Hottest Links: Market Noise, Survivorship Bias, And Margin Of Safety

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Hottest links for Wednesday, April 9th, 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 posted below.  For your Wednesday afternoon reading pleasure, we’ve got some great stories, including Warren Buffett stumping for Airbnb, a great think piece on why value investing isn’t more popular considering its historical results, and Mohnish Pabrai being candid on his “copycat” process.

Hottest Links: Stories

Value Investing

Buffett Will Steer Investors to Airbnb to Avoid Price-Gouging by Omaha Hotels

The billionaire investor is planning to mention the website at Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE:BRK.A) (NYSE:BRK.B)’s upcoming annual shareholders’ meeting on May 3 as a low-cost alternative for shareholders who don’t want to pay the jacked-up rates that Omaha hotels charge while the gathering is taking place every year. [Anupreeta Das, MoneyBeat]

Does Mohnish Pabrai’s Cloning Theory Deserve Such Contempt?

In a talk that he delivered together with Guy Spiers, Mohnish Pabrai explained the entire process in great detail by giving several practical examples. He also candidly admitted that he was a “shameless copycat” of Warren Buffet’s stock picking process. [Arjun, Rakesh Jhunjhunwala]

The Dolan Company and the True Meaning of Margin of Safety

In my original post, I valued the The Dolan Company (OTCMKTS:DOLNQ) at $5 per share, which measured against the $2.75 share price at the time, implied a 45% margin of safety. [Mackie, Moatology]

Value investing works. Why isn’t it more popular?

A big reason is that what value investors do is not well known or understood because universities accept the notion that markets are efficient and, as a result, they focus on teaching and applying modern portfolio theory, which cannot be more different from value investing. [George Athanassakos, The Globe and Mail]

Funds

Chart of the Day: New DM-EM Equity Convergence

This Great Graphic, created on Bloomberg, depicts the MSCI equity index for the developed countries (orange line) and the emerging markets (white line). [Marc Chandler, Pragmatic Capitalism]

Hottest Links

Value In Fixed Income CEFs: Relative Value Partners

Maury Fertig, CIO of Relative Value Partners, also sees intermediate bond funds as attractive to value investors. He notes that investors are mistakenly lumping all fixed income closed end funds together without looking at the underlying leverage adjusted duration. [Brendan Conway, Focus on Funds]

Faber: Own Most-Beaten-Down Stocks

Meb Faber: here are different metrics, but a lot of the valuation indicators will end up lining up on the same side for a stock or country. If you’re looking at a country like Russia, most of the valuation metrics line up on the same side, and universally say that it’s cheap. Whereas for an expensive stock, like Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA), or Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), a lot of the valuation indicators will say the same thing. [Cinthia Murphy, ETFs.com]

Daily Value Idea 04/08/14 , Nano Cap

Today’s thought, a tiny (15M EV 25M MC) company with a solid balance sheet with outstanding ROIC. Spindletop Oil & Gas Co (OTCMKTS:SPND) founded 1985 explores, develops, and produces crude oil and natural gas in North America. SPND produces in 16 states with large Texas concentration. [ShadowStock]

Survivorship Bias

Many funds that were around 20 years ago no longer exist. Not surprisingly, the funds that closed tended to have relatively poor performance. Fund companies have a habit of merging losers with better-performing funds, which allows them to keep their clients’ assets and mask poor performance. [Michael Rawson, Morningstar]

What You’re Hearing Is Market Noise

In speaking with strategists, money managers, economists and analysts one pattern that rapidly revealed itself was the schism between the commentariat and the markets. The noisy, click-hungry, traffic-seeking headlines of the online and TV financial news media often have a very different tone, focus and punch line than what is going in equity and fixed-income markets themselves. [Barry Ritholtz, BloombergView]

Hottest Links: Not The Onion

Man who tried to have sex with a corpse busted after falling asleep In coffin

The 47-year-old man, named as Chin Chean, was caught when villagers saw his foot sticking out of the grave and told the family of the teenage girl whose body lay in the coffin. Chin Chean told police that he started digging up the coffin at 10pm, the day after he had attended the funeral of the 17-year-old girl. [Creepy Reality]

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