Hielko

Good post. Agree with it very much :)

Margin of Safety is basically just an $800 copy of You Can Be A Stock Market Genius IMO. Both books cover a lot of the same sort of material, but I thought Greenblatt's was better. I enjoyed all the case studies. MoS is not bad necessarily. But there's not a lot of "new" in there to justify the price if you already have had a broad exposure to value philosophy. To be fair, Margin of Safety was written years earlier than You Can Be A Stock Market Genius, so if you want to call something a copy it should be the latter one... (I do agree though though that it's one of the best investment books ever written).

+1 this (but IMNAL etc) Secondly, is I sort of doubt that arguing that you were just an lucky amateur that didn't spend a lot of time on investing is the best. Doesn't really create a very "responsible" image if what you do is just gamble big with all your money... secondly... if you drag this forum in your fight I don't think it will really help since you have probably been one of the most active members with almost 7K posts (and that doesn't count the posts from the MSN board time)... Good luck arguing you didn't spend a lot of time on investing if you have been one of the most active members on an investing board.

You still have to move the containers from the trucks to trains and/or vice versa. That requires manpower, time and machinery. Besides that, adding a train step might add considerable delay to delivery times as well. It's not like cargo trains run every 10 minutes to every destination, and a lot of destinations might also add a bit of a detour. So adding the train step will only make sense if the two destinations are sufficiently far apart.

What makes you think that COBF is top 0.1% of investors? I guess there are a lot of people on this board that spend a decent amount of time, thinking and talking on investing. I don't think that necessarily translate into better investors, in some cases you just make things worse... (e.g. if you are not a good investor but trade a lot you become an (far) below average investor while you could have been average by buying some ETF's). It could very well be that the average COBF investor is (because of that reason) a below average investor. It wouldn't surprise me...

Google Sheets =ARRAYFORMULA(PRODUCT(1+A1:A3))-1 Excel or OpenOffice/LibreOffice Type PRODUCT function: =PRODUCT(1+A1:A3)-1 and hit Ctrl-Shift-Enter. The expression changes to an array formula: {=PRODUCT(1+A1:A3)-1} giving you the total return. Thanks, never figured this one out before as well.

What kind of pressure can Charlie Munger's jaws exert?

I think their current strategy is basically to put everything older than 1 or 2 weeks behind the paywall. It used to be that they only put the "high-quality" articles that were selected as pro behind the paywall. But I sort of understand the change, and think it's a smart move. Most of the value that I got from SA was looking at a company I didn't know, and read some old articles to sort of get an idea what's going on with a company. Most of their old pro stuff was never very compelling IMO.

What is your objective or reason for increasing the threshold to 50m? And why is 50m more meaningful than 1m? If you include companies with $1 million market caps you will have stuff with almost zero liquidity and super wide bid ask spreads. If your results for example include a company where someone sells 100 shares at $0.0001 and next year there is some random trade at $0.01/share for 100 shares as well it looks like a 10,000% return that will totally skew any result. But even if you managed to get 100% of all traded volume you would have made a profit of less than a dollar. That's why if you want to run a meaningful backtest you have to add liquidity constraints and/or take into account trading inpact, bid/ask spread etc. Otherwise you just filter out this kind of noise that cannot be traded.

Seems like the party is over...

Yeah, cool story. There is no guarantee that it will ever reach positive expected value. Just the fact that the jackpot/prizes are getting bigger might also induce more and more ticket buying, and you never know how much tickets will be sold.

If you are worried about keeping your family safe I suggest booking a one way ticket to Europe, given that the homicide rate/inhabitant is an order of magnitude lower. Or perhaps those US numbers are just skewed by cops killing blacks, and there is nothing you have to worry about ;) [/fox mode]

That depends on the balance sheet. If you have/had overseas cash you incur a one time liability because you will have to pay taxes on that, even if you keep it overseas forever (which doesn't make sense anymore). If you have on the other hand lots of unrealized capital gain taxes on your balance sheet a lower tax rate will remove a big part of those liabilities with one stroke of the pen.

I would see it from a different perspective. If you are really rich you can take way more risk and afford losing money. What can’t you do with 100 million dollar that you can with one billion? On the other hand, going from 1 million to 100K would be a big blow for almost anyone.

Not if you are an US citizen. Most foreign brokers don't accept US citizens as customers because they don't want to deal with overreaching US regulations... so your best bet is probably a broker that is also active in the US.

Dozens of companies in the resource space make wild assertions about their asset value. of course, few are accurate or pay off. A $5mm market cap company will be worth BILLIONS in a few years? Color me skeptical... Doesn't quite work like that. The "asset" for a resource company is the "in ground" asset or insitu as they call it. Unlike traditional assets which can be sold intact, an insitu asset has to be extracted i.e. capex spent and then depending on the life of mine (LOM), the cash flows are realized over 10-20-30 years. As such, one can't deem an asset cheap simply by comparing the insitu value with EV. One has to compare the EV against the NPV of the cash flows and evaluate the Capex, the grades, the jurisdiction and other risks to see if its even attractive for a major to develop the resource. That is why, you have numerous companies with billion dollar assets with sub 10m market caps in resources sector. It need not mean they are cheap. One has to do the numbers to evaluate the attractiveness. If you say an asset is worth billions (like Pakiya does) it implies to have that value after all those costs/risks. If you have a billion of gold in the ground that will take a billion to extract you have an asset worth exactly zero.

I now buy value crypto's

Funny. ESSX was actually one of my positions that performed pretty well during the year. But only bought it when liquidation was in end stage, and the selling price for the coast crane subsidiary was known. My biggest loser was by far Destination Maternity (minus 308bps), but too be honest I don't see that as a big mistake or a big deal. It was a merger arb deal with a big spread and good upside, and I thought it would probably be completed. I turned out to be wrong. It happens. Doesn't make it a mistake.

I agree with JayGatsby; understand accounting first (and how that relates to the physical business).

I see your poll isn't designed with crypto enthusiasts in mind. It's a bit sad to select >40% after a +1000% year :P (there must be some of these people, although I wonder if we can find them here) PS. I just voted for >30%, but perhaps I should have gone for the >40% option since for me I realized 30% in euro versus 49% in dollars.

I think this thread needs a poll!

Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin whatever etc....

I'm not sure if I have ever read a book twice...

Well said! This is the risk variance graph from our corporate finance textbook - as you can see, after 5 stocks the slope of the curve flattens quite a bit; after 20 not much difference on adding the 21st I think that graph is probably a bit deceptive. One portfolio of 20 stocks isn't going to behalve the same as another portfolio of 20 stocks. I guess here they averaged the results of multiple portfolio's (?) so you don't see the variance of the variance. And most investors don't buy portfolio's of random stocks; they buy something with a common theme because they think those are a good deal. Perhaps they focus on bank stocks, perhaps low P/B stocks, perhaps it's growth; whatever it is, you can be sure it will be more correlated and the portfolio will not behave like that graph.

Do you want to give partners the option to exit easily? Imagine what happens if the two other partners want out? Do you have the cash to just buy them out laying around? And especially being able to exit at a predetermined valuation is problematic, because what if they can exit at 20x cash flow and the market is trading at 10x cash flow?? If you do a build-in exit mechanism I think you should do something like 95% of appraised value or something like that. Don't offer liquidity for free, since it will have a real cost for the partner(s) remaining.