Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Inside Wall Street's Black Hole by Michael Lewis

In my opinion, one should just file Black-Scholes in the same category as the Efficient Market Hypothesis/Theory, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), Beta, etc. That category, to borrow a term from Charlie Munger, should be labeled TWADDLE. But let's hope 99+% of colleges/universities continue to teach them so that value investors can have some limit to competition.
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Oddly, this failure of financial theory didn't lead Wall Street to question Black-Scholes in general. "If you try to attack it," says one longtime trader of abstruse financial options, "you're making a case for your own unintelligence." The math was too advanced, the theorists too smart; the debate, for anyone without a degree in mathematics, was bound to end badly. But after the crash of 1987, individual traders at big Wall Street firms who sold financial-disaster insurance must have smelled a rat. Across markets—in stocks, currencies, and bonds—the price of insuring yourself against financial disaster rose. This rise in prices and the break with Black-Scholes reflected two new beliefs: one, that huge price jumps were more probable and likely to be more extreme than the Black-Scholes model assumed; and two, that you can't manufacture an option on the stock market by selling and buying the market itself, because that market will never allow it. When you most need to sell—or to buy—is exactly when everyone else is selling or buying, in effect canceling out any advantage you once might have had.
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 This is interesting: The very theory underlying all insurance against financial panic falls apart in the face of an actual panic. A few smart traders may have abandoned the theory, but the market itself hasn't; in fact, its influence has mushroomed in the most fantastic ways. At the end of 2006, according to the Bank for International Settlements, there were $415 trillion in derivatives—that is, $415 trillion in securities for which there is no completely satisfactory pricing model. Added to this are trillions more in exchange-traded options, employee stock options, mortgage bonds, and God knows what else—most of which, presumably, are still priced using some version of Black-Scholes. Investors need to believe that there's a rational price for what they buy, even if it requires a leap of faith. "The model created markets," Seo says. "Markets follow models. So these markets spring up, and the people in them figure out that, at least for some of it, Black-Scholes doesn't work. For certain kinds of risk—the risk of rare, extreme events—the model is not just wrong. It's very wrong. But the only reason these markets sprang up in the first place was the supposition that Black-Scholes could price these things fairly."
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One of the revolt's leaders is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness and a former trader of currency options for a big French bank. Taleb can precisely date the origin of his own personal gripe with Black-Scholes: September 22, 1985. On that day, central bankers from Japan, France, Germany, Britain, and the United States announced their intention to torpedo the U.S. dollar—to reduce its value in relation to the other countries' currencies. Every day, Taleb received a list of his trading positions from his firm and a matrix describing his risks. The matrix told him how much money he stood to make or lose, given various currency fluctuations. That September 22, when the central bankers announced their plan to lower the dollar's value, he made money but didn't know it. "I didn't know what my position was," he says, "because the movement was outside the matrix they'd given me." The French bank's risk-analysis program assumed that a currency crash of this magnitude would occur once in several million years and therefore wasn't worth considering.
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Taleb made a killing that day, but it wasn't thanks to a grand plan and it wasn't happy money. "People in dark suits started coming from Paris," he says. "They said that the only way I could have made that much was to have taken far too much risk." But he hadn't. They had simply failed to account for the true nature of risk in financial markets. "Then I started looking at the history of markets," he says. "And I saw that these sorts of things happened all the time." Taleb became obsessed with the way prices in the options market, based on the famous Black-Scholes model, underestimated the risk of extreme and rare events. He set up his trading to profit from such events by buying up disaster insurance that would, according to Black-Scholes, be considered overpriced. When October 19, 1987, arrived, he was prepared. "Ninety-seven percent of all the returns I ever made as a trader, I made on that day," he says.
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Books:
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The psychology of the housing mess - By Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

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Monday, April 28, 2008

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Major Takeaways from a Visit with Warren Buffett

Some notes from University of Western Ontario students' visit with Mr. Buffett on March 31, 2008. The source and a PDF file of these notes can be found HERE.


Life Learning Lessons

1. Using the concept of buying or shorting 10% of one of your friends to identify the things that make people successful in life. You want to add more of the characteristics that make your friends more valuable and remove those characteristics that are devaluing. It’s never too late to change.

2. Being humble gains respect. Check your ego at the door.

3. Try to live within your means.

4. Be loyal to your friends and expect loyalty in return.

5. Be reasonable with your view towards social responsibility. Berkshire would never buy a tobacco company; however, they will invest in retailers that sell tobacco.

6. Being an inherent optimist is a key trait to success.

7. When I asked how he balanced his passion for investing with his commitments to his wife and family, he said “never have contracts with your family” meaning that no silly rules or formal routines are necessary if true happiness is involved.

8. A good business partnership evolves into something intuitive over time, when it’s based on the proper balance of trust, humour, accuracy, and friendship

9. Formula for happiness: kids that love you, a job you jump out of bed for and working with people you enjoy being around.

10. Most important choice in life is one’s spouse.

11. Do what you’re best at and then give the fruits of your labour to people who are best at humanitarian work. Don’t muddy the waters with inefficient capital or resources.

12. Do what you love, not for the money, do it because it’s in your heart.

Market Specific Recommendations

1. The 19th century belonged to England, the 20th century belonged to the US and the 21st century belongs to China. Invest accordingly.

2. Have a long term view. Short term events are a good source of experience and learning points, but stick with the end goal and don’t be rattled.

3. Use volatility to your advantage.

4. Buy healthcare stocks in a basket to diversify risks since it is very difficult to decipher which company’s pipeline is most optimal.

5. Vices are a good business because they are human nature.

6. Financial institutions should, in general have more regulations.

7. Markets are not efficient.

8. Read as many annual reports as possible per year without knowing the stock price. Try to value the stock independently of knowing its valuation.

9. Buffett reads “Value Line” (http://www.valueline.com/) to source his information on investing.

10. Highly recommends Katherine Graham’s Autobiography

Quotes

1. “Look to be turned on everyday in life. Doing something solely to build your resume is like saving up sex for your old age.”

2. “Happiness is tap dancing to work every day.”

3. "Wealth allows you to be meaner."

4. "It's hard for a man not to be happy when he comes home to happy family and home."

5. "Surround yourself by people who love you and will support you in life. This support system is integral to happiness."

6. "I do what I do because I love to do it, not because I need the money. It's fun and I surround myself with people I enjoy seeing everyday"

7. “Success begets success and it starts from the inside and flow out.”

8. “Brilliance is the ability to simplify a mass amount of information in to a simple yes/no decision.”

9. "There are many very wealthy people (other billionaires) in this world and they are very unhappy. Money does not buy happiness."

10. "If you ever want to find me on line playing bridge, look for TBONE, that's my name."

11. “Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.”

12. “Giving unconditional love is the best thing you can do. When you give it out you get it back 2x, you can’t get rid of it.”

Monday, April 21, 2008

Giverny Capital – 2007 Letter to Partners

Looking Up to Warren Buffett

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About the only thing slick about this 43-year-old investor is his market-trouncing track record — annualized returns of nearly 25% since he set up shop in 1999, enough to earn him a growing cult following. His "secret"? Probably the most documented investment strategy around — a bare-bones, Warren Buffett style of stock picking. While that description may inspire yawns — sometimes it seems like everybody claims to be a Buffett disciple — Pabrai takes it to an extreme. His office houses an impressive Buffett mini-museum: a wall covered with photos and articles he's amassed over the years. He recently dropped a stunning $650,100 at a charity auction for the privilege of just one lunch with the Berkshire Hathaway guru. Even his minimalist approach to e-mail mirrors the Buffett philosophy of avoiding distractions. And his track record is more than Warren-worthy: A $100,000 investment in his flagship Pabrai Investment Fund 2 in June 2001 would have been worth $465,200 at the end of 2007; the same amount invested in the Dow, only $145,500.
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Friday, April 18, 2008

Amazon.com's 2007 Letter to Shareholders - Jeff Bezos

We humans co-evolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us. Writing, invented thousands of years ago, is a grand whopper of a tool, and I have no doubt that it changed us dramatically. Five hundred years ago, Gutenberg’s invention led to a significant step-change in the cost of books. Physical books ushered in a new way of collaborating and learning. Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans. I value my BlackBerry—I’m convinced it makes me more productive—but I don’t want to read a three-hundred-page document on it. Nor do I want to read something hundreds of pages long on my desktop computer or my laptop. As I’ve already mentioned in this letter, people do more of what’s convenient and friction-free. If our tools make information snacking easier, we’ll shift more toward information snacking and away from long-form reading. Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools. I realize my tone here tends toward the missionary, and I can assure you it’s heartfelt. It’s also not unique to me but is shared by a large group of folks here. I’m glad about that because missionaries build better products. I’ll also point out that, while I’m convinced books are on the verge of being improved upon, Amazon has no sinecure as that agent. It will happen, but if we don’t execute well, it will be done by others.
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Related previous post: Put Buyers First? What a Concept
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Thursday, April 17, 2008

Leucadia 2007 Letter to Shareholders

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Even people living in the jungle eking out a subsistence living were watching television and vicariously experiencing the abundance of the Northern Hemisphere. Governments in every part of the world have responded to the rising expectations of their populations. China, despite being a dictatorship, has devised ways for its population to raise its standard of living by becoming the low cost manufacturing center of the world. India has followed a slightly different path, but there too living standards are rising at a dramatic rate. These two countries alone account for one-third of the earth’s population and adding in the rest of Asia over half. The demand generated by the growth of Asia accounts for the dramatic increase in commodity prices that we are all experiencing and reading about in the newspapers.
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Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Whitney Tilson: Let the herd stampede first before making your move

Take financial talking-heads with a grain of salt - By Mark Sellers

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And a note to Mark Sellers, since the above links to the last article he'll be writing for the Financial Times, thank you for your rational thoughts and all the best!

Monday, April 14, 2008

What Warren thinks...

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In the above article, it mentions that Mr. Buffett told students, in response to the question on how he gets his ideas, "I just read. I read all day." Along similar lines, take note of the quote from Charlie Munger:
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"In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time -- none, zero... You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads -- at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out."
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And the Mark Twain quote:
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“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
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So, if you're looking for something good to read, START HERE.

CEO Interview: Costco's James Sinegal

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One of the best bargains Costco offers is the CEO himself. Though the stock is up 15% in the past year, his salary has remained at $350,000 with a maximum $200,000 bonus, putting him near the bottom of most corporate-salary surveys. At a time when investment-bank CEOs are resigning with huge payouts, this sort of frugality is refreshing. But instead of finding the charm in a thrifty CEO who's content to shove six Formica tables together in the conference room, many analysts have pleaded with him to cut costs elsewhere. Take salaries: Costco's average hourly pay, $18.15, is 68% more than the average pay at Wal-Mart. What's more, "he could raise prices a negligible amount and the stock would go through the roof," says Deutsche Bank analyst William Dreher. That advice falls on deaf ears. "That's where it starts, and before you know it, you've got Sears," whose decades-long decline is an American tragedy, in Sinegal's view.
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Friday, April 11, 2008

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Crossing the Rubicon - Bob Rodriguez, FPA

These past two weeks have been extraordinary in that the Federal Reserve has had to take actions that have not been used since the Great Depression and a few that heretofore have never been used. There have been several crises in the capital markets that lead us to comment on what they appear to mean. During the last year, we have conveyed a growing concern, through several prior commentaries, as to the dangers and implications of an absence of fear toward various types of increasing risks in our financial system. We believe the culmination of these risks forced the Federal Reserve to take the recent extraordinary actions of creating two new lending facilities for primary dealers and facilitating a merger of Bear Stearns with JPMorganChase to prevent a liquidity and solvency crisis from potentially toppling the U.S. capital markets. The partners of First Pacific Advisors, LLC (FPA) discussed these events on March 21 and came to several conclusions about what the long-term implications of these actions might be and we will share them with you in this commentary. Fortunately, over the last two years, our preparations for potential financial market disruptions have meant that FPA and most of our product areas have essentially avoided the calamitous effects of this credit crisis.
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In an earlier era, Bear Stearns would have been left to fail. This is not the case today since there was apparently a deep fear on the part of the Fed that a failure of Bear Stearns could create a domino-like crisis infecting a wide array of financial institutions, thereby accelerating and deepening the current credit contagion. As Steven Romick said in our FPA partner meeting on March 21, “I’m more concerned about what I don’t see. Why is it that we are not being told about or seeing another bidder for Bear Stearns other than JPMorganChase? Might JPMorganChase be playing defense so as to protect its $91.7 trillion dollar derivative exposure (according to September 2007 Office of the Comptroller of the Currency data) that is supported by just $123 billion of equity? How much counter party exposure did JPMorganChase have to Bear Stearns?” In our opinion, the Bear Stearns transaction looks very suspicious. If the situation were so precarious, why shouldn’t shareholder ownership have been entirely wiped out because of the excesses and mismanagement by their firm? Why should the Fed’s balance sheet be placed at risk while shareholders are receiving some type of compensation? A week later, the bid was raised from $2 to $10 per share, increasing the value conveyed by approximately $1 billion. Again, why should there be any compensation to shareholders? This compensation is being conveyed to owners of a firm that had derivative positions, with notional amounts as of November 30, 2007, totaling $13.4 trillion. Warren Buffett has, on several occasions, described derivatives as potential “weapons of mass destruction.” Apparently, the collapse of Bear Stearns might have triggered a financial market nuclear meltdown and this potential outcome forced the Fed to intervene.
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In light of the above comments, the partners of FPA came to a unanimous conclusion that the recent Federal Reserve actions and the potential new Congressional policies under consideration are likely to lead to a significantly higher level of long-term inflation in the U.S. We are more than disappointed in the substandard decision making that has taken place within the Federal Reserve and other governmental entities these last several years. The misguided monetary policies of the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, created an era of “too big to fail” that has led to two major asset bubbles. With each successive bubble, the policy actions available to the Federal Reserve to reduce financial system risk have been systematically reduced. The extraordinary actions taken by the Bernanke Federal Reserve reflect acts of desperation rather than long-term policy solutions. The rapidly changing events within the capital markets are forcing the Fed to adopt policies that have the potential of long-term negative consequences. These recent events, and their fundamental changes to the U.S. financial system, are forcing the leaders of FPA’s product areas to reassess their present portfolio allocations. In essence, we believe we have “Crossed the Rubicon” into a new financial era.
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Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Fooled by a Percentage Into Catching Falling Knife! - by Sanjay Bakshi

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