Hielko

That's what all the fish recreational players say and do ;). Constantly trying big bluffs and big calls chasing that epic moment of being right, quickly forgetting all the times it didn't work.

Maybe you want to play something other than AK or better? ;) Folding for hours is maybe a bit exaggerated but live you play maybe 25 hands/hour. Game is usually full ring with 10 persons. 15% vpip for full ring is sort of loose (most live regs play more, but most have huge leaks in their game as well...) so you play 3 or 4 hands on average per hour. Most hands end quickly (you raise, people fold or you get reraised and you fold etc) so it's usually pretty boring.

Also played professionally for roughly five years, now I don't play at all anymore. I think it has been a good way to get to know some important concepts that apply to investing as well. Especially learning to distinguish the difference between process and outcome (I see so many investors who think that they made a bad investment when it lost money for example, or vice versa when it made money) and risk management as well (trying to optimize for long-term growth rate which implies by necessity a very low probability of catastrophic losses). Having said that, I wonder how helpful learning poker really is. My hypothesis is that looking at professional poker players you simply select the people who have the innate physiological and mental capabilities to do well, both as a poker player and as an investor. If they didn't they wouldn't have been able to become poker professionals. Of course, not every poker professional could be a good investor and not every good investor could become a good poker player, but there is a large overlap there. In live games I love(d) to present the image of a very straight forward tight ABC player, and then use that to be able to represent big hands whenever I wanted them. Works well until you get caught :D

I don't think I really have a favorite idea right now. I have a couple positions that I have liked for years now (Beximco and Conduril among others), and there are some nice special situations out there, but nothing extremely awesome is on my radar right now.

Yes, stock trades in ZAC, not ZAR

A fund that doesn't charge a management fee, but only a performance fee is IMO not ideal. Without regular income there is a strong incentive to try to get performance fees, whatever the cost. Better to blow-up trying to get to high-water mark, than getting stuck with zero income.

Actually, IB has often been the only broker that worked when there was high market volatility while others such as TD Ameritrade were down. I also don't recognize your issues with errors, but might depend on the version of the software you are using.

+1 Have no questions, but enjoy reading the story :)

If the company would be able to earn a ROE on equity of 100% forever it would be worth an almost infinite amount of money (assuming a discount rate lower than 100%). So if you would buy it today you would be able to buy an almost infinitesimal fraction of a share. Next year the company would still be worth an almost infinite amount of money, and your infinitesimal fraction of a share would have returned the discount rate and not the underlying return on equity.

Testimony on p7 Doc#235 and listed on p420 Doc#246. Thanks

How do you get the $30 million number for the assumption of liabilities? I'm reading the purchase agreement and the liabilities they will assume are basically those that arise after closing (so zero at the moment), accounts payable that are listed on Schedule 1.3(b) (seems to be something like $9 mil?) and employee liabilities listed on Schedule 1.3© (but on this schedule no numbers are reported?).

Enjoyed the podcast as well :)

An interesting idea indeed! Thank you for alerting us to it and sharing your research! Mcap: 30 million earnings: 0.7 million Revenue: 13 million So they currently trade at nearly 3 times revenue and the whole case is based on them growing. Seems expensive to me. That's why it's in this thread of course :). But saying that something is expensive because it trades at 3x revenue is IMO a bit easy. For some companies that is extremely expensive, for others it can be cheap.

I thought the book was okay, not great. The first part of the book with his life story is very interesting, second half of the book where he tries to explain basic investing stuff among others could better have been removed.

Somewhat speculative with multibagger potential, HemaCare (my write-up is here: https://alphavulture.com/2017/05/02/hemacare-deep-value-turning-into-growth-story/). Rapidly growing turnaround story. Lots of upside if they can continue on the current path.

That would be my recommendation. I don't know why people feel compelled to discuss politics here - this is and investment board. Granted, politics and investment mix to some extend, but much less than generally presumed. Even Munger said, that politics don't matter much for BRK's business, I don't know why it should matter for us here. +1 all the politics discussions here add zero value for me

It's probably a lot easier to try to get some meaningful statistics by looking at the performance of your whole portfolio, not by looking at the IRR of individual stocks.

Luck plays a huge role, and I totally agree that most people don't appreciate it enough slash recognize it. At the same time, it's not all luck. For example: meeting your wife/girl friend probably had a big luck factor. Maybe the odds of meeting her were almost infinitesimally small. But there are millions of people you could potentially meet. Every individual meeting is unlikely, but that you will meet someone is at the same time likely. The same is presumably true for many other import positive life events. Every single one of them is probably unlikely to happen, and you should consider yourself lucky when they do happen, but at the same time you're almost certain to encounter some of them at some point in your life.

If the merger doesn't go through it's probably because the whole company is a scam, and it is doubtful you will ever see any money in a liquidation. This one could work out, but you better assume something close to 100% downside.

Exactly. Sure, it's nice to have (a lot of) money when you get Alzheimer to get good and professional care. But perhaps it's even nicer to not work 60 hours a week when you are between your 30's and 50's. Perhaps having a better quality of life in your early decades in way more valuable than potentially having a lower quality of life when you are old and sick. Having both is of course better, but to some extent it is a trade-off. And not one that many people are making consciencely.

You don't need money when you're dead. With a 3% withdrawal rate you can earn nothing and still survive for 33 years. Retire at 65 and that would last till you're 98.

I sold KZ last week for 7.49. Was sort of clear that there were some market participants that knew the deal was almost done in advance... wonder if I just should have kept it for the last cent, or not.

Those management fees, trading costs and taxes are a big hurdle to overcome. I'm not surprised. Especially since I guess this is about mutual funds, so they have constraints about things like position sizing and leverage so even if you can find a couple of good idea's it's hard to make them count.

Interesting paper, certainly applies to this board as well: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/publications/pdf/echo-icwsm17.pdf Abstract:

Seems like some solid research