What We're Reading ~ 3/13/19

The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence [Benoit Mandelbrot]

Transcript of interview with Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell [60 Minutes]

Status as a service [Eugene Wei]

The four fundamental skills of all investing [Collaborative Fund]

The perils of investing idol worship: The Kraft Heinz lessons [Aswath Damodaran]

A pitch on Nintendo [HardcoreValue]

A pitch on Molson Coors [Elevation Capital]

A look at the timeshares businesses [Yet Another Value Blog]

A look at HSBC [UK Value Investor]

How internet marketplaces unlock economic wealth [Bill Gurley]

DoorDash tops GrubHub & UberEats in food delivery [Fortune]

Google quietly releases hotel booking with potentially huge implications [Skift]

Pricing algorithms can learn to collude with each other to raise prices [MIT Tech Review]

Not caring: a unique and powerful skill [Collaborative Fund]

On Manchester United: the paradox of profits without trophies [FT]

Investors get burned after betting on electric car metals [WSJ]

What We're Reading ~ 2/28/18

On decision regret [A Wealth of Common Sense]

Why competitive advantages die [Collaborative Fund]

Notes from the Wharton restructuring & distressed conference [Reddit]

The case against Google [NYTimes]

Consumer goods: big brands battle with the little guys [FT]

The end of the low volatility regime [13D]

Myths and facts about "risk parity" [FT Alphaville]

Inside Facebook's two years of hell [Wired]

How Softbank, world's biggest tech investor, throws around its cash [WSJ]

Canada's housing market flirts with disaster [FT]

Everything you need to know about 5G [IEEE Spectrum]

Inside T-Mobile's big, brash comeback [Fortune]

Boeing is killing it by squeezing its suppliers [Bloomberg]

From imitation to innovation: how China became a tech superpower [Wired]

Chinese tourists are taking over the earth [Bloomberg]

There's a global race to control batteries - and China is winning [WSJ]

Didi Chuxing took on Uber and won, now it's taking on the world [Wired]

Autonomous cars: no one wants to let Google win the war for maps all over again [Bloomberg]

Dyson bets on electric cars to shakeup industry [FT]

How to succeed in business?  Do less [WSJ]

What We're Reading ~ 10/4/17

The Four: The hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook & Google [Scott Galloway]

The main fundamental skills of all investing [Collaborative Fund]

Skilled managers should hold fewer stocks [Institutional Investor]

Machine learning for investors: a primer [Alpha Architect]

Blue skies ahead for John Malone's LiLAC Group [Barrons]

Benedict Evans on the future of cars [EconTalk]

On the characteristics of aggregators [Stratechery]

Elon Musk versus the haters [Institutional Investors]

The new world of monopoly? What about flying? [Marginal Revolution]

Amazon makes up 43% of all online sales [Inc]

Millennials are moving to the suburbs, buying big SUVs [Bloomberg]

Media companies are finally getting serious about data and targeted advertising [Adweek]

Shopify is an excellent business [Tom Tunguz]

A negative piece on Shopify [Citron Research]

What We're Reading ~ 8/31/17

The Emotionally Intelligent Investor: How Self-Awareness, Empathy & Intuition Drive Performance [Ravee Mehta]

The death of many brands [Intrinsic Investing]

The global economy coalescing around a few digital superpowers [HBR]

A dozen attributes of a scalable business [25iq]

On Disney's tough choice [Stratechery]

Beauty industry gears up for an ugly market share war [Barrons]

Javascript is eating the world [dev.to]

Blue Apron's struggles show why it's tough to make it with e-commerce subscription [Bloomberg]

Louis Vuitton knows fashion is a money pit and keeps throwing money at it [Bloomberg]

How brokerage app Robinhood got millennials to love the market [Fast Company]

Primer on the gaming sector [Ethereal Value]

How the three-tiered beer distribution system works [Fermentarium]

On the two systems that determine and influence every decision you make [Thrive]

Ruane Cunniff (Sequoia Fund) Investor Day Transcript 2017

Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb recently released the transcript from their investor day a few months ago.  Known as the managers of the Sequoia Fund, David Poppe and his team talk about many of their investments.

As of the end of June, their top ten holdings were:

Berkshire Hathaway (BRK A / BRK B) 11.28%
US Treasury Bills & Cash 8.65%
MasterCard (MA) 7.72%
Alphabet (GOOGL & GOOG) 6.5%
TJX (TJX) 5.93%
Dentsply Sirona (XRAY) 5.3%
Carmax (KMX) 5.04%
Constellation Software (CSU) 4.83
Rolls Royce (RR.LN) 4.74%
Liberty Media Corp 4.13%

They talked about what they often find in their top investments:

"Hopefully that gives you a sense of the kinds of companies we want to buy: high-quality enterprises trading at discounts to their intrinsic value, with long-duration growth opportunities.  I would note that every great outperformer we have purchased during my eighteen years here - from Fastenal to Idexx to Mastercard to O'Reilly to Precision Castparts to Sirona to TJX - had something in common.  And it was not a low P/E at the time we first invested.  It was a long growth runway and, most often, a long organic-growth runway."

The transcript that follows touches on their thoughts on Priceline.com (PCLN), the threat of Amazon (AMZN) to various businesses, and some of their holdings like TJX and O'Reilly Auto, as well as other positions like Rolls Royce and Charles Schwab.

Embedded below is Sequoia Fund / Ruane Cunniff's 2017 Investor Day Transcript:




You can download a .pdf here.

For more from this firm, you can view their transcript from last year here as well.

Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger & Bill Gates Interview

Becky Quick on CNBC recently sat down with Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett for a one-on-one interview and then was later joined by Charlie Munger and Bill Gates for a discussion on a myriad of topics.  Here are some highlights:

Warren Buffett's Interview

-  Talked about technology stocks a lot at Berkshire's annual meeting.  Munger said they missed Google (GOOGL) and Buffett thought they should have had some insight into it because GEICO was a heavy user of it for advertising and paying per click.  He wasn't sure if there was a first mover advantage or if increased competition was going to come along (Bing, etc) or if there were going to be technological advances he couldn't understand.  "If I were forced to buy it or short it, I'd buy it.  Same with Amazon."

-  Apple (AAPL) shares were much more reasonable compared to future earnings so that's why he bought that tech stock.  Likens the consumer nature of the product as a way for him to easily tell what's going on with customer preference.  "You can't move people by price in the smartphone market remotely like you can in appliances ... the loyalty is huge."  Notes that most items are price sensitive (TVs, etc) but AAPL's products don't seem to be.

-  Recently highlighted how Buffett sold some IBM and he said that they've experimented with IBM's Watson at GEICO.  In that space you have to worry about somebody coming in and jumping ahead with the utility.  "The biggest value will come when it replaces human labor." 

-  Doesn't make trades on the basis of political election outcomes, doesn't look much at quarterly GDP numbers.

-  Railroad figures show the economy is doing 'OK', 2% rate or so.  Natural gas has gone up in price so that dictates the use of goal a lot of places, so coal shipments are up the most % wise. 

- Housing market is getting better, but not 'booming.'   Berkshire owns Clayton homes (manufactured homes), Acme brick, Berkshire Hathaway realty, Shaw flooring, Benjamin Moore paints. 

-  "Credit card volume will tell you a lot about the consumer., what their attitude is."

-  "Packaged goods has generally been a very profitable business."

-  Largest investor in four major airlines (UAL, DAL, AAL, LUV): Airlines have found a very high percentage of customers are price conscious.  Yet most consumers are captive to whatever airline flies the route they need to take.  Thinks consolidation of the industry has helped and it's no longer a 'suicidal business.'

-  "I have no idea what the market will do in the short-term."  They've got $95 billion sitting around and it doesn't make him happy that he's not earning anything on it.  Says it's getting tougher to buy businesses these days, "Once you buy a business, the business doesn't know what you paid for it."  "It's a very tough period to allocate capital."

- Says he's still cheap but not as cheap as he used to be. "You can afford to overpay a bit for a really fine business depending on your degree of certainty that it's a really fine business."

- Buffett says one thing he mentioned at the annual meeting no one really appreciated: that the five largest businesses today by market value ($2.5 trillion or more) you could run those businesses with no equity capital.  That's a completely different world than the past when industrial giants needed a lot of capital.

-  Didn't buy Amazon (AMZN) because of "stupidity."  Says he was impressed by Bezos long ago but didn't think he could pull off what he has.  On shares currently: "It's a big valuation ... I'm not buying any.  These are powerful ideas with big potential and he's executed."

-  One essential factor that determines what he thinks about market valuations: "The most important item over time in valuation is obviously interest rates."  "Anybody that prefers bonds to stocks today is making a big mistake.  It's ridiculous for somebody to buy a 30 year bond at these rates."

-  "Every smart guy is tempted by leverage, and some of them are broken by it."



Then at the end of Buffett's 1-on-1 interview, Charlie Munger and Bill Gates also joined Buffett to talk about healthcare, tax reform, mistakes they've made, and other topics.


Embedded below is the video of Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and Bill Gates's interview on CNBC:



For more from these investors, be sure to check out Warren Buffett's recommended reading list as well as Charlie Munger's favorite books.

What We're Reading ~ 3/23/17

Mauboussin: The incredible shrinking universe of stocks [Credit Suisse]

7 traits for active investors to win in the long term [Jim O'Shaughnessy]

How to fight a price war [Harvard Business Review]

Stephen Jarislowsky's secret: buy stocks you never plan to sell [Canadian Business]

The fourth industrial revolution: a primer on artificial intelligence [Medium]

A pitch on Alphabet (GOOGL / GOOG) [Wexboy]

The autonomous vehicle revolution [Rational Walk]

Mohnish Pabrai thinks autonomous vehicles will take 20 years [Benzinga]

Baidu's (BIDU) CEO envisions a spinoff of robot cars arm [Bloomberg]

On Intel's (INTC) purchase of Mobileye (MBLY) [Stratechery]
Apple (AAPL) wants to bring augmented reality to the masses [Bloomberg]

Tech and entertainment in the era of mass customization [Andreessen Horowitz]

How being wrong can help us get it right [Tim Harford]

Advertisers are more interested in Instagram than Snapchat [Fortune]

Interview with Ctrip.com's (CTRP) CEO [Skift]

The billion dollar industry of professional video gaming [Bloomberg]

Soda loses its US crown; Americans now drink more bottled water [WSJ]

Pat Dorsey Interview With Young Investors Society

Pat Dorsey was recently interviewed by Young Investors Society.  He's the founder of Dorsey Asset Management and prior to that worked as the Director of Equity Research for Morningstar. 

He's also the author of two books:  The Little Book That Builds Wealth and then The Five Rules for Successful Stock Investing.  Here's some takeaways from his talk:


- His book talks about moats and competitive advantage.  He wished he put more in his book about the business that is building the moat, versus one that already has one.  A younger biz with a longer runaway and each dollar of incremental cashflow is being invested at an increment ROIC.

- If you've got long-term time horizon, smaller pool of capital, and investors ok with volatility, your returns are probably gonna be superior. 

- For companies, the ability to reinvest is where you really maximize things

- On short selling:  Highlighted the not-so-great risk/reward of only being able to make 100% on your position but the potential to lose an infinite amount (if the short just keeps going up and up).  "Shorting is tough because time is not on your side."

- Short selling is very hard and the few good short sellers he's met never ever ever short because of valuation.  They short because a business is fraudulent or fundamentally flawed.  For shorting candidates, look for businesses that both raises equity and pays a dividend.

- On Snapchat (SNAP): Thinks it could be a smoking hole in the ground after a while.  Mentioned to look at the company's growth rate once Facebook (FB) rolled out its 'stories' copycat feature on its Instagram platform.  Said SNAP needs to find a monetization model over time.

- Said investing in DryShips (DRYS) is kind of like playing poker with Kim Jung Il.

- Make sure it's a business you can understand, don't ignore management.

- On Facebook (FB), which Dorsey owns: seems almost too obvious; has huge topline but still growing at over 50%.  Global advertising market is huge (opportunity).  Advertising grows a little bit more than global GDP but digital ads have grown even faster.  Advertisers follow attention.  2 companies get 80% of incremental ad spend: FB and Alphabet (GOOGL).  But if you had to take the stock and lock it up and not touch it for 10 years, you probably can't do that with FB because the landscape changes too much.  FB is hyper-aware of the risk of declining user engagement.  The current valuation does not assume dominance 10 years from now.  Close to 17-18x EBIT now, growing over 50%.

- "We worry about all our positions.  If you ever have a position you're not worried about, you're probably in trouble."

- Single biggest lesson is to avoid endowment bias.  Just because he owns it doesn't mean he should trust management more.  "My biggest mistakes have definitely come when I've not kept the bar as high as it should be with management quality or business quality."

- You can never have too high of a hurdle rate for businesses you evaluate.  You don't need to own 100 stocks, you're not running a Fidelity mutual fund.  Maybe 10 in your personal account, or 30 if you're running a fund

- Sticky note on his computer: "No FOMO"  or No Fear Of Missing Out.

- Ask yourself: Does it fit your personality?  Does it fit what you're trying to do as an investor?

The publisher disabled the ability to embed the video but you can view it here at the Young Investors Society YouTube channel.

We also recently posted up Mark Cuban's interview with Young Investors Society as well.

What We're Reading ~ 3/1/17

The Tao of Charlie Munger [David Clark]

Excellent write-up on Costco (COST) [Scuttlebutt Investor]

YouTube bets it can convince cordcutters to pay for TV [Bloomberg]

Also, YouTube tops 1 billion hours of video a day [WSJ]

The man who broke Ticketmaster [Motherboard]

Cinemark is undervalued [Forbes]

A pitch on Grupo Televisa (TV) [Barrons]

Grit: a complete guide on how to be more mentally tough [James Clear]

Why facts don't change our minds [New Yorker]

Long-term investing in an age of small attention spans [Safal Niveshak]

How Indian families took over the Antwerp diamond trade [Qz]

The fast rise and slow demise of daily deals company LivingSocial [Washington Post]

3G Capital's purchases and their profit margins [Economist]

Amazon's antitrust paradox [Yale Law Journal]

Student debt in America has hit a new record [Bloomberg]

Top 10 Stocks That Matter Most To Hedge Funds Per Goldman Sachs (Q4 2016)

Goldman Sachs' quarterly hedge fund trend monitor outlines what stocks matter most to hedge funds.  Here's the list as the fourth quarter 2016:


Top 10 Stocks That Matter Most To Hedge Funds: Q4 2016

- Alphabet (GOOGL / GOOG)

- Facebook (FB)

- Amazon.com (AMZN)

- Bank of America (BAC)

- Charter Communications (CHTR)

- Apple (AAPL)

- Microsoft (MSFT)

- Yahoo (YHOO)

- Time Warner (TWX)

- NXP Semiconductor (NXPI)


As you can see, it's quite tech-heavy.   The major exception is Bank of America (BAC), which was a consensus buy in Q4 among hedge funds we track in our newsletter.

For more on what stocks hedge funds have been buying & selling, check out the brand new issue of our premium newsletter that reveals the portfolios of 25 top funds.

What We're Reading ~ 11/30/16

Warren Buffett's meeting with University of Maryland students [UMD]

Is the next financial crisis on its way? [Steve Eisman]

A write-up on the impending Hilton (HLT) spinoff [Clark Street Value]

CBRE (CBG): industry deep dive to detect an emerging moat [Punch Card]

A look at Discovery Communications (DISCA/K) [Contrarian Edge]

Sustainable sources of competitive advantage [Collaborative Fund]

Why deep learning matters and what's next for AI [Algorithmia]

The unexpected genius of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg [Fortune]

Google's online travel adventure upsets its biggest advertisers [Bloomberg]

A billionaire's dreams of creating a guns empire [NYMag]

If oil refiners crash, so will the economy [WSJ]

Mastercard, Visa set to reap spoils of India's war on cash [Bloomberg]

How Best Buy (BBY) fought Amazon [WSJ]

The evolution of media & entertainment: conversation with CEOs [YouTube]

How to get comfortable with being umcomfortable [Inc]

Why gut feelings may really help you make risky decisions [Washington Post]

Why stoicism is one of the best mind-hacks ever devised [Aeon]

What We're Reading ~ 9/21/16

But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past [Klosterman]

Profile of Alphabet's CFO Ruth Porat [Fortune]

The third transportation revolution [Lyft's CEO]

Electric vehicles: it's not just about the car [Bloomberg New Energy Finance]

US setting federal ground rules for self-driving car push [Forbes]

Profile of Ulta's CEO Mary Dillon [Fortune]

2016 US mobile app report [comscore]

On the inevitability of everything 'in the cloud' [Digits To Dollars]

8 price action signals every trader should know [Tradecity]

A look at Spanish banks [Exane]

Heavy equipment glut weighs on machine makers [WSJ]

Inside the cannibalistic culture of China's Tencent [Bloomberg]

Q&A with Chase Carey [Formula 1]

How Wells Fargo's high pressure sales culture spiraled out of control [WSJ]

A look through the eyes of beer wholesalers [Beverage World]

AT&T wants to blanket the country with gigabit wi-fi from utility poles [Gizmodo]

Ruane Cunniff (Sequoia Fund) Investor Day Transcript 2016: Rolls Royce, Valeant & More

Ruane Cunniff Goldfarb, managers of the Sequoia Fund, recently released the transcript from its investor day.  In it, they talk about many of their investments.

Their top ten holdings as of the end of the second quarter were:  Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A/B), TJX Companies (TJX), MasterCard (MA), Alphabet (GOOG/L), O'Reilly Auto (ORLY), Mohawk Industries (MHK), Fastenal (FAST), Rolls Royce (RR.L), Constellation Software (CSU.T), and Dentsply Sirona (XRAY).

They outline their thinking on Rolls Royce and also address the Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX) saga, which they no longer own.

Embedded below is the transcript of Ruane Cunniff's 2016 Investor Day:



You can download a .pdf copy here.

What We're Reading ~ 8/10/16

When you don't know what you don't know [Medium]

The mirage of relative performance [ai-cio]

On investing and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable [Cordant Wealth]

Jim Grant: negative interest rates will end badly [CFA Institute]

Mark Hart bets China's currency will collapse [Bloomberg]

Interview with Daniel Kahneman [The Big Picture]

Daniel Dennett's most useful critical thinking tools [Farnam Street]

A look at Jefferies [Dealbook]

Coho Capital's pitch on Amazon [ValueWalk]

Think Amazon's drone delivery is a gimmick? Think again [NYTimes]

An e-commerce business' experience with the Amazon behemoth [Medium]

What happens to tons of jobs with autonomous vehicle disruption? [NPR] 

Why we pine for manufacturing [New Yorker]

Mark Zuckerberg on the next 10 years [The Verge]

Playing the long game inside Tim Cook's Apple [FastCompany]

Google and Facebook killed free media [Bloomberg]

What disruption really means [Hardbound]

What We're Reading ~ 8/3/16

Ego is the enemy [Ryan Holiday]

Is active management dead? Not even close [CFA Institute]

When is a 'value' company not a value? [Investing Research]

Interview with Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes [Bloomberg]

On Tiger Global's bet on Flipkart [LiveMint]

Amazon's ascent in India shows that price isn't everything [Nikkei]

On capital light compounders [Base Hit Investing]

Why is the stock market so high? Ask the bond market [NYTimes]

US homeownership rate falls to five-decade low [WSJ]

How China became the world's e-commerce king [TheDrum]

Didi schools Uber on doing business in cutthroat China [Bloomberg]

Uber finds passage to India blocked by Ola [Bloomberg]

What happened to Yahoo? [Waiters Pad]

Google plots cheaper wireless future to expand fiber project [Bloomberg]

Here comes 5G wireless, but first a reality check [Recode]

Big US brokerages chase the rich [Reuters]

App coins and the dawn of the decentralized business model [Medium]

How free mobile games are designed to make money [Vox]

What We're Reading ~ 5/25/16

How to make better investment decisions [Morgan Housel]

Why active management fell off a cliff - perhaps permanently [Reformed Broker]

Falsification: how to destroy your best ideas [Farnam Street]

Importance of ROIC: reinvestment vs legacy moats [Base Hit Investing]

Position sizing in value investing [Journeys of a Bumbling Trader]

8 big ideas from super investor Philip Fisher [Safal Niveshak]

JD.com (JD): a multi-decade compounder [Value Venture]

The race to 5G: inside the fight for the future of mobile [Tech Republic]

An inside look at Google Fiber [Recode]

The story of Facebook's biggest setback in India [The Guardian]

The most important investors of all time [The Irrelevant Investor]

On hero worship in investing [Clear Eyes Investing] 

The battle between startups & incumbents: distribution vs innovation [Andreessen Horowitz]

Why we still don't see a China hard landing [Mark Mobius]

The business of too much TV [Vulture]

Baby lull promises growing pains for economy [WSJ]

Luxury brands go on a diet [Bloomberg]

What We're Reading ~ 4/27/16

Second level thinking: what smart people use to outperform [Farnam Street]

Consumption in China is resilient, despite troubled economy [Economist]

What if China already had a hard landing? [FT Alphaville]

Baidu - a hidden gem [Variant Views]

A look at Expeditors International [Rational Walk]

The curious case of Hercules Offshore [Oozing Alpha]

A subprime boom, insane interest rates, predatory lending: sound familiar? [Motherjones]

Luck meets perseverance: the creation of IBM's competitive advantage [Farnam Street]

A look at India's e-commerce market through Flipkart [Founding Fuel]

The extinction invention [MIT Technology Review]

Learning Larry Page's Alphabet [Fast Company]

The case for investing in Latin America [Bloomberg]

The affordability crisis: what happens when millennials can't afford homes? [Apartment List]

More than 40% of student borrowers aren't making payments [WSJ]

47% of Americans can't come up with $400 in an emergency [The Atlantic]

Will driverless cars mean the end of auto insurance? [CSMonitor]

Inside the fall of SunEdison [WSJ]

Lessons from SunEdison's collapse [BaseHitInvesting]

Facebook wants to be the layer between you and the future [Buzzfeed]

Inside Apple's secretive iPhone factory [Bloomberg]

What We're Reading ~ 4/20/16

The Great Minds of Investing [William Green]

On simplicity versus complexity in investing [Reformed Broker]

Capital allocation - defining what is good and what is bad [Value and Opportunity]

Why we think we're better investors than we are [NYTimes]

Billing by millionths of pennies, cloud computing takes in billions [NYTimes]

Inside Amazon's cloud computing infrastructure [DataCenter Frontier]

Inside the nondescript building where trillions trade each day [Bloomberg]

The Energy Transfer - Williams poker game [SL-Advisors]

Kinder Morgan: asymmetric upside potential [Value and Opportunity]

India's thirst for oil is overtaking China's [Bloomberg]

HDR is TV's next big format war [CNET]

Profile on Google's Sundar Pichai [Buzzfeed]

How Jeff Bezos became a power beyond Amazon [Fortune]

Inside the house that Jack Ma built [Bloomberg]

The billionaire behind Walgreens' quest for global dominance [Fortune]

Media websites battle faltering ad revenue [NYTimes]

Ugg: the look that refused to die [The Guardian]

Critical things successful people do every day [Linked In]

What We're Reading ~ 3/16/2016

Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism [Jeff Gramm]

Two powerful mental models: network effects and critical mass [Andreessen Horowitz]

How to be wrong as an investor [A Wealth of Common Sense]

A look at the concept of moats in investing [Intrinsic Investing]

The great race: e-commerce in India [The Economist]

A look inside Google's DeepMind [The Verge]

Amazon's Echo brims with groundbreaking promise [NYTimes]

In-depth analysis of Moody's (MCO) [Value Seeker]

A look at Visa & Mastercard [JanaV]

American Express, Synchrony Financial & the changing credit card landscape [PunchCard]

Amex: cheap blue chip or value trap? [Value & Opportunity]

How credit cards tax America [Priceonomics]

After TV: Video's future will be bigger, more diverse & precarious than its past [Redef]

John Malone 'cable cowboy' faces test in rounding up the right mix of assets [Variety]

The television has a business model problem and it's killing good TV [Redef]

The craft beer bubble [VinePair]

The rise and final hours of Chesapeake's Aubrey McClendon [Bloomberg]

Sequoia Fund Investor Day Transcript 2015 (Ruane Cunniff & Goldfarb)

Ruane Cunniff & Goldfarb recently released their Sequoia Fund investor day transcript for 2015.  While the event took place back in May, it's still interesting to get their insight on their investments given their long term focus.

Sequoia Fund's investment management team discussed their thesis and outlook on numerous portfolio companies, including Valeant, Google, Mohawk, Idexx, Fastenal, Rolls Royce, TJX, O'Reilly, and many more.

At the end of the second quarter, Sequoia Fund's top holdings were:

Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX): 28.7% of portfolio
Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A/B): 10.6%
TJX Companies (TJX): 5%
O'Reilly Automotive (ORLY): 4.3%
Fastenal (FAST): 4.2%
MasterCard (MA): 3.2%
Precision Castparts (PCP): 2.7%
Mohawk Industries (MHK): 2.5%
Idexx Laboratories (IDXX): 2.3%
Google (GOOGL): 2% 

This really is an interesting read in its entirety given their candidness about assessing their positions.

Embedded below is Sequoia Fund's investor day transcript for 2015:



You can download a .pdf copy here.