Jurgis

That's a nice post. I can offer couple thoughts from myself: - When I bought most of my FRFHF position (throughout this year), I was mostly looking at past results. I did not spend much time thinking about their current business/holdings/etc. Now I know more, which is both blessing and a curse. ;) - I can't say if I would have bought FRFHF in 2012-2014. Part of the reason I bought it this year is that market is expensive and FRFHF is cheap(ish). If a lot of attractive companies dropped a lot and Fairfax stayed at current price, I'd probably switch. - As I mentioned before, based on various reasons, my FRFHF allocation is currently higher than BRK. Looking at both companies and their prices and their holdings, I think that this might be misallocation. If all things were equal, I'd strongly prefer BRK. (Things are not equal: Buffett's age is a factor and BRK size is a factor). So for me personally, I might decide to rebalance. This does not mean that Fairfax is a bad investment. - With all this said, it's tough to predict the future. How many here predicted the huge MKL outperformance vs BRK and FRFHF this year? At the beginning of the year I wouldn't have picked MKL out of these three. And yet so far it performed best. There are definitely scenarios in which Fairfax performs best going forward. Anyway, this is just purely based on my current situation and thoughts. Peace.

IBM is not See's candies. It's not even a cableco like utility. If it doesn't grow, it will not stay flat, it will shrink and it will start losing money at some point. Ginny Rometty realizes this more than the people on this thread. That's why she's trying to grow analytics and security and some other buzzwords. Whether she's gonna be successful is another question. It's a business where you have to innovate to stay in place and you have to innovate squared to get ahead. She wasn't joking when she said that every company is a competitor of IBM. Sure, IBM has some very strong assets and some moats, so it can compete in some areas from a position of strength. But it's not gonna be a walk in the park. And it's not gonna be See's candies. (BTW, the stock is somewhat cheap, so it might work out OK. But if it does, the reason is unlikely to be no-growth-and-share-buybacks).

It is concerning that investors have to rely on crash/recession/deflation/doomsday scenarios to make the case for FFH. I hold a somewhat large position in FFH, but I need to reevaluate if it's not better to rebalance to BRK.

I think it's a fallacy that every time someone talks about declining revenues at IBM, IBM bulls respond with the strawman argument that IBM does not seek growth at all costs. And they are somehow very self satisfied with this argument as if it explains how successful shareholder friendly companies operate. Nobody asks IBM to seek growth at all costs. However, apart from cigar butt stocks, every single company that has been successful long term has done so by growing revenues and profits. To argue against revenue growth is to argue for a subpar returns at best if we take long term view. Please show me a single company that has been successful long term (not for couple of years) by not growing revenues.

The bold part sounds nice, but doesn't the italic part contradict the bold part? I.e. if you have a group "discussion" (read: argument), the fundamental premise of argumentative theory starts playing a role: your goal is to win the argument, not to reach the correct solution. The group as a whole may or may not reach the correct solution. But it seems very likely that the participants of the argument are more likely to dig in and try to persuade others of their POW rather than change it because of the discussion. (There's numerous examples of that in this forum too ;)). I wonder if responses to this post will be a meta example of the point above.

My impression of Rometty remains similar to before. On one hand, she seems to be shareholder friendly through financial engineering: divestitures, buybacks, concentrating on high margin products. And she is right when she says that some of this is underappreciated. But then she goes off into business vision and it becomes a business suit buzzword stream: "platform" (repeated over 100 times I think), "cloud", "services", "analytics", etc. They bought Weather company, cause weather impacts like everything. :o And somehow Weather company is a platform for Internet of things. ::) And Watson is a platform too. 8) Look I really love Watson and I wish them a lot of success. But to think that IBM has a patent on machine learning systems or analytics is naive. Of course her job is to sell the "uniqueness" of IBMs solutions. ;) I am still not convinced that IBM is going to do well in the future. IMHO, it's going to be a fight and a slog. Though they are clearly in a stronger position than HP enterprise or Dell.

Why? This is the interesting bit that I would like to discuss to learn more about ourselves. I pulled partial trigger at C$0.67 I wanted to put more, that would have been like an additional four times the previous partial trigger at C$0.67. I wanted to have the dry powder and I wanted to avoid having none. Was I scared? Did that play a thing and I am thinking is because of the dry powder? No. I wanted to show a discipline to myself. The very same reason I am sitting with this and havent sold anything yet. When PWE was at $.48, pretty much all oil cos were in freefall and I had to balance between choosing what to buy, keeping some powder dry, and keeping myself from being scared shitless. ;) There's always coulda-shoulda with bottoms. Very few people buy significant positions close to exact bottoms. Have fun.

Since you're not US based, I don't think the TPOU.L/PSH.AS status for US investors is relevant to you. Short story: it's complicated. :) "cos" == "companies". Sorry for shortening. "too hard pile for me" - too hard for me to analyze the valuation and the company, so I don't have position and don't plan to have one. Take care.

This is not a bad idea and not a bad selection. Whether you will outperform market (which market? US? ;) ) and index (which index? SP500? ;) ), is a 64K$ question. I hold a bunch of names you mentioned. I do try to value them and buy/sell accordingly. Although I can't say my weightings reflect the relative values well. E.g. I don't think MKL is cheap right now. (Some of these comments depend on the country you're in, so... this is USA centric). I don't hold TPOU.L - Third Point Offshore - I am not sure Dan Loeb is a great investor. TPOU might be better than TPRE as you say. Not sure if US investors can hold TPOU.L IEP - Icahn Enterprises - Don't want to deal with K1 reporting BAM - Brookfield Asset Management - same? I don't remember if BAM is LP and does K1's. Also I am a bit skeptical about RE cos, even the ones with distinguished pedigree as BAM. HHC - Howard Hughes - too hard pile for me. I hold some LMCA+a-lot-more-Malone-cos and FRMO. IMO, FRMO is overpriced. I would not buy it here. I also have some CKI.TO/CLKFF. Not sure if it's gonna perform great decade+ though. Edit: currently I have been buying BRK pretty much. Might add a bit to Liberties, but out of all this list BRK is still most attractive IMO. I may change my mind at any time though. 8)

So you believe that WFC is currently overvalued???? :o

Pretty nice transcript. If FRMO was trading way lower, it could perhaps be a good cash substitute - like someone said about BRK. I think people ask questions about cash and the stock is going nowhere (down) because there is a gap between stock valuation and FRMO holding a lot of cash.

Never got rights with ADR...

This is completely incorrect explanation. R&D yields low return not because "valuable time of extremely smart people is being directed towards the development of something which people do not value very much" but because finding drugs that work and are safe is extremely difficult. It is possible to spend hundreds of millions of $ and tens/hundreds of person years on a promising direction that could yield a highly needed drug and yet have negative results. ::) I think you just like to argue. The drug isn't valued much compared to the value that was spent in the creation of it. Just what exactly do you think a bad return on investment means? You did not even bother to read what I wrote. Good luck

This is completely incorrect explanation. R&D yields low return not because "valuable time of extremely smart people is being directed towards the development of something which people do not value very much" but because finding drugs that work and are safe is extremely difficult. It is possible to spend hundreds of millions of $ and tens/hundreds of person years on a promising direction that could yield a highly needed drug and yet have negative results.

Lessons learned: - Sizing is paramount. Not more than 1-2% of portfolio. - Management communication not to be trusted. 8K and proxy pointed towards easy passage, success, etc. - Communication with management helps (thanks Packer for Friday update), but only to the point. See bullet above. - Consider opportunities for exit or cutting the position. Friday was such opportunity. Monday was too though at loss. - Hard deadlines are very bad. A lot of bankrupt companies continue trading after BK, so you can exit, sometimes without a big loss (sometimes with a big loss). With ROIQW, the warrants are halted and you can't exit at all, except at $0. - SPAC tendency to not pass deals has to be weighed accordingly.

Well........ Don't forget that Charlie Munger lost 30% per year back to back in the 70's. He still turned out to be a great investor. :) OT: so how do you decide if the Mr. Hedge Fund Manager is going to be next Munger or next Failure? Of course, everyone underperforming compares themselves to Munger and Buffett (see Mr. Big's letter to the clients). But how do you decide whether to believe them? Also see the Third Avenue/Marty Whitman bashing thread in General. It seems all rather emotional and like/dislike based. "Einhorn is cool dude, so he's gonna be next Munger even if he's underperforming, but Whitman is a has been who has no clue" (actually Whitman is has-been since he mostly retired from his funds and so the blame for underperformance goes to his crappy successors, but ...). This year will be tough again to Einhorn, Loeb (I think), Ackman, Stahl/Bregman, possibly Sequoia (if VRX does not recover), etc. Might be tough to BRK, FFH too. So these questions are quite pertinent.

This has been obvious for a long time now.

Not more generous than other credit cards. Fido Amex is 2% cash back, but Citi has that too. Don't know about travel rewards since I don't use them, but AFAIK Money magazine suggests other cards for travel too (and AFAIK they are pretty good in selecting the best cards).

Filed today: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1581607/000114420415060479/v422673_8k.htm http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1581607/000114420415060480/v422673_8k.htm

Right. I mentioned before that for me Amex does not mean prestige. Actually more like "does this place accept it at all" feeling. Also, IIUC, some of the perks and service are not provided by Amex on cobranded cards. This might be benefit to Amex (reduces their expenses), but it also means that the glowing reviews like yours and Spekulatius' will be mixed with "I have Amex and the service sucked". E.g. I'm not even sure that extended warranty is there for cobranded card. Same with rental auto insurance.

Back testing is notoriously difficult to do correctly. Best chance is to work with someone who did it correctly in the past (either academically or professionally). Otherwise, you can do it yourself and then try to get peer review/feedback, but that could waste a lot of effort. Sorry can't help you more, good luck

I think you are mostly preaching to the choir here. The only interesting question is who's selling at $.4X prices this week? Stupid money? Smart money who knows what info? Edit: I could also argue that the fact of no news after Wednesday means that redemption requests are not derailing the deal. Otherwise, ROIQ might have delayed the vote again. But this might be wrong interpretation and wishful thinking. ;)

"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" ;)

This is what happens by default according to Fido. I am pretty sure you can't elect for warrant to survive. You will get cash + 0.05 share if you buy today and deal goes through. However, call your broker. IANYB. 8)

This is what happens by default according to Fido.