Circle of Competence

You are browsing the archives of 2008 April.

Arbitrage is as time-old as any market “technique” out there. When we talk about arbitrage spreads, we are speaking of two companies merging, a large tender offer, or other “workout” situations with a defined shareholder payout and a (relatively) defined time period. There are also defined reasons why our investment won’t work out. [...]

Sorry for the flurry of posts today. I guess some days I’ll hit you guys with a ton of stuff, and most days there will be nothing. However, I just read a tremendous going-away column from Herb Greenberg of Marketwatch. It contains some terrific advice, and I think my readers should take [...]

I don’t watch CNBC, at all, but I do have their Buffett Watch in my RSS aggregator, so I know when they do interviews with him, which has been fairly often in the past year. CNBC is 99% noise, but when they do pieces on Buffett, you can usually pull up some valuable nuggets.
As [...]

If you want to be a successful investor, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have laid out the basic mechanism you need: read, and read all of the time. Now, under this mandate from Warren and Charlie there is a tremendous breadth of material that investors need to consume; magazines, newspapers, articles, annual reports, and importantly, [...]

If you haven’t read Freakonomics, the extremely popular book by Dubner and Levitt, run, don’t walk to Amazon.com and pick it up. It’s an interesting read on how “common knowledge” is more “common,” than “knowledge.”
The two write a blog for NY Times, and a column in the NYT Magazine. I read their most [...]

Today I’ll talk a bit about another big investing mistake (remember I mentioned that I invested in AHM before its bankruptcy) I’ve made, recently, that I still hold today. I figure I’ll get my mistakes out of the way early, that way you all know what an idiot I am and that you should [...]

Today I’ll talk a bit about another big investing mistake (remember I mentioned that I invested in AHM before its bankruptcy) I’ve made, recently, that I still hold today. I figure I’ll get my mistakes out of the way early, that way you all know what an idiot I am and that you should [...]