Recent comments

郑博仁2008年10月21日在上海交通大学的讲座上，根据巴菲特的价值计算系统，预言中国股见底，可以买入。当时我们半信半疑，现在看来郑博仁还是看准了。价值计算是个好东西。

不知在市场大升后，你们有何新看法？

I found these value investing lecture notes insightful and well organized. Thanks for posting them here!

He is buying JNJ, KFT, WFC, DELL.
Sounds like he thinks that the crowd is too bearish.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/francis/archive/2009/02/19/fair...

During the mortgage bubble, JPMorgan Chase was pushing home equity loan and mortgages like a mad dog using thousands of their personal bankers in all the branches.

The WaMu they swallowed is even worse, granting mortgages to millions unworthy borrowers.

If Citi, BoA and even WFC are heading down like this, there is no way that JPM is going to hold up.

The myth of JPM as a strong bank is a hoax.

Shorting JPM and long WFC would be a good pair trade.

This could be the 10th time I watched this short video, yet it still drove me to tears. Thank you for posting this special video. You guys are sharing some great stuff in this forum. Go Zenway!

Seeing a three-month T-bill that involved a small amount of negative interest, Buffett joked that the mattresses sold by Nebraska Furniture Mart were a better place to put your money. Presently there is a bubble in U.S. Treasury securities. Credit spreads have gone from far too narrow a couple of years ago to far too wide today. Money can be made shorting Treasuries and going long corporate bonds, provided you can play out your hand. Excessive amounts of leverage used by hedge funds have resulted in enormous losses from sensible bets because players could not play out their hands.

Buffett told a silly joke about how tough things were in the financial sector. “I know off a Wall Street investment banker who got no bonus this year. He came home and told his wife that they’d have to really cut back. “If you could learn to cook,” he said, “we could lay off the kitchen staff.” She replied, “If you could learn how to make love, we could lay off the gardener too.””

Source:
http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=27421675&sort=postdate

“Berkshire Hathaway has made big insurance investments. Is Berkshire apt to get into health insurance in a big way?” “No,” Buffett quickly replied. He does not want to get into types of insurance where buyers may not understand what coverage they have or can expect. Harley Davidson bonds should do well. “It’s a wonderful business when your customers are willing to tattoo your name on themselves,” Buffett said.

“Will the stimulus package work?” Buffett said that monetary policy has been exhausted, and classical Keynesian fiscal policy stimulus is all that’s left. Proposed fiscal policies are much better than sitting back and doing nothing. However, the power of fiscal stimulus is limited. When FDR took over, for example, he had an unlimited ability to get things passed quickly. While the U.S. unemployment rate fell from 25 percent to 9 percent by 1939, the U.S. economy never fully recovered from the Great Depression until World War II. Today, we could have the Federal Government put everybody to work making capital equipment, or battle ships, and take them out into the ocean and sink them, but that would not be as beneficial as current plans to stimulate the production of capital goods and services that will be used over time. Still, Buffett admonished, we have to be careful. “When it comes to economic policy, you never do just one one thing at a time.”

On okbridge.com Buffett is “T-bone” while his friend Bill Gates is “Chalenger.” (With one "L") “Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard during his junior year,” Buffett said, “apparently, spelling is a senior-level course.”

This article may have contributed to the late drop in BRK late today:
http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idINN0537838620090205?rpc=44
No new insights.

This forum rocks!!! Great content. I like that fact you posted Bill Gates's original words, not the media interpretation.

Bill wrote: "If you take a longer timeframe, such as five to ten years, I am very optimistic that these problems will be behind us."

The media headline of Bill Gates predicting a 4 year downturn is perhaps an misinterpretation by Media. From the sentence above, Bill only said he is sure that over the long term things will be fine. This shows you that second-hand media headlines are often misleading.

"Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc. and Live Nation Inc. are close to a merger, people familiar with the matter said, in a deal that would consolidate two of the most powerful forces in the music industry under one roof."
....
:)
(Now, I just need Brk.B to initiate a cash buy-back)

raytoei

i agree with both of you. i share p's conviction about value investing. i share brian's point that we need to consider the flip side. munger says: revert, always revert. buffett said we need to collect and sort out conflicting information. so we argue from both sides. develop a conviction on one side, and then we can't be dogmatic, we have to continue to listen to the flip side and see if we were wrong. anyway, yin yang yin yang, thanks to my wise ancestors! debates and thought challenges make all of us wiser.

Thanks for writing down and sharing your idea! I need to do more of what you did. With the arguments written down, I can always come back 3 years down the road and analyze what the heck went wrong in my freaking mind. :)

I try to look into investment ideas one at a time. And today I did my daily quota thanks to your posting. I found the TKTM had bad earnings and cash flow in 1998 to 2001. Do you think the business dramatically improved versus the past?

Could the business be so volatile that it turn negative very soon?

If I run a show, I would sell tickets over the internet on my own. Why give TKTM a % cut? How much is TKTM's fee? What's the cost advantage to theaters? I feel I don't understand this beast. Please enlighten me.