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).

Sometimes if you quickly hit ctr+a and then ctr+c you can get it copied before it disappears and then paste it into word.

"‘You know, in the future, you’re going to be able to type on your phone, search engine this, do this, boom, boom, boom, you should invest.' I invested, and then a couple years later, I got a really big return,” - Shaq

I think I've more or less done this. It's a good education in how far stock prices deviate from what you think would be a good estimate. Or maybe I'm just bad at this. For me the first part of the formula would be to put it into a basic category. Is it a turnaround, a high ROIC moat stock, an asset play, etc. Without making that decision you really have no idea. And even within those categories there are more attributes to consider. I imagine the code for something like this would be extremely long and complicated. You'd probably need a big team of programmers to come up with something for all cases and even then there'd probably be a lot of holes in it. For me the idea of one guy knowing the price of everything is a little like the idea that the government can decide the amounts of things to produce, and the prices to sell them at. The economy is too big and too complex, so it works better when you have one guy or management team trying to make those decisions for a small part of one market, and even then it is very hard even for smart and dedicated people. Same thing with stocks I think - the market is more efficient with many different specialists working in their area, and the corollary is that you will probably be better off becoming a specialist yourself.

I do remember one exchange where another poster couldn't believe Eric hadn't looked at the call report (for bank of america I believe). I think at one point Eric even said he didn't even know what a call report was. P.S. Just googled to find the exchange about the call report, it was between you and planmaestro in the bank of america warrants thread around nov 12 2012. Also, I was just reading the "Ask Eric" thread and there's a lot of you telling people that you don't really know much. There's also some stuff about you spending time with your kids.

When you say rock pit, is that the same as a quarry? I know of someone who likely made a killing on a quarry - after it was depleted. He bought it and turned it into a little water park. He charges like 10 bucks to get in or something like that and makes money renting out gazebos and selling concessions. I went there one day a couple summers ago and there were hundreds of people there. Other businesses that are good? Like Buffett says, go a-z and you'll probably start noticing some weird little companies making ridiculous returns on stuff you'd never expect. There's a lot of companies that trade otc that fit this bill. I suspect that the situation with a lot of them is that it's a pretty small niche and no one bothers competing with them, I say this because a lot of them have tiny PPE accounts that they never seem to spend any money on. Trouble is most of them don't pay dividends. They either pay themselves too much in salary, or they stockpile the cash, probably waiting for the stock price to bottom out so they can buy out the minority shareholders on the cheap. Munger mentioned a guy who just bought up service businesses. I think he meant professional services like accounting offices and so on. There's a guy on here who buys up cleaning businesses who said he figured he could make 20% on them. I think a lot of times the returns are greater in smaller businesses. Doesn't have to be anything fancy. I knew a guy whose father in law made a killing recycling junk from offshore oil rigs. I can't remember if it was steel or rubber or what it was. I don't even think he processed it, he just turned around and re-sold it. I imagine business is tougher now, but it's not like he borrowed a ton of money to build a factory. If worse comes to worse he'll probably just go do something else. Lots of people were making a killing on little businesses like that down in the gulf of mexico area when oil was high. I think many times there is money to be made as a service business doing work a bigger business doesn't want to bother with. Find something that offers great returns that is too small for them to bother with and build a relationship with them. I worked for a guy who did maintenance work on the grounds of a refinery. He had vacuum trucks for spills, mowed the grass, and so on. He was one of the richest guys in the town and got there with a really basic business.

ADM? As far as I know he's pretty much tapped out on utilities and railroads. Like someone else said he can't buy a bank which is what I'd imagine he'd like to do. ADM earns decent returns and I would imagine they can spend decent amounts there. Berkshire is so big now it's getting to where there's not much to do. I think when Buffett retires I'd probably rather they just dividend out the money than try to make any more big acquisitions unless they have an opportunity for something really special.

So it sounds like you think it has a future as a currency and not just as a replacement for gold, snarky puppy? This was what they said in the original paper. Where would you guys see the transaction costs leveling out to? Is this going to be something where I can buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin at a sensible price?

I love reading about the early days of Buffett. Here are some links, not sure if there is any new info here but it may interest some of you: https://www.gurufocus.com/news/169950/how-warren-buffett-made-his-first-100000 http://valuevista.blogspot.com/2007/06/warren-buffett-50-returns.html https://blogs.rhsmith.umd.edu/davidkass/uncategorized/warren-buffetts-meeting-with-university-of-maryland-mbams-students-november-15-2013/ http://boards.fool.com/buffettjayhawk-qa-22736469.aspx?sort=whole

If you even have to ask about the safety of a 3% investment...

I looked into this in the past but never ended up doing it. Etrade offered it at that time but that was a few years ago.