Ross812

Fortress reminds me too much of another company I invested in, Imperial Sugar. I bought it for $8 after they received $14 in cash a share from an insurance settlement after a plant explosion. They ended up paying roughly $3/share in damages. They had $11/share in cash plus a second productive sugar mill, all of their corporate headquarters in Sugar Land (suburb of Houston) Texas, and 50% ownership in a natural sweeteners company growing at 30% (heard of steviacane/truia) . I watched them burn all that cash rebuilding the destroyed plant only to discover there was not a profitable market for refined sugar. I watched a 40 cent dollar destroyed by poor management and legacy pension obligations (about $3 a share I had not accounted for, always watch for an underfunded pension!). Louis Dreyfus just bought them for $6.35 a share ($210 million). 210 million for what is now 40 million worth of the Steviacane company now growing at 20%, a new 250 million state of the art sugar refinery, a second fully depreciated refinery on the books for 90 million, a 25 million dollar JV with Cargril, and 15 million of corporate HQ (397 million total). Shareholders were happy for the offer when IPSU hit $3 a share. You can do everything right, and get screwed by poor management. You may think you are holding a 50 cent dollar only to discover a private bid is only going to be for 50 cents on the dollar. I would only touch another one of these situations if you showed me a 25 cent dollar, and I would really have to think about it.

I've owned some PRIS.B for two years. It's not exclusive to commodities... 6% position now worth ~1%

Intel's strength is in a four year process lead over the competition. Their moat is just as strong as Microsoft's on the enterprise segment because full windows runs only on x86. Now we are seeing declining pc sales because of mobile. The casual user no longer needs a pc. The server market is still growing for them. Windows 8 is Intel's first real foray into tablets and the jury is out on how that will go. I addition to they are two years from having their own flagship cpu's in mobile phones if their current ticktock program progresses at the same rate it has the past seven years.

I really want Brown Foreman to come down to a reasonable P/E...

Agreed. I can't get my girlfriend to update her SGS2 to ICS because she likes it the way it is. I think most people like a phone that will just work. If you really want the latest and greatest, root your phone and install any number of custom roms. I think most of the complaining about fragmentation is coming from bloggers and sudo developers who use/make custom roms and can't enable new flavors of android without phone drivers spoon fed to them by the phone manufacturers. The technically inclined may cry the loudest, but I have never seen a facebook status from someone complaining their phone is not getting the latest google update.

3.15% expense ratio!

Individuals who used their homes as ATM machines got us into this recession in the first place.

I would have gladly paid much more than $10 for a membership. Thank you for all your hard work Parsad and I'm sorry spam has become such an inconvenience. This board has been invaluable to me and has helped me learn a lot about wealth management. I am looking forward to meeting many of the board members in person at a future Fairfax shareholders meeting pre-dinner.

I really like IB, though I don't pay for any of their services aside from commissions. I pay $10/month or commissions which ever is higher; I make 2-3 trades a month. Commissions are usually a $1 for common stock a 70 cents for an options contract. Quotes are something like $10 a month and I honestly don't need them. Investors were around and made money a long time before level II quotes updated every tenth of a second where available at all times.

Bidvest - 23% CHKDG.pk - 11% BAC (common, warrant, options) - 18% INTC - 5% JEF - 3% LUK - 5% ALS.TO - 8% POW.TO - 4% PBG.TO - 3% MCD - 2% UPS - 2% RLI - 2% Cash committed to Secured Puts - 7% (no margin) Cash - 8% I'm building INTC right now selling cash secured puts. I will be ~10% in Intel by Monday.

Groupon doesn't have a moat but what did people think of Priceline's moat in 2001 or even Amazon's moat? At what price does Groupon become a "value" or can it never have any value if it doesn't have a moat? Wouldn't that eliminate all newer Internet stocks that may build a moat when value investors aren't looking? Without a moat it is impossible to predict the future cash flow the company will produce. Will Groupon build a moat and become the next Priceline? It could, but that is speculation. What is it worth? I have no idea. It has a 3B market cap right now. How much would Google or another competitor have to spend displace Groupon? I'd bet much less than 3B.

The highest margin of safety I've found in the past year was on bac preferred l shares which where selling in the 600s last September. At the time their yield was 11% which meant they could be bought on margin and the dividend played the borrowing costs. Chk recently had a similar situation with chkdg which i still believe is undervalued. There are still undervalued companies out there but you have to have a catalyst to realize a good return.

I tend to agree with that because I learned the hard way. I still remember vividly having a limit order on MA at $224 a long time ago. That day it got down to $225...but not $224. It basically never came back. I still could have bought it all up through the $200's but my anchoring bias to that price, using a limit order, and only buying stocks on the way down kept me from doing so. Im not suggesting to chase prices, but that was obviously a huge mistake and I've tried my best to remember and learn from that. "I'd rather be roughly right than precisely wrong" -Charlie Munger Bac's fundamentals are improving, but the market is not going to reward shareholders until bac shows its earnings power. I agree that bac could run away from me and I may never get my price of 7.5 but I don't see a lot of positive catalysis in the near future that could cause a further run except for further extension of this overvalued market rally. I am still very heavy on bac with warrants a leaps and a big move up will still benefit me very much. The market is hard to time, but it is almost certain their is going to be a pullback given the negative macro environment. Cash is king and in this environment; I like to have enough to take advantage of fat pitches that come along. Bac is a large cap fat pitch, but by no means is it the only fat pitch out there. Chk, olympus, and pbkef have all far out performed bac in my portfolio this year.

I think BAC at $8 is cheap, but I think it will trade down with the market. I think the chances of this rally continuing for another 3 months with the Eurozone Central Bank resuming debt crisis talks this week and the fiscal cliff resolution relying on a lame duck congress is less than 50%. I still own all of my BAC warrants but selling Sept. calls on the common for .50 today made some sense to me with the S&P at a four year high and the previously mentioned negative catalysts.

The market has been rallying since the beginning of June and I have been selling on the way up. I've found myself trimming core positions (Bidvest) and selling completely out of Google, Olympus and Petrobakken. I sold ITM options on BAC common 8's and JEF 14's today. I'm 30% cash right now with and could get up to >45% cash if the options expire ITM. I have a short list of companies to buy at the right price. UPS, RLI, MCD, BAC at $7.50, JEF at $12, GOOG back under $600... The only thing I still think is cheap right now is CHKDG.PK and DHR on a historical P/E basis. I'm waiting for Mr. Market to realize he is still upset about Europe before I get back put too much back in.

I use series I bonds at treasury direct as a savings account. If you move in slowly, you have a steady stream of maturing I bonds that can be rolled over if/when interest rates increase. I've got the majority of my "cash" savings earning .5-1.5% + Inflation (currently 2.2%). The high yield checking seems like a lot of work if you do not currently use a debit card and the 25k cap may not work for some people...

I use this board as my indicator. Whenever the gentleman with the handle munger posts, I know its time to start buying. I can ignore what all the professionals are doing! I haven't seen a munger post in a while...

$70 a month for a 1Gbps connection AND a 1 terabyte Google drive subscription. At $70a month its a no brainer. I pay$45 a ,month for 10 Mbps. Don't forget Google offers a free 5 mbps connection if you pay for the $300 install. I would not be surprised to see Google offer free city wide WiFi of they can figure out how to implement it. Don't forget that lan Ethernet becomes obsolete when you have a GB internet (full saturation) connection. Syncing with Google drive becomes as seamless as saving to the lan.

I read an article on seeking alpha today that suggested Google may be getting into the service of being an ISP. I didn't realize Motorola had so many wifi and wireless network mesh solutions. http://www.motorola.com/Business/US-EN/Business+Product+and+Services/Wireless+Broadband+Networks/ There has been a lot of talk concluding that the motorola aquisitiion was about aquiring patents to defend their android platform, but perhapse the wifi infrarstructure patents were what google was really after. Considering that Google has focussed on providing free internet services to more deeply integrate themselves as the internet's primary search provider, I think it makes sense that they would build out internet infra structure to offer either a free or low cost internet connection to everyone. Cosidering the google fiber project going live in Kansas City: https://fiber.google.com/about/ It seems they are on their way to offering this kind of service. The Motorola wifi infrastructure could allow Google to build out their network more cheaply and tie it into existing Google Fiber nodes. (Does Google Fiber tie into the Level 3 network?) This is just some musing I had after reading the seeking alpha article. I thought it was an interesting thought for those of us trying to figure out why the heck Google bought Motorola. My initial thoughts of hardware and patents don't seem to be playing out. http://seekingalpha.com/article/765121-google-is-not-just-an-ad-company -Ross

Yeah, but they cap your data... Which as a t mobile customer, really irks me... They cap your 4g data after a certain limit (my limit is 2 gb/month) but their 2g is unlimited. I switched from Sprint which has had terrible 3g speeds in my area since they got the iphone. I get faster data on T mobile's 2g than sprints 3g. I've never hit my limit. I stream Pandora often but never watch video...

I'm on T-mobile's value plan. Basically they give you $20/month off your contract if you provide your own phone. In addition there are quite a few companies and organizations you can belong to that give you 15-20% off your monthly bill. Not a bad way to have unlimited data, minutes, and text for $50 a month and a nice phone like the Galaxy S III. The One S and Galaxy Nexus are nice phones as well.

That looks like the one you want beerbaron. I forgot to mention you need to make sure the card is a Visa. Mastercard is not accepted everywhere in Europe.

Visa?

I went to Europe last year. I used a Capital One Venture Rewards card for almost everything. The card has no foreign transaction fee and converts currency as the transaction posts to your card. I use a PNC premier checking account which charges no currency changing fees when using foreign ATMs so I could withdraw money at the daily exchange rate. I already had the PNC account before I planned on going to Europe so it was a nice perk I learned about when I was preparing to go. If I didn't already have the PNC account, I would get the Capital one card and pocket the $100 dollar bonus they give you for signing up, then pay the 2% for 1000 euros before leaving. I only withdrew 500 euros while I was over there and had to try to get rid of my last bit of currency before leaving because plastic is accepted everywhere. I went to Italy, Greece, Croatia, and Turkey.

Windows 7 replaced XP as the new long term enterprise operating system in February of 2011 with the release of SP1. The Metro UI of windows 8 is going to throw a lot of consumers for a loop when they first use their new laptop, but I never viewed Windows 8 as being a relevant enterprise OS. Give Microsoft a little time, say 2016 (2017 with the Service Pack) to produce something relevant for businesses. I think most businesses upgrade hardware on a 3-4 year cycle and every other cycle should be accompanied by an OS upgrade. Windows 8 will be Microsoft's effort to get the bugs in their tablet and phone interfaces ironed out as well as building an online software distribution store (ala the Windows app store). With that said I sold my ditm msft leaps in the $32 range. It is worth more that $32 but Windows 8 is far from a home run imo.