compoundinglife

Notice I prefaced my statement with "anecdotal" which by definition means my view my be completely irrelevant :) I also won't argue that yoga pants are probably a fad with regards to the non-yogi or non-athletic consumers that have hopped on the train. But, I feel the brand recognition is strong enough and they have established themselves enough that they are more than a 1 trick pony. Yoga pants may not be as popular in a few years but I think the brand likely will be more popular. No position. Just offering my opinion which could be totally wrong.

Anecdotal, but as someone who has practiced yoga for around 10 years I don't think this will cause a shift in loyalty to other brands. People that practice yoga especially women tend to be really fanatical about the exercise clothing they wear. Nike and others do not IMO offer the same feeling of being associated with a particular lifestyle or method of exercise. People who purchase their products are making a statement and you can't make that statement currently with the athletic brands like Nike. I think men could be easily swayed to buy Nike products but I think the brand recognition that Lululemon has with women is strong. I see this more as short term road bump. Agree the valuation is rich.

Most of the ads I see on this site are based of my google profile activities (searching and gmail) ;)

I remember reading Ori Eyal's thesis on the prefs way back when, it seemed really enticing but I put it in the too hard pile, would have made some money. He had a list a of the issues and suggested a basket approach. Anyone know of any CEFs that hold decent amount of prefs or common? Could be an interesting way to play either side.

Not sure off the top of my head what the discrepancy is from but I have found the ATOM based feed to be superior to the RSS feed. My guess is that reader and feedly are defaulting to the RSS based feed. See my notes here: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/rss-feed/msg98551/#msg98551

Netnet - I had registered last winter as well. Didn't get a chance to go through - am doing it now. A synthesis of Dawkins' writings and cellular automata rule throws up interesting explanations for me. I started it over the winter but got distracted by work and family around Thanksgiving and Christmas. Taking it again. I liked what portions of the class I took last time around.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-57575364-235/bezos-expeditions-recovers-pieces-of-apollo-11-rockets/ The video is really cool: https://dg9yyrvzimtaq.cloudfront.net/Video1.mp4

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/03/19/new-money-laundering-guidelines-are-a-positive-sign-for-bitcoin/

Agree. thanks for mentioning other managers. One other thing to think about is that (at least in my opinion) someone like Tepper could have hedges or paired trades that might not be obvious, so following him into a long position might not mirror what he is actually doing, where as some of the others mentioned are usually just long their best ideas. I generally try to keep apprised of what my favorite managers are doing, try to figure out their thesis and then wait to see if the price goes below their cost basis.

Seems to be only useful if one is a subscriber. Google for the Title: Shale-Gas Boom Alone Won't Propel U.S. Industry If you are coming from Google WSJ will let you read the article.

Yeah looks like it. GSK goes back to 2007: http://www.dataroma.com/m/hist/hist.php?f=brk&s=GSK and SNY going back to 2006: http://www.dataroma.com/m/hist/hist.php?f=brk&s=SNY

The easiest way (for me at least) is to watch/read the WEB interviews. People ask him why he bought Intel or GM and he will mention that they were not his purchases. This used to happen all the time with Lou's portfolio, BAC was a Lou position that people always asked Buffett about. AFAIK these are the current holdings that WEB's picks. Anyone see any errors: WFC KO IBM PG WMT PSX MCO WPO COST MDLZ(kraft spin off) KRFT GCI GE USB PSX(cop spin off) COP JNJ You just omited American Express, his fourth holding :) Duh! Cut and paste error :)

The easiest way (for me at least) is to watch/read the WEB interviews. People ask him why he bought Intel or GM and he will mention that they were not his purchases. This used to happen all the time with Lou's portfolio, BAC was a Lou position that people always asked Buffett about. AFAIK these are the current holdings that WEB's picks. Anyone see any errors: WFC KO IBM PG WMT PSX MCO WPO COST MDLZ(kraft spin off) KRFT GCI GE USB PSX(cop spin off) COP JNJ

It has been a while since I used that Excel plugin but I have used it with the Old School Value spreadsheet, and from what I remember you had to go into the plugins section in Excel and check a box to enable it. There is a video that may help: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbW9-HanvzY

my eye! oh well, that's life I guess. There are some easier ways. Edgar has full text searching with an advanced search option that allows to specify the form type. It is sometimes easier. For example: Go here: http://searchwww.sec.gov/EDGARFSClient/jsp/EDGAR_MainAccess.jsp Clicked on advanced. I have found some of the warrants prospectus as from type 424B7, although they may not all be of that type. So if you enter Bank of America on the company name field and form type of 424B7 on the drop down then search you should be able to find it. It works for some and not for others. You can also narrow down by date. Someone more familiar with the prospectus form types (424X) care to comment on the different types and what they are used for?

I remember reading an interview with him where he was asked how he knew when he was wrong. His answer (paraphrasing): When I can no longer get a quote. That did it for me. FWIW, I've felt that Seth Klarman's barbs at "value pretenders" in his Margin of Safety was directed, amongst others, at Bill Miller. Best, Ragu http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/legg-masons-bill-miller-releases-4q05-shareholders-letter-55119377.html

His big drop seems to be the 2008 crisis and my understanding is that he was big into financial stocks at that time. But weren't many other value investors hit in the same way. From what I gather, people (Miller and other value investors) didn't anticipate liquidity risks which ultimately killed companies like Bear Sterns and took funds like Miller's down. Was he different from other value funds in that regard? I think Uccmal is referring to the fact the Wechler and Combs made it through the crisis without getting killed and that was highlighted when Buffet hired them as examples of the type of people BRK wanted to hire. Hence there are other people available to watch or follow who have records of capital preservation. They were managing partnerships/hedge funds though not mutual funds. Not sure which value mutual fund managers made it through the crisis without getting killed. Berkowitz was %30 down in 2008 but from what I remember he was not holding any of financials that got creamed. I think he really started getting into AIG and BAC in 2010.

Which fund does he actually run now? From the link you posted, his biggest S&P beats seem to some in the late 90s. Was he a big tech guy? He manages Legg Mason Capital Management Opportunity Trust (LMOPX) now. With regards to tech stocks, I am pretty sure he owned AOL, Amazon and Dell probably others. He also owned Enron and WolrdCom.

I actually setup a website to track warrants few years back, there might be some stuff you are looking for on it. http://warrants.valueashram.com/ Go to "screen all warrants" then select "50" from the drop down list of # of items to display (it shows 10 by default). I have not messed with it for a year or two so some of the data may be old or broken. In theory the prices should update regularly from yahoo finance. So yeah no promise the data is accurate :) If there is interest I could update it to be more useful or have more data on it. At the moment it just pulls some stuff from yahoo finance (div, book value etc..) which is not always accurate. Actually, that's exactly what I've been using--it just doesn't have the dividend adjustment threshold(that's mostly what I'm missing). Do you have those somewhere? More generally, I'm interested in knowing how to find the SEC filings for these, just to get my SEC-fu up. Edit: Also, thank you very much for that website, it helped me find several of the warrants. I think it is missing Sun trust and GM warrants, btw. I just dug up my spreadsheet, it only has a few of the div hurdles and a few of the CUSIPs (which are handy for finding the prospectus in edgar or via google): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AklQsl6HU-bedDg5QWw4SFRmdXBSXzUwcTZFZFpaN0E#gid=0 If you can corale any more data, I can put it on the site or update the tables to have more columns like the div reduction.

I actually setup a website to track warrants few years back, there might be some stuff you are looking for on it. http://warrants.valueashram.com/ Go to "screen all warrants" then select "50" from the drop down list of # of items to display (it shows 10 by default). I have not messed with it for a year or two so some of the data may be old or broken. In theory the prices should update regularly from yahoo finance. So yeah no promise the data is accurate :) If there is interest I could update it to be more useful or have more data on it. At the moment it just pulls some stuff from yahoo finance (div, book value etc..) which is not always accurate.

Ok this very hacky but it works for the few symbols I tested. If I were going to use this on a regular basis I would use one the html parsing modules available for python, but I wanted a quick POC that did not require installing additional software. As mentioned earlier in this thread, the SEC offers ticker -> CIK resolution via there web interface and you can screen scrape data that way if you have the ticker and want the CIK. However they do not offer the reverse. So basically what my script does is hit the SEC website with the CIK to get a company name. It then takes the company name and does a search against yahoo for the ticker. if more than one ticker are returned from yahoo finance it only grabs the first. I tested it on a few tickers and worked ok, but I imagine it will not work for all cases. And this code is very dependent on yahoo or the SEC not changing layouts on their websites. I also do some fuzzy matching on the names. For example I only grab the first two words in the company name unless the second word is only 2 letters long, then I grab three. This is try and avoid situations where one data source has "corp" and the other has "corporation" etc... The best way to do this long term would be the harvest the data yourself with some scripts and then run your software or site or whatever off your normalized data. Here are some usage example assuming the script name is "cik.py": python cik.py 0001021860 Searching for symbol that matches 0001021860 Found company name NATIONAL OILWELL VARCO INC from SEC Attempting to search yahoo finance for NATIONAL OILWELL Yahoo search URL is http://finance.yahoo.com/lookup?s=NATIONAL%20OILWELL NOV python cik.py 0001067983 Searching for symbol that matches 0001067983 Found company name BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC from SEC Attempting to search yahoo finance for BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY Yahoo search URL is http://finance.yahoo.com/lookup?s=BERKSHIRE%20HATHAWAY BRK-B python cik.py 0000783412 Searching for symbol that matches 0000783412 Found company name DAILY JOURNAL CORP from SEC Attempting to search yahoo finance for DAILY JOURNAL Yahoo search URL is http://finance.yahoo.com/lookup?s=DAILY%20JOURNAL DJCO python cik.py 1085917 Searching for symbol that matches 1085917 Found company name BANK OF AMERICA CORP from SEC Attempting to search yahoo finance for BANK OF AMERICA Yahoo search URL is http://finance.yahoo.com/lookup?s=BANK%20OF%20AMERICA BAC And the python code: import urllib import urllib2 import re import sys cik = sys.argv[1] print "Searching for symbol that matches %s" % cik yahoo_url = 'http://finance.yahoo.com/lookup?s=' edgar_url = 'http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?CIK=%s&action=getcompany' % cik string_match = 'companyName' # Fetch company page from edgar using the CIK response = urllib2.urlopen(edgar_url) for line in response: if string_match in line: name_match = re.search('<span class="companyName">(.*)<acronym', line) company_name = name_match.group(1) print "Found company name %s from SEC" % company_name # Here we do some fuzzy logic. If the company name has more than # three words then only use the first two unless the second word # is 2 chars or less. if len(company_name.split()) >= 2: company_name_words = company_name.split() if len(company_name_words[1]) <= 2: company_name = '%s %s %s' % (company_name_words[0], company_name_words[1], company_name_words[2]) else: company_name = '%s %s' % (company_name_words[0], company_name_words[1]) print "Attempting to search yahoo finance for %s" % company_name # URL encode the company name company_name = urllib.quote(company_name) #Take the company name to yahoo and get the ticker yahoo_url = 'http://finance.yahoo.com/lookup?s=%s' % company_name print "Yahoo search URL is %s" % yahoo_url response = urllib2.urlopen(yahoo_url) # Interate throught the HTML and print the first ticker. If there # are more than one we only get the first. for line in response: # the existence of "ticker_up" or "ticker_down" tells we are # on the line with the first symbol if "ticker_up" in line or "ticker_down" in line: ticker_link = re.search('<td>(.*?)</td>', line).group(1) ticker = re.search('">(.*?)</a>', ticker_link).group(1) print ticker break

You could programatically get it by scraping the data off the edgar website. I usually use python for stuff like this but it could be easily adapter to other languages. This code (in python) takes the ticker in the variable "ticker" and the fetchs the company data page from edgar, parses out the CIK. import urllib2 import time ticker = 'BAC' string_match = 'rel="alternate"' url = 'http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=&match=&CIK=%s&owner=exclude&Find=Find+Companies&action=getcompany' % ticker response = urllib2.urlopen(url) for line in response: if string_match in line: for element in line.split(';'): if 'CIK' in element: cik = element.replace('&amp','') print cik Woops this does the opposite of what you asked for. Could do the reverse easy as well. Happy to post an example after dinner for getting the reverse if you want/need it.

You could programatically get it by scraping the data off the edgar website. I usually use python for stuff like this but it could be easily adapter to other languages. This code (in python) takes the ticker in the variable "ticker" and the fetchs the company data page from edgar, parses out the CIK. import urllib2 import time ticker = 'BAC' string_match = 'rel="alternate"' url = 'http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=&match=&CIK=%s&owner=exclude&Find=Find+Companies&action=getcompany' % ticker response = urllib2.urlopen(url) for line in response: if string_match in line: for element in line.split(';'): if 'CIK' in element: cik = element.replace('&amp','') print cik

Which one? GREK?

Just seems to an outsider, that Greece has a much more of a systemic problem and Ireland more of a bubble problem. Initially no one really understood how much off balance sheet commitments the government had but I believe that is all now known. NBG's biggest problem AFAIK is that they hold of a ton of gov bonds, I don't think they did anything really terrible other than owning greek bonds (such as buying a bad mortgage paper factory). Seems like with those factors it would be a good place for the Fairfax team to look for deals. True Greece has a lot of issues with tax evasion and corruption but from what I remember reading in The Boomerang NBG was actually fairly well run.