I wanted to share with you my interview with my friend Bob Huebscher who runs a terrific website Adviser Perspectives. I am very excited about this interview because in a very unconstrained format we had a chance to discuss Paul Krugman’s latest bearish article on China, the linkage between the European crisis and Chinese and [...]
I am bored and exhausted. I am on my third cup of coffee, but my lack of excitement has not changed, as I am about to explain why the sleepiest, most boring stock in the universe—Microsoft Corp.—offers a very compelling r eward with very reasonable risk. Microsoft was the bright light in the tech firmament [...]
There is a good reason John Lennon wrote “All you need is love.” We want to be loved and usually gravitate toward people and things that others cherish. But when it comes to investing, love is not cheap. The trick is to identify misplaced (or mispriced) hate that will turn into love. This brings us [...]
One of the biggest hazards of being a professional money manager is that you are expected to behave in a certain way: You have to come to the office every day, work long hours, slog through countless e-mails, be on top of your portfolio (that is, check performance of your securities minute by minute), watch [...]
Everyone is looking with horror at Europe, waiting for the European Economic and Monetary Union to break up and for the PIIGS to start dropping like flies, taking the rest of the euro zone and the global economy with them. Unlikely! European monetary union was a great experiment that made a lot of sense on [...]
CNBC interview discussing sideways markets, Xerox, HP, Vivendi
Interview with Matt Nesto, segment 1: HP, Xerox, Vivendi (we own all of them) Segment 2: China
Most CEOs are not good capital allocators when it comes to their stock: They are not objective analyzing their company and thus not objective in share buyback. In majority of cases they think their stock is a buy all the time. Why? Because they spend long hours trying to grow the business, they keep telling [...]
I was going to write something smart and pithy about this recent market decline, but then I realized that I’ve written about this in the past (more than once). So here is an excerpt from the Little Book of Sideways Markets. In addition, here is a copy of the presentation about sideways markets. – Enjoy. [...]
Mark Twain said, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” To a Fed – an institution employing an army of economists and academics – everything looks like an economic problem that needs to be quantitatively eased. But the Fed is killing the economy. Undermines confidence Sir Alan Greenspan, who, after he [...]
Anger and frustration are the two emotions pulsing through my veins as I write this. HP, once the symbol of innovation, is being dismantled by its high-pedigreed board and the CEO of the hour (I truly hope his tenure will be measured in hours, not years). I vividly remember the early 2000s, when Carly Fiorina, [...]
I have received many emails and a few calls from friends, asking one question: What are the consequences of the downgrade? So I decided to put my thoughts on paper. I break up the consequences into three categories: fundamental (the impact on the economy), emotional (the short-term impact on the market), and political (will it [...]
A Pyrrhic victory is so called after the Greek king Pyrrhus, who, after suffering heavy losses in defeating the Romans in 279 B.C., said to those sent to congratulate him, “Another such victory over the Romans and we are undone.” Dictionary.com A quick thought on the debt-ceiling debacle. I believe that by August 2nd we’ll see the debt [...]
I looked at Brown & Brown about a year ago (May 2010), here are my thoughts which are still relevant today: Risk of growth by acquisition Very significant portion of Brown & Brown’s (BRO) growth in the past came from acquiring brokers. I am naturally skeptical of sustainability of this type of growth as it [...]
Party rulers in China are trapped in a position that chess players deeply fear — zugzwang — where any move made puts you at disadvantage. In China, the potential cost of both action and inaction is economic collapse. China is slowly starting to face the consequences of its actions — loans grew over 30% a [...]
This is the letter we wrote to our clients in the first quarter of 2011. It discusses the importance of international investing and our purchase of a UK retailer, Halfords PLC. If you want to read a shorter version, I’ve turned it into an article that was published in the June issue of Institutional Investor, [...]
VALUEx Vail 2011 is over. I already miss these three days. I got the idea to put together VALUEx Vail after I attended VALUEx in Klosters (a little ski resort town in Switzerland, located on the other – the “value” – side of the mountain from Davos) in February this year. Since I live only [...]
While in Omaha attending the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting I had the pleasure of participating on a Value Investing Panel at Creighton University. Ben Claremon from Inoculated Investor blog took very good notes from the event, you can find them in the PDF below. Creighton Value Investing Panel(function() { var scribd = document.createElement(“script”); scribd.type = “text/javascript”; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = “http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js”; var [...]
Jeff Saut, Chief Market Strategist at Raymond James kindly mentioned my Cisco article in his weekly letter: Efficient Markets?! May 31, 2011 “Markets are efficient, or so we’ve been told. I am not here to put a rebuttal to this academic nonsense, but let me give you one of the core reasons why markets are [...]
I was on BNN (Canadian CNBC) with Jeff Saut (Chief Market Strategist with Raymond James) and Jeff Hirsch (editor of Stock Trader’s Almanac) discussing sideways markets. We did three segments, here are links to the segments one, two and three.
Markets are efficient, or so we’ve been told. I am not here to put a rebuttal to this academic nonsense, but let me give you one of the core reasons why markets are and will remain inefficient: because human beings are efficient. To function in everyday life, our brains are used to simplifying complex problems, [...]
I’d like to invite you to the first annual VALUEx Vail being held in Vail, Colorado, June 15th through 17th. VALUEx Vail is designed for serious PROFESSIONAL investors to share ideas, learn from one another experiences, all while enjoying each others company and fun activities in the beautiful Colorado mountains. We are only sending out this [...]
I am back! It was an amazing trip. It started with Warren Buffett’s Omaha. I flew into Omaha on Thursday morning, and a few hours later received a call from the CFA Society of Nebraska, asking me to give a talk to their members. Whitney Tilson and his partner Glen were supposed to do a [...]
When I wake up in the morning and check news for the companies I own, I worry. I don’t worry that my companies missed their quarterly guidance by a few pennies – running a business is an art, and things don’t usually work out in a precise, linear fashion. The companies that have a “deliver [...]
I’d like to share excerpts from our quarterly letter we send to our clients (this is Part 1; I’ll send out Part 2 in a few weeks). I’m not sharing the full letter for a simple reason: we are still accumulating shares in some stocks mentioned in the letter. Purchase of Big Lots Big Lots [...]
It is time again for the annual trip to Warren Buffett’s Omaha to Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. Warren Buffett over the years was turned into god. He is an incredible investor, brilliantly smart, full of worldly wisdom; but, like everyone else, he gets up in the morning and puts his pants on one leg at [...]
I was quoted in FT about David Sokol, CEO of a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary, buying shares in Lubrizol a few months before Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway bought Lubrizol at a significant premium, which made Sokol 3 million dollars on his $10 million purchase. “Some investors expressed concerns about Mr Sokol’s actions. ‘Any time you buy stock [...]
I gave a presentation on China/Japan at the “Rethinking Seminar” at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. My presentation was videotaped; video (both streaming and download), audio, and even cliff notes may be found here (by the way, make sure to take a look at other presentations on their website). Also, I updated my slides [...]