tnp20

Simply superb investment advice. Thanks for posting it. I have most of his archived memos downloaded and they truly are investment gems.

Does anyone know of good website(s) that give you heads up on upcoming special situations like:- (i) Rights offerings (ii) Spinoffs (iii) etc. in Greenblatt fashion. Its hard to find some of this stuff on the SEC websites. Lot of the rights offerings get filed as different types....N2, S1, S2, POS EX, POS 8C etc..... I don't even mind if they are paid websites as long as they give you give you fair amount of upcoming opportunities.....

Beerbaron Can you please share some names. I like EXC....its cheap on various metrics, pays 5% divi, cheapest electricity producer and play on eventual rising Natural gas prices which are currently causing low electricity prices. Also if the carbon tax credit were to get off the ground, this would benefit. Management is very good at building shareholder value.

I have some AHLp. Preference share of AHL....currently paying 5%....~$3 premium for the convert feature from current price. - So you get 5% whilst you wait - Get to be higher on the capital structure - Potentially free one long leg of an arbitrage against market/another similar but weaker insurer/AHL common as an opportunistic trade.

Absolutely fantastic set of interviews. Kudos to Miguel. It further confirms my belief that Alice is a very smart and brave lady. She has a very unique and distilled perspective on WEB that can only be garnered when being so close to him and she risked it all by putting the negatives with the positives out there. Buffett stands tall amongst the giants on numerous socio-economic measures , but he is not perfect. Alice is one of the first to bring out the less exposed side of Buffett for which she must be given full credit for. All this nonsense of her trying to monetize on her close relationship with WEB is just bunk...she frankly doesn't need the money. She is smart enough to be successful without ever having met Buffett....... I have found her to be very accessible....

Josh, would you mind sharing your calculation and thought process to $0.30-0.50 ? Thx. My estimate is proforma post-bk debt $470M, equity $600M. => EV $1070M If strike prices is at average $1.45B, and if you assume it will trade closer to EV $1800M than $1070M, it should trade above the strike price not long after post-BK emergence. If it doesn't than buying equity post emergence would make sense assuming Kronos comparisson is valid. $350M * 7.5% / 42M shares = $0.625 (not counting 7 year optinality value). Its trading currently in the 0.58 - 0.65 range but that doesn't mean much.......

Under the current Plan, shareholders of Tronox Incorporated would have received two-year warrants convertible into 5% of the common equity in reorganized Tronox at a strike price indicative of a $1.5 billion enterprise value for reorganized Tronox, but only if the class of shareholders of Tronox Incorporated voted to accept the Plan. As a result of the settlement, existing shareholders of Tronox Incorporated will receive an improved package of warrants, consisting of two tranches of warrants, each exercisable for seven years, on the following terms: •Tranche A warrants convertible into 3.5% of the common equity in reorganized Tronox Incorporated issued on the Effective Date, at a strike price based on a $1.4 billion total enterprise value for reorganized Tronox; and •Tranche B warrants convertible into 4.0% of the common equity in reorganized Tronox Incorporated issued on the Effective Date, at a strike price based on a $1.5 billion total enterprise value for reorganized Tronox. >>>>>> So the new plan gives 7.5% equity in new Tronox at average $1.45B EV and a 7 year term. Compare to Kronos and assuming more realistic EV of $1.8B ....that gives $350M difference >>>>>>> 42M outstanding gives ~0.63 cents not counting the option value.

"The surprise announcement came after two candidates—including Chinese-American hedge fund manager Li Lu, and another individual Mr. Buffett was interested in—took themselves out of the running for the job, Mr. Buffett said." So the Billion dollar question is who was the other individual who took themselves out of the running......MP is the only guy I can think of.

"Throughout history at all times Gold has always been money" US Airforce fighter pilots survival suite contains gold soverign coins, not US dollar notes. Gold is not an investment, it is a currency that has historically been established as universal store of value. Like any other currency, it will fluctuate in value against other fiat currency. However it has particular usefulness/utility in times of war, economic chaos, strong debasement regimen when its value will increase in relation to the impacted fiat currency. It is a highly portable currency and virtually universal in acceptance. It is a currency without country. It is a currency than can only be printed in the amounts that can be mined. So in some respects Warren is right, gold is not an investment. Most other investments will out run gold in stable well managed economies. In some respects Warren is wrong, gold is an insurance policy against black swans such as war, economic collapse, debasement etc...where those other investments might become worthless. I personally own 5% of my assets in physical gold. If we get a spike in the gold price as happened in the 1980s, without the corresponding war, hyper inflation or economic chaos....the gold is out of the door and converted to cash.....other than that it will stay in my portfolio. Throughout history, gold has always flowed from West to East. We are about to embark on a massive flow of gold from West to East as Chinese and Indians become wealthy and there are a lot more of them and growing in number faster than gold is being mined. Gold is an integral part of the culture which won't change in just one generation no matter how rational they might be. Diamonds are not the same. Its a creation of DeBeers.

Sanj I wish you best of luck. I did a similar proxy challenge to get directors on board several years ago with an investor friend I met online. We did it mostly ourselves and the total cost was $10,000. We did not succeed, we failed by 0.05 votes...it was close but there were several important lessons learned. Couple of things to watch out for to ensure your success:- (i) After filing our proxy, we called all the large owners of the stock to solicit support for the proxy and to get a vote count. Most were supportive, however susequent to the final vote we found out that we came up short more than we thought. Several funds that supported us claimed they owned X number of shares only to find out later that their backoffice had lent the shares out so their holding was immaterial from a vote count perspective. Make sure the shares you are counting on to be voted in your favour have not be lent out. (ii) Broker votes are a killer. Broker non-votes might mean you might not even get to a quorum. Need to determine how the broker votes will be counted. (iii) Company may send out confusing communications to deliberately confuse shareholders as to which proxy card to vote.

Why not just buy the bonds in Tronox....they are going for 92.5 cents on the dollar.....and they'll capture more of the easy upside before warrants even kick in ? Is there some aversion to Tronox bonds ?

It would be also interesting to see age break down.....I suspect younger folks are still in the early part of capital accumlation mode so its probably resonable to expect younger crowd towards lower brackets and older crowd towards higher brackets. A 65 year old might have a 40 year head start on a 25 year old.

T-bone I think you can rightly say she profited from the book, but I doubt you can say she profited from the articles......she does these articles about once per month.....going rate on these short articles is $250-$500. Hardly profits to talk about ! That's not her motivation. From having communicated with her (not that I know her well) my sense is that Buffett spurned her after the book was published (I have not read the book) , perhaps justifyably so, but she feels there is another side to him that needs to be exposed. They may also be some bitterness factor in this which leads to question of her objectivity. But she is a very smart lady nonetheless....... Buffett and Munger by all accounts are investing geniuses. They are some of the most ethical and intelligent roles models we know. But there are instances which raise questions about thier purity...... Buffet was supoened by congress during investigation into the ratings agencies (He owned Moodys during the crisis). He did his best through his lawyers to avoid appearing. Finally he showed up under pressure. To the question of wether he knew there was a housing bubble, he claimed that no one could have forseen the housing bubble and the collapse. This was the time when he built one of the greatest CASH war chest of all times......one must look at peoples actions rather than the words.

Buffett was against breaking up of microsoft during the anti-trust fight, when MS had clearly abused its monopoly power. Schroeder is actually a very brave women (foolishly or otherwise) to choose targets such as Buffett and Munger.

I have spoken to Alice Schroeder in the past and she has some valid points. Munger and Buffett aren't perfect and its good to see someone chip away at their godly pedestal and their biased view and present alternates wether you agree with them or not, additional light shed can be either considered or discarded. People like Stiglitz and Krugman advocated nationalization of the banks as a remedy to the crisis. This was an alternate plausible solution that would have rightfully wiped out bond holders and stockholders of banks and no doubt the collateral damage would have been steep but the rearchitecture of the financial system would have been quicker rather than this slow peice meal approach. Stigliz has operational experience through IMF and Worldbank with other bank crisis around the world and in other crisis banks were nationalized and those economies did recover....so its an alternative solution. Paulson consulted Buffett in the heat of the crisis. Buffett isn't exactly gonna say I am for nationalization of the banks. The rest is history.

Sanj Is there some requirement to get into the Pabrai Fund AGM ? Kill two birds with one stone ....

So, here is my question: why do so many board members (whom I respect so much for their comments and insights over the years), feel that now is not the time to buy? This is my first post. There are different themes of "blood on the streets". Some periods opportunities last weeks/months, whilst others last for years. The trick is to identify which theme we are in. http://www.scribd.com/doc/34316183/T2-Partners-Presentation-7-13-10 (look at Page 5/47) Secondly, there is the concept of reversion to the mean. Generally if index/market spends much time above the long run average, it must spent good portion below average to get to average. In this crisis we haven't fully gotten there......so more downside is yet to come. CAPE and Q haven't gotten to bargain levels seen in previous crisis.....will it deny us that opportunity this time ? Probably not is the bet of the bears that are patiently waiting. http://www.smithers.co.uk/page.php?id=34