Some links
Half year report of TGV Truffle funds (NOV, DNOW)
Half year report of TGV Rubicon Stock Picker
Damodaran with a great summary on Crypto currencies (Bitcoin)
Interesting: Analysing companies via word clouds
Farnam Street on filter bubbles
DryShips, the world’s weirdest listed stock ?
value and opportunity 
Some interesting posts from ZH:
– Unless oil prices turn up, Canada is heading to the cliffs.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-12/canada-serious-trouble-again-and-time-its-real
– Corporates getting financing for free. Means owners of some companies (shareholders, probably you&me) are getting free financing. I find very controversial that the whole society is subsidizing the investments of a part of it (those that can afford investing). That’s perverted capitalism!!
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-17/there-has-been-just-one-buyer-stocks-financial-crisis
On Investment via Word Clouds / Word Analysis – a book recommendation by Buffett: Investing Between the Lines: How to Make Smarter Decisions by Decoding CEO Communications (General Finance & Investing)
Thanks, nice list of links again!
“Weighting largest investments: 23.5% ”
That is quite over the point when I start asking how concentrated a depot should be.
Just does depends on how many investmentS (it cannot be a typo ! )
I would enjoy reading the next TGV report if it dealt with such rather interesting topics in an intelligent way. That means no reference to a star investor for explanation, of course. Don’t think they need to.
As a derivative of Goodwin’s law, I will make my own version, that I will call
ALPIN’s law:
the probability that an investor recalls Buffet in any of his N-th investment thesis approaches 1 for growing N’s.
I have no problem with managers quoting Buffett. I have more problems with managers owning the same stocks. Or even more problems with people quoting Buffett but doing soemthing completely else.
If you don’t know what to write: Just quote Buffet. It appears intelligent 🙂
Catholics believe in their Pope, and greedy people believe in Buffet.
I dislike thesis where Buffet is quoted (see TGV). It is just simplistic, overly simplistic.
Any brain with some numerical acumen knows that the evolution of a system is dependent on the initial conditions. (solution of (diff.) equations are depenring on boundary conditions).
Applying nowadays similar strategies as Buffet (where ext. conditions have changed) and expecting that the result will be similar is just insane, or an act of faith/greedyness. In recent years, Buffet himself proved he is not outperforming. Basically his successful method in the past is obsolete in the present.
Back to TGV reports: they mention how good EuroTech SPA is (just an example),…. however the real question is how good are them compared to others out there in same field. That is what makes it hard the investor’s life.
Conclusion: little trust to those that use St. Buffet to explain their underperformance…
Well, we will see. Personally, I think there is a lot of wisdom in what Buett has written. Clearly for him it is hard with hundred of billions, but much of Buffett’s wisdom can be applied today.
I don’t wirte about it that much but I guess that my own decisions are influenced very much form Buffett’s writings.
One more thing: Yes, under his old metric, Buffett hasn’t been outperforming. But that’s mostly a matter of size and not that his method is obsolete. To the contrary, I think the philosophy works better than ever.
Oh, and by the way: You sound like a super successul investment manager yourself. Where can we look up your track record ?
1. I am definitely not an investment guru, and won’t try to be. You folks are much better! Some of you are even legends!
2. As Seb said, St.Buffet is like the Jocker in a card game: appearing everywhere, for anything. Too often, too many people quote Buffet in vain. Just to pretend.
3. Fundsmith tries to replicate the early strategies of your hero, and as I said in the past he has been quite successful at it.
4. If TGV gets good results ahead, all the best. Not my business. 🙂 … When I read the investment thesis, and I missed the critical point (in my humble view) where they evidence that the companies they are invested in are superior than all their competitors. Maybe I missed it. At least I guess that ROCE’s of companies in TGV funds, meet the Buffet’s roce criteria, as some like to call it…. (the proxies for ROCE in Eurotech, in FT arre rather unpromising). Let’s see and best luck to all.
“In recent years, Buffet himself proved he is not outperforming. Basically his successful method in the past is obsolete in the present.”
Just a little thought experiment: A logarithmic chart of BRK shows a rather straight line from Oct. 76 up to a vertex on June 98, from which the line flattens considerably.
Let’s assume, Buffett had indeed continued his success (compound rate of about 38,5% annually from 76 til 98) until today. Then today’s quote of BRK class A shares would be exactly 40.511.581 $. The market capitalization of BRK would be 66.6 trillion (6,66 * 10^13) USD. This is about today’s global market capitalization. This means, if Buffett had not slowed down back in 98, then, as of today, Berkshire Hathaway were the one and only remaining public listed company.
Buffett, being a smart cookie, at some point certainly realized that such a massive concentration of wealth and power would not be tolerated by society, let alone by the US government. As a historic precedent, Rockefeller’s empire was crashed simply because it had become too large. This certainly was neither in his interest nor in the interest of his shareholders.
Starting form June 98 until today, BRK had a compound rate of about 6.6% annually. Despite this meager growth rate, Berkshire today is one of the largest companies worldwide. It ranks among the top ten, the exact position depending on the measure you want to apply. Rest assured, anything larger would be crashed by a Berkshire anti-trust law. So slowing down in 1998 was the best move Buffett could possibly devise to keep BRK out of harm’s way.