oddballstocks

Took The Davis Dynasty to the beach with me this past week. Read maybe 5-10 pages at most. Spent the rest of the time digging in the sand or swimming with the little ones. A huge change from years ago when is read at least one of not two books at the beach. That said its a fun change. I'm sure someday when I'm old and gray I'll be back to reading on the beach... I will second The Martian. Couldn't stop reading that book. Was up to 2am reading nightly until I finished.

This is the crux of my style as well. Identify the main fulcrum points, get those right and everything else works out.

Love: Costco, Apple, REI, JetBlue, Amazon, Merrell shoes (their running shoes are incredible)..and of course good craft beer Hate: Kids toys that break quickly with light use, people blasting music in public places, fad diets, health insurance (high cost & terrible product..obtuse billing nightmares)

I feel like the author has little concept of the CUs. They are the banking equivalent of mutual insurance companies and provide a great service by providing pricing competition. The "profits" made are just partial rebates on the costs of owning a bank and services are limited regionally. I hope technology will allow CUs to thrive again (atm deals aren't cheap). Unlikely. Tom Brown is one of the best known and well regarded bank analysts. CU's are attempting to be banks without taxes. CU's can compete because they pay no taxes and have a very lax regulator. Without taxes or a regulatory burden they can undercut banks.

Sounds like these guys are very innovative. I've never heard of hard charging or ruthless private equity guys in the past who are solely focused on making partners money...

Agreed with the premise. Don't think the legislative will exists to do it now. What I keep hearing is that CU's are the dumb money this time around. Maybe after we have a washout and they go begging for capital they'll be hit for taxes, or just forced to convert.

Agree, but would mention that if you step down and look at banks besides the giant one the view is much different. Dodd-Frank isn't strangling regional or smaller banks. There is considerable growth going on beneath the biggest names. I know of a $35m bank (yes terribly tiny) that told me there is no additional regulatory burden beyond what they've had over the past 10-15 years. Had a guy at a $350m bank griping regulation was killing them because customers have to sign a lot of new paperwork. Then he admitted they plunked down $20-30k on some software that automates the signing and it solved the problem. We have a regulatory system in banking that is built to push the evils of large bank problems from the last crisis. Thus large banks will suffer, we see this. Smaller banks aren't being crushed, and they're taking advantage of the large bank misfortune.

Why not call your broker? I am not long PR bonds because after the expected downgrade to junk, the bond did not sell off as I expected, which means it is bullish. I am long BPOP. :) Did you look at OFG? Any reason you picked BPOP over OFG? Have spent some time on both, curious as to your thoughts.

Looking at a $2.5b company today that's incredibly cheap, but I do agree with you. Even in the forgotten corners of the market value isn't as apparent as it used to be. I'm seeing a number of dark companies trading up to book value or above for the first time in eons. Banks are all floating higher as well. I'd say look in France, a number of cheap smaller stocks over there. A number of cheap stocks in Asia as well, although I haven't looked at many of them in detail in a while. I saw a post by someone saying they were astonished at the quality of the cheap stocks on the AIM, some decent valuations there too.

James, Was thinking the same thing about Toronto this morning, not many individual ideas out there. This is an interesting market, everyone is looking at tech as the culprit or source of a bubble. But what's fascinating to me is the different dynamic between now and the late 90s in the tech world. There are a lot of me-too companies for sure, YikYak's etc. But there are also a LOT of profitable companies, and the startups I'm aware of are all focused on generating profits not just revenue or eyeballs. My feeling is this. In the 90s there were a lot of companies selling the dream, and the dream was too early. Now the dream is true, but valuations are high. One last thought on point 1. After 2000 there was a death of CS graduates in US colleges. I was lucky to get a job out of college with a CS degree. No one wanted to be in tech. Over the past decade we've experienced a significant shift in business, where a lot of things have been automated and tech is taking over the guts of places. I know companies I've worked at have had a terrible time trying to hire talent. There is a hole in talent from the last tech bust. It is very hard to find good talent. Maybe there'll be a glut in 3-5 years, but right now supply is still constrained.

Interesting observation considering some emails I've received recently. I've been included on a thread that's debating why NICK's credit quality has dropped and why it's getting worse. I would say they have loosened significantly in the past few years, and that might be cause for concern, or maybe not. I always appreciate the different perspectives, that's what makes a market!

What are you hoping to do with it? I took Level 1 & 2. Failed 2 and decided to spend my time analyzing stocks instead of reading about analyzing stocks. I don't consider it a waste though. I took one econ class in college where I received a C-, and no finance classes. The CFA was my finance education (to a point, other books as well). And being forced to sit and read and study gave me rigor to learn the details I would have otherwise glossed over because they were boring. One of these days I tell myself when I have time I might take L2 and L3 just for a sense of completeness, not that it matters for anything. I just hate leaving things unfinished.

Why does this matter? There are so many factors that make these polls and numbers irrelevant. Having $1m means something different for someone in NYC compared to Dayton, OH. Some might have $200k in assets but are receiving a pension ensuring a nice lifestyle. All of these things are relative. I wince when we spend $250 at Costco, for others it's $500, does it matter? I'd stop worrying about everyone else, focus on how you're doing relative to your own goals. Most Americans will never have more than $100k in net worth, so if you can hit that or exceed that you've done better than most of the country. Who cares if there are a few who are wealthier? We have this tendency to look above us and not below us. Looking above leaves us dissatisfied with what we have. Instead of looking at some poll where a few people have millions or tens of millions why not look at the vast majority of the US with less than $100k and be thankful?

Had a friend who argued to his wife that it was cheaper to go to the bar to watch the games, plus there was a sense of community there. Around here bar's have deals for Steeler games. Usually you can get a Miller or Coors for $2, figure five beers and the NFL "costs" $160 or so. I'd say he had a point considering that seems to be the average monthly Comcast bill around here.

Cut in July 2005, haven't looked back since.

I believe the problem with global warming is the same as politics. There is a very delayed feedback loop. A voter votes for a terrible politician who creates all sorts of bad problems...but the problems don't manifest themselves for 20 years. That voter doesn't necessarily link their vote and the politician to the problems. If they do some new solution that might create problems is required to fix it, consequences are delayed. Global warming is the same. Something that's a problem right now might not be terrible for 20-30 years. There is no feedback, and it's not immediate so people have a tough time with it. I don't know why using less of things, being more resourceful, and conserving is all that bad. Even if there isn't any global warming those are good things we should be doing anyways. Unless someone is a contrarian to be contrary why is "I just want to waste and use too much of anything for no reason" something anyone strives for?

it's depressing. Yes ... Intellectuals are not infallible. History has proven this time and again. Not everyone that disagrees with predictions of catastrophe is ignorant. "Scientific consensuses are an important part of any modern society—they tell us the general state of agreement in a field, not so we can blindly obey the experts in question (experts and consensuses can be wrong) but so that we can understand and critically think about those experts’ views." -Alex Epstein Yes, you are right. At the same time, it's a meaningless quote that you could just as easily use to support someone who thinks the earth is flat or someone who believes in intelligent design. Ahem.. you know the president of the flat earth society does believe in global warming, evolution and 9/11. He does not believe in gravity, so there's that thing: http://www.theguardian.com/global/2010/feb/23/flat-earth-society

XBRL is fairly new, especially for smaller firms. It's also different for each company. This makes it difficult to work with. Maybe some have switched over in the past few months, I don't know. European banks are working to adopt a data reporting format in XBRL. I took a look a few months back and the files were 1.5GB per quarter per bank. That's 1.5GB of xml text, mind blowing. The verboseness is over the top to the point of it becoming meaningless. It is faster to re-key the entire financials and all notes compared to parsing a XBRL doc like that.

This is a not so subtle distinction. As someone who runs a financial data company and who's seen a lot of professional feeds I think most users would be shocked at the quality of some professional feeds. My company pulls our data directly and digitally from regulatory data. This is a key distinction, by doing this in an automated fashion we ensure that the exact same figures that regulators have are what we have. Why is this important? The biggest players in the data space (Bloomberg, SNL, not sure about Morningstar) all input ALL of their data by hand. There are people who are manually entering and standardizing all data. This leads to potential errors at times, and prioritization for certain companies. In general large SEC filings companies all have the same data on these services. I say in general because someone was giving me a demo of their research platform using a Morningstar feed and when I requested they pull up some large cap banks I could see basic metrics such as BV were incorrect. They weren't horribly incorrect, but a difference of 1.5x BV and 1.1x BV is enough that I'd question what's going on behind the scenes. A company needs to have a process to ensure accurate data is being entered, and also needs domain knowledge on what the data is. Case in point on that I demoed another research platform where they had EV/EBITDA metrics for bank securities. Clearly there was zero banking domain knowledge on this platform. But that didn't stop them from selling very expensive per seat licenses to funds. Caveat emptor to their users on that one. It's really the smaller companies and more obscure pieces of information that are difficult. If a system is able to pull original source data digitally I'd trust it the most. The problem is sometimes humans do need to get involved. I embarked on a project recently to get share counts and insider information for all holding companies in the US public/private. This is obtainable information but it's in scanned copies of forms. We've looked at this from a number of different angles and came to the same conclusion as the larger players. The only way to get data into our system is by hiring a team of people to manually enter 500,000-1,000,000 pieces of information. Is it ideal? No, but the data is valuable, and there is no other way. Everyone relies on financial data and these numbers, yet few investors really drill down to determine their accuracy. I remember GuruFocus had some data quality issues. But it's not likely them, they're probably just pulling a feed from someone else. The biggest players are Bloomberg, Morningstar, Thompson/Reuters, S&P and a few others. With this new generation of trading/research apps I've been able to determine which ones share the same feeds by identifying the same data inaccuracies across apps. Right now it seems like Morningstar is the new go-to name in the industry. I don't know how SpecOps is pulling the data, but data quality and availability is king. Anyone can build a great looking UI, not everyone can build a scalable data platform with accurate data. That is the value proposition.

I would argue that you should be a politician. Basically all Buffett has done is found a really inefficient and incredibly difficult way to tax people and use the resulting taxes to fund health care, foreign aid etc. The same thing Buffett did is accomplished much more effectively by taxing people and funding things through government. One Deng Xiaoping is equivalent to a thousand Warren Buffett's. I enjoy this forum but sometimes I feel like everyone on here is going 120mph and I'm struggling to go 25mph. I have absolutely no clue what this means.

I also have that feeling. I look at the numbers constantly, but they don't feel all that real any more. I'm not planning on using that money anyway, just making it grow until I die and give it all away..... I wonder about this, here comes a heretical thought. You save up and spend all this time investing, you never spend any of it and then you give it all away. What was the point exactly? Is it so you get your name on a building when you give it away? How many people remember the names on buildings at places? If you're truly doing this for an impact (my presumption) you could probably make a bigger impact by donating your time and life to some mission. People remember Mother Theresa even though she doesn't have a name on a building. If you're saving for the future, or you spend part of your savings I get this. But if you live on less in some monkish lifestyle and never touch a dime to unload all of it I'm missing something. Why not just disavow money in the first place, live the monk lifestyle and then make an impact through your time?

In a weird way I'm more comfortable with larger sums. It does two things for me: 1) It's a gut check on if I really like an idea. If I'm thinking "oh I'd toss $1,000 at it but won't toss $5,000 or $10,000 at the idea" I need to re-evaluate and consider why. 2) The larger positions make a difference. I remember when I started investing in my Roth out of college and invested $600 in a position. It grew by 20% or so and I remember thinking "only $120?" With a $10,000 position if it grows 20% that's equal to a $2,000 position from a few years ago. Like others said the key is percentages.

We have a 1-year-old son. Over the past year, and the years before as we observed the many people around us who had kids, it became quite clear that kids can be as expensive or inexpensive as you want. And a lot of what people spend on kids isn't actually things that make them happier and better people. In fact, the best thing for most kids would be to spend more time with their parents, and to see those parents be stress-free and happy. Most people spend all their time away from their kids to earn enough to buy a bunch of crap that the kids don't even notice and that they would gladly trade for more time with their parents (do they care if you drive a BMW instead of a Honda or that you have granite countertops instead of wood?). Between me and my wife having taken about a 7 digit aggregate pay cut over a 4-5 year period, to spend more time with kids, I cannot agree with you more. I stopped going to office from the day my son was born, working from home for 7 years that offered a lot of flexibility. Finally I quit my job entirely when my wife was pregnant with our second. I used to take frequent unpaid 3 month time off as well. Main motive was time with kids. A good school district brings a lot of intangible benefits that I did not realize before my son started going to school. Moving to a good school district though increased our housing costs quite a bit. Vinod This is awesome congrats! I echo Liberty. Kids can be expensive if you want, or cheap. My wife and I are still living on the budget we set up before we had two kids. Some things have gone up, but you can be frugal and cut in other areas.

Cloud, At what point do we stop worrying about diet and fitness, and just enjoy things with some degree of moderation. Worrying about it is just more stress, right? If you follow research about stress and its affect on telomeres lengths, that seems to say alot. People who care for a spouse, disabled child, or parent full time without a break have been shown to suffer from chronic stress and it reduces their health and well being immensely. Sorry to say, you shoot yourself on the foot with this. Moderate amount of a bad thing is still a bad thing. Preventing suffering doesn't cause me any stress. I don't worry about preventing suffering. I just take actions to the best of my ability. I don't feel stressful about: e.g. eating healthy, exercising,not drinking any alcohol (meaning no chance of getting in a car accident under influence of alcohol), avoiding smoking cigarettes, no texting and driving. I do see smokers become stressful when they are suddenly cut off from cigarettes. The ability to say no is a key indicator of success in all areas of life. Check out Stanford marshmallow experiment. Now let's talk about stress ... Some people don't care about their financial health and physical health. For example, when they lived carelessly for their whole life without any consequences. Then they reach age of 60,70, after an operation, let's say to take out a gallbladder after a gallbladder attack, they suddenly can barely walk, and experience urine incontinence. (What causes formation of gallstone?) Or worse, they have cancer. Now, because they are not financially independent, they will need their children, probably at their 30s, to become care giver. That's endless medications, doctor appointments. Meanwhile their children are working full time and use up their 2 weeks vacations just to go to their parents doctor appointments. At this stage of life, their children are probably starting to think about or just started raising their own family. If their children don't have high enough income, they are been sandwiched between their own family and their parents. They are called sandwich generations. Some even are so stressful that they can't have their own family. I take care of my financial health and physical health to ensure my children will not become sandwich generations. For wealth, I'll become financially independent at age 45. For health, I want to be like Fauja Singh than one day laying on a death bed dying slowly. "I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all." Here's the thing, time and chance do happen to all of us. You might never touch a drop of alcohol and never drive. But what if you're walking and a drunk plows into you at an intersection? Maybe you exercise and eat only the best food but still get cancer. The fact is everyone dies. The person who shoves their face with McDonalds and never leaves a couch as well as the health nut, both die. Sometimes the health nut dies first. There are no guarantees in life. There is no magic formula. Eating perfectly and exercising doesn't guarantee a long life. Just as eating terribly and never doing a thing doesn't always mean an early death. Time and chance happen to us all. There's a stress and worry that I think is robbing some people, it's the stress of being healthy. Of never doing anything unhealthy to ensure a long life. The thing is that's just a stressful as someone who's working a high pressure job. The best way to reduce stress is to actually enjoy life! Talk a walk on a nice day, play with kids or grandkids. Go have a beer with friends. Go hiking or running. Enjoy life. I exercise myself, I like to run. I went running this afternoon. Not because I want to live long, but because I truly enjoy it. I also enjoy a good beer, so I'm having one now. Did I negate the running? I don't know, and honestly I don't care either. Here is a very personal story I'll share. My dad was the model athlete, he held a state record in a sport for years and went to college on a full ride scholarship. He played three sports in college before being forced to choose one. He stayed in shape his adult-life. My mom was into health food. White bread? Never ate it. She used to shop at some boutique health place in the 80s. So fast forward...10 years ago he was diagnosed with cancer. Then his body was riddled with arthritis, it runs in the family. He's had numerous joint replacements. The cancer was gone, then came back and gone again. He has another replacement surgery this week. He said he thinks he needs three more (another hip and two shoulders). He was strong, athletic and did nothing wrong. Yet his body fell apart. His youngest brother was just as athletic and went farther than my dad. He played MLB baseball for years in the late 70s and early 80s as a relief pitcher. Excellent shape as well, kept up with athletics and sports through his adult years. He has a number of health issues as well and hobbles around. I asked him if he could even pitch a baseball anymore, he said he couldn't. Maybe my stories are the anomalies. I feel great right now, but I'm also young. I know I might end up like my dad and have health issues in my 50s. Or I could be like my mom's family and never exercise, eat terribly and live to my mid-90s. The bottom line is this. You need to enjoy life. My guess from your post is you're young and you have the world by its reigns. You already know everything and we're probably all wrong. I just hope in 5-10-15 years maybe some of this will be remembered and sink in before it's too late.

Like Buffett, for example. ;D I never bought a stock because it paid or did not pay dividends. Not planning to do this in the future either. There was a thread about this a while back. Buffett does not pay dividends but his holdings do, and he seems to insist on it. Note much of what he's done recently is preferred issues that generate a lot of income.