I guess for some journalists a 30% cash position is encouraging news:
The Boston-based manager’s partnerships were down between 0.25 percent and 0.60 percent in June. As a result, they are up 2.25 percent to 2. 75 percent for the year to date.
Not too shabby given the very conservative nature of the funds.
The super-secretive hedge fund manager, who at… Continue reading
There was an interesting piece written by Anne Jolis and published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. The article was on John Coustas, a Greek and head of Danaos Corporation, the third-largest container ship company in the world. I will simply quote from it:
Mr. Coustas sees the rot (in Greece) as
…as Buffett noted in his Superinvestors speech–see tab above–despite having little overlap in their portfolios.
I liberally copied from the business models used by Ben Graham, Warren Buffett, David Einhorn, Seth Klarman, and Mohnish Pabrai. Those investors started small with family-and-friends capital; employed a value-investing philosophy; invested through a private partnership structure (i.e. a hedge fund); recruited smart investors; and were willing to return capital in… Continue reading
View, in 5:10, practically everything you need to know about the efficiency of free markets and how freedom leads to rapid improvements in your standard of living (H/T: CafeHayek.com):
The most convincing argument in favor of free markets is to demonstrate that the poorest in the US today have access to more life-improving resources than the richest people in the US had just 80- to… Continue reading
If I am correctly reading the notes taken by the Inoculated Investor (http://inoculatedinvestor.blogspot.com/) at Charlie Munger’s annual meeting recently, then Munger is a big fan of Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist too.
The Google document:
I disagree with the conclusion (Munger’s or II’s? page 2) that Ridley fell in love with the division of labor as the sole… Continue reading
As of July 1, 2011, the Cyclically Adjusted PE (CAPE) ratio for the S&P 500 is 23.13, which essentially means the average share of common stock in the S&P 500 companies trades for 23.13 times its annual earnings averaged over the previous ten years. (The data for the attached chart was taken from Professor Robert Shiller’s website at Yale.) Excluding the dot com fueled market in the late… Continue reading
We wonder what will become of the dozens of Chinese ghost towns, which are literally unoccupied whole cities in China built for hundreds of thousands of occupants on loans such as those in the attached article. What will happen when these loans default? Throughout history, it has rarely turned out well after massive amounts of resources were allocated by central planners.
(H/T: Global Association of Risk Professionals… Continue reading
Narrowly focused company analysts are raising performance expectations for the businesses they follow while broadly focused market strategists and economists are lowering their estimates for market performance. One group is going to be wrong. David Dreman and many other value investors have demonstrated that there is a consistent over-optimism in corporate analysts’ estimates and Michael Mauboussin suggests we take a broadly focused outside view in our analysis. With… Continue reading
I have added a link to Whitney Tilson’s Value Investing Letter to the blogroll today. The Letter has timely updates on value investors and investing ideas. The link to his value investing website shall remain in the Value Investing Resources section to the right because it contains archival material.… Continue reading
