gfp
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Posts posted by gfp
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A couple years when the stock market only goes up with negligible volatility is probably not enough experience to take on other people's capital. My advice is to continue learning, build an audited track record over multiple market cycles - at least one bear market - and to start to cultivate a group of people with investment capital who over time express an interest in you taking over management. Then you can either start a small partnership, or much easier and lower cost, use a separate account advisor platform at a broker like IB. You will need the series 65, so you could start studying for that while you build a track record over a meaningful period of time.
I doubt you will find it pleasant to manage outside capital through a bear market if you have never managed your own capital through a bear market.
I just got the green card yesterday so I no longer need to continue to be a code monkey for the longer term.
I've been learning investing since a few years ago and had reasonable results. I'd like to start a hedge fund but I have no clue how to get started, any things to pay attention to and how to keep the costs as low as possible.
Can anyone give me some advice?
Thanks!
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And one more-
"Specialty (re)insurer Fidelis has confirmed that it will launch with around $1.5bn of capital, after it secured an A- rating from AM Best.
The start-up, which is led by CEO Richard Brindle and CFO Neil McConachie, said that it will look to optimise its returns across the liability and asset sides of its balance sheet.
The Insurance Insider first revealed in October that Brindle was working on a new vehicle after exiting Lancashire, the specialty insurer he founded in 2005, and reported on 2 June that the Fidelis fundraise was due to close this week at $1.5bn.
As previously reported, private equity houses Crestview Partners and Pine Brook will invest in the new Bermuda-based business. They will be joined by CVC Capital Partners, rather than Oaktree as initially intended.
In total the three PE houses will contribute $650mn of capital, Fidelis said, with the balance coming from individual investors, family offices and institutions.
"By focusing on either assets or liabilities, legacy insurance models have failed to optimise shareholder returns, and the low returns generated by fixed income investments have been challenging," Brindle said.
"Fidelis will pursue a total return strategy by tactically shifting capital and risk between insurance and investments to maximise our return on equity across market cycles. But we are first and foremost an underwriting company."
Fidelis confirmed that it would use a number of fund managers with a range of different strategies rather than allocating all of its assets to a single investment manager.
At the time of the fundraise, Fidelis said that it intended to use fund managers including York Capital, Seminole and BlackRock.
The asset management strategy will be developed in conjunction with Goldman Sachs' Alternative Investments & Manager Selection Group and will be managed by chief investment officer Edward Russell.
"In addition to seeking returns that outperform peers, we believe the diversification in assets will protect Fidelis against financial market volatility better than a single-manager strategy would," McConachie explained.
"Optimising across hard and soft underwriting markets, as well as through different investment cycles makes Fidelis not only a strong new player, but also very attractive for investors looking to reduce downside risk."
Fidelis said that its underwriting portfolio - which will be spread across reinsurance and insurance - will principally be in property, energy, marine and aviation risk classes, although it is also understood to be looking at writing a book of political risk business.
As previously reported by The Insurance Insider, Amlin's Ben Savill is in line to become CEO of Fidelis in Bermuda, with Aon Benfield's Dan Burrows set to take up the role of London CEO once regulatory approval is secured.
Brindle will act as group chief underwriting officer and will be actively involved in underwriting the company's portfolio, it is understood."
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He had some fans on this board, so I thought someone might find it interesting
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Insurers have 'one hand tied behind back': Brindle
Adam McNestrie
Legacy insurers have been "sleepwalking" for the last seven years and have failed to adapt to the realities posed by a low interest rate environment, according to Fidelis CEO Richard Brindle.
Speaking to The Insurance Insider as he launched his new $1.5bn carrier, Brindle argued that since the financial crisis began, "everyone has had one hand tied behind their back" when it comes to their low-yielding fixed income portfolios.
"They're making 0 percent now where they used to make 5 percent," he added.
Historically, the industry has relied upon generating a return from the asset side of the balance sheet as well as the liability side, but - unlike other areas of the financial services sector - insurers have failed to recalibrate their business model, the CEO argued.
Fidelis - his answer to the challenge - is a total return carrier that will dynamically change the amount of investment and underwriting risk it takes depending on market conditions.
Brindle said that Berkshire Hathaway is the only company in the space that has pursued this sort of model.
But while he admires Berkshire's trading instincts, Brindle said that Fidelis would not take quite such an opportunistic approach to its underwriting to ensure that client and broker relationships were safeguarded.
The Lancashire founder told The Insurance Insider that the business would not be gunning for the same level of investment returns as some of the more aggressive hedge fund reinsurers.
"We're not trying to be a Third Point Re and make 15 points a year on the investments," he said. Instead, the aim will be to make a high single-digit return on the asset side.
"The focus will be more on the investments than the underwriting in the first couple of years," Brindle said, with the second half of 2015 and 2016 seen as a "ramp up" period in underwriting owing to market conditions.
However, the business is still targeting a few percentage points of return on equity from underwriting in its first full year in operation.
"To begin with the underwriting piston will be pushed most of the way down and the investment piston pushed most of the way up," he said. "But we could move our allocation to mostly cash and fixed income almost overnight if we need to."
When the concept was under development last year, Brindle and CFO Neil McConachie were thinking more along the lines of a portfolio weighted towards specialty insurance, with some reinsurance exposure.
However, the emphasis has since shifted towards reinsurance.
"It's carnage in some of the specialty insurance classes - pricing has just gone off a cliff. We're not ideological about which lines of business we write."
Brindle has a long history of writing terrorism and energy business, and many expected them to be cornerstone classes for Fidelis. But the former Lancashire executive described them as "probably the worst in the world" at the moment.
By contrast, some reinsurance classes - including property catastrophe - continue to have attractive margins, he argued. Nevertheless, Brindle acknowledged that "the garden is hardly rosy" and that he regards current market conditions as unsustainable.
This stance represents a contrarian perspective given that the value of a reinsurance book is currently being heavily discounted in favour of portfolios of specialty insurance business.
Brindle maintained that there were opportunities in the reinsurance market for a new business of Fidelis' size, adding that the brokers were getting "spooked" about the "disappearance of counterparties" as M&A activity gathers pace.
And, although he continues to believe that a certain scale is needed to ensure relevance, Brindle insisted that the industry has overreacted, with carriers now "obsessed with becoming hulking big companies".
A nimble carrier with talented underwriters and a $100mn line size was closer to the industry sweet spot than a $10bn business, the executive argued.
He also said that Fidelis had not finished fundraising, with secondary raises from the Goldman Sachs high-net-worth network on the cards, potentially in the coming months.
Brindle said that CFO McConachie was responsible for pioneering the current operating model at the public London companies, which involves significant capital returns to shareholders, and said that this would continue at Fidelis.
A strong stream of dividends would be a major attraction to shareholders as the company navigates towards an initial public offering, likely in New York, over a two-to-five-year time window.
Charles Mathias, who resigned as chief risk officer at Lancashire earlier this week, is joining Fidelis in the same role. Goldman Sachs and Kinmont advised Fidelis.
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A service that consolidates all your recurring bills into a single payment, they tell you what you owe and you write a single check for it. Maybe they take a percent or two for convenience on top of that too.
This is a nice idea and one that used to exist. My roommate in college used an early online service to do this before many companies had their own online / automatic bill pay stuff set up. I can't remember the name of the service. I believe he used it for years, then the company finally went out of business. There may still be a service like it out there, but I think the business model became tougher when virtually every service provider provided their own free online / automatic bill pay systems.
It saved my roommate's credit though - without that service (back then you had to have all your paper bills mailed to their address for it to work) he could NEVER pay a bill on time and he was constantly getting calls from creditors, etc... Our landlord would take a check from me for my half of the rent but my roommate had to hand it to her in cash each month because he was so bad with money management. Luckily for him he is wealthy now, he wouldn't have fared well otherwise...
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Not sure poached is the right word. Wasn't he retired for two years before being approached by Ackman to run CP?
CEO of CP Rail - Hunter Harrison. He turned around CN Rail to become the most efficient Class I railroads and was later poached by Bill Ackman to run CP Rail and he is doing it again. (As a CN Rail shareholder I was pissed but he is an icon in the business)
Thanks,
S
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You will need to switch to a margin account and apply for options trading permissions if you haven't already done so. They will send you a booklet describing the 'characteristics and risks of standardized options.' Not all brokers require a margin account to purchase long positions in options, but it appears that TD Waterhouse does. Similar to the other thread on this board describing margin approval at Merrill Lynch, you will probably need to indicate you are experienced in trading any securities you want approval for.
Be careful buying options, even for hedging. Make sure you know what you are doing.
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I make a lot of my own frames, but there are several options online for 36x18 cheap frames.
http://www.amazon.com/Art-To-Frames-Picture-36-Inch/dp/B0034609JO
http://www.arttoframe.com/18x36_picture_frames
etc...
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Could be a great deal for 3G - would love to see a big participation by Berkshire if it happens. BUD moved as well, but I wonder if BUD is actually the vehicle they use for this?
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It's out of stock but will probably be available a bit later. In the meantime you can download the Charlie Munger chapter here -
http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/05/book-review-the-great-minds-of-investing/
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i tried this... it didn't work for me. i must be doing something incorrect?
Click this, wait, click on top link that comes up --> http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Profiling+Wall+Street%27s+Bright+Lights+Barrons
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Gamecock posted the 1994 report here -
I'll look around and see if I have any of the others from that range. People with access to business school libraries can probably get them for you.
edit: couldn't find pdf's full scans of 86-93 Annual Reports, but did find a pdf of just the shareholder letters. Obviously also available from the BRK website, but at least it's a pdf format -
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/339810/buffett-all.pdf
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Maybe send him a copy of 'When Genius Failed'? I would have no problem with 100% of my investable net worth in Berkshire at 1x book value (not a typo, didn't mean .1x). But I wouldn't do anything like that for an arb spread that can widen just as easily as it can narrow. That's just stupid. I think the Lion Fund did the closest I've seen to 100% in one position with CBRL. Fairholme did as close as I've seen in a mutual fund with AIG.
People lever up and put multiples of their net worth into commercial real estate deals all the time. I think that was what ultimately turned Charlie Munger off from that business.
I had a discussion with a trader who does index ETF arbitrage and he showed me a theoretical opportunity where an ETF was trading $0.15 from fair value and asked me if I would trade against it and how big my position would be. I said I would trade on it but don't know how big of a margin of safety it was. He said he would put his maximum buying power in it, take out a second mortgage on his home, call his parents and take out a second mortgage on their home and put all that money into the opportunity. It just made me think of how different people's think of risk differently.
What would have to happen for you to put 100% of your net worth into one position?
Berkshire Hathaway trades at 0.1x book? Google trades at 4x P/E? IBM becomes a net net? Discuss
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Which ones do you want to short? There is at least one ETF, ticker SOCL, but it has exposure to big profitable companies that might not be the ones you are looking to short. I don't recommend going short on valuation alone, but if you have an issue with a specific company and it's business model and valuation, buy a long dated put or short the stock/basket. The real bubble seems to be the private companies and you won't be able to get short those.
Someone on this board mentioned a wonderful short, Bazaarvoice, a few years ago and I was very happy to short it and stay short once I got to know it very well. The valuation was absurd. But I wouldn't necessarily want to be short Facebook, Yelp (for sale?) and twitter.
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I didn't see any mention of an IRA account in your question. If you are US-based and have some of your investable capital in IRAs, that would be the place to park a potential PFIC. I would not ignore it and hope the IRS doesn't notice. I put Pershing Square Holdings, Kennedy Wilson Europe and Fairfax India in IRA accounts with no issues.
This is a question for American investors in FIH. It was noted earlier in this thread that FIH could well be deemed a PFIC by the IRS. Jurgis commented, "It likely will be [a PFIC] unless it acquires controlled operating businesses fast." So I'm wondering how others are dealing with this issue. Possible strategies:
(1) Ignore the risk and hope the IRS either doesn't notice or decides it's not a PFIC. Might work if you're a small shareholder. Huge losses if it doesn't work.
(2) Try to figure out the PFIC rules, and go by them. My impression is that the taxes one would then owe would make the investment much less attractive--I think essentially, all unrealized gains are taxed like ordinary income each year. Also it's unclear to me what information is needed for tax filing, and how to get it if the company doesn't help out.
I've only owned one PFIC, and the (Canadian) company provided Americans a sheet each year with the necessary information to deal with PFIC filing.
Useful link:
https://ustaxcompliance.wordpress.com/tax-triggers/a-pfic-primer/
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Does anybody know what Ackman said on his Q1 conference call on FNMA/FMCC? Saw brief tweets from ValueWalk, but was looking for clarity.
He didn't say much, but his analyst did an update on Freddie and Fannie. This is the gist of it:
* Continues to believe that F/F are vital to the 30 yr. mtg and market share has continued to grow
* There is a growing acceptance that they are vital and here to stay
* It was an unlawful taking, and the current situation is both legally and economically untenable.
* Stuff coming out of Sweeny case suggests the Government hasn't turned over all the documents it was required to
* Plaintiffs are making progress in moving forward towards a trial
* Believes the market misinterpreted the dismissed case in Iowa as being a material event (it was dismissed because of it's similarity to laberth case) Lamberth case is on appeal, so there are still two cases going, with sweeny progressing nicely.
* Core credit guarantee business of F/F continues to be strong.
* Government profit sweep is on reported earnings, so the Gov. has taken less recently even though the core business continues to improve. Reported earnings are bing depressed by mark-to-market losses on derivatives to hedge a fixed income arbitrage porfolio. The underlying assets that are hedged have increased in value, but the hedges depress current reported earnings.
* As the fixed income arbitrage portfolio shrinks, he thinks that the underlying strength in the core business will show through
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Then in the Q&A section:
* Estimates it will take at least through the end of the year to get through discovery, with the government attempting to withhold documents it can take awhile. Believes the judge will be harsh on attempts to withhold documents
* Estimates a year, year and a half before a trial begins
* Analyst throws out wild-ass-guess on date of a final decision from the trial: May 12th 2017. Gets some giggles, but the analyst stands by his number..
* They believe some positive decisions in court will help to spur parties to the negotiating table, "we'd love to help if we can."
* Says their average cost on Fannie and Freddie is around $2 and they hold above 10% of each (of the float, i assume)
* In response to a question on the applicability of the Starr/AIG case decision, he says a decision in favor of Greenberg would be a slight positive for the F/F cases, but not directly applicable since the plaintiffs in the F/F litigation are not challenging the expensive preferreds, etc...
* Question was how likely are plaintiffs to succeed vs Fannie and Freddie and what type of upside do you see in that situation - Bill answered that they believe they are "much more likely than not" to win in the court of claims or on appeal and that he envisions "very significant upside in fannie and freddie"
* says F&F combined are around 3% of consolidated assets
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The seeking alpha article they pointed you to is way off on the investments per share math.
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The MO for Van Tuyl / Berkshire so far has not been to acquire large groups. They have acquired 3 or 4 dealerships since the deal was announced and they are likely to continue their joint venture model where they partner with the selling management team.
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When you know the headline of the article you want to read on WSJ or Barron's you type that in to a google search or google news search and when you click through you will get a "free pass" to read the article. You have to access it through the search engine though.
I read both the WSJ and Barron's through the Google backdoor.
It's mostly skimming though, I wouldn't pay for this content, it's not worth it.
What's the google backdoor?
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California taxes capital gains the same as ordinary income. Some states don't have a capital gains tax. The system in California is progressive and starts at 1% and goes all the way to 12.3%. It might be the worst state for capital gains taxes but I don't know for sure.
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edit - never mind, site fixed
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Glad to hear it isn't just me - yes, the site has been painfully slow this morning.
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I saw somewhere that there is a house across the street where the owner is asking for 10 A shares, so now I'm confused. Was that a parody/joke? Or are there two houses for sale there?
Two houses for sale - the one you are talking about is really playing it up in the marketing -
http://www.livenexttowarrenbuffet.com/
(not super classy..)
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I haven't seen any personal notes out there yet, but the WSJ notes cover pretty much everything. Morningstar also did one, but it wasn't quite as good.
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/05/02/live-analysis-the-2015-berkshire-hathaway-annual-meeting/
Here's one from a fool contributor - http://boards.fool.com/berkvilles-golden-year-31738454.aspx
Here are M*'s - http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=695453
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No, it's somebody else. Has been in the same family for 50 years
Donald Keough's house?, i.e., estate sale?
Cliff Notes for Warren Buffett Essays?
in Berkshire Hathaway
Posted
There aren't that many essays, articles, etc. It's a pleasure to read his writing directly. Are you talking about the shareholder letters?