Yours truly is an avid loser of money on rail freight stocks. I won’t bore you with my pathetic history of investing in BNS, those bastards, but let’s just say I’ve done my fair to enrich other people in the realm of freight rail investing.
Today’s Financial Times rubs it in a bit with this story on UP:
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The operator of the US’s largest railway network has crossed a key profitability threshold for only the second year in its 149-year history, amid a rebound that has vindicated Warren Buffett’s 2009 gamble on the sector.
Rob Knight, finance director of Union Pacific, told the Financial Times that its 2010 returns on invested capital exceeded its cost of capital – a key test that the industry’s regulators and investors consider when deciding how much railways can reasonably charge their customers.
Which means I was wrong. Again! Because I guffawed at Buffet last year when he went in. (Brilliant investor (1), rail pundit (0)).