Hottest links for Monday, February 24th, 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. To start off your week, we’ve got a list of people who can’t accurately forecast markets, private equity eying US farmland like a tasty slab of beef, and the one question nobody is asking about Netflix.
Hottest Links: Stories
Value Investing
Stanford Graduate School of Business Search Fund Primer
Notes on “A Primer On Search Funds” produced by the Stanford Graduate School of Business [valueprax]
MG Book Club – The Intelligent Investor – Chapter One
This is the second discussion of the ModernGraham Book Club’s reading of The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham (affiliate link). In last week’s discussion, we talked about the Introduction of the book. [Benjamin Clark, Modern Graham]
The Way to Scale Up a Compounder
“I want to do one thing, and do it well. On the internet there is a lot of flash and fad. What we are trying to build here is a long-term persistent sustainability.. The simplicity and utility of our product is really what drives us. [Koon Boon Kee, Beyond Proxy]
Funds
Its all fun & games until someone loses an economy!
This month, 1,865 pages of FOMC transcripts from 2008 were released to the public. Bloomberg studied the transcripts, finding on average about 25 references to laughter per meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee. [Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture]
Can we All Agree to Stop Comparing Everything to the S&P 500?
Benchmarking is a pernicious thing in financial circles. Not only because it disconnects the way the client and a fund manager understand the concept of “risk”, but also because the concept of benchmarking seems to be misunderstood. [Cullen Roche, Pragmatic Capitalism]
Mark Zuckerberg, Global Minister of Information
“WhatsApp,” hissed Vladimir into his iPhone. And Yanukovych made yet another horrible decision, feigning ignorance, answering lightheartedly, “Not much muchacho, whassup with you?” Putin went silent, in utter disgust, torturing his stooge. [Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker]
“Half of U.S. Farmland Being Eyed by Private Equity”
An estimated 400 million acres of farmland in the United States will likely change hands over the coming two decades as older farmers retire, even as new evidence indicates this land is being strongly pursued by private equity investors. [Climateer Investing]
My 2 cents on Sports Marketing and what I learned from SMU Basketball this week
I had the pleasure of going to an SMU Basketball game this past week. It wasn’t a huge game from a standings perspective. It wasn’t a big rivalry game. [Mark Cuban, Blog Maverick]
The One Question Not Yet Answered on Netflix
Here’s a reality check: I’ve been on the wrong side on raising red flags over Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX)’s metrics, which have been trumped by a stock that prices the company as a monopoly with pricing power. [Herb Greenberg, Herb on TheStreet]
Ackman Sees Big Upside to Fannie, Freddie Bet
William Ackman is taking a big gamble on Fannie Mae / Federal National Mortgage Association (OTCBB:FNMA) and Freddie Mac / Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp (OTCBB:FMCC) but recently said at an investment conference he sees a huge upside on the bet: the hedge-fund manager said he believes the common shares of the mortgage-finance giants could be worth more than 10 times their current value in several years. [Juliet Chung and Nick Timiraos, MoneyBeat]
Are You Lucky or Skilled?
Kenneth French—the Dartmouth professor who constitutes one half of the famed duo behind the Fama-French three-factor model of stock returns, which questioned the underpinnings of the Capital Asset Pricing Model—offers his students that hypothetical as Skill v. Luck 101. And he doesn’t stop there. [ai-CIO]
Point-by-Point Case Comparison
Point-by-Point Case Comparison Of MF Global, Sentinel and PFG Best [Francine McKenna, re: The Auditors]
The really strange Comcast-Netflix deal
The big potential loser was Netflix. Under the old rules [the ones that the court overruled] tier one internet providers like Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ:CMCSA) or Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) had to deliver Netflix packets the same way as they delivered any other packets (on landlines anyway) – and that meant that they could not selectively slow Netflix packets. [John Hempton, Bronte Capital]
People who cannot accurately forecast markets
A list of people who cannot accurately forecast markets [Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker]
Hottest Links: Not The Onion
Punter calls council to complain about prostitute who refused to have sex with him
The unnamed man, from north London, emailed Harrow Council after being rejected by an eastern European sex worker at a brothel in the borough. [Metro]
