Partner24

Neither me Crip, but anyway it's good news. Cheers!

I'll not talk about if Berkshire should pay a dividend or not, but you ask a good question. Well, if he consider it to be a good measurement stick enough to write it in the Owner's Manual, I 'm sure he believes that it is useful to use it. And if not, it would be silly to do that and Buffett is VERY FAR from being silly. It would be like to write yourself a norm that say "If I don't run 100 meters in 11 seconds, I'll have to stop eating hamburgers" and then, when you get 13 seconds, say "Well, that norm was bull**** and I'll keep eating hamburgers" It would be a relevant question to ask at the next AGM or for a student to do so in one of the Buffett meeting.

Experience is learning from your mistakes. Yes! There is people who make a lot of mistakes, but don't realize they made some or don't remember them. So, I guess that some people have more experience after 5 years of investing than some have after 20 years of investing. But I would add this. Experience is: - be able to be candid enough with yourself and be able to realize that you were wrong (not the market, the managers, the economy, etc. but you). - identify as clearly as possible what went wrong with you (the mistake) - memorize it next time you buy or sell something and... - learn from mistakes of others too! It's a very cheap way to gain experience ;) I'll call this "deep value experience gathering". Ah! :)

Well, I've been saying that since 4 years now... I hope that you're right! My family would be happy ;D

That's small change ;-)

I like this kind of mental exercice. Thank you for posting it. I'll begin to plunge and answer your question very partially (I may be wrong) I have one chance out of three to win each time I play (1 chance to win, 1 chance to breakeven, 1 chance to lose). The odds that I will win every 5 games (5.0.0) are 0,4%, quite small. If I have to bet 100$ for each tournament and the person who get (5,0,0) win a 30000$ sum from the house, the odds are slightly in my favor and the house will goes bankrupt over time. I'll check this out for answering your question fully. Cheers!

Ahah good analogy Crip.

Interesting analysis of bubbles and why Wall Street model doesn't work to prevent and avoid them, and will very likely not in the future neither. Thanks to David for the link. Cheers! http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/12/why-wall-street-always-blows-it

Here are the results. - 54 voters (none have sent me email to vote for less than zero). - Highest votes for a given range: 16-20% - Mean: 17,3% Thank you for voting! Cheers!

BAM is an interesting diversified conglomerate. It's jockey is doing a very decent job. But it has one anchor : it's size. It's not as large as Berkshire, but it's significant. If I would like to own a conglomerate in this "big size" category, what would I prefer to own over the long term? Berkshire or Brookfield? To me, the choice is easy to make. Just my opinion.

Good question Viking. There is risk and there is the pricing of risk. Two years ago, market was underpricing risk. Now, market is overpricing risk. Maybe not in all cases, but in the case of munis backed by Berkshire, they did get a juicy return at a low fundamental risk. I mean, it's even safer than if they bought Berkshire bonds directly because they are not the first payers. Who would have tought that you would get this for an approximately 9% before tax yield equivalent? In the case of several canadian companies investments, that's a very different story. In the case of most of their largest US equities, these are mostly fundamentaly strong companies at intrinsicaly cheap prices. Can all of these investments go lower in value over a short to medium of time? Absolutely. Still, are most of these investments are fundamentaly a good deal? Ultimately time will be the final judge, but I'm optimistic that 5 to 10 years from now, we'll take a look at what Fairfax has done since the fall of 2008 and conclude that it was brillant. But......only time will tell.

Interesting comments from Prem. Thank you very much Omagh.

Happy birthday Sanjeev and thanks for the good work.

how come there is no negative? Oopss. I tought that I had only 5 options available. :-[ But if someone think that it would be less than zero, please email me to "post" your vote and I will keep your name confidential. I will adjust the final results with these votes. Cheers!

Please don't try to be overconservative, just the most likely range of return that you truly think. Also, keep in mind that this poll is anonymous. The results will be shown in 5 days. Cheers!

I have a suggestion. Why not try to offer the board members the opportunity to donate voluntarely until we cover the costs (hosting, URL, etc.) of operating this site? I think Wikipedia use that way to finance itself. We could post a barometer with the goal (500$) and the funds raised to date. Just a suggestion.

I wish I had invented this humoristic tool, but I think I first saw it used in an investor presentation (a Sanjeev one?). Anyway, that's a good idea to use it if you want to lunch a new reinsurance analyst service. It's worth as much as predicting the short term stock price of a given stock. Oh wait, maybe I'm overestimating the power of stock price predictions here so it would actually give you a hedge ;) Cheers!

Ahaha Crip same for me with what's happened with the Canadiens this season.

Well, guys, at this point the best thing to do would be to put a popcorn bag in the microwave, open a beer and watch The Weather Channel. ;) And to entertain us between the tv ads, I have found this terrific tool that some of us have already seen to help us forecast what will happen with ORH stock this year :o http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8NP85xJ2nMc/SOMX0-Kr1AI/AAAAAAAABLs/Bt4u0umLSn8/s320/weather+forecasting+stone.bmp Cheers!

This board has so much collective wisdom, especially if you compare it with Yahoo Finance and some stuff like that. I appreciate it very much. I appreciate the toughts that you shared with me. They are inspiring. I've been on the board of this organization for 2 years and worked with the principal officer on several projects. Nobody's perfect (myself very included), but overall I was satisfied with her job. She has energy, she learned to work with a lot of different people, she is open to suggestions and she care about the organization. But yes, sometimes she don't give enough credits to other people and organizations (not because of bad faith and because she want to claim everything for herself, it's just because she forgive to do so I guess). That's not a big problem after all. Buffett sometimes speak about the importance to have an inner scorecard. It's easier to build great things when your scorecard is inside of you than when it's in the eyes of the others (but that being said, it doesn't hurt to have some positive feedback sometimes). My inner scorecard tell me that I do a decent job there that will bear it's fruits (when I'll see the smiles on the faces of my fellow community members of all ages). Them having fun is what is mostly important. Our community told us by a poll that they were missing the good old times when they had get together happenings like that. They are collectively proud of where they live. Now they will have one and it's gonna be free. Maybe this happening will come back year after year and some people will have a little bit more joy two days per year, year after year. That's my main dividend. And Prem's motto is very true. Thank you very, very much for your wisdom, your counsel and your kind words. It appreciate it a lot! Cheers!

This is a topic not related to investments directly, but since I think that a lot Fairfax and Berkshire shareholders share some values that I have, I would like to have your opinion of a situation that I had recently, especially the ones that I've known here for some time. Please keep this confidential. It is important to me. I do care about serving my small community and try to do my best to put my ego out of it (pictures in the newspapers, etc.) and I am implied on some boards and specific projects, sometimes unfortunately a little bit at the expense of my family (that has changed recently since I reduced the amount of work). One of these projects is a community happening that will last 2 days this summer. We'll have a lot of family activities. Everything will be free. It was first my idea to start that and to be open to include other partners in the project and I do some work on specific activities on it as well as serving as an adviser at the board of that project. We had a press conference to announce it, but I had too much work on my desk to be there. But I knew that some others people was there to do that, so it didn't create any problem at all. Fact is, the principal officer of the non for profit organization that handle it did mention the names of every single person that was involved in that project, except mine. And when I left the board of that no for profit organization several months ago (I'm still active, but not as a director), the principal executive did forgive to say "Thank you" at the AGM for all the time and efforts I gave to my task. I frankly think that I have done a good job as a director and a organizer for the activity that I've talked about. I frankly don't think she didn't mention my name twice because of bad faith. I try to put my ego aside when I do something, but when it happen twice like that, I feel that I don't get any gratitude for all the free time and efforts. It's a little bit annoying, even if frankly I do it primarely for the benefit of my community. I will still do all the tasks that I have to do for this happening and fully. I do not want to complain to anybody in my community about that (and I will not) and that's one of the reasons why I'm talking about that here. I would want to know how would you feel in a situation like that and what would you do. Sincerely, Partner

When FFH announced their munis backed by Berkshire buying and the before taxes equivalent rate they got on them, I tought it was absolutely brillant and was delighted. My father is very busy, so I try to not bother him with his holdings news, but I was so much delighted that I came with a smile on my face at his office room to announce him the news. These munis could be down in value today, it wouldn't change my tought. It was fundamentaly a very winning risk/reward combination. That being said, your charts are very impressives. What a so much short period of time can do is mind blowing. We live in crazy times! Thanks for sharing them! Cheers!

The better quote that I found on diversification and focus so far is one from Buffett. Here it is: "Focus investing creates wealth. Diversification protect wealth". It's actually more complex than that, but it's a pretty good summary. Small business owners have overall far more chance of failure than if you have a diversified portfolio of very solid companies like MSFT, BRK, etc., but when they build from scratch a small business that his succesful over time, the return on their investment can simply be mouth watering. Something you could not dream of with Berkshire and Microsoft at their present size. Regarding focus investing in stocks, I say when you've fund a given investment that has very strong odds of sucesss and a decently small chance of failure, a fat pitch if you prefer, then a good thing to do is to slam big.

What a nice dilemma it would be to decide what do to with FFH if it was trading at 2,5 X book value... ;) I guess I would then sell a part of my FFH shares, but maybe not all of them. I find it very hard to put my money in businesses where I have as much trust and confidence about it's long term prospects and it's people than FFH. There is some, but not very much. If my other holdings were also too much expensive, I guess I would try to find somewhere else to put my money, but I could also just sit on cash and wait for a good price before buying them again. It's no fun to sit on cash, but it's better than make stupid investment decisions. That being said, suffice it to say that this is actually a very theorical discussion. Cheers!

While Markel usually don't get a lot of attention, gurufocus spent some time recently on Markel and posted likn some other notes and recent interviews with Tom Gayner: http://www.gurufocus.com/news.php?id=56841 http://www.gurufocus.com/news.php?id=57240 http://www.gurufocus.com/news.php?id=57284