Ballinvarosig Investors

Honestly? I think it's going to be very difficult for a young person with no experience to break into value investing as a career. I don't mean to be negative, but in today's climate, firms are more likely to be letting people go rather than hiring. That is the reality of the situation here in London, and I suspect the same is true in the US. I am not saying finding employment is impossible - good people will always find a way, but I think the days of ordinary MBA's just floating into the business without experience or a real passion for investing is dead (if they ever even existed!). I think one way you can increase your chances is to maybe consider doing your own investment blog. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a dozen people who have found gainful employment through someone discovering their blog, or else by being able to point to it as a track record. It gives you a track record, it means you can stand out, and it can also be a great way of networking and learning about the business. Of course, to be useful in finding employment, I suspect you'd want to be able to show some sort of decent returns - easier said than done in this climate.

He really does go to town on hedge funds and their high fee model, most of the rest of the letter seems to be filler. When he talks about hundreds, or maybe thousands of manager (in the entire world) who are capable of beating the index, he is basically telling us that most of us are wasting our time and that we would be better off in index funds. Maybe Prasad should close the forum and redirect the URL to Bogleheads?

I am guessing he didn't buy Sandridge, rather some of the debt he held was converted to equity.

25 years ago Klarman talked about this sort of effect that indexing would have on the market, he even called it a fad. Same with Stahl and other active managers. As Dwight from the Office once said: " They’re going to be screwed once this whole Internet fad is over." Haha, I agree that Klarman's statement sounds pretty foolish at the moment. The indexing strategy has been on a multi-decade bull run and shows no signs of slowing if outflows from active to indexing strategies continue. However, I think at some stage in the future, Klarman will be proved right, dumb human behaviour combined with mindless indexing is going to lead to inferior market returns. At some stage the wall of money that's pushing over-valued, US mega-cap companies on an ever upward trend will abate. If we saw a substantial market decline, we could see a rush for the exits that would exacerbate any market decline as investors decide that indexing is no longer a good strategy. Indexing is a great strategy for most investors, but I think just like we saw with the Magellan fund (where most investors saw very little gains because they bought and sold at the wrong times), human psychology can be relied upon in wrecking decent strategies.

25 years ago Klarman talked about this sort of effect that indexing would have on the market, he even called it a fad.

According to POTUS, "integrity" is an alt fact for losers. I for one fully support Wikileaks on Boston financiers. People above are doing god's Trump's libertarian work. The person who put this online is violating an agreement they made and that is wrong. But once it is online already, reading it doesn't violate any agreement, because if you are already an investor you have already read it, and if you are not you have made no secrecy agreement with anyone. By posting a link to copyrighted material, are you exposing the owner of this board to a claim of contributory copyright infringement? No.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-31/buffett-bought-12-billion-of-stock-from-election-through-friday Wow, so Warren did have some sort of input into buying the airlines.

http://www.canadianbusiness.com/investing/francis-chou-value-investing/

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1067983/000119312517002728/d287902dfwp.htm When in Rome.

Don't know about you guys, but I have mostly been cutting/trimming positions in oil and financials over the last two weeks. I was 35% cash before the election and since then my portfolio which is heavily weighted towards financials has just been unreal. I wish I could say that I was an investing genius and that I foresaw the value in major holdings I have like Wells Fargo, Lloyds and Uniqa, but the reality is that I have been at least partly lucky. The uplift we're seeing in financials is mainly due to a shift in sentiment in the treasury market. When I look back at the write-up's I did on the financial companies I own, while I did say an insurance company like Uniqa were getting killed by long-term bond yields wrecking returns on their investment portfolio, it was never core or central to my investing thesis. Same thing happened with the two oil stocks I own. I was mostly going by the value of the assets, then OPEC come out and announce a production cut, whoosh the stocks go up. I recommend that everyone reviews what Mauboussin had to say about investors confusing luck with skill in order to keep themselves grounded. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-16/michael-mauboussin-on-skill-and-luck FWIW and I know this will not be popular to say, I think the US market in particular is now grossly over valued. You only need to look at large cap American stocks and their European counter-parts to see the extreme divergence. For example, take a look at Nestle and Kraft Heinz. We all know the story here, two huge companies in similar established industries with limited growth prospects. The divergence in valuation makes no sense to me and that is why I am nearly 50% cash.

I have no skin in this game, because quite frankly I don't like investment decisions to hinge on personalities, politics, or an implicit government guarantee. However, in this instance I was an investor in FNMA/FMCC - I would absolutely sitting on my hands with this one. I think Trump has enough incentive from his campaign backer to make you whole.

Speaking of Whitney, I don't often find myself agreeing with him, but has anyone looked at his short position on Wingstop?

Not much there, but I did think that this bit was interesting.

http://fortune.com/2016/11/22/surprise-warren-buffett-turns-out-to-be-more-prescient-about-stocks-than-politics/ So Buffett was completely wrong in his prediction, the DOW return was 5.9%, not the 6% he predicted.

So I've done a bit of further reading on COTY to try and understand what's going on. I found a good article on Seeking Alpha. http://seekingalpha.com/article/4008144-look-procter-gamble-company-coty-inc-exchange-offer This looks like one that is definitely worth monitoring for now. It appears that a lot of PG shareholders who received COTY stock have been dumping it, causing the share price to fall. Relative to the market, it looks too expensive to me. But if it got down to about $16, then I could see the potential for this to double if management met the expectations they set out when the merger was consummated. COTY investor presentation - http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?t=1&item=VHlwZT0yfFBhcmVudElEPTUyMzY2Njl8Q2hpbGRJRD02NDQ4MDI=

It's almost certainly Tedd and/or Todd, the position sizes are tiny.

True, but the Hostess Brands pick is interesting.

Latest 13F. http://www.dataroma.com/m/holdings.php?m=sa Portfolio shrinks to just $35M and now Burry has gone long Twinkies. His largest holding (COTY) makes no sense to me whatsoever on a traditional valuation metric.

Ackman is trying to make the best out of the situation he's in. With Trump in, it appears to may have a shot at making some money with Fannie/Freddie. Can't say I have a problem with that. It's not as shameless as Bruce Berkowitz abandoning the Democrats before the election by funding Trump in a desperate attempt to make his Fannie/Freddie position come good. We know that this sort of backscratching is endemic in politics, but I really thought Berkowitz was supposed to be one of the good guys. For him to get his hands grubby in an attempt to save an investment just seems wrong to me.

I didn't know Buffett personally holds 2M shares in WFC.

You guys gave Pabrai a bit of stick in the last thread, but I thought this video he did for Peking University was interesting.

I agree, and I did make these points! But what have facts got to do with anything when it comes to elections? He made the promise that he will stop manufacturing jobs going abroad. Whether it happens or not is irrelevant, the people of the rust-belt believed it and voted accordingly.

For a start, I wasn't talking about the US population as a whole. Lots of places in the US have done quite nicely since the financial crash. I was talking about places like the rust-belt states. Electorates that were traditionally Democratic states that ended up swinging the election by voting for Trump. Plenty of struggling, disaffected people there who ended up determining the course of the election.

Pretty insulting comment you've made there. If you're involved in manufacturing in America's rustbelt, you have probably lost your job or seen a decline in benefits and wages. You've watched the hollowing out of America's manufacturing base by successive generations of Republican and Democrat governments over the past few decades. This free trade, lassiez faire doctrine has been economic mantra since the days of Reagan. Sure, you've seen the benefits of cheap imported goods, but the devastation reaped on middle America has hit the rustbelt hard. When you look at living standards, particularly in the rust belt, they've gone nowhere since the financial crash. As a corollary, you see corporations and the 1% growing fatter and fatter off the inflated assets prices driven by QE. Is it any wonder people are fed up with the disparity in wealth that has only widened through Democratic government? The first person who has drawn a line in the sand and said enough is enough has been Donald Trump. You can debate the merits of free market economics or protectionism if you want. The reality for the electorate is that if they're suffering, they won't care. They just want someone to come in and improve their lot. Therefore, I think to label struggling people as "jackasses" shows an incredible lack of hubris. Whether you're in Europe or the US, people on this forum who manage capital (whether their own or others) have seen huge benefits from economic/monetary policies of the last decade. We should be pragmatic enough to realise that we live in a democratic system, and we can't simply continue to reap a windfall while others out there are suffering. For the record, I am not suggesting that Trump is the man who can help make change for middle America. I think he is just a reaction to a Democratic party that has completely lost its way, a party that should never have gotten into bed with the big investment banks, hedge funds, etc.