Green King

you mean to say you don't see that in your head when you are reading annual reports. ;D

Sounds like you have insight please elaborate.

Great Book. If you get bored get the audio book. half way done. It has strong familiarity my experiences in the past year. Helping my family build a consumer beverage company from a piece of paper. Leverage, negotiating, positioning dealing with stake holders. Hiring people and getting them to contribute to you vision and actually do work. Working with people getting ideas across and then implemented. Injecting a brand with emotional appeal with the products's natural characteristics and desires of the consumer. overall informative and enjoyable read.

Care to explain the mechanics and reasoning behind doing that ? This was the first oil boom and Calgary had little experience with the boom and bust cycle. Jobs were plentiful, adventure was everywhere, pay was good, and as in booms everywhere; people bought ‘toys’ and expensive houses – sure it would never end. Dome Petroleum was the ‘darling’; and I was a 2nd year petroleum engineer flying up and down the McKenzie Valley pipeline, teaching Cariboo to walk under elevated pipeline, & doing engineering tests on cold weather metal fatigue and heavy drop parachutes (D9 cats yanked out of a Hercules in flight, & dropped softly onto a 50m target, when the plane is going at 200km+ an hour). Then the bust struck. Petroleum Engineers with 30yrs experience couldn’t get a job, & went from king to bum in under 6 months. It lasted a long time, folks couldn’t pay their bills, and mortgage foreclosures went through the roof (often every 2nd or 3rd house on a street). Alberta’s depression era laws were still on the books, & they had the effect of making recourse loans ‘non-recourse’ under certain conditions. If you had title, you could essentially ‘quit stake’, sell your property in a public auction, and just give the banker the proceeds; if it wasn’t enough to pay off the mortgage – the banker had to take the loss. Block party auctions were common, underwater homeowners would put their property on the block, and ‘enforcers’ would ensure that nobody offered more than $1 - or competed against the selected ‘winning’ family (cant bid if you’ve been rabbit punched, & are on the ground with a boot across your throat). It was community action, and it saved a great many people from poverty. I went to university with many of the sons & daughters of these people, and many of their dads owed their companies to a successful win at poker – when it was common for roughnecks to ante up their partial well interests, so that the winner would have a better chance at building something. They were being wiped out, and there were more than a few suicides. I found it utterly amazing, & extremely odious, that Canada’s banks didn’t know their sh1t; and that this level of misery had been allowed to happen. I changed majors to finance, researched what had made it so bad, left Calgary, & swore it would never happen to me. I learnt these things are recurring, what you can do to avoid getting burnt, and how to exploit them. It turned me into a counterculture value investor, & I have been forever grateful for it. Not much different to the experiences of many of the ‘greats’. SD Thanks you that made my day, you always have the nicest things to share. Those bankers were probably under a lot of pressure from Gresham's law, being mostly empty suits with no skin in the game they did what ever the system allowed. This added with Eric house buying story make me question the true strength of large national banks. Will they eventually self implode as success make them large and their size eventually become their greatest handicap? like what happens to most fund managers when they get large.

Care to explain the mechanics and reasoning behind doing that ?

Merry Christmas to all board members! :D The next year is not going to be what is used to be.

On Good Analysis

good to hear that you guys liked it. On Good Leverage

I Just finished reading this series of past lectures by Benjamin Graham. It seems I did not move too far from the source material. His ideas are refined absolute truths making them useful even today. I will be posting some of the ideas that I like in the following days in the hope to generate greater interest. Enjoy everyone. PDF: http://www.grahamanddoddsville.net/wordpress/Files/Gurus/Benjamin%20Graham/The%20Rediscovered%20Benjamin%20Graham%20Lectures.pdf On Base human nature

I've found pricing data and open interest. Please do share you experience if you had made a trade before. http://www.optionsclearing.com/webapps/flex-reports

anyone have experience with this ?

neither will be a good bet since there is a lot of black swan risk in those assets. Communism, taxation, populism, advancement of technology making the asset less or no longer productive. Like what happened to textile looms for Berkshire Hathaway. The best asset would be to improve your skill in something. Since it cannot be take away from bankruptcy. preferably something cognitive based. The second would be to do great things or heroic acts for society and people around you as an whole since the good will generated from them could last generations. Third would be a mix or productive businesses, portable wealth, and land.

I really like his emphasis on the investment return equation. Price, Cash flow, and re-investment.

As mentioned above please don't take advise from others you don't know or know to have superior performance. Make your own decision. If they are not working do a post mortem. what do you think they are worth today and what do think they were worth the day your bought them. why did you buy it and did it happen. If you are doing pure graham or net net investing you should have a larger number of positions 30 to 100. Sell them when they become fully valued.

Yes, it does. Although people losing their car(s) is obviously much different than losing their home. I doubt there will be much economic significance if a large number of people default on their auto payments. I am not sure about this... In the last great meltdown (2008), a lot of people let their houses go & kept up on their car loans. If worse comes to worse, you can live out of your car. You absolutely need your car to run errands and get to work. In other words, a car is more important than a house. Could it be that people lost their houses in the last meltdown. Now they are living with family/friends, have lost their jobs, and are now letting their cars go? If people are now letting their cars go, why is it different this time around? Are you sure they are not people letting their second or third car go? or people who can't afford cars get a it on lax standards ?

Scion Asset Management began around Q4 2013. I have nothing to back this up but I doubt Burry is generating anything close to the returns he did at Scion Capital. This is not an indictment of his investing abilities, it's more a reflection of the market environment post financial crisis. He tends to invest in very distressed equities and resource companies (a la fairfax) which have not done as well as they did pre-crisis. More generally, it’s interesting to observe all the sub-prime 'heroes' post-crisis. A surprising number have performed poorly over a multi-year period (Bass/Paulson/Whitney/Eisman/Whitebox/etc). As far as I know only Cornwall Capital have maintained their impressive returns. I still think there are very few investors of Burry’s caliber. He's one of only a handful of managers I would invest with. Do you mind sharing Cornwall's returns ? Thank you in advance Cheers GK 52% gross / 40% net Thanks Poor Charlie. Sounds like what one should expect if what they say they are doing is still working.

Scion Asset Management began around Q4 2013. I have nothing to back this up but I doubt Burry is generating anything close to the returns he did at Scion Capital. This is not an indictment of his investing abilities, it's more a reflection of the market environment post financial crisis. He tends to invest in very distressed equities and resource companies (a la fairfax) which have not done as well as they did pre-crisis. More generally, it’s interesting to observe all the sub-prime 'heroes' post-crisis. A surprising number have performed poorly over a multi-year period (Bass/Paulson/Whitney/Eisman/Whitebox/etc). As far as I know only Cornwall Capital have maintained their impressive returns. I still think there are very few investors of Burry’s caliber. He's one of only a handful of managers I would invest with. Do you mind sharing Cornwall's returns ? Thank you in advance Cheers GK

Merry Christmas

I have nothing add. If you think they are using growth to cover up loss than pass on it. Its a trap. ;D

what kind of risk do they deal with ? Where is the balance sheet? looks like a growth trap. Things like these could grow for years until one day it blows up.

Is that you in the video?

do you want to look at Bombardier Inc ? I've looked at it a few weeks ago because of the cheap preferred shares. I keep getting a back a envelope valuation of zero for the equity.

Instead of seeing only Valeant? Oh yea. Ahhh, I wondered why someone would want to ignore a thread but now I get it. Like Sears from a couple of years ago too. Interesting please elaborate

found this on Reddit. Very inspiring article on Super Catastrophe and Risk and why there should always have a large margin of safety. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones.html?_r=0

Whats the name of the company ?