Eng12345

You're missing the point. Are you buying the market or are you buying stocks? And even then: What is a 50% draw down on money you don't need? Opportunity. And if you need the money: well then, you're not rich enough. Hence why cash flow is everything (especially so in your personal life)

I just read the last few pages and a 5 years ago when I was simply indexed into my 401k I probably would have loved the content and discussion. Now I read the last few pages and can't help but think how brain numbing. I credit this forum for that change in mindset. I guess my general thoughts are: Why should I care about the market value? I'm not buying the market. I'm buying stocks. Yeah sure in some super macro event I may draw down ~30% but if you're not ready for that you're not ready for the volatility of great returns given by concentrated positions. The US dollar is going to collapse. Oh really? What is the world's wealth going to flow to? The euro - where they are mired by in fighting amongst different member countries and even after a decade of losing world strength and influence cannot manage to shift focus to why. Oh I guess the wealth will slowly shift to the yuan? Yeah, no I don't see that happening as the world has shifted views over the past few years. Maybe some of the BTC guys will say the worlds wealth will shift to some unbreakable blockchain - but the truth is if that happens every government in the world will likely be against that. Hell on the BTC topic - I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA already has it compromised in a severe way. Nevermind the very real energy consumption issues with it (hint: energy consumption is a transaction cost). (BTW I'm sure the BTC guys will come and attempt to put my head on a pike for saying something along those lines but my overarching point remains) The reality is the world is likely to revert to its natural state - fractured. And in a fractured world the US has some of the biggest unchangeable advantages of the world. I'm not talking about education. I'm talking about geography - we're uninvadable (especially once Canada is the 51st state ) and the natural resources of our country are for the most part unmatched and untapped in comparison to other areas of the world. So even if I play this macro view crap - what is the risk to the US dollar? But even if all that horrible crap does happen? What does it matter to me? I buy individual stocks with a goal of buying them when they are cheap.

Sold TLN and bought JOE and AEGXF

Brett - I listened to a podcast you did on the book. It was excellent and wanted to share with the board, but cannot find it again. Nonetheless, I purchased the book and look forward to reading it.

Thought this was an excellent book though and perfectly explained why I think so many utilities are un investable. If you have questions about how the grid is run or why we won't ever get to 100% renewables, I suggest reading this book.

This was a good read on a snowy day here Spek. Thanks for posting.

Hahaha thanks John I should have known better than to assume anything was black and white. Nothing in life is.

I think I've attempted to touch on this before but want to make sure my understanding is correct. Say I have two brokerage accounts Etrade and Fidelity with multiple cashflows over a year. Etrade publishes a 20% TWR for the year Fidelity publishes a 10% TWR for the year I'm assuming I cannot combine these returns as they are both geometric means. However, thinking about it I can't verbalize why you couldn't assuming the two TWRs are over the same period, and you weighted them accordingly for size of account. But I'm not confident that would be a correct approach. Gut is telling me no. The problem I'm trying to solve is attempting to incorporate my inactively managed funds (current company 401k) into my return calculations. This year I was able to calculate a 26% TWR because I didn't have a lot of cash flows on my active investments and recorded balances appropriately but I'm not able to incorporate the inactively managed funds. edit: The document @John Hjorth posted a few pages ago is actually more helpful. It seems XIRR is the best method really. Thanks for the eye-opening conversation on all this. I never really thought about quantifying returns being so open to discussion. Thought it was a bit more black and white, but realizing now it has some grey area to it.

I'm 32 year old engineer. I've always been interested in investing but never really knew where to get started. I decided to get serious about investing a few years ago when Tesla was making up something silly like 4% of my index funds and I didn't like that. Had read a few books before but ordered 3-4 more sat down and read them. Scoured reddit for alternative sources of info and saw a comment mentioning this forum. Shadowed the what are you buying thread for a few months before plopping my $50 down which ultimately ended up being the best investment of my life. I may not post as much but I'm reading nearly everyday. Somedays more intently than others, but I can't underestimate the amount I've learned just from reading/osmosis. Thanks to everyone on this forum and HAPPY NEW YEAR. Good luck to all in the new year.

26.5% TWR Mainly driven by two of my smallest positions - SMNEY.DE and TPC. Dragged by SAVE in January of 24 and dragged by JOE. I'm not upset with matching SP500 when I was ~35% cash for most of the year out of pure laziness.

Definitely starting to realize I won't even be able to come close to seeing everything in 4 days there...

Thanks for the tips Saluki! Definitely going to try to sneak in a show at broadway!

Anyone have tips on NYC trip for a first timer? My wife and I are planning to be there 20th-25th and we're staying in Midtown/Times Square area. I know the touristy things we want to do include Brooklyn Bridge Comedy Cellar Rockefeller Center/Christmas lights An observation deck Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island <<<probably not worth it for such a short trip/first time Walk Time Square Walk Central Park Any other thoughts/must dos?

This is a crazy take. Restraint has a purpose. Think about how so many later Soviet us conflicts would have ended had Truman not taken the stance he had taken. We would be in a nuclear hell scape.

Gary - a little late and I'm sure you've figured it out, but I was confused on initial reading ~18 months ago. This is AECON - a Canadian construction company. AECOM is a much larger US company.

Yeah but who takes a job like that after 17 years at Merrill Lynch and then subsequently quits a few months later? I may be reading the tarot cards too much but it does seem as if something was materially misrepresented

To Dalals point it does sometimes feel like a case of moving goalposts but I maintain that late 2025 is my personal deadline for MEANINGFUL buybacks

I agree the thesis has not played out but I continue to lose confidence. A big hit to my confidence was when that Andy Siegel report just quit after a few short months. That was pretty telling I think. I wanted to sell a lot of at that point a few weeks ago but it was tactically a bad time. It still remains my second largest position, but I continue to lose confidence and I'm not convinced any of the performance to date is based on company performance rather than market performance. Apologies for the bad punctuation on vacation in Aruba.

some C

@Spekulatius touches on the realities of the scenario. But I would add that in a make believe scenario where growth and everything else was equal capital light would outperform simply on the basis of cost of capital. In a simplistic view: using money costs money.

Personally - I'm coming to terms recently with the folly of low PE. It sounds like a good endeavor though. I won't have time to partake for sometime. Starting 12s and masters classes tomorrow.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust is receiving Class B shares worth about $4 billion as of Thursday’s closing price, while the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation is receiving about $400 million. Don't you love "journalism"? Tell the whole story WSJ. I'm paying for it.

Whatever the solution is - it will likely be multipronged. Batteries will likely play a big role. To be honest - I didn't realize California has deployed so much batteries this year. There's a lot of other things that can be done besides the generation side - think demand response like shutting stuff down to flatten the curve. The funny thing is that everyone is trying to tell a story. I found this blog to be a good read regarding this when I was trying to catch up on that (frankly I don't trust any source that's touting one generation method over another like pv-magazine). Batteries Taking Charge of the California Grid (gridstatus.io)

- the points you make regarding baseload power, dispatchable power and the need to instantaneously match supply to demand are very simple, make sense and should be easy to understand. So why have we gone of the rails with renewables? Maybe it just gets back to the local needs and politics as you say. Yes - ultimately it goes back to local needs and politics. The electric grid is a fragmented thing and has a lot of interested parties who all form their own opinions. Like I said we can do almost anything - the question is cost. How much are you willing to pay for your electricity? I know personally I don't want to pay much more than I am currently, and I know people who simply can't afford to pay more. On a cost per megawatt hour basis natural gas is simply the cheapest right now - especially once you start considering in all of the various quality factors. - regarding nuclear not being a solution for dispatchable power. Doesn’t it make sense to keep adding nuclear as baseload and having gas / coal as the dispatchable? Additionally do the small reactors terraform/gates is working on solve this problem. Absolutely - the solution to the problem is going to be multipronged. I think of SMRs as essentially breaking up the chunks of ramp rate required similar to an integral. Nonetheless I don't get excited about SMRs - it's not really a new concept, just being flashed around as new. Our forefathers were just as smart, if not smarter than us and there's a reason they didn't go this route. It's not like they didn't have fab shops and stuff to prefab in the 60s. That said - if they can reduce the capital requirements to deploy more nuclear I think we will see a lot more development. Additionally, there's a lot of hub bub around the development costs of nuclear generation. A lot of blame has been fairly put on the NRC, but I think erring on the side of caution is the correct thing to do. I haven't been involved in a nuclear development project but I have a 2x1 combined cycle plant. I once heard a nuclear guy lament and use as an example of NRC incompetence that when they built the steam piping system, they built it from both ends and met up in the middle. He used that as an example of NRC ineptitude because the NRC made them redesign all the piping when it didn't meet up in the middle and was off by 2 feet. But the truth is that was for damn good reason. Steam piping is heavily stressed components and specifically engineered for location. When I was building a 2x1 we started at one end of the steam system and made damn sure everything was on location before moving forward - for specifically that reason the construction must meet design when it comes to any sort of safety critical item. We knew that if it wasnt on location it would have to be restressed. That's why I tend to think a lot of the cost overruns from Vogtle were simply due to poor design and contracting operations less so NRC incompetence. From a high level and without looking closely - theres a reason once bechtel got involved they were able to build it from essentially foundation to firing in 6 years.

Yeah I don't know about the whole crypto thing - I don't know much about crypto or ecoins, but I'm sure there's money to be made there in terms of using the stranded energy. It doesnt seem all that different than what TLNE is doing selling power from Susquehanna Nuclear Station to AMZN for an onsite data center. What's interesting though is in some places we have TOO much generation - you can see this via the LMPs (locational marginal pricing) going negative. Just today I looked at the CAISO LMP map and almost all of them were negative thereby indicating if you were an operator and you added generation to the grid you would be required to pay money for adding generation!