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Strategies & Market Trends : Buffettology -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Moominoid who wrote (2849)	6/4/2001 9:22:12 AM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4691

SJR is a communications company - you can be sure WEB measured it by cash flow, debt and subscribers. Conventional PE's are distorted by the high level of amortization on the physical plant. Market cap + debt all divided by subscribers is the standard metric for cable and satellite TV plays. I haven't done the numbers on SJR myself recently. Owned it long ago and sold when the market went weak last year.

To: Moominoid who wrote (2849)	6/4/2001 7:38:50 PM
From: Paul Senior	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4691

David Stern, I don't know what you mean by Buffett 'errors' or 'mistakes', but if you mean 'has lost money', he came out of US Air "okay" (imo). That is, he came out whole or better on his US Air converts. I will have to defer to others here who are knowledgeable, but I believe his investment was in converts only, and although he says he made a mistake in buying an airline (and joked he has an 800 number to call for psychological counseling if he ever gets the urge to buy an airline again), and although he apparently wrote down his US Air investment - he did get all his dollars back plus the preferred dividends. He did not lose money from my perspective. From his perspective, maybe he didn't make a 15% annual on the investment or it took much longer than expected to work out or the investment took precious time away from other potential investments -- so he might call US Air an 'error' or 'mistake'. There might be other things going on with Guiness and Kaiser as well. Guiness company was sold, if I'm not mistaken, and Kaiser had some valuable subs apparently. Are you or anyone else here sure that those investments, if they were made by Mr. Buffett, weren't special converts like US Air or were they publicly issued stocks that were actually sold at losses? I'll look at it this way: Since this thread was started, there have been a number of stocks that many people here believe were bought by Mr. Buffett as evidenced by the public filings. Disregarding whether Mr. Buffett will come to believe some are 'mistakes' or 'errors', the issue for me is whether anyone could make money buying those publicly identified stocks and buying them at prices equal to lower than the price Mr. Buffett might have paid. From what I can tell, the answer is yes, ALL the stocks, every one has moved up in price from the price at which Mr. Buffett bought. Perhaps wrongly, I will sidestep the valid argument that it's not possible to tell if it's Mr. Simpson or Mr. Buffett who has bought and who one might be following into these stocks. At some point for example, it did appear very likely that a analyst selected some REITs for Mr. Buffett's account. If I recall correctly, those stocks appeared "odd" to people here - there was much suspicion right away that they were not Buffett stocks - although the pick of Tangier (and others?) did appreciate. My opinion - and I have zero facts to support it - is that if people here had simply bought all or a selection of the stocks Mr. Buffett bought when they could be got at his or better prices, they would've done just as well or better than in studying and choosing from a selection of other stocks that have been discussed here over the years that posters considered "Buffett" stocks. (Ignoring jhk in kc. --gg- But he may be doing very well for himself with his choices and his skills/luck in avoiding crashing stocks.)