OK, so since I am a big Dimon and JPM fan, how can I not post something on this? So JPM held an emergency conference call to announce that they have $2 billion in losses and people seem to be going crazy. The Volcker rule crowd, of course, love this. “Told ya so!”. People keep…
LUK: Leucadia National, Some Quick Notes
2011 Annual Report As usual, the Leucadia National annual report is a great read. This is one of those annual reports that is never a waste of time. They made an exception in this year’s annual report to talk about the sorry state of this country’s politics. It says, “Usually we begin our Letter…
Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting Notes (of Notes) 2012
OK, so I was not there but since the information is all over the place on live blogs and things like that, I thought I’d just sum up some of the things I’ve read including things I’ve heard on interview clips on places like CNBC, Fox Business News and others. Most of the actual meeting…
HRG: Harbinger Group, Negative Stub Value
I looked at HRG last year to see if there is an opportunity. Someone called this the next Berkshire Hathaway. I wrote about it here. With Falcone in the news a lot again, I thought it’s a good time to take another look at this thing. I will take a completely fresh look at this and…
Biglari’s Compensation Plan
So I understand that Biglari has pissed off a lot of people with renaming Steak N’ Shake to Biglari Holdings and his hedge fund-like compensation package, which is of course unheard of for publicy listed restaurant companies. To be sure, Warren Buffett doesn’t have anything like that, nor does the Tisch family or the folks…
OAK: Oaktree Capital Management IPO
Oaktree Capital Managment had their IPO recently (April 12?); the stock was offered at $43.00/share but is now trading at $39.41 (today’s close). The price range for the offering was $43-46 so it came it at the lower end, and the planned 10,295,841 share offering was reduced to 7,888,864 shares (excluding the shares sold by…
Biglari Holdings Annual Meeting
So I did something unusual and went to an annual meeting last week. I am usually not interested in annual meetings as they seem to be sort of love fests or promotional events and most of them seem to be rubber stamp events with no real substance. Of course, the glaring exception is the Berkshire…
JPM Annual Report 2011
JPM posted their 2011 annual report last night and as usual it’s a great read. It’s probably the best annual report written out there (other than Warren Buffett’s). I know a lot of people are skeptical of what corporate executives say. They say, “you actually believe what these CEOs tell you?!”. Good point. But what…
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka
OK, so I took a closer look at the Singer operations in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka (this is a post-script to the Retail Holdings post). Sum of the parts is a good and fine, but if the underlying stocks are overvalued or trading at silly levels, then it doesn’t matter if something is trading at a…
Retail Holdings
Here’s an interesting ‘liquidation play’ I’ve had for a while (paid $10/share or so a while back) but still might look pretty interesting. Retail Holdings (ReHo/ RHDGF) is just a holding company that owns 56.2% of Singer Asia, which is just another holding company that holds shares in Singer Bangladesh, Singer Sri Lanka, Singer Pakistan,…