Circle of Competence

You are browsing the archives of 2008 June.

A few days ago, I posted a lengthy analysis of Western Sizzlin’ Corporation, a company that I am a huge fan of, run by Sardar Biglari, a young hedge fund manager.
The company, as I mentioned, is structured as a holding company, with nearly half of its market cap in 3 investments: Steak N Shake common [...]

In case you guys don’t read College Analysts, which you should, James Cullen interviewed me this week via e-mail, and he posted the full interview on the site today.  I’m sure there are some much better interviewees out there than myself, but James asked me to answer a few questions so I’m flattered.
Go check it [...]

You’ve got Berkshire; the king, the original, the Mecca.  Investing in Berkshire Hathaway over the last 40 years has been like injecting rocket fuel into your portfolio, generating 20%+ returns since 1965 and, in the process, minting millionaires and loyal followers. However, nowadays Berkshire is getting so large that, by the laws of statistics, its [...]

Now with over 100 readers, Welcome to the New and Improved Circle of Competence! We’ve got our own domain and our look is new, but the content will be the same as it’s always been.    Enoch Ko kept me updated on the nuances of feed technology, and as such you will not need to re-subscribe [...]

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I don’t have anything substantive to say on the issue, but Einhorn’s vindication continues as Erin Callan has now been ousted as CFO of Lehman Brothers, downgraded to a lower position in the company. There is going to be some wild media coming out surrounding this issue in the coming days, I suspect, but needless [...]

Value investing gets a pretty narrow rap. While, in essence, value investing should be defined as merely buying any asset for less than its worth, thus defining all intelligent investing, it often is just spoken of as buying equities with low PE ratios, low price to book ratios, and the like.
In reality, value investors [...]

I always like to point out good commentary by others, especially in the financial blogger arena. I’ve been a long time reader of financial blogs, many of which inspired me to write my own, notably NoiseFreeInvesting, Fat Pitch Financials, F Wall Street, Controlled Greed, Reflections on Value Investing (to which I now contribute), and [...]