Hottest links for Monday, February 10th, 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 kick off your work week, we’ve got a slew of fascinating stores, including a great piece on John Templeton, an ETF tsunami in the works, and Soros pocketing another few billion.
Hottest Links: Stories
Value Investing
Reflections on Thinking, Fast and Slow
I recently finished Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow“. It is essentially a psychology book published in 2011 that a number of people referred to me. [ContraSpin Capital]
Small-Cap Investing in Germany: MLP AG
Enjoying a recurring revenue stream from the sale of financial products including old-age provision (retirement savings), health insurance and wealth management, MLP AG (ETR:MLP) (FRA:MLP) (OTCMKTS:MLPKF) manages €24 billion for over 825,000 private and 5,000 corporate clients. [Jerry Getsos, BeyondProxy]
Sir John Templeton: The Last Yankee
Sir John Templeton is one such figure. Templeton wasn’t a WASP: born and bred in rural Tennessee, he was too plebian ever to fit in with the yachting set at Bar Harbor, and too intellectually superior to want to do so in the first place. [Eddy Elfenbein, Crossing Wall Street]
Energiedienst Holding (CH0039651184) revisited
Well, firstly, the stock price of Energiedienst Holding AG (SWX:EDHN) (OTCMKTS:ERSTF) dropped a further -25% form around 38 CHF to currently around 29 CHF. So just from the pure valuation point of view, the stock clearly looks cheaper: [Memyselfandi007, Value And Oppurtunity]
Funds
Value Based Insider Buying for the Weekly Period Ending 02/07/14
Additional fundamental data and comments to follow tomorrow. [ShadowStock]
Is It a Good Time to Invest in Emerging Markets?
Q: Is it too early to speculate on emerging-market investments, and what’s the safest way to play these markets? All kinds of emerging markets, including Turkey, Argentina, South Africa, India, Brazil and Indonesia, have come under pressure, weighing on their currency and stock markets. [Gregory Zuckerman, Market Watch]
China A-Share ETFs Tsunami Coming
Renminbi qualified foreign institutional investor (RQFII) ETFs are a new breed of funds in the U.S., capable of directly holding mainland China-listed “A-shares,” as opposed to using derivatives to capture the fairly restricted market. [Dennis Hudachek, ETF.com]
Going live
the S&P 500 (INDEXSP:.INX) (market-weighted) and the S&P 500 Equal Weighted are obviously closely related, with the same securities, just weighted differently. The third index shown, the PowerShares FTSE RAFI US 1000 (ETF) (NYSEARCA:PRF), draws from a larger group of companies and is fundamental weighted. [Tom Brakke, Research Puzzles Pieces]
Blue Nile and Marc Andreesen’s theory of public company shareholders
Marc Andreesen has been toying with a theory of public company shareholder. The short (Twitter) version is “At any given time, public co’s shareholder base consists entirely of one of: growth investors, value investors, arbitrageurs, or nobody.” [John Hempton, Bronte Capital]
George Soros picks up $5.5bn as Quantum Endowment fund soars
George Soros’s Quantum Endowment fund had its second-best year ever in dollar terms in 2013, adding $5.5bn to the billionaire’s fortune. [James Mackintosh, FT]
Wall Street planning assault on UK
It is not the archetypal image of a Wall Street titan, but that is exactly what he is. Singer is the billionaire activist investor behind Elliott Management Corporation, the New York hedge fund which has lately beaten a path to the British high street, taking stakes in Game, Wm. Morrison Supermarkets plc (LON:MRW) (OTCMKTS:MRWSY), and the collapsed retailer Comet. [Katherine Rushton and Graham Ruddick, The Telegraph]
Hottest Links: Not The Onion
Russian snowboarder’s iPhone crashes from photos of naked women after he puts number on helmet
