beerbaron

Whatever the metrics the current quotations are a good price. Bough some today. I hope this NYSE delisting will continue to depress the stock, I love buying great companies for a good price it's getting scarce by these days. It sucks for the US board members tough. BeerBaron

What did you learn from the Crash and rebound? I learned how much I love investing when price are deeply depressed. I learned I can handle a portfolio value decrease pretty well. I learned the power of cash. BTW, I never knew what value investing was before the crash I was investing in Index Funds and that's all. The crash deeply sparked my interest for real value. BeerBaron

We have Mike Weir tough :)

Judging by everybody's comments. Why would we expect a turnaround from a management we can't trust... maybe if management would change it could become a nice turnaround opportunities. BeerBaron

Yeah, but let's nor forget that there is some other Buffetteers in those hedge funds. Klarman, Biglari, etc... I'm really against friction costs and I manage my protfolio a such and I'm glad Buffett is doing this bet. Would BRK beat the S&P500 if we have treated it like a hedge fund with a cost structure of 2/20? I don't know but my guess is it's pretty even. BeerBaron

Don't you guys find that this episodes rimes a lot with Asian/Russian crisis of 98? Asian crisis --> Lower revenues for Russia --> Russia Defaults --> 17% S&P Decrease Occidental crisis ---> Lower revenues for Dubai + Tight credit --> Dubai defaults --> ??% S&P decrease I'm far from an expert about the 98 crisis but I have a few questions about it tough: -What was Russia's total bond value in USD before it's currency started plunging? -Not a lot of banks can take a second hit today compared with 98, could it be a domino? -How really united are UAE? Would they bailout their brother? -Would it mean increased oil production? BeerBaron

For the US readers, the CMHC is not free at all for the consumers. The CMHC charges an opening fee of a few thousand $ when the consumer want's to insure plus an extra % point or two on the interest rate the consumer has to pay to the bank. I find the terms the CMHC insure the customers are very attractive for the CMHC. One day or another tough they might have to absorb a lost after 20 years or easy profits. BeerBaron

It seems to me like pure bet from Buffett it's ego is getting as big as Berkshire :) BeerBaron

I know a lot of you guys follow the insurance industry really closely. I remember reading KFS's annual report in February and believed their position was nos as bad as the share price reflected (didn't buy tough). But today I was updating myself on KFS and man did they screw up. Is it an underwriting problem or ...is it just their bad acquisitions... you know something similar to FFH problems when hurricanes almost wiped it's equity... Since I'm novice in understanding insurance I would be interested on your views on this one. BeerBaron

There is another video from this guy on Ted where he explains how the world has grown for those interested. It really makes a point the the world is a better place today then 50 years ago. BeerBaron

I switched everything to Questrade this summer after my old broker charged me 2x30$ for a transaction that was done in two days. This represented more then 2% of the total transaction which is totally unacceptable. Questrade had a promotion that paid back the transfer fees from other institutions so I took advantage of it. My personal experience with Questrade customer service has been pretty bad. When I asked to get reimbursed about the transfer fees they were all mixed up about the minimum amount. Some were saying that it had to be the minimum amount of cash transferred... which make no sense. Finally after 5 calls they agreed to pay me back but they said they had to wait 3 months after end of the promotion before they would transfer the money. The promotion finished august 31st... so in a few days I should have my money but I believe I will have to remind them! Their system is horribly presented, my RRSP and TFSA trading uses two different logins. Plus another login to manage the account and another login at a third party website to know the history of my accounts transactions. That is 4 different user/pass to remember! The trading support is not good, for example if I want to trade FFH, I would have enter FFH.to into the ticker symbol. For Richelieu it is RCH.VN. I'm not sure if you guys know but it's very annoying that the first time you try to place a trade that you just can't find how to place it. Especially if the customer service is closed. On a positive not I'm a cheap bastard, the annoyances stated above are well worth the 25$ per transactions savings. I do about one transaction per month but for me friction costs is critical. I fully intend to use the USD/CND currency capabilities of Questrade... this is great as I can use 30 years to let a falling currency get back to where I bought it. BeerBaron

Thanks, I'm impressed. BeerBaron

I like the Job Losses in recent recessions graph. The dips are very symmetrical, which gives some insight on how much longer we need to wait before the job bleeding stops. It looks somewhat between the 8-15 month outlook. There is indeed a lot of optimism in the markets, but it doesn't mean not to buy anything. It just means to discount your IV accordingly. BeerBaron

Here is a business school archive with lots of Value investing videos. Among the speakers there is Karman, Chou and others. Enjoy. http://www.bengrahaminvesting.ca/Resources/videos.htm BeerBaron

US Treasury Bonds could be seen as a bubble with the type of return they give. Equities are entering a nice little bubble. The worst part is everybody knows the bubble is inflated because of a very low interest rate, everybody is playing musical chair thinking they will get out when interest rates raise. Gold, I can't say anything. Contrary to my girlfriend I'm gold neutral :) BeerBaron

In his notes he says he sees good investments in illiquidities. I have certainly seen that happen with venture with far better prospects and balance sheet then lots of S&P TSX stocks... BeerBaron

I don't see any conflict of interests with Moody's being paid to rate a company. The same thing happens often enough with UL, CSA, ETL, etc... in the engineering side. Strict procedures are setup exactly to avoid any conflict of interest and the whole subjective aspect of evaluating something dissipates. The rating agencies become drones that add up numbers in a form regardless if it makes sense. The model is not doomed, it is just broken... make the forms more intelligent, you know, by having someone think about the numbers behind them before signing the document. BeerBaron

CapEx! That has always been the Achilles’ heel of Railway business. They have to maintain their roads. The good news is that they are also in a monopoly like business... if other transportations become unsustainable the elastic could extend a lot. Maybe that it's bet that with oil increasing in price, rail freight will be more lucrative business. It's a much safer bet then a future contract on oil. BeerBaron

I don't know BNI but looking at the financial statement. Is that just me or is it borderline pricey? Most railroad have huge hidden assets is it what he is going after? Or is it just that BRK size, forces it to buy to such a high PE multiple? I guess Warren regrets the days where he could buy Sees Candy for lower PE then BNI :) BeerBaron

Common! We are entitled to better quality analysis on this board. Firstly, your figure should be $1,658 billion, not trillion. Secondly, if you are talking about $5 per barrel, then your number needs to be divided by 42 (the number of gallons in a barrel) giving only $40b! Thirdly, a $5/bbl increase in the price of crude does not translate into a $5/bbl increase in the price of gas (it would be more). A simple reasonableness analysis should have alerted you to the error. Oil prices shot up about $100/bbl to $150 in 2008. If your number were right, the impact on the consumer would have been $33 trillion! Your father may be richer but is it for the right reason? I don't have the price of crude in Nov 2007, but I believe it was not that much higher than it is now ($80-90 maybe). The markets collapsed because of problems in the financial system. You are totally right, my calculation did not make the division by 42. I modified my original post to reflect that change. That is an unacceptable mistake I will verify my numbers twice in the future before posting. I believe the financial crisys did of course start the recession, there is no doubt about it. But bad debts + increase in price did precipitate the issue. The price of oil in january 2007 was 46$ and raised to 86$ in November. This removed a lot of liquidities in the consumer's hands. The same thing might happen here if oil gets momentum. BeerBaron

KISS?? BeerBaron

I'm talking about a 5$ per barrel increase ;) BeerBaron

In November 2007 I remember having a discussion with my dad where he said that he was all in cash because he felt that oil prices were in bubble and that he has seen enough bubbles in his life to know that bubbles splattered in every markets. I don't know if he was right or just lucky but his reasoning seemed right and today he's much richer. There is 42 gallons in a barrel, so the current price of oil is about 1.83 USD per gallon. Knowing that the oil consumption per capita is about 3 Gallons per day. That would mean that every 5$ of price increase will reduce the amount of money available for recovery of about 5$x303Mx3x365/42=39 Billions. I don't know about you guys but this number could put an end to any recovery plan. There is part of that number that should not be accounted because it's not all consumer spending but still if 2/3 is used by consumer were are still talking about quite a drag on consumer spending. Do you guys think that oil prices could indeed stop any recovery and at what point would you start to be scared? I personally believe a close look should be kept on this commodity, to me, it's a much more important indicator then consumer confidence. BeerBaron

The technology that all manufacturers are looking to right now are LiFe batteries. That is, lithium and ferrite, lithium is a metal that is quite common but currently mainly harvested in Bolivia (30% of world production). It seems lithium is not concentrated in many places on earth. Ferrite is obviously very common and easily harvested. Now, here is the kicker on the story... there is ways to make LiFe batteries charge at a crazy rate like 3 hours for a full charge or so but so far that requires Platinium. You might want to look for IREQ lithium battery on Google, I remember reading an article about it. Here is how I see that the electric car will penetrate the market. Since the batteries will represent a huge part of the overall cost a solid recycling program will need to be in place. At first, the car manufacturers will need to amortize the cost of those batteries over the lifetime of the vehicle. Then, when the materials get recycled, the price will be maintained to a somewhat lower level then their real costs if they were made from new materials. BeerBaron

Well, he has made it clear that we are not the only ones that are worried about the USD devaluation. BeerBaron