Hottest links for Tuesday, February 11th, the late edition. Get our free daily newsletter and never miss a single linkfest. Also, now if you sign up you will get our new e-book on value investing.
Top stories for today are included below. We’ve got some killer stories for your Tuesday afternoon reading pleasure, including a money manager seeing a protege, a world without dividends, and a hedge fund minus the whole “money” thing.
Hottest Links: Stories
Value Investing
Compounding blog experience
It’s no great secret I have been blogging here for awhile now. That is why I found this post from Charlie O’Donnell at This is going to be Big… on the ten things he has learned from ten years of blogging so awesome. [Tadas Viskanta, Abnormal Returns]
Security. Safety. Stability.
Apparently, you can market gold investments as “safe, stable and secure” – the exact wording used on the radio all the time and around the web in banner ads I’ve come across. [Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker]
Your highest conviction idea for 2014 + why
J.W. Mays, Inc. (NASDAQ:MAYS) – Former bankrupted department store owns 7 seven buildings including 2 prime assets (> half a million sqft) in Downtown Brooklyn. Standalone RE company not married to some struggling dept store/restaurant etc and free to raise rent. [Corner of Berkshire & Fairfax]
How to Avoid Value Traps
“You are now a changed man. But you were just doing your job.” This is a feedback comment received by one of Singapore’s top-notch professionals in his conversation years ago with another outstanding top brass who’s a shrewd observer of people. [Koon Boon Kee, BeyondProxy]
Seth Klarman EBITDA Example
EBITDA, in addition to being a flawed measure of cash flow, also masks the relative importance of the several components of corporate cash flow. Pretax earnings and depreciation allowance comprise a company’s pretax cash flow; earnings are the return on the capital invested in a business, while depreciation is essentially a return of the capital invested in a business. To illustrate the confusion caused by EBITDA analysis, consider the example portrayed in exhibit 1. [Joe Koster, Value Investing World]
Funds
A World Without Dividends
Charlie Munger has a great saying that is a very helpful mental tool – invert, always invert. At Dividend.com, we’re firm believers in the power of dividend investing, of course. [Jared Cummans, Dividend.com]
Your Ideology Is Killing Your Portfolio
A hedge-fund manager was lecturing me about the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003, better known as the Bush tax cuts. [Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture]
77-Year-Old Social Media Aficionado Bluffs Apple Into Doing What He Wants
Carl Icahn was hardened on the school playgrounds of Queens in the 1940s. He knows how to play the game. So what if everyone hates his non-binding Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) buyback proposal, which had absolutely zero chance of succeeding? [Jon Shazar, DealBreaker]
Betting On Europe With ETFs
European equity ETFs have seen heavy inflows, but seeking exposure with two popular ETFs means a heavy tilt toward the UK and Switzerland. [Dimitra DeFotis, Focus on Funds]
Dying for attention: Park Lawn Corporation (CVE:PLC)
I enjoy the oddities of the market. I find companies that don’t conform interesting. The exceptions are what keep me interesting in investing. If investing were merely a formula I would lose interest quickly. [Nate Tobik, Oddball Stocks]
Houston Based Money Manager Seeks Protégé
We have been fortunate to attract and hire some outstanding people in the last year. We have integrated these people into areas where we had substantial needs, and we are starting to look toward the future. Now, we are beginning to search for the “next generation” of leaders for [redacted] Investments. [Bess Levin, DealBreaker]
Like a Hedge Fund, but Without the Money
Keith McCullough, who runs an imaginary hedge fund called Hedgeye Risk Management, inspires weird intense passions in certain corners of the financial internet. [Matt Levine, Bloomberg]
Who Knew that CLOs were Hedge Funds?
U.S. financial regulators found themselves on the receiving end of an outpouring of concern from law makers last Wednesday about the risks to the banking sector and debt markets from the treatment of collateralized loan obligations (“CLOs”) in the Volcker Rule final regulations. [Margaret E. Tahyar, The Harvard Law School Forum]
77 Reasons You’re Awful at Managing Money
People usually get better at things over time. We’re better farmers, faster runners, safer pilots, and more accurate weather forecasters than we were 50 years ago. But there’s something about money that gets the better of us. [Morgan Housel, The Motley Fool]
Daily Journal’s Portfolio Holdings Revealed
Daily Journal Corporation (NASDAQ:DJCO) publishes several newspapers and publications with a specific focus on topics of interest to the legal and real estate professions and also provides specialized information technologies to courts and other justice agencies. [The Rational Walk]
Hottest Links: Not The Onion
Iran women’s football team turned out to include four men
Athletes failed to pass gender-testing. Football players are now in line for a sex-change operation. Despite strict rules in the Islamic Republic of Iran, players will be allowed to continue their career after mandatory sex-change operation. [ITAR-TASS]
