matjone

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Has anyone seen what the hospitalization rate was for working age people in Italy? It seems like if that is low enough it's possible to work out something for the older folks to stay home and allow everyone else back to work for a partial reopening?

First, why would you even take this bet? The only positive outcome for you is if one (or both) of us start a fund and fail. That's it. You get to say "told you so, loser!" If we win (a pretty good likelihood given how uninspiring Tilson's returns have been) you're out of a $1 million. This leads me to two possible conclusions: you either have an insane amount of money where you can spend $1 million for fun and it literally doesn't impact you at all or 2) you don't fully understand risk and payoffs. The anti-Pabrai: Heads I don't win, tails I lose a lot.

It's way worse in severity. The duration is the big question and there are too many unknowns to estimate that with any useful degree of accuracy. My thinking is that this could have been much less severe if our leaders had acted promptly when they were briefed on it but they didn't (except for dumping their stocks on the public LOL). They continue to do little to give me much confidence in them so that is why I am pretty pessimistic about how this plays out over the next several months. Of course the main reason to ask this question is cause we're trying to figure out how to position ourselves. If I put on my long term investor hat, I have to say that if they were closing the market for 10 years I'd probably be mostly allocated to stocks. But if I put on my trader hat, the likelihood of a long recession seems high and stocks usually don't sell at 20x peak earnings during bad recessions.

I think what you say would be true in a country where the middle class actually makes enough to have a rainy day fund but that is not the case here anymore. Everyone is scraping by. What happens if you force millions of families out on the street at the same time? Are you sure it's only the poor who will be learning hard lessons?

I understa Spanish flu also intersected with the end of World War I. I understand that but are we sure it would have crashed the economy otherwise? Also why would the war ending have saved it (sorry if that's a stupid question)?

Why will bouncing back from this be so much more difficult than spanish flu which killed huge numbers of working age people?

Saw this hilarious reddit page while googling DXC https://www.reddit.com/r/DXC/

Your welcome. Morningstar sucks, long live QuickFS! I'd personally find coverage of Japan, and really any important foreign market like Germany, France, Korea, etc., useful.

I own some of those. Since I started investing in Japan I've hardly ever lost money but many times I haven't made much either. The currency moved against me a little but the main problem is that these companies simply aren't run for the shareholders. A lot of times even if the business is decent they'll sit on cash for years on end earning like 4% on equity. Their business culture is very different. I forgot where I read it but someone was describing how they bought out a sake brewer. The guy's family had been doing it for like 500 years or something crazy and then he sold out. Apparently that was a very unorthodox decision and he was going to be seen as a failure for abandoning the family business. Price paid, returns on other prospective investments, etc. didn't figure into it. It kind of reminds me of how people view farm land where i grew up. One thing I think might be smart, if you think there's a decent chance there's some sort of mass awakening of all these zombie companies, is to look for the ones that hold a lot of securities. That way you'd get a double re-rate. But to me it's a big if if this even happens. It would be interesting to hear from people who are over there what the feeling is.

Obviously you can go straight to a primary source like the company website or an exchange or regulator, but I am looking for a service that compiles 10 year (or longer) of financial statements in an easy to read format, like morningstar used to do. A good stock screener would also be nice. I'd also like to share this site for those of you who aren't aware of it (I'm not affiliated with it). It has good coverage for the u.s. and canada but lacks coverage for foreign stocks without adr's or otc listings. https://quickfs.net/

Are you sure this is an optional program? I knew someone who had something similar going on. I can't remember the specifics but according to them they were locked into it as long as they had that job.

Never say never Parsad ;) No offense, not trying for a jab at you.

Yes, correct. Really obscure stuff in the past...at this year's meeting, he did say it would be very specific unique arbitrage opportunities. He said that opportunities are much lower today to do this than say 10-20-30 years ago. Cheers! That’s interesting to me for a number of reasons: 1. In the not too distant past I’ve heard him say it might actually be easier now cause information is easier to access. 2. He seems to have switched his stance a little. Before when people asked him to speak on this subject he’d talk about finding super cheap small companies and going long the stock. Now it seems he thinks arbs are more inefficient. 3. I assume that for him to have an opinion in this he must be looking in that area from time to time. I like the idea that Buffett loves this stuff so much that he’s still taking an occasional peak at these tiny obscure situations, even as an old billionaire philanthropist who has no reason to care. By the way, does anybody me have a transcript or audio/video of this? Thanks in advance.

When they asked him about it years ago he said the return would go down dramatically as AUM went from 1M - 10M. I take that to mean to look at things that are too tiny even for a $10M fund. So look in small stuff, find something way out of line, and bet big, cause you're probably not gonna find them that often. Look at the ethanex bankruptcy Thomas Braziel invested in, Norilsk Nickel arb at kiddynamite's blog, mexican restaurants (CASA) which was a regular long from oddballstocks blog a few years ago (actually just read the whole oddballstocks blog archive).