moore_capital54

I highly recommend the American Dream panel as well, with Professor Niall Ferguson

We are adding, I can't believe it's down here again...

This is the first I heard of your fund, I just visited your website and read all your annual reports. You have done a superb job, and I really enjoyed reading about your performance. This is exactly the type of Fund that belongs in this thread, and the type of fund I would invest in. I highly suggest you get in touch with Jeff Banfield so he can include you in his Hedge Fund Report Card, most of the top hedge funds in Toronto are included, not sure if you even care about increasing AUM but if you do definitely get in touch with him... Here is an example of one of his reports: http://www.highwatercapital.com/Commentaries/June-2011-Hedge-Fund-Report-Card.pdf Lastly, my favourite quote from your annual reports that coincidentally is very relevant to what started this debate is this one: "It took NO skill to earn a positive return in 2009. I may as well have thrown darts at the stock pages as give any time to thinking about risk. In fact, ROMC‟s result was worse than that of some „know-nothing‟ investors: Had you put your savings in a Canadian equity index fund last year, you would have beaten ROMC. Skill, if I may, was required in years prior and undoubtedly will be handy in future. " Keep up the good work!

You are a good man Parsad, the more I see the more I like... Maybe one day I will even show up at these things.. hehe

It's happening. Got an unsolicited piece advertising a new opportunity to invest in the environmentally friendly "Ben Franklin" method of capturing enormous amounts of electricity from the air. ( Run a wire up on a balloon instead of a kite and voila! There you go: free electricity!) Now isn't that a good idea. Full disclosure: their chief scientist is a recent graduate with a BS degree from The Colorado School of Mines. ::) You are talking about SEFE we are short it.. we short those all the time...FYI Anson is short the name as well..

The Milken Global Conference has some incredible guests this year, I highly recommend the video page for some fascinating panels and interviews: http://www.milkeninstitute.org/events/gcprogram.taf?function=videos&eventid=GC12

I think this would be a great thread to start. Lets us assemble a list of investors in the public domain, who have audited, or tangible results, who have generated fantastic returns and who have received very little press attention. There is much to be learned from such investors. Categorize by Name, Age, Type of Investor (Private, Fund Manager, or Public Company Executive), and Performance. I am going to start with one, his name is David Moradi and he runs a fund called Anthion Global in New York. He's only 29 years old, previously worked for Soros then Pequot. Since starting his fund in 2008, hes compounded at over 15% and has not had one down year, and earned himself over $30 million personally. Current AUM is nearly $700 million. Nice guy nobody has ever heard of that keeps quietly hitting the ball out of the park.

http://texastailwind.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/top-speed-on-a-bicycle-how-fast-can-you-go-downhill/ Apparently it is quite difficult to surpass 55 mph but I have never tried, nor will I!

One of the biggest insights into Sardar has been his collection of sports cars, I heard he has a Ferrari a Lamborghini and Bentleys. I don't believe any value investor in their right mind would be caught so early in their career with even one of these cars, later on maybe one but never 3, and in Sardar's case, he appears to love the attention. I also believe that the stake in CBRL is being acquired with additional debt, I truly hope its non-recourse.

You will find that if you do not live your "youth" now you will forever wonder whether you fully enjoyed what the world had to offer in those finite years. To be your age, and be as wealthy as you are, I would definitely suggest taking the university route, only for the thrills. I can tell you that at my age now with all my millions of dollars I would give about half or even more just to be in your position and go back to high-school or university. Those were the best times of my life, and where I met my wife. Money isn't everything in life and generally someone with your skills will do great with money so you don't need to worry about getting started as an investor. And as some of the wiser posters said, a good investment generally involves buying and then waiting for many years at times. Just my two cents!

I Can't for the life of me figure out where the cash is coming from. I believe he is borrowing against the CBRL Stake and buying more shares in CBRL. This could end very badly if the shares decline. Can anyone provide clarity on this?

We hired a local company down there to do it, they charge us 8% of gross rents, the figure I quoted you was NET of all costs. Right now about 70% of the homes are vacant so the jury is still out, but we feel good about our prospects for capital appreciation over a 5-10 year period. We are not looking to buy much more homes or we would consider setting up our own management co, this was really just a punt on housing down there, if were right well produce 20% CAGR over 5 years, if were wrong well probably break even, but the LP's liked this bet because at worst we distribute homes to them pro rata. I do know of a group in Maricopa County that is up to 850 homes and manage everything themselves, those guys are claiming they rent homes within 3 months or less at 12-17% cash on cash yields.... Overall, I think investors will do better buying equities over the long-term, but once again its a very easy product to sell as people love the idea of owning tangible real estate. My partner and I will probably net 10-20 free homes from our fees alone :) Shit I guess I am falling into the "Tangible property" trap as well, will be nice to just have some homes cash flowing for my daughters when im gone... BTW this reminds me of a funny joke I heard this week: What do you call an Asian RRSP? ....................... A Vancouver Condo! :)

We started a fund in November to purchase homes in Las Vegas. We have acquired 100 homes for less than $5 million US and are slowly renting these homes out for an average of $500-600 net return per month.

Great Job gents, just wanted to drop by and say hi. This year has been absolutely incredible for us.

This is complete hogwash, the entire market for Greek CDS was $3B with avg price paid nearly 7 million to protect 10 million of debt. Even if Kyle had bought every CDS in existence (which is an impossibility) the total profit on the trade could only be: 840,000,000

I just spent the evening reading all the letters. I had previously read the ones from 1998 onwards as they were available on sec.gov. Just want to thank you guys for making them available. There is much to be learned from these letters, and it is very obvious to me that LUK has really messed up having owned and sold some incredible assets, I don't really understand why they would ever sell some of the real estate they owned like the French Properties (2.1m square feet) and the Park Avenue/Chicago Skyscrapers. It also behooves me why they sold their retail banking operation. I would much rather own the LUK of 1986-1994 then the one today. What kills me is that they obviously understood the merits of investing in assets that protect against inflation but somehow decided to dump their exquisite property portfolio. You could have had here another Brookfield properties inside of Leucadia worth at least double of the current market value, + everything else.

I would very much appreciate if one of you could PM those letters to me as well (pre 2003) Thanks a bunch!

Honestly, Eric I don't understand why you hedged the position out, you were merely reacting to volatility imho.

We see absolutely no reason to take any BAC off the table, fundamentally the situation continues to improve if anything we may even add to our position on this pullback. The next event to look forward to is the stress test, and possibly guidance on dividend or buybacks. I don't see any chance of a US recession when Bernanke has his hand on the trigger of another round of QE targeted at MBS. The smart money is buying nonrated MBS as we speak, including Kyle Bass. These are gonna rock and roll when the fed buys agency MBS with newly created money. That will also mark the housing bottom as we know it. This pullback should it continue, presents a fantastic averaging up opportunity.

There may be a play on MSG here based on Lin :) Fantastic form tonight!

$190 million :( Personally, I feel bad for Falcone he is the type of manager I like to see succeed...

We added to our position through the European markets last night. Fundamentally the greek austerity vote was another move in the right direction for de-risking this position.

Well if he started 12 years ago, then he compounded at roughly 12% net of fees which isn't bad at all! Cheers!

Here is how we see it. The greeks will have to sell their stake, but their stake will command a premium as it reflects a control position. The privatisation of the stake brings with it additional value as a private operator will most likely work harder at boosting not just the divident prospects but the actual equity value. Even if a new Greek Drachma is worth 30% of the current Euro, I believe OPAP will produce sufficient returns on invested capital. If we compare to the ARS (Argentiniean Peso) situation in 2001 the Greek Drachma will roughly trade at 50-60% of the Euro long-term. With regards to some of the comments here relating to the velocity of greeks gambling or that the figures will decline based on the greeks nominal income, I disagree as if I have learned one thing in my life, never bet against people continuing to gamble. One of the biggest misses we had here was LVS in 2008/2009. My partner, and our analyst tried to get me commit and I vetoed the idea due to the $10B debt load. Even after Adelson committed a capital injection I felt that in the new economy people would care less about gambling and it would take a while before gaming revenues reached their pre 2007 peak. It was fairly easy to estimate that LVS would survive, given the renewed injection but where I was having difficult with was on multiple. LVS was trading at $3 at the time. Anyhow, I learned my lesson. The gambling business is an amazing one, and when you can buy a company which owns a monopoly on gambling or betting in an entire country, you do it hand over first. OPAP is going to be a great case study for value investors a few years from now. We are not making it a big position given the current risk of currency devaluation, but as we feel this risk disappears we may make this a 5% position.

I can completely relate to Eric here and think he epitomizes the way an individual value investor should run his book.