Buffett Loses to Desmarais as Power Exceeds Return

July 30 (Bloomberg) -- Deep among the pine forests of rural Quebec lies a private estate the size of Manhattan, a refuge where French President Nicolas Sarkozy has gone to relax.

Former U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton have played golf here, on 18 meticulously groomed holes with a bright-yellow cottage for respite at the 13th tee. Pheasant shoots are orchestrated from the hunting lodge; opera is performed in the music pavilion. An original of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker and a statue of Thomas Jefferson adorn the rough, granite hills.

At the heart of the property is a grand residence surrounded by formal gardens called Cherlieu -- which means beloved place -- that’s modeled on a 16th-century Palladian villa. This is the home of Paul Desmarais Sr., a white-haired, Canadian billionaire whose obscurity outside Quebec masks his family’s vast connections and influence in global business and politics.

“They keep a very low profile,” says Brian Mulroney, who met Desmarais in 1965 and, as Canada’s prime minister from 1984 to 1993, introduced him to President Ronald Reagan and Bush. “That’s the way they like it.”
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Interview With Precious Metal Guru Eric Sprott - Still has 90% of Personal Money in Precious Metals

 follow the observations of Sprott Asset Management and also own shares of Sprott Resource Corp which I have written about here:

http://valueinvestorcanada.blogspot.com/search/label/Sprott%20Resource%20Corp

It is hard not to pay attention to Sprott whose hedge fund is up 23% annualized over the last decade, much of that owing to an early call on both gold and the financial problems in the United States.

On the Sprott website is a recent interview where Eric Sprott suggests that silver is now the investment of choice. I'm more of an oil man myself, but I don't think it is ever a mistake to at least listen to the opinions of someone who has either been very good or very lucky for an extended period of time.

Warren Buffett In His Own Words: 23 Timeless Quotes on Investing

Warren Buffett is the most successful investor of our time, perhaps of any time. He is famous for his pithy and witty quotes, which often appear in his annual letter to shareholders.

When strung together, his quotes pretty well sum up his investment philosophy and approach.

Here are my picks for his best sound bites of all time on being a sensible investor. I would invite readers to use the comments feature to offer their favorite Buffett quotes.

1. Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.
   
2. Investing is laying out money now to get more money back in the future.
   
3. Never invest in a business you cannot understand.
   
4. I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.
   
5. I put heavy weight on certainty. It's not risky to buy securities at a fraction of what they're worth.
   
6. If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.
   
7. It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.
   
8. Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.
   
9. For some reason people take their cues from price action rather than from values. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
   
10. In the short run, the market is a voting machine. In the long run, it's a weighing machine.
    
11. The most common cause of low prices is pessimism. We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism, but because we like the prices it produces. It's optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer. None of this means, however, that a business or stock is an intelligent purchase simply because it is unpopular; a contrarian approach is just as foolish as a follow-the-crowd strategy. What's required is thinking rather than polling.
    
12. Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.
    
13. It is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.
    
14. All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies.
    
15. Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.
    
16. You do things when the opportunities come along. I've had periods in my life when I've had a bundle of ideas come along, and I've had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I'll do something. If not, I won't do a damn thing.
    
17. What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history.
    
18. You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.
    
19. You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.
    
20. You should invest in a business that even a fool can run, because someday a fool will.
    
21. When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.
    
22. The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something quite similar today to what they were doing five or ten years ago.
    
23. Diversification may preserve wealth, but concentration builds wealth.

Fed Policies Work; EU Should Follow Germany: Greenspan

Current monetary policy has worked because it has helped lift stock prices which in turn have fueled the economic recovery, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told CNBC on Friday.

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CNBC Takes You on A Trip Through China with Buffett and Gates

CNBC takes you on a trip through China with two billionaires. The trip happened in September of 2010.

Billionaire buddies Warren Buffett and Bill Gates travel through China.

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The making of an investor

After I wrote Behind the Berkshire Hathaway Curtain: Lessons from Warren Buffett's Top Business Leaders, many people asked me to define the winning formula for investment.

Having had the opportunity to interact with many of the investment elite, I know there is no Holy Grail. It is not always the smartest people who win, but those with the right attitude.

The World In China's Orbit

By NIALL FERGUSON

"We are the masters now." I wonder if President Barack Obama saw those words in the thought bubble over the head of his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, at the G20 summit in Seoul last week. If the president was hoping for change he could believe in—in China's currency policy, that is—all he got was small change. Maybe Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner also heard "We are the masters now" as the Chinese shot down his proposal for capping imbalances in global current accounts. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke got the same treatment when he announced a new round of "quantitative easing" to try to jump start the U.S. economy, a move described by one leading Chinese commentator as "uncontrolled" and "irresponsible."

"We are the masters now." That was certainly the refrain that I kept hearing in my head when I was in China two weeks ago. It wasn't so much the glitzy, Olympic-quality party I attended in the Tai Miao Temple, next to the Forbidden City, that made this impression. The displays of bell ringing, martial arts and all-girl drumming are the kind of thing that Western visitors expect. It was the understated but unmistakable self-confidence of the economists I met that told me something had changed in relations between China and the West.