What I’ve done here is used Peter Boodell’s notes from and annotated them with some of my own thoughts.

With today’s news regarding the Bear Stearns buyout, the markets were certainly volatile, with some large sell-offs for Lehman Brothers (LEH) and MF Global (MF). I was more interested in the performance of the credit default swaps that are held in the portfolios of Odyssey Re (ORH) and Fairfax Financial Limited (FFH).

As a whole, the Street Capitalist portfolio is up 12.82% over the course of less than 5 months. During the same period, the S&P 500 is down -6.46%. I’m quite satisfied with this type of out performance of my benchmark. In the future I’d like to make a few more changes:

Picking companies to bet on to weather the growing financial crisis in the United States, noted value investor Whitney Tilson appeared on CNBC last week and named just three: McDonald's, Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, and Canadian financial services conglomerate Fairfax Financial Holdings.

A brief look at two attitudes held by value investors which are not only childish but inhibitive to our learning.

John Bethel reviews the performance of the Controlled Greed portfolio for the first quarter of 2007. Overall, the group was up 4.6% vs. the S&P being up about 0.2% for Q1 of '07.

John Bethel tracks the performance of stocks mentioned on his blog. "I’ve made 18 stock purchase recommendations since...launching this blog on April 27, 2005...In all, the stock picks made on this blog have averaged a gain of 38.4% during the life of this blog." John details the performance of each pick. This post is worth reading simply to see the list of stocks.

Here is GuruFocus' actual tracking page for Tom Gayner of Markel (MKL) . You can see all of his positions as tracked by GuruFocus. His largest positions include Fairfax Financial (FFH), CarMax (KMX) , and Berkshire.

GuruFocus has added Tom Gayner of Markel (MKL) to its list of Gurus. According to GuruFocus, his top positions include Fairfax Financial (FFH) , CarMax (KMX) , and Berkshire. Some have suggested Gayner as a possible Berkshire CIO candidate. But, it seems almost every great investor has been mentioned in the press.

"No, it's not a crime novel but the tale of insurance giant Fairfax and its CEO's crusade against some very powerful hedge funds. Is it a quest for justice or an attempt to silence critics?" Fairfax Financial draws the attention of many value investors with some loving the company and others hating it. Regardless, all will likely want to read this article.

James Altucher of Stockpickr says, "In this article, I want to focus on the Dogs of the Magic Formula: the 10 stocks that have been crushed over the past year that now meet the other criteria, which are described below."

Disclosure: I own shares of BRK, OVTI, TRLG, and CRYP

A Globe and Mail article asks: "If wily veteran money managers are buying battered forestry stocks, shouldn't you?" Stocks mentioned include Domtar (DTC) , Norbord, and Canfor. Money managers mentioned include Irwin Michael, Cundill, Third Avenue, and Fairfax Financial (FFH).