Kraven

For those Lenny Dykstra and/or boxing fans out there, this is the event of the century. Jose Canseco vs. Lenny Dykstra in the ring. Dykstra has vowed to destroy Canseco for "spreading lies". The rest of the fight card isn't too shabby either: Joey Buttafuoco, Tareq Salahi (the infamous White House dinner crasher), Jeremy Jackson from Baywatch, Kato Kaelin, Coolio, Amy Fisher (just because Joey Buttafuoco might be lonely) and the Octomom. This one has it all for the low price of $19.95. Now that's a deal a value investor can get behind. http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/blog/big_league_stew/post/This-is-real-Canseco-to-fight-Dykstra-on-celebr?urn=mlb-wp26322

Was joking.

this exercise has already been done by Fairholme. I don't believe they will be willing to share their findings, however. I can just see Bruce sitting there in his home office with the Pekingese sitting on the desk furiously googling each address and valuing it based on the satellite view and some reviews on Yelp. Maybe if someone asks nicely he will just send over the file. People are nice like that, they like to share hundreds or thousands of hours of work.

Valuing each of 4,000 stores individually is a fool's errand. You will literally be guessing 4,000 times. A professional commercial real estate appraiser would need to spend time at each location and work through piles of paper just to come up with a number that is a guess. And you will do it with Google, etc.? I respect the initiative, but think that this is when Buffett's quote is in order: "I'd rather be approximately right than precisely wrong". Good luck.

I'm no fan of Corzine, but had a brief encounter with him once that always left me impressed. It was at the Delta Shuttle at LaGuardia in NYC. For anyone who has ever been there during peak rush hour, they know how crazy it gets there. This was when he was a senator and running for governor. It was one of those crazy days and I saw him sitting alone at the little food counter they have there. He was eating a sandwich, drinking a beer and reading the newspaper. He was all alone, no entourage. In all my times being on the shuttle, I have seen many people of lesser fame than him with entourages. Most of them also get special treatment and get to board and deplane first (for example, I saw Charles Rangel several times and he always had 3-4 people with him and there would be a commotion as he moved to the front of the line). But when the call came to board, he simply got in line with everyone else. They then moved the huge line so it was pointing in another direction. That caused mass hysteria as everyone was pushing for a better position. I ended up standing next to him in line and we kind of looked at each other and shrugged about all the chaos. I said something about the line and the chaos and he smiled and just said something to the effect that everyone should slow down a little as they will all get seats. I was impressed at his laid back attitude and the fact that he wasn't looking for special treatment. Of course this has nothing to do with this situation, but just something I always remembered about him.

Nothing new about that. It's been unbearable since the mid 90s. Everything about it make me cringe. The whole "it's 4 pm, do you know where your money is?" is like fingernails on a chalk board.

Lol. I think you are probably overstating how many girls are on this board. I bet there may be a whopping low to mid single digit amount of girls here and I am probably not being conservative enough in my estimate.

I don't understand the outrage over the charge. Switch banks if you don't like it. For some reason I don't hear people get pissy about being charged for floormats when they buy a Chevy.

I completely agree. The point isn't that Jobs win the Nice Guy of the Year Award, it's simply that he pushed technology into areas where it hadn't gone before. These types of arguments are so bass ackwards. It's like when people discuss great baseball players and Ty Cobb comes up. But he was a racist they say. He isn't being discussed for his humanitarian endeavors, but the fact that he was a great baseball player. When people want to discuss the top assholes of all time, then we can discuss whether Jobs and Cobb belong there. In the meantime, their personal views don't detract from the subject at hand.

I'm a big Burry fan, but always thought Greenblatt was painted too much as the villain in trying to get money out. Don't forget too that he backed Burry when no one else was there at the beginning. But remember that he backed him as a value equity fund. Performance was tremendous, but then all of a sudden Burry is out there investing large sums in these newfangled CDS. I am not sure it would have been unreasonable for Greenblatt to say hey, Mike, we love you as a deep value guy in stocks, but I don't know about this derivatives thing. Of course it turned out spectacularly well, but I don't know that his 5 years or so of performance necessarily entitled him to a blank check without parameters. He was managing other people's money. Obviously the documentation allowed him to do so, but clearly the intent wasn't that he would be doing anything other than securities.

The problem is that there is so much crap out there that if someone makes a credible argument we might miss it. Agreed. But unfortunately this kind of thing rings the bells for those looking for any kind of "support" for their arguments (in fact I think it led to a brief sell off this morning). I do find it amusing that when someone writes a carefully researched short piece on a Chinese RTO, they are roundly criticized. Yet, when a short piece is done on the financials, forget just BAC, it is considered a worthy addition to the debate, even though it is long on opinion and absent as to fact. As Arsenio Hall used to say back in the day, this falls into the "Things that make you go hmmm" category.

That is the quality of VIC contributors? Maybe it was not so bad to be rejected if that is your average contributor. First point: Sustainable competitive disadvantages and Potential Run. Potential Run?what is he talking about, has he not seen the liquidity that BAC has? Has he not seen the last Qs deposit trends? It actually has TOO MUCH deposits and its problems is what to do with them. Some banks have actually started to charge for deposits ... they do not WANT them. And no competitive advantages? Has he not seen BAC's cost of deposits? Well I could not pass beyond this point especially where a skim of the rest did not show much in terms of facts. The way that he used a hand wave to dismiss the use of Countrywide's Ch11 as a negotiation tool and using as a matter of fact the litigant's claims ... Well, another wasted 5 minutes in terms of looking for a credible bear case. I couldn't agree more. I didn't waste 5 min thank god, but did waste about 2 1/2 min skimming it quickly. This was more like a bad Seeking Alpha article than anything else. There are so many problems with it I don't know where to start.

Watch the movie Fast Food Nation.

This thread has really made me think. It makes some very good points and has really changed some of my ideas about investing. Just as an example, I recently found a couple stocks that I am positive are 8 or 9 baggers, but I've throw them back. They're guppies! I only focus on stocks that are AT LEAST 10 baggers now. If my money won't increase 10x, I don't want to hear about it. I want to be a super investor too, after all. I just cleaned out my office and threw away anything dealing with Ben Graham (the real one, not the board guru), Schloss, Cundill, Brandes and Donald Smith. They are worthless. I mean, come on, they find things that have perhaps 50-100% potential upside. Guys, get out of the sandbox, we only deal with 10 baggers.

My wife does the shopping and insists on as much organic as possible. I'm in the Washington DC area. You are definitely getting a lot for your money. Unfortunately (for me) much of ours comes from Whole Foods as she says that the regular stores don't have as wide a selection of organic produce and other foods. Personally I find much of the organic foods lacking in, shall we say, tasting good, but I'm told that I need to be healthy and that I'm lucky someone is looking out for me and making sure I eat good.

This along with Moore's post sums it up well. People are at different stages in their life with different financial resources and needs. I remember being 25 and getting my first bonus. It was a whopping $2500 which after taxes was about $1600 or so. I was walking on air. My wife and I were ecstatic and put that money to very good use and had some fun too. But you get older and needs change.

I agree to each his own, but those that are spending these ridiculously low amounts on food obviously don't have children or anyone in the house that like there to be edible things around. My kids like avocados and those are at least $2 or more each. That would blow the $2 a day budget without anything else being consumed or anyone else in the house eating. We don't eat extravagantly by any means, but just to eat out at a Friday's or something is $40-50 with the kids.

There would seem to be a difference between dining with your folks and taking home some leftovers, however often that might be, and a strategy of saving money on food by doing so. Food shouldn't go to waste of course. Maybe if someone is doing this they can bring their laundry over too. While mooching on the food maybe Mom can iron the socks and underwear and pack a sack lunch for the next day.

I eat at my mom and dad's and take home leftovers a couple times a week. ;) Mooching! ;) I figured food either came from parents or the taxpayers. Nothing wrong with that though (the parents anyway). If you are out of your 20s and getting food from your parents, perhaps that's not such a good thing any more. I assume that isn't the case though.

I don't know. I tend to phase out with talk about 10 baggers. Carry on.

All one has to do is look at the great super investor Warren E. Buffett to see he has held The Washington Post for a 10 bagger and Berkshire Hathaway it self, he will hold forever - 10 baggers. All Value Investors are taught at Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing -Columbia Business School and The Ben Graham Centre for Value Investing at Richard Ivey School of Business, both teach all of this to their students. Below is what is taught at these value investing schools. (3) Principles of Value Investing First, think of stocks in the same way that a business person would think of a business. Second, do not follow but instead try to take advantage of the manic depressive Mr. Market. Third, always look for a margin of safety. http://www.bengrahaminvesting.ca/ http://www7.gsb.columbia.edu/valueinvesting/ I don't understand a thing you are saying. All value investors go to Columbia or the Richard Ivey School of Business? Buffett's Washington Post and Berkshire investments define value investing? All very intriguing.

I know about GEICO. I am not sure though that one holding (albeit his best one) changes a lifetime of different investment strategy.

Hmm, really? Most "super investors" hold their positions until they have a 10 bagger? Where is your authority on this point? Also, what is your authority that "all" value investors seek to own a business with growing operational income, cash flows, etc. and have a competitive advantage? This is all very interesting and apparently your namesake isn't a super investor under any of this criteria.

Stanley you are my new role model. BeerBaron hahaha. thanks, man! 8) Wow! $6-9k a year?! That's impressive. Are you currently incarcerated? That's the only way I could see expenses being that low.

It works in theory, but probably not in practice. Take your JNJ example. Someone buys the call from you for $2880 (using your numbers). They now have the right to call the 100 shares from you at $3500, for a total outlay not including commissions of $6380. This is $15 less than your total outlay. The dividends are $0.57/quarter. So assuming the price stayed constant they could call it from you today for a $15 profit + the $57 in dividend payments upcoming for a total gain of $72. So assuming commissions on the whole thing are less than $72 it would make sense to call the stock from you. If the price was to move up in the interim all the more reason to do so. You are only protected really if the price stays roughly constant and it's not worth the cost and effort to do it, or the price goes down. The perfect situation for this type of strategy would be to buy them on a huge sell off and wait for the market to move up and then sell the calls and at least build yourself a little cushion. This is one of those things that tend to fall into the "free lunch" category. They sound great, but the chances of being able to capture the dividend for 2 years with virtually no real chance of any loss is somewhat slim.