March 7th 2012 CSX:                                      $20.25 Market Cap:                       $21.4 Billion Dividend Yield:                  2.37% P/B:                                       2.5 2011 Net Income:            $1.822 Billion 2011 Free Cash Flow:      $1,396 Billion Company Overview:  CSX is one of the largest North American railroad companies controlling 21,000 miles of track, predominantly on the eastern United States.  CSX hauls...Read More

Today Treasury announced that they will be selling $6 Billion of AIG stock, and AIG announced that they will be buying up to $3 Billion of it.  This is enormously accretive to AIG shareholders being that if AIG were to pay $29 a share from Treasury, they would be purchasing their own stock at 52%...Read More

Fortune has a great article on Eddie Lambert, who happens to be the best performing Hedge Fund thus far in 2012 after a rough 2011.  While three months performance doesn’t make him a genius, one bad year doesn’t make him incompetent either. The only way to assess a money manager is through understanding the investment...Read More

The article below does a good job of pointing out some of the supply/demand problems that Baby Boomers face in meeting their retirement goals.  It isn’t practical to invest in overly diversified mutual funds or ETF’s and expect the returns that most investors need to maintain their same living standards into retirement.  At T&T Capital...Read More

Over the weekend Third Avenue Funds released their quarterly commentary, which always includes wonderful commentaries from their fund managers let by their Chairman Martin Whitman, whose investment philosophy as articulated by his shareholder letters and books, have become a  key component to our core value investing philosophy at T&T.  Whitman is unique in that he...Read More

On December 19th I sent out an email discussing the unbelievably cheap valuations that we were seeing, which you can see from the forwarded email below.  This is just a quick update on how they are faring.  The point is not to get overly excited, just as we don’t want to get overly pessimistic when...Read More

Assured Guaranty (AGO) came out with earnings after the close today that were phenomenal.  Please keep in mind that operating earnings are far more relevant than net income due to very obscure and illogical accounting rules for the financial guaranty industry.  For the year AGO posted operating earnings of $3.26, and less importantly net income...Read More

Here’s a link to an article regarding Berkshire Hathaway’s valuation.  Traditionally Berkshire has traded at between 1.3-1.8 times book value.  The reason for this is that the majority of the market capitalization was represented by Buffett’s investment portfolio which are marked to market, therefore any valuation in excess of book value represents what is known...Read More

Today SHLD reported disappointing earnings as was expected given their announcement right after Christmas, which caused the stock to drop substantially.    As you are aware we have never been advocates of Sears as a best in class retailer because it simply is not.  Our investment thesis has been that the value of the assets minus...Read More

We have seen some very encouraging insider buying at AIG that I believe warrants attention.  AIG is one of the most misunderstood large cap companies that we see.  Most analysts and market participants are blinded by their recent history of liquidity failure, as opposed to the century long history of becoming one of the most...Read More