Jurgis

Obviously not if casinos are switching to other providers.

Is Berkshire Energy the high cost provider or are other companies loss-selling (or very-low-margin selling)?

Let us know when it's purchasable from US. :)

I agree with Merkhet that it depends. ;) Hard to decide in abstract. Somewhat abstracty: - If it's a Buffetty hold-forever great management, great moat company, then hold forever. Especially if it's still cheap. - If it's a dinky microcap/nanocap that was a cheap because of mediocre business and mediocre management, but just became "great management growth story can't do wrong" and is cheap based on new thesis, sell. Most of these roundtrip IMO. In other cases, think long and hard. Although personally, I'd probably diversify (diworsify) from 50% allocation even if the position was god Buffett himself.

13. In addition to the same question, I also cannot do math.

I am not familiar with Exor. Care to point me to any particular background or write-up? It doesn't look like there is a thread. Here you go: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/investment-ideas/exo-mi-exor/

Sold my very small position this week. I'll probably never get comfortable buying such nanocaps to reach even 1% of my portfolio per position. Got merger information statement today. Good read if you can get it somewhere (mine is paper, so can't post). Interesting that the auction has been going on since August 2015 and company did not hold 2015 meeting so as not to go through another proxy fight in the middle of the auction. Interesting that apparently nobody knew that auction was going on - even the guys who presented KRSL at Fairfax dinner (otherwise they would not have presented it probably I guess ;) ). And tons of time to buy shares if anyone wanted to. I almost added after looking at their 2015 results. But wasn't sure whether their capex was justified, not sure about management, not sure about "disappearing" activists. And as I said above, I'm not comfortable with nanocaps. :-\ Any post mortem from folks who were involved in the activist side? Or held (larger) positions?

Exchange might matter in terms of connections with investment banks that might be more willing to do bond sale for a company listed in more prominent exchange. But, yeah, I don't know enough either. Just thinking aloud. Take care.

You said you exclude OTC, but that's probably the place where it makes most sense to upgrade. I was just told yesterday by Fido that stock XXXX is blanket not available for purchase to Fido customers because and So basically investors have hard time buying the shares in company X that would make the shares less likely to be liquid, reach "efficient market" price, etc. Do you or the company care? Maybe, maybe not. There can be arguments on both sides. E.g. if you're looking to hold the shares for 10 years and you don't care for liquidity and efficient market, then perhaps this is just fine - no rabble will buy shares and you can accumulate in peace for ages. One argument for uplisting: if company wants to issue cheap debt, it's likely that better listing might mean cheaper debt. I don't think there's a blanket argument in general though. I have no clue about Canadian exchanges and their peculiarities.

What? Where? Investment forums? I've been tarred and feathered for any left-leaning posts everywhere. OK, so investment forums are naturally right leaning, but still. Society? You mean with Republicans capturing Senate and House somehow you feel that "for the last 8 years its been "cool" to be liberal."? That's ridiculous. The only thing liberals had was Obama. And actually Obama is way more center leaning and business friendly than Republicans acknowledge. I'm not criticizing him for that, but I'm amazed at the right vitriol directed at pretty centrist president.

Cause obviously "accomplished business people" cannot be wrong. We just need to clone their opinions. Oh wait.

I guess people expect some positive moments between the wedding and the giving half stuff... ::)

This would make me buy iPhone.

Hear, hear. 8) I like the italicized part. :) Anyway, yeah, it's great if you can do what you like and your wife and friends are on the same wavelength. :) Makes life so much easier. Relatives - relatives are tough - can't choose them like you choose friends ;) - some are great, some suck. Have to deal with that though. Sometimes find something that works for everyone. Sometimes not. My mother's last wedding was at Elvis non-Elvis chapel in Vegas with just her, her husband and me. Plus dinner at Stratosphere. She's been happily married for >10 years now. Yeah, it wasn't dream wedding perhaps, but I doubt dream wedding would have changed much in the married life. ;)

I vote against compensation packages for almost all companies I invest into. Exceptions are BRK, FRFHF, and maybe couple more that I forget offhand. I don't expect things to change though as TwoCitiesCapital explained.

By being optimistic. I am optimistic. But I realize that I am part of top X% (5? 3? 1?) of population, so I might not be seeing all the issues of general population. E.g. RE prices are tough to afford for general population on most of the coast markets.

How is this different from prediction markets or from Tetlock's Superforecasting and http://goodjudgment.com/index.html ? BTW, there is investing UNU: http://go.unu.ai/unums/601 Most of the questions are crap. Some answers might be interesting. Some are contradictory (across multiple questions related to the same company): Apple is losing cool, won't outperform, don't buy, but don't sell either...

Where are you pulling this number from? My ass. 8) In general though, wouldn't 50% of businesses underperform the index on average? ::) Edit: comparing to market weighted index, the number of underperforming businesses can be larger or smaller than 50%. My guess is that long term, the number approaches 50%, but there is no guarantee this is true. Edit 2: I don't think it made sense to make another post on this, but after thinking some more I believe that, yes, more than 50% of companies underperform the index. Otherwise, it would be much easier for us to outperform the index when investing. I know it's still hand waving argument though. :) I guess we did not establish the rules at which point the great businessperson gives up and closes the shop when they see that their business is underperforming the index...

Let me meditate on your question... Here you go: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/off-topic-meditation/

There is no exact date for the spinoff yet, correct?

Businessperson's goals can be creating something new (new technology), something good for the world (beautiful RE), something good for community (jobs, etc.) and so on. None of these likely apply to Trump, but they do apply to other entrepreneurs. If every business person benchmarked to the index, we would not have >50% of the businesses. This is unlikely to be positive. (If every investor benchmarked to the index, we would not have >90% of active investors - which actually might be positive 8) ).

I think it's stupid to value any businessman/entrepreneur by comparing their results to index fund. It's valid way to value investors, but businessmen have other goals rather than just replicate or outperform market returns.

Sure you can have a multiple expansion in the formula. I don't think you can predict it though.

I think scorpioncapital raises couple of valid issues: The actual return is based on market price. What if market either continues to undervalue the business or overvalues it a lot? Is it useful to compare the actual return against your expected return if the actual return is determined by "unreliable" partner Mr. Market? Assume you assign whatever conservative expected return to AMZN/NFLX: 5%? 10%? 20%? And then market goes and does 50% annual or 100% annual for 1-2 years. Is that information useful? It doesn't necessarily reflect the quality of your decision to buy this stock. Or you buy IBM/GM with expected return 5%? 10%? 20%? and market gives you minus 5% return for 2-4 years. Does that reflect the quality of your decision? I am wondering what is the information that you get when return trounces expectations or vice versa. I guess when return is way below expectations, there is possibly a lesson there. I think - like scorpioncapital alludes to - it's hard to estimate the return unless you are talking about long periods (5-10 years) and you expect the return pretty much to come from growth rate. I.e. like Buffett says, long term, the price is less important since return is pretty much based on business growth and roughly corresponds to it. If you buy for shorter term gains from undervalued to fairly/overvalued, your return may be 50% a year or it could be 10% or 0% or even minus 20% depending on market's perception (and on company's performance - which you might be able to estimate better than market's reaction). If you buy for long term hold, then market's reaction may be less important and company's performance may be way more important. So the long term return comparison vs. expectations might give info about your understanding of the company. For short term return comparisons, the info is more whether you can figure out what mispricings/catalists/etc. market will correct in couple years. It seems to be rather interesting exercise and might be worthwhile to do it and see what it tells you. :)

I don't track "expected returns" vs. real returns. I think it might be great idea going forward, but it's tough to go back to past purchases and quantify expected returns without bias. However, to contradict majority of people above, pretty much all my X baggers (up to 10 baggers) were crappy companies. E&Ps in 2009, busted (European) bank prefs in 2009; PFHO, WDC/STX. The other X bagger subset: high growth momo stocks - AMZN, NFLX, ISRG - smaller since I'm "value investor" and I don't buy these and even if I buy, I sell them too soon. These observations might be tainted with memory bias: i.e. I might not remember remember good returns on Buffett'y steady grower businesses since they were slower and took years.