matjone

I love this kind of music. I grew up listening to Dylan as well as a lot of other folk singers with my Dad. Leonard Cohen is a great songwriter, though I tend to like other artists' renditions of his songs better than his. Townes Van Zandt is another good one.

He used to try to do a little policing from time to time and keep it respectable, but I think he realized we're hopeless. There are a few guys I have been wondering about. For example, whatever happened to Bronco? He was funny but he never posts anymore.

Earlier on he's discussing how an investor in private businesses would insist on all his criteria being met, but people in public markets tend to be less selective. I can see what you mean though and he did specifically mention Geico, so that was probably a bad example for me to use.

Kraven you are on fire today. Picture him pitching that process to investors. I imagine that guy had to come up with a better story than that to attract capital. I was going to post this earlier but I thought it was too far off topic, but it looks like we are well off the original topic anyway. I liked the interview with Gottfried but the thing that I noticed was him saying that everything has to line up for his investments. The thing I've realized is that many times you have a great investment where 9 out 10 factors don't line up, but there is one big factor that overshadows the negatives. For example, geico in the early 70's, early berkshire before people understood the plan, or for a lesser known example take Mexican Restaurants. In each case you had kind of a murky situation and you could sit there and name all kinds of negatives,but you could also pretty much sum up why you should buy it anyway in one sentence.

For those of you who are buying japanese stocks, how are you hedging if you are doing so?

I remember when Bass was talking about this a few years ago and it worried me, but then someone else pointed out that it was an extremely small position for him, and that perhaps it was more valuable to him as a hype generator to grow AUM than anything else. Also, around the same time I remember someone posting a video of Buffett with the japan company handbook on his desk, which made me wonder if he was buying Japanese stocks in his personal portfolio. I don't know anything about economics but the numbers certainly sound scary enough to my uneducated mind. I have no interest in macro bets. The question I would like to ask people who are interested in this trade is if they have looked at japanese stocks and if so whether they think those valuations are justified. I think even the bears would agree japanese equities are still a good bet at some price, so the question is how big of a discount is big enough? If you can put together a portfolio that is 5x earnings and 1/2 book is it enough to compensate? Maybe you'd only buy at 10% of book and 1x earnings?

This has a lot of appeal to me, because if you can find some way that takes less work it frees up time for other things, and I am not one of those guys who is really thrilled by the game of investing. If you can find something that beats the market by a couple points that will probably be enough. Graham had a lot of lazy strategies that you could pick from. Net nets, the defensive investor checklist, low pe low leverage formula, buying CEFs at discounts, and many more. Charlie Munger had the best lazy strategy ever: go to a dinner party and meet the best investor of your generation before he gets big and give him your money.

I actually liked the Snowball probably the best out of all the Buffett books I've seen. Honestly a lot of Buffett books are pretty hard for me to get through. What I'd like to see is a Buffett book that is focused more on investing and less on biography. I'd especially like to see more in depth discussion of the investments made in his early days while working under graham, his partnership investments, and the investments he's made over the years in his personal portfolio. There hasn't really been much discussion about a lot of this. Most of the books just do a few pages on the partnership days in which they'll discuss some of his control investments and the AXP investment and maybe a couple other things. For the generally undervalued securities category the only description we get is something like, "Buffett bought cheap stocks along Graham lines". What was actually going on in his portfolio? What did he buy, what did he almost buy and pass on, what were his biggest winners and losers, why did some work out and others not, etc? There must have been something special going on beyond basic Graham investing that led to such spectacular performance but for whatever reason it's never been discussed much. Schroeder has actually mentioned doing another book about him that will be written with an audience of investors in mind. Hopefully she can get it done.

I'd have to say CASA was the craziest I've seen. I don't think Awilco or Deswell were at that level of cheapness. I think of them as just regular cheap stocks, maybe a double or triple. Of course they may turn out to be 10 baggers and make me look dumb but that is nothing new.

If a younger Buffett or Klarman started a CEF with 10 mil in capital I'd happily pay 25% above NAV.

what do you guys actually think about this deal? Not that it matters much what me and my handful of shares have to say about it, but to me it looks like FCBN shareholders are getting shortchanged. 4 shares of fcnca with a bv/shr of 223 for 1 share of fcbn with a bv/shr of 1149. I like the idea of a bigger and hopefully more efficient bank but it seems the terms could be better. forgot to include the $50 payment. Still seems like a bad deal.

I usually know it within a few percent unless there's been a lot of volatility. It's good to have a decent idea of it so you know how to size positions if nothing else, but I have no interest in calculating it too often. If it helps other folks stay motivated then I suppose it's good for them. I've made it a point to compute the look through earnings and net assets of my holdings once a year. I got the idea after reading the letter Buffett wrote to Katherine Graham about their pension plan. I think it helps with my mindset to spend more time on this and less on market values. As long as I consistently grow my equity and earnings the net worth should eventually follow. I also keep a spreadsheet of my fixed expenses, and calculate the deficit between that and my look through earnings, and try to come up with ways to reduce it from both ends

http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/small-investment-funds/

I asked a similar question once and got some responses. If you believe that returns go down as AUM go up, it wouldn't make sense to answer this question.

I am for legalization. If we are going to continue with prohibition we should at least be honest with ourselves and admit that the black market and the violence associated with it are here to say. I think we are in a state of denial about this. It is as if people believe that if we just make some tweak to our strategy we can finally win this war. I lean libertarian so I am also for legalization on moral grounds. The way I see it it is not my business what my neighbor puts into his body as long as he leaves me alone. I wish there was a way to tailor my view of this board so that these types of discussions didn't show up. I get sucked into these threads and waste time that could be spent on something that might actually make me money. Maybe we should start a new category for discussions on religion, morality, social causes, and the stock buyback vs. dividend debate :)

Thanks for directing me to morningstar. I didn't even know they had Japanese stocks on there. I am inept when it comes to technology, so this may be a stupid question. But how can you translate the reports in chrome? When I tried finding annuals on TSE they only came up as PDFs.

Some of these companies are running overly conservative balance sheets, which is affecting their profitability. 9760 is a good example of what I was talking about earlier where the nature of the assets listed as long term investments is important. If they are marketable securities then it is obviously undervalued even if there isn't a business there at all, and the business wouldn't look nearly as bad if you excluded those securities and the excess cash when measuring profitability. What we need is someone who can read Japanese. We are really shooting in the dark on this hunt.

I guess I have generally preferred lower p/b companies, especially net nets, as long as they are at least holding steady. I am not sure that is the smartest strategy though, and I may branch out and buy some low pe stuff. Actually I already did that with Fujimak. And honestly I didn't look at quality of earnings while picking these. I was simply buying a basket of net nets. I've usually avoided net nets in the retailing sector because the ones I've seen were usually struggling businesses with a lot of their current assets in inventory of uncertain value. Writser, where are you seeing a decade worth of financials for Japanese stocks?

Why would you choose 1933 as the starting point for measuring return for the era before shareholder value became all-important? Maybe it would be better to look at something managers have more control over, like return on equity? If managers are using gimmicks to inflate the price at the expense of long term value, maybe the answer is smarter investors? "Business should be a force for good, not for the enrichment of a few small individuals." So we are saying that business hasn't been a source of good for society?

Thanks for your ideas guys. These are the ones I've bought so far: +7501.T +7928.T +9760.T +2055.T +2737.T +3599.T +3766.T +5965.T +6466.T +6930.T +7314.T +7521.T +7558.T +7559.T +7885.T +8141.T +8150.T +9476.T +9932.T When I first started looking over there I was looking strictly for net nets. I was using FT and reuters for data and I was lumping the long term investments and long term notes receivable items in when calculating NCAV. Now I've realized that this was not correct. The long term investment line can mean different things - sometimes it is marketable securities, and sometimes it is investments in associates. So I have been discounting them when calculating NCAV. Oh, one more thing - ft and reuters seem to be including treasury shares in the shares out when they calculate their market caps. So I have been calculating it myself with the shares out on the balance sheet.

Has anyone seen one for a long time frame? The only one I've seen just covered the 90's and part of the 00's. By the way, does anyone follow this strategy?

I picked this one up finally after seeing it mentioned on here. I was thinking I wouldn't like and it would be silly, an opinion I formed solely from the title and a few excerpts I had seen online about some guy asking for advice about how to obtain golden shekels. I was wrong - this is a great read and now I feel the urge to read it again and commit certain passages to memory. Some of the events in it were so similar to my own episodes of financial foolishness it was uncomfortable to read. When you get that feeling you know it is something you need to hear. So, to Gio and others, thanks for the recommendation.

I think some businesses have a more ethical culture than others. The ones that require a contract or a monthly payment seem to be more prone to shenanigans. I've had bad experiences with cell phone carriers and I know a lot of people who have had bad experiences with charter communications here in st. louis. I quit using ebay several years ago after a bad experience with the dispute resolution process with paypal. I came away with the impression that ebay in effect had a no return policy, even if the seller sent the wrong item. That's not going to work for me for an internet transaction. I can see maybe buying some small dollar items but for any major purchase I'd be scared to use them. My sister had a seller's account and she seemed to have the same impression as you, DTE. Apparently it sucks from the seller's perspective too. I will just stick to amazon.

I watched all these a few months back. The two that I really liked were Michael Richards and Ricky Gervais. Gervais' joke about Hitler's honeymoon was hilarious.

Haven't read the book. I used to run but quit after our family doctor told my mom that it is just a matter of time before a jogger loses all the cartilage in his knee, an opinion he had formed based on his own experience and conversations he'd had with a specialist. So I switched to walking. I do walk barefoot when the weather is nice. I get a lot of quizzical looks and comments but it makes my back feel better. If I could figure out a way to run without damaging my knees I'd probably go back. When I run I feel much better, except for my knees. I saw something once, I think it was in the NYT, about barefoot running. The gist of it was, "our ancestors ran and our bodies haven't changed; therefore we can run all our lives." My question was whether our ancestors lived long enough to have knee problems, or whether when they did develop knee problems they stayed back at the camp and let the young 'uns do the running.