Here is a joke that I heard from Warren Buffet years back. A very successful oilman dies. He faces Saint Peter, who says, “You’ve been a good man and normally I’d send you to heaven, but heaven is full. We only have a place in hell.” The oilman says, “Any chance I could talk to [...]
Our investment process is both qualitatively and quantitatively intensive. Throughout the course of a year we look at hundreds of companies. Most of them receive only a cursory look – we don’t like the business, the valuation is too stretched, or we simply have no insight into the business. We usually glance at them and [...]
Today I want to share with you an unbelievable piece: “Adagio,” from the ballet Spartacus, by Russian-Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian. Many of you, especially those who have kids, will know this piece from Ice Age 2.
I don’t run, I don’t lift weights, and I don’t frequent a gym. I admire those who do, but that’s not for me. In the summer I ride a bicycle to work; in the winter my kids and I ski. Alpine skiing is probably the laziest winter sport ever invented — gravity takes you down, [...]
One of my brightest childhood memories is of skiing. I spent my childhood in Murmansk, a port city up in northwest Russia (located above the Arctic Circle). Incidentally, it was the birthplace of the fictional submarine Red October from the movie The Hunt for Red October. On Sundays, my family – my father and mother, [...]
My presentation at Value Investing Congress Value Investor Congress Las Vegas 2013 – I Like Big Dividends and I Cannot Lie – Vitaliy Katsenelson by VitaliyKatsenelson
Traditions. I write this word and I think of Tevye the milkman in Fiddler on the Roof saying (actually singing) it. As you get older your life slowly starts turning into a series of “traditions.” Over the years the beginning of May has turned into a wonderful tradition: the trip to Omaha to Buffett’s Berkshire [...]
If I were a dividend, I’d fire my press agent. I’d be jealous and feel neglected because stock prices get a lot more attention than they deserve. The only time dividends make headlines is when they get reduced, because dividend cuts (or omissions) often go hand in hand with stock price declines. The stock is [...]
I have known about Van Cliburn was since I was very little. He was about the only American that (Soviet) Russians did not hate but admired (maybe the only other one I can think of off the top of my head is Louis Armstrong). Van Cliburn won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition. It was 1958. [...]
When Hewlett-Packard Co. is discussed in the media, it is portrayed as a PC company. On the surface, that makes sense: HP is the largest PC maker in the world, and personal computers are 30 percent of its revenue. But — and this is a very important but — PCs today represent only 10 percent of HP’s operating [...]
Investment mistakes usually fall into one of three categories: analysis, behavior or bad luck. In October 2011, after the shares of Hewlett-Packard Co. had been halved from about $48 earlier that year, I made a case for the stock. That was a mistake. There was no bad luck. I made several errors in my analysis. In this column I want [...]
When my father talks about classical music you’ll never hear him
In today’s musical note I want to share with you one of the most popular operas of our time: La Traviata. It was composed by Giuseppe Verdi in 1852. I watched this production a few years ago and I thought it was probably the best one I’d ever seen. Aside from the great performances by [...]
Michael Dell should ask himself a simple question: “Who is my daddy?” He says his current daddy — Wall Street’s army of sell-side analysts and impatient investors with their insatiable thirst for short-term results — makes it impossible for him to transform Dell from a PC maker into a technology services company. He doesn’t want Wall [...]
VALUEx Vail 2013 The Third Annual VALUEx Vail will be held in Vail, Colorado, June 19th through 21nd (Wednesday – Friday) VALUEx Vail is created for serious investors to share ideas and learn from one another’s experiences, all while enjoying each other’s company and fun activities in the gorgeous Colorado mountains. You can read my thoughts from the [...]
Berkshire Hathaway buying Heinz is unlike any deal Buffett has ever done. In his past deals he was always a passive owner – he let existing management continue to run the company. In this case 3G, a private equity firm that has done terrific turnarounds in the past, will be the new management. They are [...]
I’ve stumbled on Eugen D’Albert maybe fifteen years ago or so. I was shocked how good his music was and unknown he was. He is a Scottish-born German composer who was also a pianist (you can still find recording of him playing works of other composers). Similar to Moszkowits he lived in the Rachmaninoff’s era [...]
Earlier this week I wrote about the psychological challenges that Apple shareholders face. I also discussed the evolution of Apple’s “i” gadgets — the iPod, iPhone and iPad — and how they have created an ecosystem unlike those of other technology companies. Apple’s ecosystem is an important and durable competitive advantage; it creates a tangible switching [...]
So many articles have been written recently about Apple — defending it or explaining why this glorious fruit will turn into a shriveling pumpkin by midnight (with Samsung’s help) — that I really haven’t felt the need to contribute to the unending debate. But then Apple’s stock crashed to $450 last month, and we bought a [...]
This week I’ll share with you two undeservedly underrated and underrecorded composers that in my not so humble opinion deserve to be overrated and overrecorded. Both lived in the golden age of the late romantic, early modern period of classical music, that is, the late 19th to early 20th century. I want to share with [...]
My parents were never into sports. During my childhood in Murmansk, I probably went to one game of soccer with my father, though the central stadium was a block away. My father barely watched sports; we’d watch occasional hockey finals games on TV, but that was about it. I was never athletic enough to play [...]
Months before the recent Sturm und Drang surrounding nutritional-supplement maker Herbalife, my firm took a long, hard look at the company. On the surface it was a value investor’s dream: great balance sheet, high return on capital, high revenue and earnings growth, and attractive valuation. Of course, there was one problem: The validity of its multilevel marketing [...]
In this segment I am discussing Herbalife with Jeff Macke
I was on Yahoo! Breakout with terrific Jeff Macke discussing Apple ….
ARMED WITH fancy, Nobel Prize–winning equations and Greek terminology such as beta, portable alpha, neutered theta and sigma-squared delta (okay, I made up the last two), an army of consultants evaluates mutual fund and hedge fund manager performance on a monthly and quarterly basis, ignoring the fact that in the short run stock movements are [...]
Here are slides of my updated/revised presentation on sideways markets. Over the last three months I’ve given talks on sideways markets three times, to CFA Societies in South Florida, New Zealand, and Atlanta. It is very hard to be excited about the US stock market. I read that Rich Bernstein, former chief investment strategist at [...]
The part I hate about writing is the first paragraph — the introduction. You have to say something pithy that grabs readers’ attention and sets the tone. Sometimes the intro comes naturally; most of the time it doesn’t. I wanted to write an article about health maintenance organizations, but after staring at the computer screen [...]