The Ledger, every show

“NVIDIA invests in OpenAI, and NVIDIA is a supplier of chips to OpenAI. So it's all circular, what's going on here.”

“EBITDA is the mother of all disastrous measures.”

“During raging bull markets, knowledge is superfluous, and experience is a handicap. Because if you have the benefit of knowing what happened in all the other blowups, you know how painful it could be. But if you've never experienced it, and every time somethin…”

“But if this is happening over hundreds of transactions, where it's making investments like this, in its own customers, then what ends up happening if all of a sudden it runs out of the ability to get cash or the customers end up having problems selling service…”

“And I look at Apple, and this is what concerns me. Revenues are growing. Minimal. And yet, it generates meaningful cash because it has a brand. People are still willing to pay eight, 2000 dollars for a new phone. There's a lot of competitors, and I'm not sure …”

“The bottom level of being an analyst, the junior analyst is, is going to be replaced by an AI. The one that said, find me all the references of, you know, where the company capitalized costs. That the AI can do.”

“It became a scapegoat for everything wrong with accounting at the time, and look, change needed to happen.”

“The bottom level of being an analyst, the junior analyst is, is going to be replaced by an AI.”

“If that junior person doesn't learn, doesn't get on the in on the ground floor, they'll never learn to be able to make all those connections.”

“I think we're in what seems to be, you know, and I hate calling things bubbles, but I think we're in a period of extreme euphoria”

“If you see that my name as a key investor and a leader in this industry is making an investment in this company, well, then what does everybody else do? Warren Buffett tells you he's buying something. What does everybody do? They go buy it. Well, if NVIDIA is …”

“We wrote about Valiant. We said sell Valiant, ok? We're the only sell on, on Valiant in 20 12, 2013. The company didn't blow up until 2015, ok?”

“If you look deeper, they were just manipulating the accounting and changing the pricing on, on drugs and creating a fraudulent network of online pharmacies.”

“I think CPP should do the same. CPP should be encouraged to invest in Canada. The U.S. Pension plan should buy U.S. Companies. Encouraged to do that.”

“If making acquisitions is part of my business model, there are no longer one-time costs.”

“I think stock options should be an expense. And if they're not an expense, I borrow from Buffett and even the chair of the accounting has said things like this, that, that if it's not an expense, then what is it?”

“The role of the board is to embrace the position of and the viewpoint of the shareholder, and or the stakeholder, I, we always, always focus on the shareholder, but stakeholders, stakeholders, employees customers, the communities the company works in, the comp…”

“The danger I think we're having of the index investing, passive investing, is that in essence, all that is, is momentum investing, because it's a, you're buying an index, which is market cap weighted, So the money that you're investing is going to the largest …”

“So to me, it's a point that says I have no other investments in my business that That would generate a return higher than my cost of capital, and so I'm going out and buying my stock, and I think that is very risky.”

“If we had better information, then you know what? Stock prices on news would hardly move. Everybody would already have known.”

“The AI makes me get to the answer perhaps more quickly, but it's my, if I don't already know where I want to go, then AI just gives me information. But that information doesn't help my decision if I didn't start with where I want to get to.”

“And so it was found in the courts upon appeal that Arthur Anderson was not guilty, but that was way after the fact because Arthur Anderson was already was brought to its knees and it was over.”

“And the challenge is time, because you have to do this quickly. Pressures on costs. And essentially, think about it this way. It's like, I tell you, look, I just prepared my report card. I got an A. I now hand it to you and say, look, it's an A. And if you say…”

“You need to learn it without the calculator, and then you can use the calculator, which is the same with AI. You need to understand how the financial statements are prepared, understand the linkages, developmental models, so that when the AI gives you informat…”

“And I think that's something that the AI can't quite do, unless you tell it where to look, because it doesn't know the link to it that I'm thinking about. But if I can make the initial stage, it can help me get there quicker. And more accurately, but if I don'…”

“And I think right now, the reason why I think we're in a very high risk situation is because the cost of the risk is priced very low. And that's when the risk is highest.”

“Well, that's the tightest, near the tightest it's ever been, which means that investors are willing to lend money to non-investment grade companies at a spread over what a government bond is at a rate which is the tightest it's been practically in history.”

“But what instead I know is I'm looking at the underlying companies, and except for some of the Mag-Seven that are growing their earnings, the smaller and mid-caps are not.”

“The ratio needs to be adapted to the company, the life cycle, the industry, the business model. If the company's selling things at a long-term receivable for over a period of extending beyond one operating cycle, but it's part of its normal operations, that sh…”

“My number one rule is avoid embarrassing loss. You want to avoid the loss of a company potentially blowing up. If the company might, you know, if it looks like it's a little bit expensive and it might potentially go down five percent or something or 10% or 20,…”

“Another rule is don't trust management. I'm sure there's many management teams and I run my, you know, we're a operating business private company. And it's not that they, that, you know, you shouldn't trust anything they say, but again, it's a mindset. Everyth…”

“You have to read the notes to the financial statements first before you actually read the statements. The notes to the financial statements tell you how the company modified the accounting because it made accounting choices. We decided to account for this, the…”

“The money management fees today are a fraction of what they were Even a decade ago.”

“Companies don't start out as being crooked. They have to convince someone to buy a product, ok, or a service. So money comes in to the company in some fashion or time, and then gets converted into something that adds value. The problem becomes outside stakehol…”

“If the company's incentives aren't linked to that, so if they're not tied to, you know, cost control, if they're not tied to driving revenues from an organic standpoint, not just from acquisitions if they're not, you know, if they're tied, if they're driven by…”

“Did a company say, you know, we're going to pay management on X performance metric. If they hit it, they get a hundred percent. If they don't, they get some graduated scale. Well, then management doesn't hit it and they change the metric and management still g…”

“And so if you look at the earnings expectations of the sloppy four 93 for this year is virtually no growth. But if you look at the growth of the mag seven, it continues to go higher.”

“If you look at what I think could make this one be a longer one, if it, if something were to occur, is it comes from earnings slowing down. And earnings growth slowing down, that would be something that would take longer to repair, especially when a lot of the…”

“Buffett has built a business that generates cash. So he has operating businesses, Geico, Prudalum, etc. These generate cash. He takes that cash and invests it when he wants to invest it. In the way that he wants to invest it. You know, the average portfolio ma…”

“And today the retail investor as a component of total investment is the largest it's ever been.”

“And at the time the accounting rules were such that this, these numbers were not included on the liabilities. They were just in the notes.”

“Cisco still exists today, but has never traded at its historical valuation. And yet it's a multiples bigger than it was back then by earnings and by revenue.”

“And in fact, after, after Nortel, FASB changed the rules and then long-term receivables became part of operating cashflow.”

“He was not taking a salary, and everything was tied to the stock price.”