finetrader

Not trying to prove my point here. Just want to express my condolences to the families touched by this tragedy at lac Megantic. http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/353842 http://www.radio-canada.ca/regions/estrie/2013/07/07/001-explosions-lac-megantic-images.shtml

Bonne fête Sanjeev!

This is interesting. I was already thinking about investing let say a 5% of portfolio in a Greece ETF and doing it the Fairfax way. i.e. buy it and forget about it.

Opened a position in Altius. If it goes down more significantly I'm gonna attack this stock like a starved animal would do on a wounded prey.

I see VIV P/E=12, still cheap but not like 8.

Can you imagine no pipeline... The amount of additional railcars on tracks would definitely cause a surge in accidents due to higher trafic. What I found with a quick search on the internet: -Pipelines are 70 times safer than railcars. -you can compare pipeline vs railcars with cars & planes. A plane crash will kill hundreds of people and will be shown on all the news. And you won't hear about car accidents but they definitively kill more people than planes. Anyway look everywhere you want, you won't find many studies or articles that says that railcars are safer than pipeline. Cheers!

It is much safer to transport oil via pipeline.

Leverage cuts both ways! You could underperform in a bear market by using leverage.

I like Howard Marks's model concerning market cycles. I think he said he feels we are in 7th inning lately. If US unemployment continue to decrease we might have wage inflation.. And that is a big treat for stocks. The day to day products and services inflation. Because this will leads to higher interest rate. Asset inflation due to low interest rate is actually very good for stocks as we can see right now. I kind of agree with this 7th inning call. I mean, i see generous valuation for stocks but no over values. Maybe some dividend stocks are a bit to high but growth stocks have rooms to go higher. And if there is a bubble right now, it is in bond. Would it burst, where would the money go? In stocks?...

BAC and AIG have a lot of DTA. For those , I don't count the DTA when looking at the balance sheet because I'm interested in TBV. But I add the tax saved to GAAP earnings.

My favorite line from Rush is: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice" from Freewill

Yeah, I should have been clearer. Time premium I don't like to pay.

I've hedged my BAC position differently. I believe that market risk is the biggest risk for BofA. With earnings in the rise because of lower expenses, operational risk seems much lower that market risk to me. So I've hedged the Fairfax way. I bought deep ITM SPY put as I don't like to pay big premium and this takes much less margin than shorting SPY. I've just started my hedging program so I have only 25% of my BAC long exposure that are hedged this way. Waiting for the BOJ effect to fade before hedging more.

Agree. thanks for mentioning other managers.

As an idea stealer from other respected investors, I feel like Ted, Todd, BB, and maybe Pabrai are the only one I can steal idea from with a good level of confidence simply because they run concentrated portfolio. Watsa would fit in but then we all know in what type of (controversial to say the least) company he gets into... Ex: I could take an idea from Tepper but then he would have only 2-3% invest in.

Fairfax's guy has said in the past that big inflation will come when unemployment rate is low. I tend to agree with that view. So were still away from this.

Must not be a good feeling to be so out of sync with the market!

It's crashing!!!!!!!! Sell everything now!!!!

I remember Buffett said that he could achieve 50% return and said look at a stock 52 week high and low, and you will notice that the high is very often double from the low.

The yen is down about 15% since then. Let say those firms have 50% sales outside japan. That's 7% top line growth. Consider operational and financial leverage, this can lead to 25% profit growth in some firms, market share gain for others, difference between loss and profit for some others, and P/E expension for all of them for brighter future perspective.

I have about 7% cash, another 8% in a special situation, and 21% in lvlt bond. I haven't heard this argument yet so I will go out and say that S&P500 is at 1500 for the third time in 12 years and this is the right one. No big decline in sight this time.

The currency play is what I'm looking at. And I would like someone to give me one reason why the yen would appreciate vs USD assuming japan will print more momey in the future than they have in the past 5 years. Looks like the odds of shorting the yen are quite attractive.

I had to post it because me too think that he his just another guy with no crystal ball. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/el-erian-normal-may-nearing-170758437.html

I remember a quote from Françis Chou saying that when you see a company that is highly levered, debt is probably a better play than the common. This has inspired me and I was tired of following Level 3, seeing that is was profitable on an operational point of view but was paying all their cash flow in interest. So I bought the bond and I'm so far enjoying a 10% yield. Also I figured that would Level 3 go bankrupt, the equity would get wiped out, but that the cash flow would probably be sufficient to allow a full recovery for a debt holder.

Do you really want to fight the FED?