Showing posts with label Bruce Berkowitz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bruce Berkowitz. Show all posts

Saturday, February 3, 2018

Links

Financiers, Heal Thyselves - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

Literally, the Trade of the Century ($) [H/T Matt] (LINK)

How GE Went From American Icon to Astonishing Mess (LINK)

How Warren Buffett’s New Man at Dairy Queen Plans to Keep a Classic Brand Fresh ($) (LINK)

Bruce Berkowitz's annual letter and Fairholme's annual report (LINK)

The Federal Reserve cracks down on Wells Fargo over scandal involving sham accounts (LINK)

Why Mark Zuckerberg Can’t Be Trusted to Regulate Facebook - by Niall Ferguson (LINK)
Related book: The Square and the Tower
Shane Parrish on The Investors Podcast (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Episode 139 — Amazon and Health Care (LINK)

The Best Mentors Think Like Michelangelo [H/T @profgalloway] (LINK)

The CDC Is About to Fall Off a Funding Cliff - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Links

Transcript: June 29, 2017, Fairholme Capital Management Public Conference Call [H/T Linc] (LINK)

An Interview with Famed Value Investor Guy Spier (podcast and transcript) [H/T Linc] (LINK)

NYC based venture capitalist Jerry Neumann talks with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (podcast) (LINK)

a16z Podcast: The Golden Era of Productivity, Retail, and Supply Chains (LINK)
Related books: 1) An Extraordinary Time; 2) The Great A&P; 3) The Box
Cialdini Asks: Richard Thaler (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Edge 495: Things to Hang on Your Mental Mug Tree - A Conversation With Rory Sutherland (LINK)

Sea Spiders Pump Blood With Their Guts, Not Their Hearts - by Ed Yong (LINK)

It's a Mistake to Focus Just on Animal Extinctions - by Ed Yong (LINK)

One Man's Plan to Make Sure Gene Editing Doesn't Go Haywire - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Friday, June 30, 2017

Links

"Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present." -John Kenneth Galbraith (A Short History of Financial Euphoria)

The David Rubenstein Show: Phil Knight (video) (LINK)
Related book: Shoe Dog
Small Companies Are Gone, but Should They be Forgotten? - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

Bruce Berkowitz Seeks Return to Glory by Betting on Sears ($) (LINK)

Kyle Bass spots 'tectonic shift' in US relationship with China (video) (LINK)

Adventures in Finance podcast: Murderer, Gambler, Aristocrat & Pauper. John Law, The Godfather of Central Banking (LINK)
Meet an 18th-century murderer, banker, convict, laughing stock, and the godfather of central banking, John Law. Accompanied by Dr. Ben Hunt, the Chief Investment Strategist at Salient Partners and author of the Epsilon Theory website, we explore how Law wrote the modern central banking playbook which resulted in a bubble which has reverberated through the actions of future central bankers since.
FT Alphachat podcast: Sizing up US retail (LINK)
In light of Amazon's $13.7bn Whole Foods takeover, Cardiff Garcia talks with the FT's Shannon Bond and Anna Nicolaou about the state of the US retail industry.
Exponent podcast: Episode 120 — Google, Antitrust, and Aggregation Theory (LINK)

What's Different about "Unicorns" - by Jessica Livingston (LINK) [You can also watch the video of her talk starting at the 24-minute mark HERE.]

Everyday Terror In Venezuela [H/T The Browser] (LINK)

Book of the day: Fiat Money Inflation in France

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Links

Warren Buffett’s Scout Inside Europe’s Biggest Economy ($) [H/T Matt] (LINK)
Zypora Kupferberg, the ‘eyes and ears’ of Berkshire Hathaway in Germany, could become more important as the company looks for new targets
Bruce Berkowitz on Bloomberg (full video) [H/T Will] (LINK)

Escaping the Magnetic Pull of a Bubble - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

Ten Valuable Insights on Structuring Your Fund (LINK)

Insurance as a platform [H/T @sanguit] (LINK)

The future of supply chains as networked ecosystems – by Sangeet Paul (LINK)

Patrick O’Shaughnessy talks with Andy Rachleff on the Invest Like the Best podcast (LINK)
My guest this week is Andy Rachleff, who is the CEO of the automated investing platform Wealthfront. Andy was also a co-founder and long-time partner at Benchmark Capital–one of the most interesting and successful venture capital firms in the world.
James Grant on the Hidden Forces podcast (LINK)

Evan Lorenz speaks with Demetri Kofinas of the Hidden Forces podcast (LINK)

The Mussels That Eat Oil - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Sunday, June 18, 2017

Links

Mohnish Pabrai on The Steve Pomeranz Show (podcast) (LINK) ["Inaction and patience are very important traits, but they need to be coupled with decisiveness and willingness to act in size. So it's an unusual kind of trait to have someone who's happy watching the paint dry; but then when all the ducks line up, you swing hard.... The key is if you're not convinced you're looking at a no-brainer, take a pass." -Mohnish Pabrai]

The Tortoise and the Hare in the Pursuit of Return - by Frank K. Martin (LINK)

On GE and the myth of the CEO superhero - By Roger Lowenstein (LINK)

Did the Jack Welch Model Sow Seeds of G.E.’s Decline? - by James B. Stewart [H/T @FourFilters] (LINK)

Berkowitz Says Amazon Deal Shows Value of Physical Retailing (video and article) (LINK)

The back story on John Mackey and his battle with Wall Street, which led to Whole Foods agreeing to sell itself to Amazon last week (LINK)

GreenWood Investors: The Battle For Whole Foods Isn’t Over (LINK)

Scott Galloway on the Recode Decode podcast (audio and transcript) (LINK)
[This interview was before the Amazon purchase of Whole Foods was announced.]... Everyone looks to Amazon for leadership and I’ve been predicting they were going to go into stores for five years. I can’t even really legitimately say I’m right, because they don’t have a lot of stores yet. They haven’t found a model that works for them yet. I still believe they’re going to buy a Macy’s, or a Carrefour or something like that. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t buy Whole Foods, for example, just because of the urban locations. They could close them down and just turn them into warehouses and I think they could justify the price.
The Radial Tire Lesson for Silicon Valley [H/T @trengriffin] (LINK)

How would Ann Miura-Ko have reacted if Bill Gates had walked into her office in 1975? - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Vegetable oils, (Francis) Bacon, Bing Crosby, and the American Heart Association - by Gary Taubes (LINK)

Book of the day: Speculation As a Fine Art and Thoughts on Life -  by Dickson Watts [See also: Rules of a Successful Speculator]

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Links

"Nothing is so good a protection against such misery as inward wealth, the wealth of the mind, because the greater it grows, the less room it leaves for boredom. The inexhaustible activity of thought!" -Arthur Schopenhauer (The Wisdom of Life)

“Becoming Warren Buffett,” the Man, Not the Investor - by James Surowiecki [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Fairholme Funds' 2016 Annual Report (LINK)

The Short Seller Who Crushed Valeant Has Picked His Next Target [H/T Matt] (LINK)

This is Why You Need a Process - by Ben Carlson (LINK)

Amazon is building a $1.5 billion hub for its own cargo airline (LINK)

Mobile 2.0 - by Benedict Evans (LINK)

Birds and Frogs - by Freeman Dyson (LINK)
Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs. Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time. I happen to be a frog, but many of my best friends are birds. The main theme of my talk tonight is this. Mathematics needs both birds and frogs. Mathematics is rich and beautiful because birds give it broad visions and frogs give it intricate details. Mathematics is both great art and important science, because it combines generality of concepts with depth of structures. It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they see farther, or that frogs are better than birds because they see deeper. The world of mathematics is both broad and deep, and we need birds and frogs working together to explore it.
Why Frog Tongues Are So Sticky - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Plant keeps moths captive inside its fruits for almost a year (LINK)

Monday, October 3, 2016

Links

Bruce Berkowitz on WealthTrack (video) (LINK) ["This mania for all things indexation will lead to disaster.... Indexation in general is a good idea.... But there are some assumptions there."]

Liquidity Risk Increases at Fairholme [Berkowitz touched on this a bit on the video above.] [H/T Will] (LINK)

Barron's discusses Liberty Media (LINK)

Mike Dariano discusses what he learned from reading Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger (LINK)

25iq: A Dozen Things You can Learn by Reading “The Success Equation” by Michael Mauboussin (LINK)

Horizon Kinetics -- Under the Hood: What's in Your Index? The Value of Cash (LINK)

Mutual Fund Observer, October 2016 (LINK)

The Absolute Return Letter - October 2016 (LINK)

Venture Capital: It is a pricing, not a value, game! - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Michael Hudson reviews James Galbraith's Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe (LINK)

Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny (LINK)
Is the head of Y Combinator fixing the world, or trying to take over Silicon Valley?
Question Everything You Know About Fitness - by Tim Ferriss (LINK)
Related book (December release date): Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
TED Talk - Ellen Jorgensen: What you need to know about CRISPR (LINK)

Mission accomplished: Rosetta crashes into comet (LINK)

The Cato chronicles, part IV: the clash with Cicero (LINK)

Book of the day: Edison as I know him - by Henry Ford

Monday, September 26, 2016

Links

The Chessboard Fallacy (LINK)

Latticework of Mental Models: Scarcity Bias (LINK) [Also from Vishal: Mental Models, Investing, and You (Special E-Book)]

The Fight to Keep It Simple (LINK)
Related previous post: If it's not simple, then I'm not interested...
Comments on investment philosophy - part one -- by John Hempton (LINK)

The ~30-minute CNBC video interview with Bruce Berkowitz [H/T Will] (LINK)

Why Getting Rich Quick Doesn’t Sound Crazy - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

Self-made billionaire Jim Koch says this book taught him more than Harvard did [H/T Matt] (LINK)
Related book: How to Master the Art of Selling
Peter Diamandis’s 9 Rules For Building A Successful Business (LINK)

Snapchat Releases First Hardware Product, Spectacles (LINK)

What’s the Best Safe Haven for Investors? - by Mark Spitznagel [H/T Jim] (LINK)

Hussman Weekly Market Comment: Structural Growth and Dope Dealers on Speed-Dial (LINK)
Presently, the Shiller CAPE stands at close to 26, which is already well above historical norms, and above anything seen prior to the sequential bubbles (and collapses) of recent cycles. But the CAPE only captures part of the risk, because that 10-year average of inflation-adjusted earnings actually embeds the highest profit margin in history. By accepting the CAPE at face-value, investors are quietly assuming that profit margins will remain at this level permanently. On the basis of normalized profit margins, which systematically produce a more reliable valuation measure across history, the CAPE would presently be at 36.
Richard Duncan posted the final chapter of his book The Dollar Crisis, written in December 2004, which was interesting to read nearly 12 years later (LINK) [And if you want to subscribe to Richard Duncan's Macro Watch newsletter, you should also still be able to use the coupon code 'valueinvestingworld' to get 50% off.]

Exponent podcast: Episode 089 — Move On from the 80s (LINK)

The Cato chronicles, part I: young Cato (LINK)
Related book: Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar
How To Overcome Addiction And Make Lasting Changes In Your Life [H/T @AdamMGrant] (LINK)

Monday, August 8, 2016

Links

The Latticework blog has posted some excerpts from the Boyles Q2 letter, where we discussed Brexit as well as our new Greek holding.

Mental Model: Bias from Envy and Jealousy (LINK)

The Insurance Industry Has Been Turned Upside Down by Catastrophe Bonds (LINK)

Without Freddie and Fannie, could 30-year mortgage be a thing of the past? [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)
Miamian Bruce Berkowitz has taken on a fight few would dare: He’s suing Uncle Sam. 
Berkowitz — whose mutual fund Fairholme Fund owns 14 percent of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac preferred stock — is among a group of investors suing the U.S. government over the two government-backed mortgage insurance giants. They claim the U.S. Treasury Department illegally confiscated the companies’ earnings after their bailout, gutting the firms when it was supposed to rehabilitate them and setting a dangerous precedent for shareholders’ rights.
Mark Zuckerberg on the next 10 years of Facebook [H/T Barry Ritholtz] (LINK)

Jim Koch: "Quench Your Own Thirst" | Talks at Google (LINK)
Related book: Quench Your Own Thirst
Barry Ritholtz interviews Daniel Kahneman (podcast) (LINK)
Related book: Thinking, Fast and Slow
TED Talk - Anthony Goldbloom: The jobs we'll lose to machines — and the ones we won't (LINK)

Iridium: story of a communications solution no one listened to (LINK)
Related book: Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story
New Hardcore History podcast: Episode 58 – Kings of Kings III (LINK)

Long on Epictetus (Part 1, Part 2)
Related book: Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Links

Max Olson has added the Blue Chip Stamps 1977 letter to that collection (LINK)

Howard Marks on Bloomberg TV [H/T ValueWalk] (Video 1, Video 2, Video 3)
Related previous post: Howard Marks Memo: Economic Reality
Sol Price on Becoming Your Customer’s Best Friend (LINK)
Related book: Sol Price: Retail Revolutionary & Social Innovator
Bruce Berkowitz on the latest developments with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Get it while you can....Uber swallows $3.5B in Saudi cash, 21st Century Fox backs an email newsletter, and more (LINK)

Richard Thaler at the LSE (podcast) [H/T Tamas] (LINK)
Related book: Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
The Future of Podcasting - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

a16z Podcast: Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly) (LINK)
Related book: The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future 
Book of the day (just released): The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Links

Buffett’s Berkshire Plans $9 Billion Bond Sale to Repay Loan [H/T Linc] (LINK)
Strong investor demand allowed the company to tighten yields on the offering. The longest part of the sale was $2.5 billion of 3.125 percent of 10-year bonds offering yielding 1.3 percentage points more than similar-maturity Treasuries, according to Bloomberg data.
Investor orders for Berkshire Hathaway bond sale hit $34bn (LINK)
Investor orders for a piece of a $9bn Berkshire Hathaway bond sale eclipsed $30bn on Tuesday, as the conglomerate headed by Warren Buffett sought to repay bank loans used to finance its $36bn takeover of Precision Castparts. 
The deal, spread across seven tranches, underscored the accessibility to the market that high-grade companies have enjoyed over the past several weeks, and stands in sharp contrast to the experience of junk-rated groups which have struggled under heightened volatility and erratic fund flows.
Berkshire Hathaway Energy Valuation Indicators (LINK)

Comments on Mistakes and Buffett’s Original Berkshire Purchase (LINK)

Latticework of Mental Models: Network Effect (LINK)

Gary Channon: the three things I look for when buying a company (LINK)

Bruce Berkowitz on Fannie and Freddie: People are going to call this 'The Big Lie' [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Being punished for doing the obvious: Peabody Energy Corp edition - by John Hempton (LINK)

Tim Harford: The lost leisure time of our lives (LINK)
Three hours a day is quite enough,” wrote John Maynard Keynes in his 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. The essay continues to tantalise its readers today, thanks in part to a forecast that is looking magnificently right — that in advanced economies people could be up to eight times better off in 2030 than in 1930 — coupled with a forecast that is looking spectacularly wrong, that we would be working 15-hour weeks. 
In 2008, economists Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga edited a book in which celebrated economists pondered Keynes’s essay. One contributor, Benjamin Friedman of Harvard University, has recently revisited the question of what Keynes got wrong, and produced a thought-provoking answer.
Bitcoin and Diversity - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

a16z Podcast: Disruption in Business… and Life (with Marc Andreessen and Clayton Christensen) (LINK)

a16z Podcast: Data Network Effects (LINK)

CRISPR: gene editing is just the beginning (LINK)

Yellowstone's Supervolcano Gets a Lid (LINK)

Book of the day: Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Links

Here's What Buffett Wouldn't Do, and Maybe You Shouldn't Either (LINK)

Sanjay Bakshi: The Eventual Consequences of Risk Seeking or Risk Blind Behavior (LINK)

Bruce Berkowitz's 2016 investor call from yesterday (audio) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Managing Risk vs. Managing Returns (LINK)

Latticework of Mental Models: Permutation and Combination (LINK)

Thursday, February 4, 2016

Links

Bill Gates interview on BBC's Desert Island Discs (LINK) [Also available via podcast.]

The Reith Lectures - Professor Stephen Hawking (LINK) [Also available via podcast.]

GMO's Q4 2015 Letter (LINK)
The 4Q15 Letter features Ben Inker answering the question as to whether high yield debt today is cheap in "Giving a Little Credit to High Yield" and is followed by a continuation of Jeremy Grantham's piece from last quarter. Part I of Jeremy’s section, “The Real American Exceptionalism” discusses the benefits of the entrepreneurial spirit that characterizes the U.S. as well as its advantage in the world given its abundant resources. Part II offers a brief review of 2015 and a look ahead to 2016, followed by an update to his views on whether the U.S. equity market is nearing bubble territory and a discussion as to how the free fall in the price of oil is playing out in the markets.
Charlie Munger on Cost of Capital [H/T @Sanjay__Bakshi] (LINK)

The Fairholme Fund's 2015 Annual Report (LINK)

Horizon Kinetics' latest in their index series: The Robo-Adviser, Part I: What Does Rebalancing Mean to You? (LINK)

John Hempton: Mr Ackman, I forgive you. Mike fooled almost everybody... (LINK)

Interview with Russell Napier author of Anatomy Of The Bear (LINK)

James Surowiecki on oil (LINK)

Kyle Bass: China banks months away from ‘danger territory’ (LINK) [The video is HERE.]
The premise of Bass' bet goes like this: China's banking system has grown to $34.5 trillion, equal to more than three times the country's GDP. The country is due for a loss cycle as cracks begin to show in its economy. 
When that happens, central bankers will have to dip into China's $3.3 trillion of foreign exchange reserves to recapitalize the banks, causing a significant depreciation in the value of the yuan, according to Bass. 
On Wednesday, he said China's export-import industry requires China to maintain $2.7 trillion in foreign exchange reserves to continue operating smoothly, citing an International Monetary Fund assessment. 
"They'll hit that number in the next five months," he said in an interview on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street." "Those that think they can burn it to zero and they have many years ahead of them, they really only have a few months ahead of them before they get into a real danger territory." 
...Bass confirmed Wednesday he is devoting much of his fund to his bet the yuan will depreciate. He characterized shorts against the currency, including his, as totaling "billions." 
The market will ultimately come to view a 10 percent yuan devaluation as "a pipe dream," he said. "When you look at the size of the imbalance and the size of their economy, it's going to go 30 or 40 percent in the end, and it's going to be the reset for the world."
Five Good Questions for Robert Murphy about his book The Primal Prescription (video) (LINK)

TED Talk - Judson Brewer: A simple way to break a bad habit (LINK)

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Links

Mark Zuckerberg's latest book club book is also a Charlie Munger recommendation, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (LINK)

Charles Brandes and the orthodoxy of value investing (LINK)
Related book: Brandes on Value
Bruce Berkowitz's Semi-Annual Letter (LINK)

Horizon Kinetics: Asia Opportunity Second Quarter Commentary (LINK)

Fred Wilson: The Bull Case For Solar (LINK)

Scott Adams: Living by the Odds (LINK)

Book of the day: The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership

Quote of the day, from Seneca:
"...it is praiseworthy to pursue wholesome studies even if they lead to no practical outcome. Is it so remarkable if those who attempt to scale the heights do not attain the summit? But if you are a man, look up with admiration at those who attempt great things, even if they fall. This is the sign of a noble heart--to aim at high things, measuring one's effort, not by one's own strength, but by the strength of one's nature, and to envisage enterprises beyond the accomplishment even of those equipped with heroic courage."

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Links

For those interested, Matt and I at Boyles were included in the latest issue of Value Investor Confidential, a subscription newsletter that allows one to sign up for a 2 Week Free Trial to test the service. 

Jason Zweig reposts an old Ben Graham speech masterpiece (LINK)

Buffett: No stock market bubble, but few bargains (video) (LINK)

Farnam Street: Ray Dalio: Open-Mindedness And The Power of Not Knowing (LINK)
Related book: Learn or Die [This book was also released on Audible a couple of days ago.]
Howard Marks on Bloomberg TV, discussing the topic of his last memo (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Value Investing Podcast: Guy Spier on The Education of a Value Investor (LINK)

Tyler Cowen talks to Peter Thiel (video) (LINK)
Related book: Zero to One
Hayman Capital Targets Shire in Next Pharma Battle (LINK)

Bruce Berkowitz: Years after the global financial crisis, William Isaac and Senator Bob Kerrey address questions surrounding Fannie and Freddie's Conservatorship. (LINK)

The April issue of the Mutual Fund Observer (LINK)

Research paper: The mortality of companies (LINK)
The firm is a fundamental economic unit of contemporary human societies. Studies on the general quantitative and statistical character of firms have produced mixed results regarding their lifespans and mortality. We examine a comprehensive database of more than 25 000 publicly traded North American companies, from 1950 to 2009, to derive the statistics of firm lifespans. Based on detailed survival analysis, we show that the mortality of publicly traded companies manifests an approximately constant hazard rate over long periods of observation. This regularity indicates that mortality rates are independent of a company's age. We show that the typical half-life of a publicly traded company is about a decade, regardless of business sector. Our results shed new light on the dynamics of births and deaths of publicly traded companies and identify some of the necessary ingredients of a general theory of firms.
Can you win at anything if you practise hard enough? [H/T @tferriss] (LINK)
Related book: Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success
The Healing Power of Your Own Medical Records (LINK)

The latest Nature Podcast (LINK)

I Followed My Stolen iPhone Across The World, Became A Celebrity In China, And Found A Friend For Life [H/T Bill Bishop] (LINK)

I'm continuing to enjoy the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. While I had linked to this last month, I had forgotten to watch it, and now that I'm into the book I thought I'd link again to: Edge #437 - Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman: A Conversation
DANIEL KAHNEMAN: Before asking you what are the questions you are asking yourself, I want to say that I've now read your book Sapiens twice and in that book you do something that I found pretty extraordinary. You cover the history of mankind. It seems to be like an invitation for people to dismiss it as superficial, so I read it, and I read it again, because in fact, I found so many ideas that were enriching. I want to talk about just one or two of them as examples. 
Your chapter on science is one of my favorites and so is the title of that chapter, "The Discovery of Ignorance". It presents the idea that science began when people discovered that there was ignorance, and that they could do something about it, that this was really the beginning of science. I love that phrase. 
And in fact, I loved that phrase so much that I went and looked it up. Because I thought, where did he get it? My search of the phrase showed that all the references were to you. And there are many other things like that in the book.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Links

PBS FRONTLINE program with Atul Gawande, based on his book Being Mortal (LINK)

TED Talk - Ricardo Semler: Radical wisdom for a company, a school, a life (LINK)
Related books: MaverickThe Seven-day Weekend
Exclusive: Tesla CEO threatens firings after dismal China sales (LINK) [As Bill Bishop said: "As brilliant as Musk obviously is, he made the classic foreign CEO launching in China mistake: loudly overpromising about their nascent business."]

Bruce Berkowitz: Fairholme Capital Conference Call [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

James Grant Talks Deflation, Greece, Stocks, And Weather (video) (LINK)

Aswath Damodaran: How low can you go? Doing the Petrobras Limbo! (LINK)

Seth Godin: The truth about sunk costs (LINK)
Part of what it means to be a creative artist is to dive willingly into work that might not work. And the other part, the part that's just as important, is to openly admit when you've gone the wrong direction, and eagerly walk away, even (especially) when it's personal.  
Yes, we have to have faith in our ability. Faith lets us do our best work. But successful artists sally forth knowing that abandoning our darlings is part of the deal.
Kahneman: Clients Driven by Losses, Not Gains [H/T CIO] (LINK)

1978 interviews with Friedrich von Hayek (LINK)

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Links

Don Graham Is Not Slowing Down After Sale of The Washington Post [H/T Will] (LINK)

Bruce Berkowitz's Q2 Letter (LINK)

Buffett Waits on Fat Pitch as Cash Hoard Tops $50 Billion (LINK)

New Drilling Largely Driven By Debt (LINK)

What's Wrong With this Chinese Town? [H/T Will] (LINK)

Malcolm Gladwell: "The Cooked Ladder" (LINK)

Books to check out (mentioned by Nassim Taleb in Fooled by Randomness):
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Bruce Berkowitz's 2013 Annual Letter

Our largest issuer position, at nearly 50% of assets, is in AIG common and warrants. Our second largest, at 15%, is in Bank of America common stock. Both are designated Global Systemically Important Financial Institutions. In other words, they are too important to fail, have significant value beyond their fortress-like balance sheets, and are capable of distributing healthy earnings to owners through dividends and/or buybacks of common stock. Yet, both trade at discounts to book value.

Headlines shout of Sears’ disastrous 2013 loss of $12 per share. A longer history shows that since the merger of Sears with Kmart, about 9 years ago, Sears has distributed over $66 of cash per share via buybacks and spin-offs and has paid down $27 per share of a pension liability that is no different, in our view, from debt. Fairholme research estimates that the fair value of Sears’ net assets exceeds $150 per share. If our research is accurate, we expect Sears’ market price of $38 to increase to this value over time.

Two of our best performers during the period were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both are absolutely essential for uniquely-American, affordable mortgages. If you disagree, try getting a 30-year, sub-5% mortgage outside of the United States. In 2008, both companies agreed to U.S. conservatorship and extraordinarily harsh terms and conditions during a time of global crisis. The plan worked. Fannie and Freddie saved the day, repaid nearly every penny of cash received from the U.S. Treasury, and can look forward to resuming a prosperous future based just on the aging of assets held. However, many believe Fannie and Freddie will be victims of a government-sponsored expropriation that brings our country closer to a future conceived by George Orwell in his novel, 1984 . We disagree.

On the macroeconomic front, U.S. fiscal responsibility and U.S. energy independence are on the horizon! Economic progress will eventually lift interest rates, which will depress asset valuations. However, our banks and insurers should more than counter this weight with a lifting of margins between earning assets and paying liabilities. Overall - a net positive.

The Fund’s portfolio prices remain a third below our growing estimates of intrinsic value... If history is any guide, expect these two measures to converge one day. For now, we believe, the difference between them to be a large margin of safety.

 [H/T Will]

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Fund Focus: Fairholme Hedge Fund Builds On Berkowitz’ 25 Years Of Success

Bruce Berkowitz may have made his name with his $11 billion mutual fund, but it's his partnership that's making headlines these days. 
While the average hedge fund was mired in the single-digits in 2013—the HFRX Global Hedge Fund Index stood at 6.72% for the year—Berkowitz's $200+ million Fairholme Partnership Fund was up 33% net of fees. Berkowitz launched the long-only hedge fund (which has a Caymans-based counterpart, the Fairholme Offshore Partners Fund) with $23 million of internal capital in January 2013 and opened it to outside capital in October. 
Fred Fraenkel, president and chief research officer of Miami-based Fairholme Capital Management, said the idea of launching a hedge fund began to form three years ago: 
“[W]e at Fairholme ran into the reality that Bruce's investment horizon [didn't] match up that well with the daily liquidity available in a mutual fund in 2011,” Fraenkel told FINalternatives in a recent phone interview. “[T]hat was...the kind of year that a real deep-value... investor longs for, where he sees stressed companies, he's identified them, he wants to own their stocks. 
“The world...believes that things are really bad and you, in performing your analysis on the companies, figure out that things are not bad, they're actually getting much better. Because what happens is, the prices go down a lot and you load up, and that's exactly what we wanted to do in 2011 but because of a bunch of circumstances—including that [Berkowitz] was named the Manager of the Decade for [domestic] equities in Morningstar for 2000-2010—he had huge inflows in front of that year, and then as soon as things started looking bad in the newspapers and on TV, we had dramatic outflows. So Bruce was confronted with not only not being able to buy more as the perceived crisis made stocks go down, he had to sell stocks off to meet the liquidity needs.” 
The takeaway, said Fraenkel, was “that there was a divergence in the business plan and the investment plan.” What Fairholme needed, they decided, was investors who understood how good Berkowitz's long-term record was and were willing to wait with him “until they realize huge returns.” 
Out of that realization came the Partnership. The fund has an unusual fee structure which Fraenkel said was designed to reward those investors willing to “wait with” Berkowitz. 
“[W]e don't charge any management fee so we don't make anyone pay unless they make money and we receive a declining percentage of the profits that we take depending on how long they want to entrust their money with us,” said Fraenkel.