Letter
“The Most Important Thing”, a book by Oaktree’s Howard Marks, was published last week in print (it has been out on Kindle for a while) and we’d like to tackle it soon. The Dealbook article has a quick Q&A with Mr. Marks, but much more useful is the link they’ve provided to all the memos Mr. Marks has written.
It’s rare to see such candid evaluations of a company’s problems, even in internal communications. In a memo sent in early February 2011, Stephen Elop doesn’t really hold anything back and tells Nokia employees the harsh truth: the company has fallen behind in innovation, accountability, product line and most other factors. In fact, he puts it in much harsher fashion… We’d like to thank the reader who sent us this letter. Keep the suggestions coming!
Bankstocks.com has a review of Jamie Dimon’s Letter to Investors in the 2010 J.P. Morgan annual report. It’s a gem, a great piece to understand financial services/ banking in general, now and in the long term. Always nice to hear candid remarks clearly written by the company’s leader to its ultimate owners. It’s a benchmark for companies in all sectors and countries.
We don’t have Baupost Capital’s full 2010 letter, but these excerpts are still very interesting. Seth Klarman’s straight talk is always refreshing. Bits on Cash as strategic asset (being able to pull triggers in the midst of panic), “Short-termism” and how that affects everything, and Edge are particularly interesting.
We set time aside one Saturday per year to read Warren Buffett’s letter, and the one for 2010, due out tomorrow, is bound to be very interesting. The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times both published stories about what to “expect” from the letter. While the WSJ story focuses on numbers and the power of “float” in Berkshire’s business model, the FT’s piece focuses on succession.
God has spoken, go out and read it. The core is dedicated to welcoming and explaining BRK to its new shareholders acquired through BNSF, so no big news. Buffett complains more about the media and investments analysts, on how they distort things, causing losses to the less diligent and recommends that everybody form their own knowledge base and opinion. Hope he lives to see that happening, but we sincerely doubt it.
The first 4-5 pages in GMO’s Q3 2009 letter are entertaining for their irony, but it’s hard to disagree with Mr. Grantham’s conclusion: concentrate your portfolio in quality U.S. stocks with a global earnings mix. We’d extend that to some non-US quality stocks with diversified earnings sources, of course.
