RichardGibbons

It's possible, but remember that back in 2004, when Morningstar named him Fund Manager of the Decade, he had a nice 27-year track record of 11.5% annually. That's a long time. So, I guess the most likely things that could explain the discrepancy are: [*]He got lucky for 27 years, and unlucky afterward [*]He got brain damaged and nobody said anything [*]He changed what he does [*]His value investing style is really out of favour, leading to bad returns [*]The world has changed and what worked for 27 years no longer works My best guess is it's mostly #4 with a spattering of #1.

Interactive Brokers does have a real-time API. It's been probably a decade since I used it, but back then, Trader Workstation had to be open to access the API, so I think it basically is an API interface to Trader Workstation.

I would think Coupa Software (tangled up in business processes) and Mongo DB (their Atlas offering--unlikely to be worthwhile changing your database provider?)

I think the issue here is predictability. In a more competitive market, one cannot assume that all participants will price rationally. So, if you buy a company without a moat, who's to say that profits will even be there in a year? Plus, companies have natural operating leverage, so if you have low margins, a minor reduction in expenses by a competitor leading to a minor reduction in pricing could completely wipe out all your profit, leavin you in a loss position. Or, they could take away enough of your economies of scale to cause a death spiral. There's just a lot more variance in the future results. So, if you value the company based on discounted cash flow over, say, a decade or two, but can't have any confidence in that cash flow beyond the next year, how do you value that company? Plus, I think historically, an inefficiency of securities pricing is that investors were willing to pay more for present day earnings than a strong moat that enables future earnings, so strong moat companies were often undervalued. The way you can see this is to compare the value of a company with a moat, where future earnings might need to be discounted at 15% with the value of a company with a strong moat where future earnings might need to be 5%. Often, the difference in those discount rates won't actually be reflected in the security prices. What's more, even if the securities are priced fairly, the 15% case is likely to have much higher variance in outcomes meaning more diversification (i.e. smaller position sizes, more research, and more expenses) is necessary. All this implies that one should generally prefer superior companies.

If it's literally the time that you spend that's bothering you, you could potentially change your process to take less time. For instance, as I've gotten older, I've cared much less about details and much more about competitive advantage. I'd guess that transition has reduced my time by two-thirds or something. If you immediately eliminate all businesses that don't have an obvious long term competitive advantage--irrespective of all other criteria--you dramatically reduce both the number of businesses you need to look at and the amount of time required to analyse each business. Then, once you've discovered a business with competitive advantage, you just need to decide if the price is fair or cheap, and that's pretty quick to do as well. What's more, if you've bought a business with a sustainable competitive advantage, you probably don't have to think about selling it for a long time which reduces the amount of time you have to spend as well. (Particularly since a business with a sustainable competitive advantage has to get quite overvalued before it's worthwhile selling and triggering taxes on the capital gains.)

I bet you can, but most honest people wouldn't do that. Keep in mind though that you're effectively charging back Air BNB. Just because you charge it back doesn't mean that you don't owe money anymore. There's nothing dishonest about doing a charge back if someone agrees to provide a service and then doesn't provide the service as promised. Even if Airbnb eats the charge-back, it's not dishonest, since they've also failed to provide the service they promised (i.e. connect the buyer who provides the room listed on the site.)

Yep. This is why one shouldn't vote for the current BC NDP--they're not driven by reason, but rather ideology and party loyalty.

This is my favorite thing about climate change arguments. The minute a carbon tax is mentioned, passionate free-market capitalists somehow believe that demand for goods is completely independent of the prices of those goods. It's fascinating. Cardboard, you should buy a bunch of KO, then suggest that they increase the price of a serving of Coke to $1000. The company sells 1.8 billion servings a year, so that's $1.8 trillion at over 99% margin! You'll be massively wealthy overnight! Also worthwhile mentioning is that in Canada, the Liberal's carbon tax is being returned to Canadians. I think this is quite elegant, since it's increasing the price of CO2 to impact price signals without actually taking away much money from people (essentially only losing a bit to friction).

Longhaul, to answer your question, it's pretty easy to know that it's a problem and that it will likely have massive effects because there are a huge number of brilliant scientists looking at this issue with a widespread consensus that it is true. (If you want to leave some room for doubt, you can act as if there's only a 99.99995% chance of the theory being true, rather than a 100% chance of it being true. It won't affect most of your actions or decisions.) People like to pretend things are way more complicated than they are, but climate change is basically proven at this point. Deniers are roughly equivalent to anti-vaxxers, anti-evolutionists, and flat-earthers.

Yeah, I think that some people care a fair amount about integrity and other people don't at all and will do what they can get away with. What's more, I think it's hard for both types of people to believe in their hearts that the other side truly exists. (You can see this in the comments here: "I don't believe that the shrewdest investor of all time would pass up on an opportunity for such a stupid reason." Similarly, I have a hard time believing anyone would even consider selling their integrity when they have literally no need for the money.) As for the argument "who cares what people think--it doesn't have anything to do with responsibilities to people and shareholders", I find the argument pretty weak. First, Buffett isn't Berkshire shareholders' bitch. He has no responsibility to destroy his own reputation--or compromise his integrity--to make money for shareholders. To me, this point is sufficient to refute the argument. Second, displaying a lack of integrity could hurt his business. One reason people sell private companies to Buffett is because they believe he'll act with integrity in his dealings. Not everyone's trying to maximize their own profit, particularly when they're thinking more about their own legacy and the outcome for their company and it's employees. If Buffett were viewed as someone lacking integrity, some people might decide not to sell to him the company they've spent decades building. That would hurt Berkshire. (Chrispy, the difference with Microsoft is that Buffett is good friends with Gates, but not good friends with Bezos or Dimon.)

Complaining about Berkshire not buying Microsoft is pretty silly considering that Buffett's made it very clear why he didn't do so. Considering his close relationship with Gates, Buffett doesn't want anyone to get the perception of any improprieties like insider trading. If anyone doesn't understand this basic thing about Buffett after holding Berkshire for a couple decades, I'd be pretty skeptical about their understanding of both Berkshire and Buffett.

I'll answer this. Most of the politics discussions on CoB&F are grounded in ideology rather than reason and science, and therefore not very interesting. Take global warming. It's been settled for science for decades, but many on CoB&F pretend that it's a disputed issue. So, I treat the politics section in the same way that I'd treat anti-vax or flat-earther forums. If one's time has any value whatsoever, there's not many reasons to spend time talking to anti-vaxers or flat-earthers. On other forums I do talk about politics, but there I'm mostly trying to push left-wingers to the right. That's more interesting because the left (excluding communists) mostly believes that their positions should be grounded in evidence, reason, and science which means that those positions can be challenged on that basis.

One of my friends bought Beyond Meat a week or two ago. He's new to investing. I think his reasoning is that the stock is going up, it's a great story, it's comparable to a tech stock, and he's confident he can get out when it starts to go down. Personally, I think he has no clue how terrible the likely outcomes are of owning a stock in an industry with tiny gross margins at a P/S ratio of 80. For a tech stock with a moat, recurring revenue, 80% gross margins, and 80%+ growth rate for several years, P/S ratios in the 20-30 range can make sense. But not in a food stock.

Also worth noting that the performance fee isn't 20%, but rather 20% of the amount above a 5% hurdle per annum growth in NAV. Because the performance fee is based on NAV, I think, in effect, it comes out after the management fee. So, for your 8% example, I think the return would actually be (8%-1.5%) - (8% - 1.5% - 5% * 0.2), or 6.2%, not 4.9%.

For me, the answer was liquid financial assets of 40 times annual expenses (i.e. I don't count the house). My reasoning is that studies show that a 4% withdrawal rate gives you something a 96% chance of not running out of money in retirement. To me, a 4% failure rate is too high because the bad long-tail result--running out of money when you're 80--would be horrible. Plus, I'm younger than retirement age so the money has to last longer, and I don't want the stress of worrying about money. So, I use a 2.5% withdrawal rate so that the odds greatly favor my net worth increasing over time. Also, if I get much below financial assets of 40 times expense, I imagine I'll cut expenses somewhat as well. Doing this has a large impact in lowering the failure rate. That said, I don't know what the number would be if I lived in the USA where it seems fairly easy to blow through huge amounts of money relatively quickly if someone in your family runs into health problems. Maybe a 1% withdrawal rate or 100 times annual expenses? Even that might not be high enough to keep the probability of not running out of money above 99%.

The argument is simple: 1. Today we have a world with the living creatures and plants to sustain humanity without massive wars, famine, or displacement of humanity. 2. Climate change is causing the extinction of a bunch of creatures and plants, resulting in effects that will be both good and bad for humanity. 3. It's hard to know exactly what the bad effects are--aside from some obvious things like seas rising and obliterating entire countries. But there's a reasonable chance that those effects will result in a world that cannot sustain humanity the same way it does today and in the same geographical areas, leading to massive wars, famine, and displacement. 4. There's also no easy way to leave this planet for an equally nice planet elsewhere. 5. So why the heck would you want to take the nice situation we have for humanity now, and gamble that randomly making massive changes to the globe won't result in a terrible situation for humanity later when it's pretty easy to mitigate those effects now? (6. The answer to the rhetorical question is: because it's a tragedy of the commons situation--everyone is saying "my contribution to global warming isn't as big as yours, so you should do stuff, but I'm going to not do anything.")

LOL, this comment cracks me up, because it's completely clear that climate change is science and that only CoBaF message board member who is fervently religious on this topic is Cardboard. Such delightful irony.

So, according to this article, in the three western provinces, there were about 85K abandoned wells, and another 122K inactive sites. About 85% of the abandoned wells are in Alberta, and more than 50% have had nothing done to them for a decade, and the ratio is only a bit better for BC and Sask. So, how do you explain the discrepancy between these numbers, and your "there is no environmental liability not being met" and "Canada having some of the strictest rules"? Is the Globe and Mail misrepresenting something about the situation? Is it just you twisting words to lie about the situation? (e.g. "There is a clear plan for dealing with the abandoned wells--it's on the calendar for June 17, 2174")

I just rewatched "Skins", the TV show about Bristol teens with dysfunctional families. It's quite brilliant, but be warned that there's a lot of swearing, sex-related content, and casual drug use, and the plotlines are often extreme and sometimes dark. It's not for someone who gets easily offended.

MGIC put out a press release a while back claiming that they were lowering rates because of lower taxes.

Not boiler, but in early 2009, I tried to get into FDX when it was at $39 for a long term buy and hold, but I decided to get into it by selling a weekly put to try to pick up $1 extra or something. The stock ended up bouncing to $45 before the put expired, so I didn't get assigned the shares. I never actually purchased any of it, so that decision turned out poorly.

LOL, this is a pretty amusing way to look at it. Trump was asking for the moon. After months of negotiation, he got a moon rock. The reason they "wasted so much time" was so that they didn't have to concede much at all. Really, it's the normal Trump playbook: 1. Bluster, bluster, bluster 2. Accomplish nothing 3. Claim a huge victory 4. Supporters blinded by tribalism and ideology twist the evidence and logic to try to support Trump's narrative

Yeah, I mostly agree with this, but I'm also concerned that people (i.e. me) generally look for disaster, so in my paranoid search for disaster I'm interpreting the evidence in a way to support a "late state empire" hypothesis. Regardless, I think the problem is that so much has changed since the 1950s that one can reasonably attribute the downward spiral to many different causes, not just kids' soft upbringings. The cause one picks is probably based on one's own biases. For instance, I'd attribute it to the evolution of "greed is good", morphing from the sensible "people acting in their own interests generally makes for efficient and effective markets" into "if I want it, it's good, so ethics and compassion are irrelevant as long as I get mine." I think the latter attitude leads to massive inequalities and corruption. That results in people like Chavez and Trump getting into power which leads to the system collapsing--a really bad outcome for both rich and poor. I've heard from several people that one sign of the decline of an empire is the rise of celebrity chefs. I don't know if there's actually evidence for that theory, but it does amuse me considering reality TV these days.

Well, or it could be that your hypothesis is bogus and related to your biases rather than evidence. Like, you're implying that the people who grow in tough, non-western countries are likely to be more successful because of those challenges. Yet, western countries composed of people with this soft western upbringing have brought about a situation where the west is the dominant economic force (and probably cultural force) on earth. So, to me, it seems hasty to imply that the western way is horrible, and the methods of less successful countries are preferable.

The call that he was talking about is so deep in the money that it wasn't selling at a premium.