dcollon

I think RWT is interesting. I can't say too much about it, but they raised a nice amount of capital over the last 12 months and a good amount of it is still sitting on their balance sheet for opportunities in distressed CRE. I view George Bull (CEO) and his team as value investors in the credit industry.

I have always enjoyed reading comments from Michael O'Leary (CEO of Ryanair) and I thought some of you might find his comments in this article as entertaining as I did. He seems to think about costs...a lot. http://tinyurl.com/yctd2cd I hope all you enjoy the remaining few days of 2009.

Somewhat off topic, this article was in the NYT. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/business/16sac.html?ref=business

It should be interesting to see how they structure this deal http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aEDs0s9EBW4s&pos=2

This is the latest article from Atul Gawande. I know some of you enjoy reading his comments. This article is much more focused on the healthcare debate. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/12/14/091214fa_fact_gawande?printable=true

I completely agree with your comments Sanjeev.

I know some of you like FPA as much as I do, so I thought I would post this interview with Bob Rodriguez. http://wealthtrack.com/index.php

I haven't seen this mentioned and actually had kind of forgotten about it myself. http://www.cnbc.com/id/34149476

Thanks for the article.

Below is Part 2 of the interview previously posted. http://www.advisorperspectives.com/newsletters09/pdfs/Bruce_Greenwald_on_Positioning_First_Eagles_Funds.pdf

I have been a long time fan of FPA and Robert Rodriguez and enjoyed his "final" commentary. I thought some of you might enjoy it as well. http://www.fpafunds.com/downloads/capital/aaa_semiannual_report_capital.pdf

Thanks for the article and for the translation. This is going to sound bad, but I didn't even know you could do that on Google. I love that company.

Some of you may have seen this already, but if not it's worth watching. http://tinyurl.com/yjye7u4

Appears that BRK bought a fair amount of WMT during the quarter. Position looks like it almost doubled to just under 38mm shares.

I think the BNI transaction fits exactly with the kind of returns that Buffett is focused on now and has told everyone he is focused on. He was able to put a ton of money to work that he most likely feels will generate pre-tax returns on capital in the high single digits or low double digits at best. If you add in the potential benefit of using float he would increase his returns by a couple percent over time. This deal isn't appealing to me from an investment standpoint, but then again I don't have a lot of capital (unfortunately) that needs to find a home. I think the error people continue to make is looking at what Buffett is buying and not understanding why he is buying it.

Scorpioncapital, Thanks very much for posting the transcript.

This is a few weeks old, but well worth watching if you have the time. I continue to find discussions of checklists to be interesting and Atul Gawande is one of the leaders in this area. As some of you might remember Mohnish mentioned him at his partners dinner. Hopefully some of you will have the time to watch. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/festival/2009/10/gawande-video.html

I would be careful about reading too much into some of these transactions. Some of the large bank positions that they have reported for Paulson & Co. came about from Preferred conversions.

I always enjoy Howard Marks comments and received this memo from 11/10/09. I know some of you probably have already seen it, but I thought it was worth posting. http://www.oaktreecapital.com/Memos/Touchstones%20111009.pdf

Most of SAC's money is Mr. Cohen's so, unless he has to sell to pay legal bills I wouldn't expect there to be as much of an opportunity. But I agree that it's certainly worth watching closely.

http://www.advisorperspectives.com/newsletters09/pdfs/Bruce_Greenwald_on_Structural_Problems.pdf

Fantastic interview. Thanks for posting it.

Thanks for posting. Great interview and I would be very comfortable with him running BRK.

I would prefer that they do a soft close for the fund. I am also interested in the "income" idea that they floated during the call. To this point I have only been able to find a few funds that I really like in that area. I enjoyed the commentary on healthcare and hope they are right.

I thought the transcript for a recent Fairholme conference call might be of interest to some of you. http://www.fairholmefunds.com/player/09-30-09.pdf