Jurgis

You are. Edit: /deleted the rest/

Not that Sergio will do it (I think), but if you spin off Jeep, the remaining company becomes even more unattractive.

They need to make more cars with doors that go like this ... and not like this ...

and they pay him in pesto sauce. ... sorry just kidding. ;)

Although I like Sergio, I think he should realize that nobody will bid price that he wants for FCAU. Big car co mergers don't work unless co is acquired supercheap from BK or forced seller. Sure, Sergio can rationalize that the merger would "work" by removing capacity & increasing scale, but both of these actually hit the acquirer's results: if you buy another company and then remove capacity, it's you who is having lower sales ( 1 + 1 = ~1.5 ); if you want to scale, you pretty much have to gut the acquired company lines and hope that customers will flock to your lines so you can scale them; or you can try to reuse across your and acquired lines - haha not easy. IMO it's completely rational that nobody wants to bid for FCAU. Well, perhaps Chinese will at some point if/when they have resources and want to get US/Euro market. But that's quite low probability (and likely greater fool) expectation. So, FCAU has to make it work without being acquired. Let's hope that 2018 plan is solid.

Happy Birthday!

IMO, both bullish and bearish arguments make sense. Bullish: SoP, cheap prices on parts (FCAU, Ferrari?, CNH?), good (great?) management. Neutral: Partner Re - it could be a good sub to own though possibly not as great as expectations run. Bearish: Possibly overpaid for Partner Re, possibly bad decision to sell Cushman and Wakefield, somewhat crappy subs (FCAU, CNH). One thing to keep in mind is that at current stock market prices, there's not that much good companies that Exor could buy. Buffett might be overpaying too when buying at this point in time (PCP). OTOH, Exor is smaller and is Europe based, so they possibly could have bought some better quality companies in Europe rather than going for Partner Re. Longer term, it would be good if they could ditch FCAU (and possibly CNH) at great price, but this may not happen for both business reasons and the historical reasons. Same with Juventus - though that's way smaller part. That's why I don't have a huge position in Exor. I have a moderate sized position and may increase it more if I get more comfortable with their business plans and execution.

Happier customers? ;D

See my post at http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/books/billion-dollar-lessons-paul-b-carroll-chunka-mui/ In short IMO often there are no clear differences between the companies that succeeded and the ones that failed. Or the difference is the management if you can evaluate it. So yeah perhaps it's safer not to invest in levered rollups at all. Or be careful and watch closely. But then you're likely to sell out at any sign of trouble. And even successful rollups usually go through trouble spots. So, we pretty much come back to trusting management or not investing. Just IMO though. :) Disclosure: I have positions in various Liberty companies.

He was adding coke to burritos to get repeat customers. ;D

Rest in Peace man. :(

Because they did the DISCA/DISCK split at the time which doubled the shares outstanding? Yahoo says Aug 7, 2014.

TDG? :)

I think the spread between the optimistic and pessimistic scenarios is very wide, so I am not sure if it's very useful if I post them. But here we go: Pessimistic: take 2015 income from continuing ops ~$17M, slap 10-15 PE == 170-255M Optimistic: take 2015 58M OCF, slap 15 multiple on that == 870M. OK, this might be a bit overtop, but if you assume good 10%+ organic growth and middling terminal PE, or DCF at 10%+ growth, 10% discount rate, 30M FCF, you gonna get to similar numbers. But with a company where you have to expect continued wheeling and dealing, these are not very useful IMO. You either trust the management and their holder overlords to do the right things or you don't. :) I don't know much about their businesses, headwinds/tailwinds there. With 4+ subs, this would require quite a bit of industry knowledge to analyze. I agree with someone (Picasso?) who said that platform companies at this stage are risky because they've been buying companies at potentially inflated prices in late stages of bull market. Perhaps Steel Partners avoided that a bit since HNH bought "captured" companies where Steel Partners had stakes, but the risk is there. They have a rather high pension liability. Pensions haven't blown up yet as some bears have predicted, but something to keep in mind. Anyway all just MHO.

I looked at this company and decided to pass. Not sure if it's worth to open a thread in such case. Let me know if you find it useful or not (in PM or here :) ). HNH is a small conglomerate - hah, let's say a "platform" company. It covers a bunch of industrial (joining, tubing, etc), building products, commercial food processing equipment/service. Most shares are held by Steel Partners Holdings, GP. It is acquiring other companies usually where Steel Partners have invested before and possibly hold a significant share. It is also divesting some subs. This makes analysis a bit cumbersome. E.g. looking at 2015 10K, last 3 years FCF yield is pretty high, but a lot of it comes from divestitures. Also growth might be coming pretty much from acquisitions, which would require adjusting CF for money spent on acquisitions. Ultimately my feeling was that there were too many moving parts and company was not attractive enough from sales growth and earnings/FCF point of view. OTOH, it might be that I am being too conservative in subtracting capex and acquisition costs. Also it could be a bet on the jockey. Assuming that one trusts the management, this might be attractive "platform" investment. Management claims that it adopts "Steel Business System" in acquired companies that optimize their metrics. Maybe some people here have looked at it and have a more positive impression than I did. ;)

Great book IMO, just finished reading it. One thing I realized from reading it is that all the supersuccessful "outsider" companies have done pretty much the same things that were billion dollar mistakes for other companies. I.e. buyouts, expanding into close-by fields, expanding into unrelated fields, leverage, etc. All of these are also things that supersuccessful companies did as well. (Yeah, BRK is a conglomerate, strike one, bought out overpriced broken companies - GenRe/NetJets, strike two, three and so on ;) ). So you pretty much can't look at company A and say "well, it's doing things that led to billion dollar mistakes, so it's gonna fail, don't invest". I guess you pretty much have to look at the management (and culture??? - I still don't know if anyone can evaluate the culture effectively en moment and not just past with perfect 20/20 vision). And hope that management results stay as good as they were in the past. There might be a few category killers that never strayed from straight and narrow even as they made killing while growing. WMT (didn't they fail somewhere abroad though?)? HD? MA/V? This would be a very very small list of investable companies. Maybe enough for very concentrated investors if they start at the right point in time. Not sure.

Yeah, but BAC is getting a better price for buybacks... Disclosure: I own some of both + through BRK

Guns in the hands of people is never a solution. If police doesn't work, fix the police. Don't give up and arm the people. And BTW the pro-gun clowns are in lala land if they think that their 80 year old parents will shoot the armed robbers stealing their cars and everything will work out just fine. Places where police enforcement breaks down and crime is rampant are unsafe whether you have a gun or not. In some situations having the gun will scare the criminals, in others it will just escalate and you'll end up dead. Presumably that's the outcome that doesn't cross the gun toters mind. The solution is to solve the economy problems, solve the crime problems, solve the enforcement problems. Yeah, it's hard. So people always go for easy "solutions" that don't solve anything. Cause NYC crime was radically reduced by giving NYCers guns. Not. http://www.nber.org/digest/jan03/w9061.html

I got 1% of my oversubscription request. Or 6.5% of subscription. Seems like the allocation was based on subscription size, not on oversubscription size.

What Eric said might be true when you roll over from 401(k) into IRAs, but it doesn't apply when you convert IRAs to Roth. IRA conversion to Roth is proportional like you said. For it not to be proportional, you'd have to put the pre-tax portion into 401(k) and then it's not counted in the proportion.

So far there has been no negative interest to retail deposit holders even in most Euro banks. It's pretty much business accounts getting hit by negatives and/or banks eating the loss and/or banks eating the loss but recovering it using fees. Don't expect negative rates for deposit holders.

I believe there was already a long thread about this on CoBF. Search? From client side the advantages/disadvantages are: - Non qualified clients can be in SMA, not sure if you can have hedge fund for non-qualified. - In SMA client does the taxes, in HF client gets K-1 - both of these have pros/cons from client side - In SMA client sees all the moves in real-time, in HF they don't and might not know what you hold at all - both of these have pros/cons - In SMA client can pull money/close account at any time, in HF you can restrict - both of these have pros/cons.

Some years ago we come back to our house after work and find big screen TV missing. Well, my wife did not even notice it, I noticed it when I got home. Call police. They tell us to get out of the house in case robber is still inside and show up in force (this being Boston and not Detroit suburbs ::) ), look through the house, find no burglar. Then one guy remains to write the report, finds the window that was open where the burglars cut the screen and got in. Well, he says, this is where they got in, but I'm not a detective, so we won't do anything more like taking fingerprints or whatever. Good bye. If you need to file insurance report, refer to case XXXXXX. That's it. I thought it was par for course. In another case, where someone stole my car (joyride) police phoned me to get it back when the car got towed with tons of parking tickets. At least I did not have to pay for the parking tickets. In yet another case, a guy stole my purse/wallet/etc. got apprehended by mall police while trying to use blocked CC. I got back the contents that were dumped by the culprit and turned to police by good Samaritans. That's my USA police experience. At least they don't ask for bribes and are not crooked - in my experience - as the police back in Lithuania... Edit: all the times I've been stopped by traffic cops in USA, they have been extremely professional and nice. All the stops were warranted and I got fewer tickets than I should have.

Soros does not do any good by scaremongering the EU disintegration. It's one thing to acknowledge that the situation is difficult and changes are needed. It's another thing to openly say that disintegration is inevitable. Calling for "we must not give up" after that sounds rather meaningless: if you believe the fallout is inevitable, what's the point of action? Now, on the other hand, most pro-EU commentators are saying that changes are needed. What changes? Soros says "a genuine banking union, a limited fiscal union, and much stronger mechanisms of democratic accountability". First two of these are probably good ones. But common people probably don't give a crap about "a genuine banking union, a limited fiscal union". Common people might care about "democratic accountability" of EU institutions, but that's a tough one to reform for people to like. Euro parliament is already elected. Transferring more power to Euro parliament is not going to be attractive right now. It's not clear to me what else can be done for "democratic accountability" of EU institutions. Other areas of contention: 1. Euro. Yes, euro was possibly a mistake. But disbanding euro into separate currencies right now would be a tough thing to do and possibly not satisfying to anyone. Clearly it would lead to some de-EUization. Might be an interesting thing to consider: to sacrifice euro and yet maintain EU. Probably unlikely. 2. Inter EU free movement of labor. I agree that this is one of the major features of EU and without it EU is so much less. Another one that common people care about (clearly on both sides: some are pro, some are against), but very difficult to envision EU without it. So probably no change, which means continued unhappiness of some (significant) percentage of common people. 3. Immigration from outside EU. This is recent issue. On one hand, this is somewhat easy to deal with: EU just closes its doors to outside immigration or at least severely reduces it. This would be popular among most common people. As much as I am pro-immigration, this might be (and might have been already) a way to go to stop intra EU breakdown. In a way, step back to lose a fight, but keep the EU. Not sure if this is possible at this stage. Maybe it's too late to change public opinion even if steps to curtail outside immigration are taken. 4. EU "laws" and "regulations". This is another place where single EU framework is a significant part of EU structure. I think this is overblown as concern to common people. I.e. it is something against-EU camp is drumming up, but in reality it's not a big issue. Reducing bureaucracy and lightening the regulatory frameworks might be possible and positive. I am not sure it would change much in people's perception. It might change things in CoBF and business owner's perception, but they are not the ones that campaign and vote against EU mostly. In general, anti-EU sentiment is mostly due to bad economy. This is usually the case. When economy is good, people are friends. When economy is bad, immigrants, politicians, gays, muslims and Euro bureaucrats are to blame. So the answer is to fix the economy stupid. The tough part is that EU has limited powers to fix economy and some of these powers are not even used well. But still perhaps it's the way to go if EU is to survive.

We can only hope that Felix Salmon is too negative. No, there are a lot of people who want Europe to be one federalist nation. It's clear from the voting too. Whether nationalists will win in the short term and long term still remains the question. We can only hope that they won't or that any of their victories will be reversed in the future. But sure, knowing Europe and Europeans, the EU progress until 2008 crisis was completely remarkable to me. I never expected EU to go so far as it did. How far it will now step backward is ongoing question.