Looking Up to Warren Buffett - Interview with Mohnish Pabrai

It often seems like every hedge-fund manager is reading from the same playbook about how to look, work and behave. Neatly pressed khakis; thumbs glued to a BlackBerry; slick digs in Greenwich or Manhattan staffed by number-crunching research drones. But apparently, Mohnish Pabrai never got his copy. He wears shorts to his Southern California office, keeps e-mail to a minimum and almost never misses his 4 p.m. nap. And forget goosing returns with fancy computer models or using complex derivatives: Pabrai doesn't even sell stocks short.

Direct Link - Looking Up to Warren Buffett

Buffett Trip - Visit with Warren Buffett

On March 31, 2008 students from Dr. Athanassakos' Value Investing class travelled to Omaha, Nebraska to meet with Mr. Warren Buffet, the world's best known investor and the richest person in the world.

Related Links :

• Buffett Trip
• Read one student’s blog detailing the experience of the visit and the days leading upto the trip
• Read major takeaways from the meeting with Mr. Buffett from notes made by the Value Investing MBA students.

David Einhorn on WealthTrack, 4-25-08

How effective has the Federal Reserve been in heading off a financial and economic crisis? What’s left in its arsenal? We’ll ask NYU economist Mark Gertler, a close friend and collaborator of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. What role have the regulators played and what can investors do to protect their assets? We’ll consult successful hedge fund manager David Einhorn, CEO of Greenlight Capital and Peter Stamos, CEO of Sterling, Stamos Capital Management, a private investment firm that follows the endowment model pioneered by Yale and Harvard.

Here is video link and transcript. (Only available for 2 weeks)
Or you can download the video (MP4 Format) here (Right Click and Save as..).

The Money Kept Vanishing - David Einhorn's New Book "Fooling Some of the People All of the Time"

Fooling Some of the People All of the Time
By David Einhorn
(Wiley, 379 pages, $29.95)

Most of David Einhorn's ideas work out brilliantly. He is a 39-year-old hedge-fund manager in Manhattan who oversees $6 billion. Bull markets? Bear markets? It hardly matters. His stock portfolio has averaged 25% annual returns since 1996, when he opened Greenlight Capital.

Now Mr. Einhorn has written a book. But instead of packaging the real or contrived "secrets" to his success – as cliché would have it – he has tried to do something less triumphant and far gutsier. In "Fooling Some of the People All of the Time," he turns the spotlight on a single, stubborn investment play that never made much money for him but created six years of headaches.

...

Direct Link - The Money Kept Vanishing

Doubling Down in Financials - Interview with Richard Pzena

When it comes to value investing or buying out-of-favor stocks, patience is a virtue. These days few are more virtuous than Richard Pzena, Chairman of Pzena Investment Management, a $20 billion assets money management company whose New York Stock Exchange listed shares are down more than 38% in the last 12 months.

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Pzena Investment Management 2008Q1 Commentary

Investors fear a massive unwinding of debt will undermine the world’s economies. But the data indicates deleveraging doesn’t equal disaster.

Related Links :

• Pzena Investment Management 2008Q1 Commentary (PDF)
• Pzena Investment Management 2008Q1 Earnings Call Transcript

Bill Miller 2008 Q1 Value Trust Commentary

I am often asked, how long do we have to wait before the fund starts to do better? The real answer here is the same as it is about most such forecasts: no one knows. I am reminded of the story Nobel Prize winner Ken Arrow tells about his experience trying to make long-range weather forecasts for the military during World War II. He told his superiors that his forecasts were so unreliable as to be useless. The word came back that the General knew his forecasts were useless, but needed them anyway for planning purposes.

Related Links :

• Legg Mason Value Trust 2008Q1 Investment Commentary (PDF)
  
• Miller Says Bear Stearns Sale Signaled End of Panic
• ''Credit spreads are already much improved since then,'' Miller wrote in a letter to fund shareholders released by Baltimore-based Legg Mason today. Financial companies may ``even have some write-ups in the second half instead of writedowns,'' he wrote.

The Financial Crisis: An Interview with George Soros

The following is an edited and expanded version of an interview with George Soros, Chairman, Soros Fund Management, by Judy Woodruff on Bloomberg TV on April 4.

Judy Woodruff: You write in your new book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets,^[1] that "we are in the midst of a financial crisis the likes of which we haven't seen since the Great Depression." Was this crisis avoidable?

George Soros: I think it was, but it would have required recognition that the system, as it currently operates, is built on false premises. Unfortunately, we have an idea of market fundamentalism, which is now the dominant ideology, holding that markets are self-correcting; and this is false because it's generally the intervention of the authorities that saves the markets when they get into trouble. Since 1980, we have had about five or six crises: the international banking crisis in 1982, the bankruptcy of Continental Illinois in 1984, and the failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, to name only three.

Direct Link - The Financial Crisis: An Interview with George Soros

Whitney Tilson's recent video clips , April. 2008

• Tilson Sees Buffett Focus on Europe `Dynastic' Companies
  
• Whitney Tilson on Bloomberg TV, 4/21/08
  • Whitney Tilson, managing director and founder of T2 Partners LLC, talks with Bloomberg's Monica Bertran in New York about the outlook for financial stocks, Bank of America's first-quarter earnings report and plan to buy Countrywide Financial Corp., and Tilson's assessment of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. Hedge fund manager T2 Partners oversees $100 million in assets.

What Warren thinks

With Wall Street in chaos, Fortune naturally went to Omaha looking for wisdom. Warren Buffett talks about the economy, the credit crisis, Bear Stearns, and more.

If Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting, scheduled for May 3 this year, is known as the Woodstock of Capitalism, then perhaps this is the equivalent of Bob Dylan playing a private show in his own house: Some 15 times a year Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett invites a group of business students for an intensive day of learning. The students tour one or two of the company's businesses and then proceed to Berkshire (BRKA, Fortune 500) headquarters in downtown Omaha, where Buffett opens the floor to two hours of questions and answers. Later everyone repairs to one of his favorite restaurants, where he treats them to lunch and root beer floats. Finally, each student gets the chance to pose for a photo with Buffett.

Direct Link - What Warren thinks

5th Annual Whitman Day: Breakfast Panel with Martin Whitman and Richard Haydon

Collectively, Martin J. Whitman ’49 BS and Richard Haydon ’66 BA (A&S) have a century of Wall Street experience—and that fact is evident in the wisdom and insight revealed in this wide-ranging panel discussion. Whitman, founder and co-chief investment officer of Third Avenue Management, and Haydon, a managing director with Neuberger Berman, treat members of the Central New York financial community to a no-holds-barred conversation on investing and current economic developments, including the housing/mortgage crisis, the concerted raid on Bear Stearns, and green investments. The discussion was moderated by J. Daniel Pluff, host of WCNY’s “Financial Fitness." The breakfast panel was part of the 5th annual Whitman Day celebration in the Whitman School of Management.

Direct Link - 5th Annual Whitman Day: Breakfast Panel with Martin J. Whitman and Richard Haydon

David Dreman : Looking Beyond the Bailout

Frightening as the markets look today, there will come a time when the liquidity crisis ends and today's prices for bank stocks look, in retrospect, like bargains.

Direct Link - Looking Beyond the Bailout