compoundinglife

Ok, so for some reason the RSS version of the feed does not contain the author, but the ATOM version does. If you care what the difference is: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6619717/what-is-the-difference-between-rss-and-atom-feeds To use the atom feed, use this URL: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/.xml/?type=atom Instead of the of the one currently linked at the bottom for RSS which is: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/.xml/?type=rss Difference is the "type" parameter. You can also customize your feeds by passing in different parameters to the URL query string, for reference: http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/XML_feeds#Members I confirmed that using ATOM in "Reeder" an OSX rss application shows the authors.

It was there at one point, screen shot attached.

Hi RK, yes that is the issue. Do you know, or does anyone else know, if the author's name used to show up on the feeds? I never use it, so I can't remember if it did or didn't show up. Cheers! They did at some point in the past, I will see if I can crawl through my google reader history to see when it stopped. Not sure how useful this is, but if I go all the way to when I first subscribed in 2009 there are authors. I have scrolled back to Oct. 2012 so far and no authors. I will keep it scrolling in the background to see if I can find where it stopped.

Hi RK, yes that is the issue. Do you know, or does anyone else know, if the author's name used to show up on the feeds? I never use it, so I can't remember if it did or didn't show up. Cheers! They did at some point in the past, I will see if I can crawl through my google reader history to see when it stopped.

Yes that site is great, used it many times. Also you can pick up a Barron's if you want to browse over a list of securities and then go to quantum to see what the features and details are.

Your way of analyzing the entire capital structure of companies is very interesting. Curious if you posted at all about the pricing of the capital structure of banks and financials in 2008-2010. I am sure there were some discrepancies there and it seems like your investing style may have picked up on a few. Packer, you're in good company. This is the way Warren frequently invests when there is some risk a company might not survive. jay21, That's how Warren invested in BAC as opposed to buying pure common stock as he did when the MOS was greater with WFC. In retrospect, that extra protection may not have been necessary with the TBTF banks. They weren't in Cpt. 11, but think of the worst of the TBTF banks a few years ago as if they were with the US as their trustee. Hypothetically, the common could then be viewed as the fulcrum security on the bubble for survival after taking a haircut. During the Q&A at either the 2009 or 2010 annual meeting Buffet and Munger said something to the tune of "If you like the bonds then your usually better of buying the stock". Does anyone remember or have a transcript of that? That might be a good addition to this conversation about when it makes sense to hold debt, convertible prefs, or stock. I don't totally agree that the BAC/GS/GE deals are the same as buying convertibles. It it is better because you get the benefit of exposure through the warrants but you don't have to covert your principle to get it. I think its very much a case by case basis which depends on what the price and features are of the convertibles. During the crisis I bought Ford convertible prefs that had a $50 par with %6.5 coupon from $2 up to $12 per share, the payment was in arrears a couple of quarters and I ended up getting the arrearage plus some regular payments for a while and then they called them in 2011. Much better option than the stock in retrospect. I can't claim that idea it was provided to me by a family member and I just started investing in stocks in late 2008 so it was just right place right time, rather than investing accumen. Wish I knew then what I know now, would have bought way more of those :) Then looking recently at the CHK convertible prefs recently I would rather own the stock because I feel like the odds are good that they will trade much higher in the next couple of years and at that point the prefs might just start to reach the conversion point and I think the assets will hopefully provide a margin of safety to the common shareholder. So I guess that maybe that is the trick, if you feel the liquidation value has enough MOS then stay with the stock. If you are worried then buy the prefs, hopefully at nice discount.

Seth Klarman only has around 3-4B of equities in his fillings, I would assume but don't know that the rest of the money that is not cash is in more illiquid investments that are probably out of reach for the average investor. He did alot with debt during the crisis and has mentioned real estate quite a bit too. While I have only been following him for a few years it seems like someone trying to mimic just his equity positions would not do so hot. From what I have read it sounds like they have made alot of money in the past few years on things that people really needed to get rid of quickly and there was little or no market for and then they jump in big.

They sort of elude to this in the article, but I would guess that developers inside apple working on IOS7 might have software emulators for the iphone 6, so this might not be the actual prototypes of the phone. Exciting none the less. Maybe I will wait to upgrade my 4S.

+38% for 2012. Largest positions at the close are BAC common, warrants, leaps 32%, USG %17, PRXI 9%, GRVY 6%, FFH 6%. 22 Positions total. BAC and USG were the big winners, biggest losers were YNGFF and GRVY, the later hasn't cost me anything but I had the chance to unload it at almost a 2 bagger and got greedy :'( But much better than last year where I lagged behind the index a little.

Excellent! I have not read that one before. I think I might make it new years resolution to read that once a week for the next year. Tons of wisdom in there. Now to see if I can find Johnny Carson's commencent speech as well.

Only 100%?? :)

Yes this article makes me feel a little better with regards to my chance of life long outperformance. Also reminds me of this :) "There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult. The academic world if anything has backed away from the teaching of value investing of the last 30 years. It's likely to continue that way. Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace, and those who read their Graham & Dodd will continue to prosper."

Happy New Years Board Members!

Reading "Investing: The Last Liberal Art", this speech is the intro. Reading Munger always puts a smile on my face.

Yes yahoo has almost all warrants and prefs that I own they just usually have different symbols than my brokerage accounts. I have never tried their portfolio tracker. I believe Wikinvest allows you manually enter portfolios as well but I have not tried. Google finance has the GM warrants using GM+A and GM+B but none of the other ones. I really wish Google Finance had warrants more prefs because I like their UI way better than yahoo. I played around with Covestor for a while too but they did not track warrants or prefs at the time.

I would love to find a tracking tool that does everything I want, so far I have not. The closet thing I have found for free is wikinvest.com, they track options, prefs and warrants, but they require that you provide them with your account credentials so they can download your transaction data via your broker's APIs, they don't support Interactive Brokers and of course if you have two factor auth setup then they can't automatically poll your brokerage account. Also even if you are not using two factor auth, keeping your creds in their database is not ideal. I have accounts with Etrade, IB, Fidelity, TDAmeritrade and Sharebuilder/COF so finding something that can import all the data from these different brokers is generally not possible. As a result I keep it all in a spread sheet and automatically pull down the stock, warrant and preferred quotes from the Yahoo finance APIs since they track more securities than Google Finance does and I manually update the quotes on my options positions. What I really want is a piece of software that can import my trading records from all of my accounts going back to inception. However it seems that most brokerages don't provide data that far back through their API, you would need to manually enter the older data yourself. One piece of software I played around with is Fund Manager: http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/ Not bad, but windows only and I am mostly a mac guy nowadays. Would also prefer something web based. I keep my spreadsheet on google docs so I can access it from my phone if I want. That is the best solution I have found so far.

http://rt.com/business/news/times-square-ads-profit-905/ Purchased in 1997 for $117M. Nice little cash machine. Maybe ESL could something similar with some of the SHLD real estates (kidding, sort of) :)

Just logged into account management with out any issues.

Most of my options experience is with buying calls, although I have written puts once or twice before. I have never executed anything more complex than that. One of things I have been looking at for situations like this is the following: sell the 2015 77.50 BRK puts and buy the 2015 75.00 puts. This would allow for levering up the amount of premium you collect while reducing your margin requirements for the trade. Obviously the down side is that you would have to potentially pay the difference of 77.50-75.00 out of pocket if the trade goes bad. I guess my question is between now and January 2015 if the price goes below $77 for a period of time how likely is it that the counter party will attempt to put the stock to you before expiration? From a little bit of reading it sounds like it is possible but not likely. Is that true? What are the gotchas? I had looked at doing this type of trade with LUK when it was trading at 16 after the JEF deal was announced. I held off and at the moment it looks like it would of worked out quite nicely.

Be careful with Gladwell, he tells a very good yarn but many of the studies he highlights have later turned out to be, shall we say, "overly optimistic". Not that Gladwell is at fault, but "new and interesting" research has a low hit rate / high spurious result rate. Yup, lies, damn lies and statistics. Some of his pieces are very thought provoking IMO and have opened me up to ways of thinking about things. Yes I am aware the studies can be very flawed. Thanks for pointing that out, always good not to take something at face value.

This is very interesting. The city I live in had a string of "swarmings" a number of years back --- vicious attacks where a gang of young guys would just beat the hell out of someone for no particular reason... or maybe to steal an iPod. It went on for about two years. At the height of it I asked a friend who's a cop about the situation, and he said there's really not much they can do, and it will just stop by itself. He reiterated this point that there are fads in bad behaviour as with anything else. Sure enough, the beatings just stopped after a while. Haven't heard of one in years. In this case it's difficult to tell how media coverage affected things. I can't remember if the swarming stories started moving off the front page, and then they stopped, or whether the chronology was reversed. It seems the dynamics of these things are very complex. I agree its very complex. I think the difference between something like swarming and mass shootings is that swarming never "tipped" so it died off. With mass shootings it seemed like they reached the tipping point a while ago and we are seeing the results of it. I have never reached a conclusion personally on gun control. I can see valid points on both sides of the fence. On the subject of the epidemic of mass shootings, I think we are past the point where gun laws will have any affect on this particular problem. If it was very hard to get hand guns when the first one happened it might not of spread but I think its too late. I also believe that if the shooters felt they would never make it on the front page of the paper or on nationwide news most of them probably would not commit the crime.

I think it's what's wrong with human psychology. If you're already disturbed, seeing the shooting in Oregon gives social proof for going out and doing something similar. Just like airplane crashes increase after a first well-publicized one. Malcom Gladwell wrote about this phenomoen in "Tipping Point" with relation to teen suicide in Micronesia. I thought it was an excellent book. "No. I think it's much more than that, because once you start to understand this pattern you start to see it everywhere. I'm convinced that ideas and behaviors and new products move through a population very much like a disease does. This isn't just a metaphor, in other words. I'm talking about a very literal analogy. One of the things I explore in the book is that ideas can be contagious in exactly the same way that a virus is. One chapter, for example, deals with the very strange epidemic of teenage suicide in the South Pacific islands of Micronesia. In the 1970's and 1980's, Micronesia had teen suicide rates ten times higher than anywhere else in the world. Teenagers were literally being infected with the suicide bug, and one after another they were killing themselves in exactly the same way under exactly the same circumstances. We like to use words like contagiousness and infectiousness just to apply to the medical realm. But I assure you that after you read about what happened in Micronesia you'll be convinced that behavior can be transmitted from one person to another as easily as the flu or the measles can. In fact, I don't think you have to go to Micronesia to see this pattern in action. Isn't this the explanation for the current epidemic of teen smoking in this country? And what about the rash of mass shootings we're facing at the moment--from Columbine through the Atlanta stockbroker through the neo-Nazi in Los Angeles?"

Well thatd the thing, if I have a 1GB connection at home for $70-$100 a month then the performance for telecommuting would be more than acceptable. I also would not need a riverbed appliance at both ends of the connection, plus most of my file transfers are done using encrypted protocols that prevent devices like that from caching because the bits look different every time they cross the wire. Would probably get some benefits from the tcp tuning they can do, but honestly the fact these things exist kind of irks me because they mainly are making up for the fact that the protocols we use were not designed for the situations in which we use them.

Well if Google buys them then they would not have that issue anymore :) Otherwise yeah their AWS bill just went way up. Because Netflix can't run an unprofitable business while google can mask it with search earnings? Kinda like MSFT and Bing? I was sort of jokingly implying that if Google launched nation wide Fiber to the home and owned Netflix then it would be much more economical for them to stream high bandwidth to each customer. But it was not mean to be a serious response more of a what if. Considering google fiber is in its infancy its much to early to know what will happen there. Imagine if they have about 10,000 concurrent users on average. Today they serve them at about 2 Mbps. How much do you think their CDN costs will go up if they were to serve them at 100 Mbps? How about their AWS resource costs? How much money will they make by charging customers $7 / month after paying for content? I don't know much about their CDN other than the fact that they built their own appliance for it. If they have these devices at all the right locations it might not go up as much you think. But I am not arguing that the costs would not go up quite a bit, I was just implying that if they were owned by a company that had a nation wide fiber to the home rollout it could reduce those costs quite a bit if a decent chuck of their customers were on the same network. I realize google currently has one small test market for fiber, but I am guessing they will expand that quickly if it goes well. So yeah 100Mbps streams would be expensive, and they don't need to go that high. I think 10Mbps of actual throughput and a low latency path between the CDN will provide a very good experience. A lot of people are mislead about streaming bandwidth requirements because they buy a connection that is supposed to 20 or 30Mbps but they don't always get that much bandwidth to the server they are downloading from.

It's 6 months now.