Tag Archives: Risk

Prem Watsa’s Thoughts on Current Macro Conditions

Prem Watsa is Chairman of Fairfax Financial, a Canadian P&C firm in the mold of Berkshire Hathaway. Prem is sometimes called Canada’s Warren Buffett. We held a profitable position in Fairfax for a while, but no longer hold any interest … Continue reading

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Baupost Group’s (Seth Klarman) 2011 Returns

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 … Continue reading

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CAPE Update (Or, was Last Week’s 5.6% Market Pop Justified?)

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 … Continue reading

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A Looming Problem in China

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 … Continue reading

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Another Disconnect w/r/t the Market

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 … Continue reading

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What are NFLX’s Insiders Doing?

The sentence below was taken from a Thomson-Reuters report of a sale by another Netflix insider (the General Counsel) who has little skin left in the game. During the past two years, Netflix Inc. insiders have made 110 sales totaling … Continue reading

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From Howard Marks’s Latest Memo…

…see link to the right: Especially since the publication of my book, people have been asking me for the secret to risk control. “Okay, I’ll read the 180 pages. But what’s really the most important thing?”If I had to identify … Continue reading

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Joel Greenblatt, Master of Smart, Terse Investment Books

I received Joel Greenblatt’s new book last week, The Big Secret for the Small Investor. I was able to devour it in a few hours and The Finance Professionals’ Post agreed to let me review it. Greenblatt is the master … Continue reading

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It’s All About the Benjamins: Or, How the Bernanke Market Could Kill Nascent Graham Fund Managers

The Wall Street Journal published an interesting OpEd piece by Mark Spitznagle today. It described Benjamin Bernanke and Benjamin Graham’s conflicting views of markets. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704425804576220983131318962.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Two disparate views of markets represent well the range of opinion among U.S. stock market participants … Continue reading

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Are We Near the Top Yet? Momentum Investing and the Anne Hathaway Effect

Today, on the same day that the New York Times published a piece that asked if investors were investing like it was 1999, Herb Greenberg produced a piece on CNBC that questioned the same thing. Make no mistake, this is a momentum … Continue reading

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