GOLD AT COSTCO !!

 Feeling Bearish?
   My initial thought was, "This Can't Be Good!" Not wishing to present bad news at this time of year and not qualified to offer investment advice, I was reluctant to post this. It is, however, my fiduciary duty to do so and I call to your attention two CBC articles you may have missed.
   It is also the case that this post can be interpreted  as "good news", since the price of gold is going up. And, you can buy it at COSTCO! Relax and enjoy the new year celebration.
   About a matter such as this, it is better to go directly to the sources and not rely on MM. Here they are: 
   I just read this one today: "The Gold Rush Is Back --- And Now at a Big-Box Store Near You: Amid Global Instability, Gold Prices Are Soaring and Some Retailers Are Cashing In," Anis Heydari, CBC News, Dec. 30, 2023.
   "Warehouse stores in Canada aren't just selling large quantities of toilet paper these days — gold bars and coins and other precious metals are moving out of the realm of banking and jewellers and into their aisles....
   According to Costco's chief financial officer, Richard Galanti, the company "sold over $100 million [US] of gold" during a recent 12-week period. Walmart has also started selling gold, silver and platinum bars online to U.S. consumers.Costco didn't respond to requests for comment from CBC News, but officials had previously told investors their gold bars would sell out within hours of being listed online."

  I had missed this earlier one, which is linked in the article above:  "Costco Now Sells Gold Bars. Are They a Good Investment?" Padraig Moran, CBC News, Oct. 3, 2023.

   "Canadians can now buy gold bars at Costco, but one financial expert warns it might be an investment with limited return — unless you're planning to flee the country.

   "Part of [gold's] mystique comes from the ability that it's easy to carry around … you can carry a lot of money in a suitcase if you've got gold," said Will Huggins, an associate professor of finance and economics at McMaster University's DeGroote School of Business....

     The 1 oz., 24-carat gold bars are on sale at Costco in Canada for $2,679.99 a piece, with member customers limited to buying a maximum of two bars every seven days. CBS reported last week that Richard Galanti, chief financial officer at Costco, said the bars were selling out within hours every time inventory was added to the company's website."

Finding Gold at Costco
   I googled the Costco website for "gold", for which there were 647 'hits'. One of them is for the gold bar and here are the data about it:

1 oz Gold Bar PAMP Suisse Lady Fortuna Veriscan (New In Assay)

Features:

24-kt yellow gold

1 troy oz (31.1 g)

Item cannot be returned or refunded

This item is not eligible for price adjustments and/or any promotions

Limit of 1 transaction per 7 days (168 hours) per Membership, with a maximum of 2 units

Bar Highlights:

Contains 1 troy oz (31.1 g) of .9999 fine gold.

Tamper-evident assay card makes it easy to determine if the bar has been handled while guaranteeing the gold weight and purity. PAMP Mint places a thin plastic sheeting that safeguards your assay card during shipping.

They will deliver the gold bar, but are sold out right now. To find the current price I had to check into my Costco account, but it would be easier to get into Fort Knox. I assume it is around $2700, but remember, you can only buy two at a time. 

"Going to Hell in a Handbasket"
   As you can see, that expression was used in the article and I wondered about it, although I knew it did not generally imply that things are going well. Here are the introductory words from the very interesting Wikiwand entry. "To Hell in a Handbasket": 
"Going to hell in a handbasket", "going to hell in a handcart", "going to hell in a handbag", "go to hell in a bucket", "sending something to hell in a handbasket" and "something being like hell in a handbasket" are variations on an allegorical locution of unclear origin, which describes a situation headed for disaster inescapably or precipitately.

The Bonus:
   At the end of the wiki essay there is a list of items showing how the term is used in popular culture. The last one is: In the American television sitcom Friends (1994-2004), Helena Handbasket is the drag name of Charles Bing, the gay father of main character Chandler Bing.
   The late Mr. Bing was mentioned recently in MM, in "Schott's and Friends." 

Signs of the Times

     

   I remember years ago, when our conversations were richer, that someone realized we were talking about real estate. Horror of horrors! That was many years ago, before Trump, so I have no idea what we went on to discuss. It could have been about some medical malady, since our conversations may not have been as rich as I remember.

  Whether we are richer now than we were then involves philosophical and economic issues which I am not prepared to deal with, so we will stick with real estate. That subject came up again recently and it never really disappeared from the salons of which I am a member. In this instance, it appears that a short piece about a local property had been overlooked (or perhaps avoided) by the participants, all of whom were homeowners.

What Goes Up

   I will provide here some information which indicates simply, that in this case the property value went down. That is a scenario difficult to imagine, particularly for property owners, who think they perhaps should have taken the opportunity to invest in the more stable option, crypto-currency. 

   Among aspiring homeowners, schadenfreude did not achieve full force since the house that had fallen in value, was still far too expensive for them. As I said, whether we are richer now than we once were is a matter for debate, but perhaps we would all be better off if a house was considered as a place in which to live, rather than in which to invest.

Source:
   "This London House Dropped $300,000K in Less Than 2 Months: Sharp Rise in Interest Rates Punishing Owners Who Bought in Early 2022," Andrew Lupton, CBC News, Nov. 9, 2023.

Valuable Business Books

 Although many people no longer care much about printed books, occasionally one reads about some books that are highly valued and which fetch a great deal of money when offered for sale. Usually they are first editions, or are very rare, and mainly they are literary or historical works, or ones that are well illustrated and beautifully printed. Business books are not typically seen to be a good investment, unless one is actually interested in, say, investing.

    I thought about this recently when AbeBook published their most expensive sales for 2021. On it was a business book that was purchased for a high price and not because of the information it contained.  A facsimile of an ornithological work is number two on the AbeBook list and an image from it is seen above. It was sold for $36,635. The most expensive book they have ever sold was also a bird book and it went for $191,000. Our business book came in at number six, at $29,000 and a description of it is here:

   This reminded me of another business book that was perceived to be much more valuable than its cover price. At the time, I was the director of a business library and we had a copy of the book in the stacks. I decided that we had better pull the book and put it under controlled circulation before it disappeared.

    The book is Margin of Safety by Seth Klarman.  A limited number of copies were published in 1991 and by 2007, copies were being sold for over $1000, or filched from libraries. Copies are still difficult to come by and expensive. There is a Wikipedia entry for the book and there are other ways to learn about it. (There is also an entry for the concept, "margin of safety.")

   Seth Klarman is a very clever fellow and there is a Wikipedia entry for him as well. If you really want a good return on your investment, put your money with him, rather than in book collecting.

  A newsletter was produced by me and it probably had less readers than this blog. I wrote a bit about all of this in The Bottom Feeder, and from it you will learn a little more about the book and Mr. Klarman. The first sentence, in what follows, refers to another interesting book that was in high demand. In this case library staff were getting lending requests as well as late night email queries, many of which were from India. They were for an "unauthorized biography" of Dhirubhai Ambani and the title of the book is The Polyester Prince. It was unavailable in India and apparently there was a "brisk trade in samizdat copies." It was pulled from the stacks as well. I wrote about this, but will spare you the details, except to say that Mr. Ambani was the founder of Reliance Industries and you see its trucks on the streets of London.

Note: The information directly below was written in 2007.
From The Bottom Feeder, Dec. 2007
"What is The Margin of Safety?"
This episode reminded us of another, involving a book that was out of print and which was, consequently, fetching very high prices over the internet. The book, Margin of Safety, by Seth Klarman has also been put on short loan to ensure that it does not “go missing”. Note this description from the Wharton Journal:

“ If Benjamin Graham were alive today, he might, at first blush, be more impressed by the appreciated value of Seth Klarman's book Margin of Safety, than with the performance of his investment fund ….that's at first blush. Seth Klarman is a value investor and Portfolio Manager of the investment partnership The Baupost Group, and when Klarman first published Margin of Safety it had an original cover price of $25. The book is now out of print, and today sells on eBay for $1,145 [that was in 2005]. That's an increase of 4580%. But you can't deploy billions of dollars of capital on the purchase of a single book, so Klarman has done it in the stock market through The Baupost Group. Founded in 1982, The Baupost Group now manages $5.4 billion, and had you put $1 in the fund at inception, you would have $55 today. That's a whopping increase of 5500% … alas, first blushes are just that.”
For more discussions about this book see” “Investing Secrets That You Won’t Find at Your Local Bookstore,” Avner Mandelman, The Globe and Mail, Aug. 12, 2006 and “The $700 Used Book” Why All the Buzz About Seth Klarman’s Out-of-Print Investing Classic?”, Roben Farzad, Business Week, Aug. 7, 2006. [ 2007]

The Bonus:
   As I indicated, Mr. Klarman is a clever fellow, interested in many things. One of them was a mega-quarry that was to be in Melancthon Township north of Toronto. Aggregates were (are) needed and Highland Companies was going to extract them. Baupost Group was a major backer. There was considerable opposition and the project never proceeded. ("Highland Companies Withdraws Mega-Quarry Proposal for North of Toronto," Heather Loney, Global News, Mach 23, 2012.) There is also a brief mention of this incident in the Wikipedia entry for the Baupost Group. 
  You noted, perhaps that the Graham book referred to in the review of the one by Klarman is Security Analysis, which is the one that just sold for a high price. It is interesting also, that the business school (Ivey) in which the library was located, now has a Ben Graham Centre For Value Investing. 
  I was pleased to see that the library still has copies of all of these books.
  When you think of "AbeBooks" you probably think of the words, 'old', 'used', 'antiquarian' or 'rare'. AbeBooks is owned by Amazon. The headquarters of AbeBooks is in Victoria, B.C. There is no Abe.