Ballinvarosig Investors

I have been a net seller since the last version of this thread was posted. Stuff I have been buying: Star Buffett United American Healthcare (own x% of this and it's complicated) Stuff I have sold: Fortress International Group Aspen Exploration Signature Eyewear Manhattan Loan Stuff I am still holding: AutoInfo Penn Miller ITEX Solitron Devices

The RSS alerts on the EDGAR site are brilliant, they just make your life so much easier. I use personally use a desktop application called RSSOwl to gather my feeds. I like it better than Google Reader because it's that bit faster and I like the layout better. I have 400 company feeds currently set up and ever day I usually get a few new filings to look at. My only problem is that I simply don't have enough time to read everything :-[

I own some VMWare. I started buying in April when EMC started purhasing stock (they still are buying by the way). To me at least, it was pretty clear that once they started buying, they were hardly just going to buy a few thousand shares and stop. The cloud computing nonsense is obviously pushing the stock up too, but the emc effect can't be ignored. Insider buying - http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/own-disp?action=getissuer&CIK=0001124610 It would not surprise me if they tendered for the remaining stock.

You've done it now. My first guess was Core-Mark, I think it fills your criteria. It's small cap, been around since for ever, is steadily growing sales and cash flows, has no debt, is below book, cheap relative to earnings and has been around since 1888. It's got nice, long-term growth as well.

Tim McElvaine is Chairman and 31.5% shareholder of Rainkmaker Entertainment.

Fremont Michigan InsuraCorp announced quarterly results, and they weren't pretty - http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1271245/000119312510188834/0001193125-10-188834-index.htm Harry correctly expressed a worry about the growth of their personal lines business, and now it looks like the chickens are coming home to roost. What scares me most, is that they're still growing these lines at breakneck pace.

What a weasel! The vote doesn't look like going his way, so he pulls the damn thing, probably an an effort to concoct something equally unpalatable for shareholders to digest.

Market hasn't reacted too well to the results. I'm guessing that the increased debt is an issue?

I see that Sonic used debt to buy back $560 million worth of stock in 2006 when the share price was in the $20 region. Four years later, the stock is under $9 and the CEO is still in place and Sonic are loaded with debt. The free cash flow generated by the business is sweet though!

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/93859/000092189510001206/sc13g07428007_07282010.htm I must say, I'm a little surprised that Biglari is concentrating so highly in the restaurant sector.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/29/news/companies/buffets_mr_fixit_full.fortune/ Excellent article on David Sokol. I didn't know he had a book out, I'll have to buy it!

In fairness to him, when he's getting interviewed by half-wits from CNBC, they're more interested in the speculative topics, rather than silly boring things like profits and annual reports. It's much better to guess which company will have the next blockbuster drug, or which company is going to make us billions from cloud computing.

The article doesn't give specifics but says that without BYD, Lu's performance as a hedge fund manager is "unremarkable." I'd like to know the author's definition of "unremarkable." ;) I guess they mean that once BYD is stripped out, performance wasn't great?

Yet you're still happy to hold CCME?

There have been quite a few people investigating Chinese companies that are listed here on American stock exchanges, and a lot of red flags have been raised! Motley Fool have done an interesting peice on a company called China Sky One Medical (CSKI) - http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/a-lack-of-logic-around-china/416849 Much of their research came from a man named John Bird, who goes into quite a lot of details listing inaccuracies between the companies American, and Chinese financial information. For more information, look here - http://www.waldomushman.com/Intro.html Since then, I've noticed that another person has emerged doing similar things. He alledges that Orient Paper (ONP) and China Marine Food are also fraudulently reporting their numbers - http://www.chinesecompanyanalyst.com I have a tiny interest in China MediaExpress (CCME) and am considering dumping it. I can't find any hard evidence of fraud, but the numbers just seem too good to be true. Thoughts?

http://www.gurufocus.com/stock-market-valuations.php United States stock market as a percentage of GDP link I forgot.

Most of the macro analysis is akin to reading tea leaves. However, I think there are a few measures that can be used as a guide to measuring the affordability of the market. The first is the historic P/E ratio. Markets tend to be dear when the ratio is close to 20, and cheap when it's closer to 10. This ratio isn't foolproof - see the Great Depression. The second is size of the stock market compared to an economies GDP. Gurufocus actively maintain this metric for the United States. Buffett has never stated it, but I believe this is the metric he uses when evaluating a market. Finally, you simply cannot ignore credit conditions in an economy. Private sector/public sector debt, M3, etc. This kind of data is usually more fuzzy, but the trends are useful. Other than those things, I wouldn't usually apply macro factors to investment decisions. I would be interested to read what other metrics value investors use. Parsad?

Management is as greedy and selfish as Biglari? Did you look at Fremont's compensation table for 2009? Did you compare it to other similarly sized insurance companies? I picked three at random, (AAME, ASAM, GAN) and in two cases, executive compensation was a multiple of what Fremont's management is earning, and in the other case it was marginally higher. If anything, these guys earn less than the industry average. To be honest, now that Biglari's true colours have been revealed, I'm glad that Fremont took action to block the Steak n' Shake takeover. There's no reason why management can't continue to plough ahead on their own, growing the business by 20-25% every year.

What do you think? Book value is $47.6m (much of which is in safe fixed income securities), market cap $33.9. The only thing that bothers me is that a not insignificant part of the equity portfolio is in mutual funds. All investments are of investment grade and fall within the top two tiers set by the ratings agencies. A.M Best have an A- rating for what it's worth. Combined ratio has stayed consistantly below 100 over the last 5-6 years. Reserving has remained conservative in the meantime. My only concern is that as they've grown their lines of business, the loss ratios have started to creep up.

I wonder who was responsible for getting that article published. A certain Mario G. perhaps? ;D

Since when have Microsoft and Google been beaten? Anyway, I don't know what the smartphone market is like in the States, but I do know that here in Europe the techies that formerly embraced the Iphone are now deserting in droves to the HTC/Android platform. The same techies a few months back were telling me that HTC were a company to watch, and that the likes of Nokia were old hat were to be avoided. The Peter Lynch school of stock-picking isn't a strategy I embrace, but maybe in this instance the techies have an insight that we mere mortals may have missed ;D

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/93859/000092189510001065/pre14a07428_07062010.htm If this is the case, why is he being compensated on simple book value growth?

I'm sorry to say, but if Tim McElvaine honestly thinks that this is value investing, then he has lost his mind. I wrote a post about banking and Greece on these very forums awhile back.

True, but I'm only going by past behaviour. With Fremont Michigan and Steak n' Shake, he filed a 13D from the outset.

As ragnar states, Biglari has filed a 13G , therefore he will not be allowed to sit on or influence the board.