Ross812

I thought about Covestor actually. If this works well, I'd be open to starting a model portfolio on covestor. Fees collected would be donated.

The portfolio will get rebalanced every quarter with another poll. If a company falls out of the top 10 it will be sold. I like the google spreadsheet idea, I'm just not sure what kind of participation we would get. The write in would be a popularity contest of sorts as well. In the next round rebalance (End of September beginning of October) we will add in some sort of write in. There will be some more discussion on how to accomplish the write in I'm sure.

So select the top 10 by popularity then value rank the companies and by a metric. The problem is what metric do we use? There is not really one metric that measures all companies equally. What about (P/BV) / (Company's 5 yr Avg. P/E) ?

I like the idea. Do you have an idea to figure our which ideas have been "trending" in the last three months?. My original idea was to only list stocks that had been mentioned in the last three months but the board is so active that the list comes to 210 names! There has to be a cutoff somewhere. Do we do the last 60 names mentioned? last 100? 60 names gets us back about 4 days... 100 gets us back about 2 weeks...

The idea of starting a crowd based portfolio to track the best ideas of the board has been tossed around a bit. Above are the 60 topics in the investment ideas forum with the most posts. Some topics were removed if the stock no longer trades or there where no posts on the topic in the past 6 months. Each member gets up to 5 votes. Choose the companies you believe will have the best total return. The 10 companies (cash is an included asset class) with the most votes will be bought in a portfolio with a $1,000,000 starting balance. Their proportions will be determined depending on the number of votes they receive. The portfolio will be public for anyone to see at the following link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AivVdWOTQE2JdGQzYkFSQUg2eUR3UVRTcThFYWpBelE#gid=21 I will start a new pole which will stay open for 10 days with the 60 most discussed companies at the beginning of each quarter and re-balance accordingly. If anyone has a better idea for a publicly shared portfolio that looks better or has more capabilities than the google spreadsheet that would be great. Let's see where this goes... -Regards, Ross

Jeffery Uben of Value Act. Not really a small fund, but a great manager flying under the radar.

Gio, Of course he expects them to reverse over time. He has made the macro bet that the developed world is in for a big round of deflation! In a deflationary environment, bonds and the equity hedge are going to do very well. The only catch is, we have yet to see the kind of deflation he is predicting. The Fed and ECB are printing money to keep that from happening. I think Watsa would be absolutely correct on his macro call if we were in a truly free market, but that is not the reality. Prem's macro call fights the Fed's monetary policy and has thus far, cost Fairfax a lot of money. We are likely all arguing over peanuts right now, because in 10 years Fairfax will likely be much higher than it is today. I think the crux of the argument is: many here on the board will hold a company with good management until they see management making mistakes. You are willing to hold through the mistakes because you believe management will ultimately guide the company to greener pastures in the future. I understand this line of thinking. If I had so much Fairfax it was difficult to buy and sell all my shares, I would feel the same way, but as a small investor I am nimble enough to get of the train when I see the deck stacked against me. I see over valued bonds, an equity hedge betting on deflation that fights the Fed, and underwriting results that have not been spectacular historically and figure I can find a better investment.

Historically Fairfax has been an average underwriter and average underwriters don't make money. I'm impressed by the 94.2 CR but I view it as a one off event as they have not proven they can maintain that kind of underwriting. You are buying Fairfax for their investment acumen; however, they have fully hedged their portfolio over the last two years and missed out on a once in a lifetime opportunity to pick up some fantastic bargains. Where would Fairfax be if instead of losing 2B on equity hedges, would have used that money to buy bargains over the last two years? The opportunity cost of the money lost is closer to 2.5B-3.5B. $496B in Bond losses is not a paper loss. The gains and book value were overstated to begin with. If you have a 5% note with a $100 par value that was trading at $130 six months ago and falls to $115, that is not a paper loss. What you have in Fairfax is a fantastic manager in a mediocre business (insurance). The management is sitting on a collection of assets that are trading at their highest premium in history (bonds). They are great investors and are managing to grow their equity portfolio slowly, but they made an absolutely terrible investment 2 years ago that has cost the company $2B (the hedge). If you were pitched an idea, say of a company that makes widgets and breaks even on them. Owns a bunch of gold that they rent out for 4% a year. And has had a darn good track record of making acquisitions, except their largest acquisition (50% of their portfolio) had destroyed the value of their other holdings for the last two years. When asked, they say don't worry, the portfolio will not lose any value but our traditional 15% returns are going to be 5% until we sell. Would you buy?

Buy everything you want to own in .5% or 1% increments. Every time the company moves 10% down, double your position. Keep your mutual funds for now, since you are likely to only have 5-15% of your account in owner operators. Your portfolio would look something like this: 10% - Owner Operators 30% - Cash 60% - Mutual Funds When you have cash you will continue to hunt and using a formula means you will lower your cost average over the next couple years or capture upside in the companies you pick.

I've bought a bit of Bidvest in the $44-$46 range in the last few days...

Cash- 30% Bidvest - 12% Altius- 10% Lancashire- 10% BAC Call Spreads- 6% Fairfax- 5% LKQ- 5% AIG-WT- 4% Fiat- 4% Petsmart- 4% Intel- 3% Devon- 2.5% NOV- 2.5% Air Lease- 1.5% Express Scripts- 1% GPT- 1% I've raised cash selling Bidvest from a 30% position down to 12%. I've sold about 2/3's of Intel. I've been buying Altius and Lancashire recently.

PM me if you need a link to the library edition of Morningstar premium.

I use IB and love their service. I don't pay for the $10 data feed though. I have a second Scottrade account that I use for their free mutual funds (i.e. Yacktman and Oakmark). I use the quotes from Scottrade before placing a limit order at IB. This gives me quotes that are accurate to the minute. I figure up until 20 years ago most investors used the newspaper for quotes and did just fine and I'll probably be fine without up to the .1 second quotes. Three years on, so far so good. IB Forex changes are $2 or $2.5, lots of US stock are $1 for 200 shares. European trades are .1% of cost basis with a minimum of 4-6 Euros depending on the country. London is a 600 pence minimum. Their foreign offerings are great, but my favorite thing about them is their execution. I can get orders filled at any time of the day and have had orders filled that I truly did not think would go through. For instance, at Scottrade, you very rarely will get an order filled at the low. For options you better put in the ask. At IB this is not a problem.

Value Act Holdings - I asked the developer at Dataroma to add them and they were added to the website not too long ago.

Supply and demand. Money moving out of other assets is finding a home where the best return can be had, Equities. Only the relatively small universe index listed equities has the liquidity to absorb this money, and the indexes continue to march higher. You have few choices: get small and find companies ignored by the index and ETFs that have a predictable revenue stream going forward; enjoy the rise and realize that it will one day come to an end and unrealized gains will be lost. If you selected your companies carefully and are value investing, not trading on value stock volatility, the company will be much more valuable in 5 years and next time prices rise the gain will be even sweeter; get in and out: use models, post of message boards, try to catch the gains with a stop-loss, and lose some sleep. If you are sitting on a pile of cash, realize you are better off than 99% of the world, smile, and swing when a deal comes along!

I had a standing limit buy order for AL at $26.50 that got triggered today thanks to the hick-up. In the big scheme of things it doesn't much matter, but it really reveals how precarious our financial market is. 1:07 to 1:11 EST shows the volatility set off by a tweet!

Wow. How tuned to twitter are the high frequency traders? http://www.cnbc.com/id/100664423?__source=yahoo|headline|quote|text|&par=yahoo

Look at the S&P Chart. What happened I wonder? http://finance.yahoo.com/q;_ylt=Av9pap2WOnv_FaXiCSKGhTGiuYdG;_ylu=X3oDMTIyMmtqc2VmBG1pdANGaW5hbmNlIEZQIE1hcmtldCBTdW1tYXJ5IDMEcG9zAzIEc2VjA01lZGlhUXVvdGVzTWFya2V0U3VtbWFyeQ--;_ylg=X3oDMTFkcW51ZGliBGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDBHBzdGNhdANob21lBHB0A3BtaA--;_ylv=3?s=^gspc

A technique for retail. Go by the store at 7pm and count the number of cars in the parking lot. Note the brands of the parked and compare it to other parking lots. I used this method to determine that Petsmart and Wholefoods and Freshmarket have the same clientele. It is a pretty interesting scuttlebutt technique to compare retail and gives a pretty good estimation of a business's core demographic.

Preview:

I completed a more complete set of graphs to be used with the SMF add on. There are now 10 years of annual data, or five years of quarterly data for the following metrics: -EPS -P/E -EPS growth box plot -Revenue -Revenue growth box plot -Net Income -Net Income growth Box plot -Profit margin -Book Value per Share -BVpS growth Box plot -Tangible BVpS -Tangible BVpS growth Box plot -Cash Flow -Free Cash Flow -Cash Flow growth box plot -P/CF -P/FCF -Diluted Share Count -Basic Share Count -Employee Stock Options + Convertible Count -Share count growth box plot -Various Management Effectiveness ratios (ROA, ROI, ROE) -Various Liquidity Ratios -Various Solvency Ratios The new file is attached. It needs to be used with the SMF add in from the first post in this thread. CE_Graph_Pack-v0.2_-_Copy.xlsx

I've been doing some more work on the graphing tab in the spread sheet. I've started to add box plots to compare growth metrics for the input ticker. So far I have: 1. EPS & P/E Ratio 2. Revenue 3. Net Income 4. BVPS & P/BV 5. TBVPS & P/TBV I am planning on adding Operating CF, Free CF, and Basic/Diluted Shares Outstanding graphs as well. I need some ideas to come up with other good metrics. We can add just about anything, even calculated metrics from the balance sheet. Does anyone have any ideas or metrics they would like to see? Here is what the new format looks like so far. Let me know if you have any formatting recommendations to make it easier to read, or if something doesn't make sense. Graphs for 3M:

I belive Devon Energy to be the highest quality gas rich energy company...

All tabs in the Excel sheet now work! I edited the original post to include the new working spreadsheet. Download it there. This was tested as working on a new computer with Excel 2007.

Progress! The SMF element number for company name (13862) is not working correctly. I switched the company name to the entered symbol and it started working. So far I have the Graphs, Scan List sheets, Financials and Summary and Rating tabs working correctly.The updated spreadsheet has been re-uploaded on the original post. As far as getting the sheet to work, the SMF addin needs to be re-referenced if you getting are errors with the new spreadsheet. To do this: Click ‘Options…’ Select ‘Enable this content’ and click ‘OK’ Click ‘OK’ Click ‘Edit Links…’ Highlight the Source with an error and click ‘Change Source…’ Navigate to the RCH_Stock_Market_Functions.xla and double click. This will fix the broken source (if it changed from the assumed source in the spreadsheet). Let me know if it's working. Edited: to reflect that the spreadsheet is now working.