Seth Klarman is definitely one of the all time great investors so people should definitely pay attention to what he does. He has a great track record over a long period of time and has written one of the great books on investing (“Margin of Safety”, which is out of print). He is also a hard…
Tweedy Browne on Johnson & Johnson
Tweedy Browne is an old school value investing shop that goes way back. I really do respect them even though their performance recently hasn’t been the best. They are a low turnover fund investing with old-fashioned value investing principles and they are very fad-proof; they don’t jump on the latest investment fads. That alone may…
Bill Miller Steps Down
I can already hear it: “Value investing doesn’t work! Look at Bill Miller! Told ya so!”. Yes, Bill Miller does look sort of like a bull market genius. He was a mutual fund hero for outperforming the S&P 500 index for 15 years in a row from 1990 through 2005. I was never a big…
Cheap and Cheaper
I know, this is a broken record blog. We all know financials are cheap and we all know there are plenty of reasons why they are cheap and why they might be right to be priced cheap. However, I tend to still like the well-managed financials. This is laughable and I don’t mean to suggest…
Olympus Continued
So the story continues to unfold and it doens’t sound too good. In my earlier post, I said that on the face of it there might be 459 billion yen or 1,700/yen per share in value at Olympus just by valuing the medical equipment business at 8.0x EBITDA, adding up the cash and securities and…
Harold!
That’s the hint Warren Buffett offered to CNBC Monday morning when he said he will tell viewers which stock he has been buying this year. None of the CNBC folks were able to guess (I had no idea) what stock it was. Harold’s short name is Hal, of course, and Hal is the computer in…
Kraft Split-up Valuation?
OK, so Kraft announced that it will split into two; a slow growing U.S. grocery business and a fast growth global snack company. First of all, let me just say that Kraft is a decent looking company trading at a decent valuation so it’s not a bad stock to own by itself. Warren Buffett owns…
Olympus Kills Japanese Stock Market?
Olympus was down again the limit and I don’t think any shares traded, having been offered down the limit all day at 484 yen/share. Olympus, on it’s own is not a big problem. These things do happen. The U.S. had it’s Enron, Worldcom and others. But the problem is that Olympus is an old, stodgy…
Possible Downgrade of Nomura’s Credit
Moody’s announced that they may downgrade the long term credit rating of Nomura Holdings one notch to one notch above junk level. This really could be lights out for Nomura (as an independent entity, at least). I don’t know if this means Nomura will end up bankrupt, but this is really bad news if the…
Olympus
What is happening at Olympus is really sad. The worst part of it is that I’m not even that surprised. I have been looking to invest in Japan for a long, long time and have only found ‘trades’ to do there; buying stocks when they are very cheap due to short term worries about this…