Spekulatius

I don't recommend them for checking accounts, but Penfed is very competitive in Credit cards (gas card with 5% cash back) and as a car lender. Sometimes, they have great mortgage deals too. Member since 2007, and i have their credit card as well As a car loan with them. For those without military associated, it costs 25$ to join.

DVN (partial buyback of a recently reduced position) ASFI (first lot) OVLY ( add)

I think most US investors don't have the expertise to invest in Chinese stocks. I bought some Swire Pacific recently and i like the idea to buy Jardine. Matheson: [http://www.gurufocus.com/news/175836/jardine-matheson-an-undertheradar-asian-growth-story-contest/url] I think Jardine in particular is a nice compounder, trading around book and compounding in the mod teens for a long time. Swire is a little cheaper in some respects (P/NAV) but maybe not as well positioned. In both cases, you get an owner operator and european style management who knows their way around in Asia. Both stocks are buys right now, imo.

I own this and think it is quite cheap, despite Puerto rico's problems. FWIW, the owners want to sell out and offered some shares recently and GTS used this to buy back some shares, which is positive for the remaining shareholders since it is accreditive to book value: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1171662/000119312513227127/d530314d424b4.htm

I agree that it's a great book, probably an investment classic. It emphasizes the importance of the capital allocation skills of the CEO. I made me look at some of my stocks with a whole new lens. I borrowed it at my local library, but I really think it should be on the shelf in my room.

I was wrong. I import my monthly statements into quicken and import quicken into turbotax. That works without problems. Another plus. - IB's ipad app is very good and quite intuitive and their Android app is decent as well. i find myself using the ipad app for 90% of my trading. It does not work for my complex order types, but. I never use those anyways. If you have several accounts with (which I do), you pay the data feed fees only once.

I have been customer with IB since about 2006. I had very few problems with them. I like their trading platform and their mobile platform. The webtrader is pretty basic though and sometimes buggy. The statements are hard to read And there is definitely a learning curve with their platform. For international trading IB is hard to beat and their low commissions are great for traders. I have used Etrade, Wells Fargo investments and Fidelity and IB id by far my favorite. I found the phone support OK but their online chat support pretty good. I use turbotax with IB as well and download their statements monthly, which seems to work OK. They don't have directconnect though.

I received my annual report as well from Interactive brokers. While pretax earnings are down ~20%, it is nice that they cleared up the confusion about the shares in the employee trust fund. So at least we now know how many shares are actually outstanding (~720k).

I hold my HNFSA shares in an Interactive Brokers account and so far have not received any shareholder communication. Sometimes, I do get mailings directly from the companies I invested in , but that is not the case with HFNSA.

Any news on HNFSA/HNFSB? I have been shareholder for a while and have not received anything in the mail yet. I suppose the annual report for Y2013 is due too in Sept? I have called "IR" a couple of times to get a message but never got a live person on the phone. Leaving a message did not yield anything. Frustrating company to deal with for sure.

WD is a commercial mortgage originator. They went public in 2010 at 10$/share and recently bought a big competitor from Fortress for combination of cash and stock. The firm was a small outfit until a few years ago and then they sized the opportunity to grow in size.The Fortress deal added more scale but it appears that their cost ratios are elevated now, so earnings were flat YoY at 42c/share. The bull case is that there is a big runaway for growth with commercial mortgages and we have a management in place that seems to know what it is doing will grow this somewhat obscure outfit into a major player, probably making this stock a multibagger from current prices. Valuation is undemanding at <9x earnings and it does not take too much imagination to see WD returning to be acquisition profit margins, once they squeezed out costs and synergies from the Fortress acquisition. The bear case is that some of the earnings are non-cash and management has overextended themselves with the Fortress deal and profit margins have peaked. FWIW, the things that have been written about Berkadia , the BRK/LUK joint venture in the same business makes me believe that commercial mortgage origination is a very interesting business right now.