compoundinglife
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Posts posted by compoundinglife
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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.
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On this site, I get a lot of ads from "Frederick's of Hollywood". I wonder what ad agencies think about me.
Most of the ads I see on this site are based of my google profile activities (searching and gmail) ;)
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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.
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I know there are some of us who are extremely disappointed with Google closing down Reader. I have already moved my google feeds to Feedly just in case all our petitioning turns out to be useless.
But today I noticed something strange in both me Feedly feeds and Google reader feeds. When I opened the COBF message board , some of the posts under 'Recent Posts' were not even being shown in either Google reader or Feedly. I am not sure why? Does any one know why these posts do not show up in Reader or Feedly ( unless of course there is some sort of an international conspiracy against some board members ;-) )
I grabbed the screen captures of both. Can some one please explain the discrepancy?
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
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Coursera (https://class.coursera.org/modelthinking-2012-002/class/index) is offering their Model Thinking course again.
I enjoyed it when I took it last winter.
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.
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On the notion of stealing, its best to steal from managers that exhibit high concentration and low turnover such as Sequoia Fund, ESL, BB, Lou Simpson, Chuck Akre, Wedgewood Partners, Weitz value and of course Pabrai/Weschler
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.
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Shale-Gas Boom Alone Won't Propel U.S. Industry .
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.
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I would think that both pharma Glaxo and Sanofi are Buffett holdings too, but maybe I am wrong on those ones.
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:
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Is there a way to determine what Ted/Todd picks are?
Compare previous 13-Fs?
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 :)
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Is there a way to determine what Ted/Todd picks are?
Compare previous 13-Fs?
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
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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
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I think you have to do it the old fashioned way. Determine the approximate date and go through each and every filing. Tedious.
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?
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Miller seems to have lacked an understanding of capital preservation.
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
We average down relentlessly. Two things seem pretty clear to me:first, no one can consistently buy at the low or sell at the high
(except liars, as Bernard Baruch said), and second, lowest average
cost wins. We constantly strive to lower the average cost of our
positions by buying more if and when the price drops. Throwing good
money after bad, others call it. Many investors think a drop in the
price of stocks they own is evidence they were wrong. We think of it
as an opportunity to increase our implied rate of return by lowering
our average cost. Someone once asked me how I knew when we were
wrong to do that. When we can no longer get a quote, was my answer.
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Miller seems to have lacked an understanding of capital preservation. It is interesting that Buffett has never made this mistake on a large scale.
There is alot to be said about avoiding mistakes as part of an overall long term success strategy. Bill Miller failed at this. As a result his long term record got slaughtered.
Buffet and Munger have stated that avoiding mistakes has been an integral part of their long term success. Buffett published his requirements for a successor, and one of them was to be able to manage risk, even where is was not easily predictable.
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.
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His horrendous performance in 2007 and 2008 killed his long term track record. He's underperfomed the S&P 500 since inception by about 10% (though since he left the fund like a year ago or whatever performance has gotten better.
http://quotes.morningstar.com/fund/f?t=LMVTX®ion=USA&culture=en-US
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.
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I'm trying to get the SEC filings for a few warrants in order to get the dividend threshold amount--how do you look them up if you know the company ticker?
In particular, I'm looking for:
BPFH
LNC
SBNY
TCB
VLY
Thanks!
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.
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I'm trying to get the SEC filings for a few warrants in order to get the dividend threshold amount--how do you look them up if you know the company ticker?
In particular, I'm looking for:
BPFH
LNC
SBNY
TCB
VLY
Thanks!
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.
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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 -
I'm looking for a way to find a ticker for a stock if I already have a CIK. The SEC is CIK driven and I can't seem to find a link between the two. Does anyone know of a list that's updated frequently with a CIK and associated ticker?
I have already surfed the SEC's FTP server without luck.
If not any idea on how to get this programatically?
On a side note can somebody explain the SEC ascention numbering scheme?
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('&','') print cikWoops 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.
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I'm looking for a way to find a ticker for a stock if I already have a CIK. The SEC is CIK driven and I can't seem to find a link between the two. Does anyone know of a list that's updated frequently with a CIK and associated ticker?
I have already surfed the SEC's FTP server without luck.
If not any idea on how to get this programatically?
On a side note can somebody explain the SEC ascention numbering scheme?
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('&','') print cik -
I'm long through the ETFs. Simple, and cheap for me. It costs me too much in brokerage fees to go a different route.
Which one? GREK?
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No different than their investment in Bank of Ireland. Cheers!
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.
Short Ideas?
in General Discussion
Posted
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.