastest type) fibers even deployed in the 80's? BeerBaron

Guys, it's time to stop fighting. Apple is a religion for the those who trust and an Anti-Christ for the ones who believe in open technologies. We would be on a geek's web site and the debate would be the same. The only difference is that Moat would be replace by GUI, PE by GHz and Growth by MegaBytes. Apple makes perfect products for the believers and crappy overpriced products for the non believers. For me, Apple's fan base is more of an insanity then anything else... but then again I can tell you about a few other organizations that sound insane to me but still lasted 2000 years or 6000 years. In my opinion, food is a better moat then technology. Our brains are made to react to stimulus. Food is a very strong stimulus as it is a direct part of our survival. It is also true that the more product creations you make the more you can make mistakes. Toyota has been the leader of Quality Control for the last 30 years and apparently they still made some mistakes... BeerBaron

Thanks a lot. BeerBaron

I suspect BRK is hardly the only company that would oppose to the legislation being retroactive. It would not make any sense anyway... that would mean that tens or hundreds of billions would be put out of circulation for collateral in an economy that badly needs those dollars. BeerBaron

I'm not used to analyze macros, so can you explain further what it implicates that the money supply has decreased? Does it mean that the deleverage is still happening? BeerBaron

I must be really dumb because I spent 6 hours yesterday reviewing about 100 small caps and none of them seemed remotely cheap. Do people really believe that the deleveraging is already over?

I managed to get it, thanks all. BeerBaron

I just watched a Canadian TV show where they were interviewing the CEO of Zip.Ca (canadian equivalent of netflix) and the guy said he doubled it's revenues in the last 2 years. Plus, streaming is coming big time, I didn't do the analisys but bandwidth is probably much cheaper then the transport fees. which means higher margins. The 200M of debt you are referring means that they will need to pay interests of I don't know, maybe 14M. With a FCF of around 100M their cash flow can certainly pay down the interests. At 40 times earnings the market is certainly putting a lot of optimism into their forecasts but that's no thesis for shorting for me. I look at about 40 stocks a week and out of those 40 there is usually 10 that almost make me puke. It doesn't mean I short them. BeerBaron

Any ways we can get a copy posted here? We need a subscription to access it otherwise. BeerBaron

Nice job! It must take weeks to analyze such a big beast! BeerBaron

I think most on this board is overweight Financials, especially insurers given their current price. BeerBaron

Some cynicals would say that the Canadian banking industry probably lobbied for such legislation, you know... to protect the Canadian banks from the much bigger funds competition and lower fees of the US. BeerBaron

Let's just say it's fully valued. On one part we have a stock market with high expectations about the future and a future that doesn't look like a clear blue sky. Ericopoly is right, there are still some good buys right now but it's getting thinner. The investment environment is getting a lot harder then a year ago. Beerbaron