Liberty

My natural inclination is to avoid these types of conflicts. But if I try to be rational about the situation, I gotta recognize that from a game theory perpective, things are better when there are consequences to getting caught promoting something that is probably a scam, or at least not as good a deal as you made it sound (it's a well-known cognitive bias that being paid by someone to "review" their stuff clouds judgement -- we should all know better and not pretend to be immune). He probably did it in good faith, but the public opprobrium will make him and others think twice next time about taking money to promote a penny stock and increase the chances of more due diligence being done. Otherwise, if there are no consequences to something like this, the good names of people can be bought more easily and the signal-to-noise ratio gets worse. So as much as I find threads like this uncomfortable, it's probably better than a world where, say, Parsad gets paid to created "sponsored threads" on his site and after one of his recommendations crashes by 95% and is revealed as probably a pumped up scam, everybody goes "oh well, it said 'sponsored' and he did it to make money for his family, so it's ok". Some will say: "But that is common! Most analysts are paid by organizations with conflicts of interests and there are tons of stock pumpers out there! Everybody should alway do their due diligence and never trust anything any one says!". Maybe, but something being common doesn't make it right, and since due diligence can't always mean rediscovering the atom, you have to end up trusting certain sources at some point, so weeding out untrustworthy sources publicly is a service that reinforces the whole system. And at least analysts always publish as analysts, while web-publishers can wear two hats and make things a bit fuzzier. My 2 cents Canadian.

I haven't read this piece yet, but it seems interesting: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer

Sorry if I sounded defensive, but I had just written "I'm confident in management" in another thread and I saw it here, so I wasn't sure if it was directed at me. Cheers.

I think this is a crack at something I wrote recently, which is strange when you consider that people like Buffett, Munger, Watsa, etc.. Constantly talk about how important management is and how their confidence in the management of many of their investments is one of the most important elements to their analysis. Personally, if I don't feel confident in management's abilities after a lot of due diligence, I won't invest even if the "tangible" numbers look good. To each their own I guess..

I don't know so I'm just speculating here, but afaik De La Rue is both a security papermaker and a printer, so their prices are not directly comparable to Landquart. It's also possible that Landquart's recent production mix was lighter on banknote and heavier on other security papers (visa papers, etc)..? It's possible that the rev/ton numbers could look completely different with another mix. At this point I'm waiting to see what happens with LQ. Too hard to predict. But I have confidence that management will do what's best for shareholders.

Thanks for that, I hadn't seen him in action! I think it is further evidence for my point above: He was the best in the world at fixed push hands and co-winner in the moving category (because the judges were corrupted, but that's another story), yet it looks nothing like the "old men making students fly around or fall down"* videos that you can find on youtube. Totally different. More like a kind of very technical wrestling that follows the laws of physics :) * Here's the top result that I saw on youtube. I bet that kind of stuff has been debunked numerous times (ie. it works on the students of that old master, but ask a random guy who knows nothing about the old man to fight him and things suddenly won't be as 'mystical-looking', though I bet he can still fight conventionally too). In fact, I vaguely remember seeing a video debunking that kind of stuff years ago, but I don't remember enough about it to find it on google.

A few microsoft items that I saw and that might interest some here: http://allthingsd.com/20120702/microsoft-writing-off-nearly-all-of-the-6-3-billion-it-paid-for-aquantive/ http://mashable.com/2012/07/02/microsoft-windows-phone-market-share/ http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2012/07/02/upgrade-to-windows-8-pro-for-39-99.aspx

I believe that most of these videos with an old master making students fly around without doing much are faked, or rather an interesting example of psychology and pseudo-mysticism (kind of like public hypnotism shows, which is more about finding willing partners to play along, consciously or not). That's different from actual tournaments where strangers fight. That's my understanding, anyway...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-02/berkshire-s-pederson-says-u-s-businesses-scaling-back.html

That's true. As I said, who the hell knows what is really going on? But when reading the economist, I had the impression that they had a pretty good bullshit detector, and what convinced me most are things that aren't so much dependent on official growth numbers but rather on things like total capital investment per capita, increasing internal consumption and the fact that almost all the debt in their system is local and the opposite of hot money that can easily leave (like in the previous asian crisis). Doesn't mean things can't get rough, but they seem to have lots more margin of safety than some think. But we'll see, i have no power to predict the future.

Great. I'm curious to know what you think when you are farther along. I'm on p. 118 and so far so good.

I didn't expect to like the martial arts chapters as much as I did. But his strategic approach makes it seems almost like chess. And that's kind of the point... Lots of approaches and skills are transferable.

Have you read the Economist's feature report? I didn't find it convincing because of the authority of those writing it versus the authority of the Barrons piece, but rather because of the arguments themselves. I'm also pretty sure that for special reports they often get contributions from all kinds of experts, including on the ground and in the industry they cover, and not just from their regular journalists.

For the opposite view, check out the special feature on China in a recent Economist issue. I tend to be more convinced by the Economist's position because they tend to address most - if not all - of the major points in the bear arguments, while most of the bears don't address the Economist's points and obviously aren't digging as deep. The only thing I know is that when everybody becomes bearish on a place, there are bound to be some bargains related to it (I wouldn't buy chinese stocks, but there are indirect ways). But as with all that macro stuff, who the heck really knows what will happen? I'll just keep buying good companies cheaply and hold them for a long time...

Welcome to the board, xazp. Hope you enjoy your stay :)

I think that's correct. Einstein said, among other things, " Imagination is more important than knowledge". But what we need to remember is that extremely smart people aren't always the best judges of how smart they are and how smart the average person is, and the sympathetic ones among them tend to be humble and downplay their achievements. You shouldn't always take them to their word...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/06/29/rim-apparently-not-interested-in-switching-to-windows-phone/

[amazonsearch]Hidden Champions of the 21st Century[/amazonsearch] I think this one is pretty well known already, so not much that I can add. But I thought it deserved a thread for discussion here.

[amazonsearch]Billion Dollar Lessons[/amazonsearch] Billion Dollar Mistakes sucked, but this one - despite having almost the same title - seems much better. I'm only a few dozen pages in and already it's a whole other animal. Well-written, well researched, insightful and useful to both businesspeople and investors. I can't recommend it yet because I haven't finished it, but the signs are good so far.

Wow, that truly makes them sound like a sinking ship. Reminds me of some of the MBIA conference calls that are mentioned in Confidence Game, the book about Bill Ackman's fight against that company.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/hunter-harrison-tapped-as-canadian-pacific-ceo/article4379406/

RIM has now lost 95% of its market value from its peak. I wouldn't want to be the guy who bought at the top and held all the way down thinking "it'll rebound any day now".

Interesting web site. Thanks for posting. If you want to explore it, the best way is through the Sequences: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/

There's one showing for June 12: http://canadianinsider.com/node/7?menu_tickersearch=als I would assume they still have to file even if it's a third party, since it's still for them, even if indirectly. But I don't know the specifics of those regulations. If anyone knows, I'd love to learn how this works.