I made the front page of Whitney Tilson's new publication - Value Investor Insight.

Whitney and John Heins bill the interview as follows:

Globe-hopping value investor explains why he loves the education business, how to identify valuable brands, where he's finding international ideas and why he's interested in EVCI, Todhunter International and OZ Holding.

Check here for details:

Guy Spier in the BRK issue of Value Investor Insight

I would be remiss if I did not thank a few people. Whitney and John Heins did a great job of interviewing me. My friend who first said that any good idea has an original provenance is Michael Broudo. He works at Mark Asset Management. The work that I did on Todhunter was done with close help and collaboration from Steve Gilberg of Happyhours. Weetabix was a great idea that I originally started researching after reading an interview with Tom Russo. Much of my thinking about brands originated with Tom - who has some great discussions of brands in the Outstanding Investor Digest.

I originally learned about Neue Zuercher Zeiting from two investors independently. One is Bill Strong of Equinox Partners. The other is Peter Cundill of Peter Cundill and Associates.

Posted by Guy Spier at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

When google decided to index some of the English world's greatest libraries, I hardly expected it to cause waves in France. It turns out that I was wrong:

"It appears that Jacques Chirac is thoroughly displeased with what he considers but the latest parry in the onslaught of American hegemony -- what the French call omnigooglization"

dailypennsylvanian.com - France's new enemy: Google

Now the French are going to try to out-google google?!?

"The most troubling problem, however, is ideological in nature. Minister Donnedieu also threw in his two ducats' worth about omnigooglization, saying that Google's method of ranking search results by user popularity is disgraceful and reflective of an "American system" of commercial capitalism. The alternative? Jeanneney proposes a "committee of experts" who will determine which Web sites have more substantive value than others. The prospect of Jerry Lewis sites at the top of every result list is horrifiant."

"Already, the world is laughing at France's expense. A Google search
for "french military victories," now returns an imposter Web site
asking if the user meant to type "french military defeats.""

Posted by Guy Spier at 12:45 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

http://www.bullresearch.de/news/news_detail.asp?NewsNr=272236

Posted by Guy Spier at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Lou does not mince his words in his book, and some of the entries are priceless. Early in the book, he bemoans the neglect of critical thinking taught by an oxymoronic, "postmodern education" system. In an example he writes of the mis-use of the word, "addict" for non medical conditions - and how this mis-use of the english language ultimately leads to the wholesale creation of professions and institutions that don't deserve to exist.

He writes:

"We speak literally of a heroin addict; figuratively of a "television addict." But when psychologists ignorantly or negligently drop the diacritical quotes, and imagine that they are really diagnosing "the disease" of television addiction, we experience the full sociological force of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis: what begins by misusing language to reify putative entities that have no existence in extra mental reality, continues by elaborating social and professional structures that purport to diagnose, research and treat the nonexisting condition. The surest and quickest way to eliminate bogus "diseases" would be to eliminate those who reify them. Teaching the reifiers critical thinking would be more compassionate, but also much more laborious"

!!! Well, that got my attention.

And later in the book, when comparing Universities to Institutes, he writes:

"The difference between an Institute and a University is also plain; the latter is an incomparably more robust entity than the former. The occidental Academy has survived the collapse of Athens, survived the dogmas of theocracy, survived the mind-numbing absurdities of Scholasticism, survived the enlightened nineteenth-century inclusion of Jews, Catholics, women, andother social pariahs of the day at University College London, and of the talented but impecunious at The City College of New York, survived the demonic twntieth-century exclusion by Nazism of, "Jewish Science", survived the psychedelic revolution of the 1960's, and will survive the current feminization, ethnocentrization, affirmative action, deconstruction, admission of illiterate, innumerate, and postcultural students, and the demonic exclusion of erudite "white" and "white-Jewish" males on the grounds that they have caused all the "problems"of occidental civilization (e.g., the establishment of democratic bodies-politic, the advance of science and technology, the creation of unprecedented economic opportunities, the doubling of life-expectancies) and that erudition is bad-and "diversity" good - for a University."

Posted by Guy Spier at 08:56 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

My sense is that AIG is the subject of a witch hunt, and a board of directors that, in a post Enron world, is just a little trigger - happy.

Article on AIG for Knowledge@Wharton

For a very useful background & set of introductory links to Finite Risk insurance check this engtry on Doug Simpson's blog.

I reviewed posts on the Yahoo.com AIG message board yesterday. A number of commenters imply that AIG's woes with Elliot Spitzer are reminiscent of Enron, Worldcom etc.

Two things strike me. Firstly, the nature magnitude of the transactions in question is dwarfed by AIG's earnings, which themselves are exceeded by AIG's cash flows from operations. Secondly, upon reviewing the recent 8K in which AIG announces a possible charge to book value, I am struck by how the transactions tended to have a zero effect on Net Income, but instead, were used ot manipulate profitability in a particular line of business.

One transaction, for example, converted losses in the Auto Insurance line into capital losses - which would have been reported elsewhere in the income statement.

This to me points to Greenberg's hubris, and desire to make the results reflect his vanity more than wholesale attempt to mislead.

Posted by Guy Spier at 07:48 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

I met Lou Marinoff at the World Economic Forum in New Delhi in 2004. I am now reading his book, "Philosophical Practice".

I am so enjoying it that I have been sifting through the notes for some of his sources. For whoever missed this the first time around, "A Physicist experiments with Cultural studies" is priceless parody, and is also deadly serious in helping the uninitiated (myself included) understand how damaging certain elements of the academy are.

A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies

Posted by Guy Spier at 07:09 PM | Permalink | Comments ()