Intelligent_Investor

Kodak, Polaroid, Sears and others did go to zero, but had you bought an evenly weighted basket of the Nifty Fifty at its very peak in 1972 and held to today, you still would have outperformed. Most people only look at the huge crash and not the longer term compounding of a lot of these businesses. There's at least 5 or 6 hundred baggers on that list and a lot that came really close even if you start from the peak of the nifty fifty. If you bought all of the nifty fifty in 1972 and held for the last 51 years you would very fucking rich right now and have done better than just owning an index fund. The huge winners made up for all the zeros, just like within Berkshire and within the S&P 500. Keep in mind, I'm not saying I would buy those companies at the price, just that even at ridiculous looking valuations, they still did way better than average companies.

Fair points regarding growth, but meta at 9x FCF, GOOGL at low teens FCF, and AMZN at ~25x normalized operating profit at the beginning of the year isn't anywhere close to the nifty fifty valuations. Even MSFT and AAPL at the time were trading at >4% earnings yield with >10% FCF/Share growth which is still more attractive than a 4.5% zero growth 10 year treasury. Even with the nifty fifty had you bought McDonald's or Coke at like 60x earnings and owned for 2 or 3 decades you still would have beaten the S&P 500. I just don't think automatically writing off a good business as being unable to continue to produce good returns because its optically expensive is a logical conclusion (doesn't mean I'd buy them at this price, but that's a different analysis).

When it comes to the big 7, their performance isn't surprising considering quite a few of them were way too cheap at the beginning of the year. Yeah Meta has more than doubled but that was because it shouldn't have been trading at sub-100 in the first place. Of the 7, 6 are objectively amazing businesses (Tesla the only exception), and of those 6, 3 were very cheap at the beginning of the year (AMZN, GOOGL, META). AAPL and MSFT are/were also reasonably priced relative to their quality. NVDA is really the only one that has run up a lot on AI hype, but their AI offerings are probably the best in the world right now so not entirely unjustified. I don't think its impossible that great businesses stay great for decades - CocaCola, AMEX, Walmart, Home Depot and a lot of other businesses have been top performers for way longer than big tech has.

Imo inflation, at least the parts the Fed can control is pretty much done and dusted, what remains is shit like energy and housing (supply issue) which the Fed doesn't really have any control over. Food/grocery prices have round tripped back to approximately where they were pre-pandemic in many items (still high in many items, but prices are starting to fall as well, or have peaked already), job market has done a 180 and cooled, while in many places as layoffs have begun, banks are pulling back on credit issuance, and cracks are beginning to show in the RE markets. The biggest risk right now is stimulative fiscal policy and a congress/Biden administration that seems to be open to running an unlimited deficit to subsidize the American people. If congress pumps out trillions in stimulus as soon as the economy slows, that's going to generate more inflation than any QE the fed does, just like we saw with the post pandemic stimulus.

When the S&P was at 3500 people were saying it was going to 2300 even on this forum lol fear really does spread like wildfire

We call them MAGMA now

4% is fine, I'm just a paranoid value investor who always wants an excessive margin of safety lol

However much annual income you need pre-tax and multiply by 50, so you are essentially assuming a 2% withdrawal rate on your investments. So if you think you need 150K/year you would need 7.5M I think this withdrawal rate is sufficiently low to provide a buffer if stuff goes wrong/you have an unexpected expense. While you might be able to get away with say 1 or 2 million, one large, unexpected expense and most of your wealth is gone and you need to go work again.

It's not the number that counts, its the severity. 1992 was a very inactive season (only 7 storms, 4 hurricanes, and 1 major hurricane), but the major hurricane was Andrew which was the costliest Atlantic hurricane for a long time. Now, even 30 years later no one talks about 1992 as an inactive season, all anyone remembers is Andrew leveling Miami. Even if there isn't that many hurricanes if we get "the big one", the impacts will be catastrophic and cause losses to the insurance industry

I believe they bought JEF just for the VTS spinoff actually. Looks like they reduced their stake in JEF

So my company's version of MS Teams now has an official GPT-4 Virtual Assistant. Pretty powerful in terms of what you can do with it

Sold a May maturing treasury bond and bought a 6 month brokered CD with 5.15% interest rate in my IRA

Bought a 5% 17month CD from my Credit Union. Currently higher than any of the treasury rates

Adding IDFB as long as this Risk Arb spread remains this wide

Is it really putting people out of work if its just restoring equilibrium in the labor market though? I find it very hard to say that people making $300k in a non-earnings generating shitco losing their jobs is bad for the economy in the long run. People acting like the job losses is all in low-income stuff when its the exact opposite, its the high-income people working in jobs that create little to no value that are losing their jobs as the tide turns from wretched excess to a more normal state of being.

The true answer is that no one knows what will happen with inflation, interest rates, and the economy, and over the last 2 years anyone that has tried to predict it has ended up being wrong. Most of the people criticizing the Fed for raising rates were the exact same people that, just 18 months earlier, were criticizing the Fed for not raising rates fast enough and saying we needed to get rates higher than inflation to bring it down.

To be fair, it seems like SVB made some absolutely idiotic decisions with risk management. Who in their right mind buys so much long treasuries at like 1.5% interest rates

IDFB at low $11s

FDIC taking over

Imo what's interesting about the bond market isn't what rates are gonna do in the next 12 months (pretty much guaranteed to go to 5+%), but what will happen in the intermediate to longer term. Is the bond bull market finally dead? Or is this a temporary phenomenon and we will be at 3.5% interest rates and on the downtrend by 2025? I personally don't think I'm skilled enough at predicting any of those so I will just roll short term treasuries for now, but this dynamic is fascinating.

For the annual meeting, is there parking outside the venue? If there isn't should I get a hotel closer or further from the venue? Sorry if this is a dumb question, I am planning on going for possibly the first time this year.

The interesting thing is that a dozen eggs at my local Whole Foods is now cheaper than at my local Walmart/Kroger/Aldi/Albertsons

Imo Bloomstran is a hack. He is a better annual letter writer than actual investor and has made a bunch of fees heavily indexing into Berkshire which is by far his largest position.

Interest rate swaps

Yeah this is the BV+Float method that Sandy Gottesman used to determine when to buy Berkshire