Claros Mortgage Trust trades at an 80% discount to book value, despite a more measured decline in book value per share. The company's high debt level amplifies the impact of asset write-downs on equity value, contributing to the stock's decline. Management's expertise and low exposure to troubled office space, along with a focus on multifamily projects, offer some stability. The recent dividend cancellation likely caused a non-financial share price drop, presenting a potential buying opportunity for undervalued shares. Read more ..read more

First mortgage real-estate lender Sachem Capital (SACH) has seen its shares annihilated as of late, having declined almost 80% from their 2022 high. This puts it at a 73% discount to book value, making it a very enticing investment from a value standpoint. The company's CEO bought some shares about 2 months ago, and stated on the company's most recent conference call that he believes the shares to be undervalued. The company has also dramatically slowed its lending, so is bringing in more cash than is leaving, which should shore up the balance sheet. But there are a few items which reduce th ..read more

What I Learned About Investing from Darwin is a terrific book that made me think deeply about my portfolio, particularly when it comes to selling. Author Pulak Prasad runs a fund and follows Buffett's principles seemingly to a T, but in India. He buys terrific Indian companies (as measured by ROIC) when they go on sale, and then never sells them as long as the business remains strong. In the book, he goes through a great deal of market and business lessons through the lens of Darwin's theory of natural selection. The question of when to sell is a difficult one for value investors, including ..read more

Karsan Value Funds (KVF) is a value-oriented fund, as described here. Due to securities regulations, the fund is not open to the public at this time. Should that change in the future, there will be an announcement on this site. For the fourth quarter ended December 31st, 2024, KVF gained $1.22 per share, increasing the value of each share to $77.06. This represents a 2.1% pre-tax return, which exactly matches this quarter's S&P 500 return, while the Russell 2000 was flat and the S&P/TSX returned 3%. The stocks in KVF's portfolio, however, performed worse than these numbers would sugg ..read more

I'm an avid consumer of Nate Silver's work, so I was excited to read his new book On the Edge. It's a book about mastering risk, and the people who seek to gain advantages through superior risk management. There were some interesting sections. For example, the section on Sam Bankman-Fried was pretty inciteful as SBF granted Silver some interviews just as FTX was collapsing. I also found the AI section very interesting. But otherwise, I found the book too long and difficult to get through. I'm usually pretty quick to put books down nowadays if they can't hold my interest, but I made an except ..read more

Saddam Hussein ruled over Iraq for decades before the US toppled his regime. What happened after the centralized state was dismantled can serve as an eye-opening lesson. In A Stranger in Your Own City, stories from a wide variety of Iraqis tell the tale of how Iraqi society reacted to the regime change. I appreciated how many different points of view there were, as the book was written by a local journalist who traveled through Iraq to get these stories. You can't really nail down one reason why many of these people chose violence in the weeks and months and years after Hussein's ousting; eac ..read more

My dive into the world of health and nutrition continues as I recently read Deep Nutrition by Catherine Shanahan, MD. The book covers a lot of topics about nutrition, ranging broadly from our evolutionary history to the nitty gritty of how to make a healthy salad dressing. The book formally introduced me to two new areas I need to learn more about. The first is that seed oils are bad for you, even uncooked. These oils have already been intensely heated (that's how they are extracted for maximum value by their manufacturers) and therefore changed into molecules our bodies have not been conditi ..read more

Karsan Value Funds (KVF) is a value-oriented fund, as described here. Due to securities regulations, the fund is not open to the public at this time. Should that change in the future, there will be an announcement on this site. For the third quarter ended September 30th, 2024, KVF lost $1.17 per share, reducing the value of each share to $75.84. This represents a 1.5% pre-tax loss, comparing poorly with the S&P 500, the Russell 2000 and the S&P/TSX, which were all up in the mid-to-high single-digit range. One stock accounted for about 600% of this quarter's loss, meaning the rest of ..read more

Big Five Sporting Goods is no longer worthy of its name, its stock price having been harpooned more than 95% from its 2021 high. The sporting goods retailer of 425 stores trades for just $40 million, or about $94,000 per store. But the company's inventory averages $680,000 per store, so this is worth a closer look! The company's tangible book value is $225 million, for a price to book ratio of 18%. The reason for the massive discount is a drop in same-store sales resulting in a negative turn on the income statement, and cancelation of the dividend. The former darling has lost money for three ..read more

Karsan Value Funds (KVF) is a value-oriented fund, as described here. Due to securities regulations, the fund is not open to the public at this time. Should that change in the future, there will be an announcement on this site. For the second quarter ended June 30th, 2024, KVF gained $8.51 per share, increasing the value of each share to $77.01. This represents a 16% pre-tax return, comparing well with the S&P 500's 4% return, and the Russell 2000 and S&P/TSX's low single-digit negative returns. Currency gains helped returns by $0.40 per share in the quarter. Most of KVF's $1.7 milli ..read more