Blake Hampton

"Intrinsic value is the number, that if you were all knowing about the future, and could predict all the cash that a business would give you between now and judgement day, discounted at the proper discount rate, that number is what the intrinsic value of a business is." - Warren Buffett Graham's Three Principles Value a stock as part of a business Expect volatility and profit from it (chapter 8 ) Always invest with a margin of safety (chapter 20)

The only good thing about Oklahoma is the cost of living

I live in Oklahoma btw

This was a great interview

Too bad Bernie Madoff died here recently, he could've been SEC chair

I can't imagine a worse pick for both Attorney General and Health Secretary

I'm not really a huge fan of gold but I don't completely doubt the reasons behind it. I personally like T-bills.

That's scary stuff, thanks for the response

Note the above is only for their equity portfolios. Benjamin Graham's take on broad diversification: "We recommended that the investor divide his holdings between high-grade bonds and leading common stocks; that the proportion held in bonds be never less than 25% or more than 75%, with the converse being necessarily true for the common-stock component; that his simplest choice would be to maintain a 50–50 proportion between the two, with adjustments to restore the equality when market developments had disturbed it by as much as, say, 5%. As an alternative policy he might choose to reduce his common-stock component to 25% “if he felt the market was dangerously high,” and conversely to advance it toward the maximum of 75% “if he felt that a decline in stock prices was making them increasingly attractive.”" I wouldn't recommend long-term fixed income at all right now, but this argument could instead be referenced using cash as a substitute. This is the tricky part for me as I think it's hard to gauge just how much to leave outside of equities in any given period. Considering his financial assets, Buffett is currently half cash and half equities

I created a spreadsheet, including some of my favorite investors, that lists their respective position sizes for each of their top 15 equity holdings. I read a excerpt written by Buffett a while back that aligns with the data, so I found it sort of interesting. The excerpt: "Charlie and I operated mostly with five positions. If I were running 50, 100, 200 million, I would have 80% in 5 positions, with 25% for the largest." The data is updated for Q3 2024 (in %): AVERAGE Bill Gates Bill Ackman Guy Spier Howard Marks Li Lu Prem Watsa Robert Vinall Seth Klarman Warren Buffett Stock 1 25.2 27.6 13.5 22.7 26.0 29.0 28.2 27.4 26.1 26.2 Stock 2 17.3 22.6 13.2 19.9 10.6 20.6 20.5 17.7 15.0 15.4 Stock 3 12.2 14.8 12.9 11.4 6.8 17.1 13.4 13.7 7.9 11.9 Stock 4 11.2 14.3 12.9 10.7 5.1 16.7 11.1 12.3 7.0 10.8 Stock 5 7.5 6.4 11.3 9.8 3.2 9.3 5.1 9.1 7.0 6.6 Stock 6 5.7 3.3 11.2 7.3 2.8 3.1 4.1 8.9 6.0 4.9 Stock 7 4.8 3.0 9.9 7.3 2.6 3.0 2.4 5.1 5.6 4.4 Stock 8 3.9 1.6 9.8 4.5 2.5 1.3 2.2 4.7 4.3 4.3 Stock 9 2.5 1.5 5.1 2.0 2.4 1.8 0.4 4.2 2.9 Stock 10 1.8 1.2 0.4 1.8 2.3 1.5 0.4 4.1 2.2 Stock 11 1.6 0.9 0.9 2.3 1.5 0.4 3.6 1.3 Stock 12 1.4 0.5 0.8 2.1 1.4 2.5 1.1 Stock 13 1.3 0.4 0.7 2.1 1.2 2.3 0.9 Stock 14 1.0 0.3 0.4 2.0 1.1 1.3 0.9 Stock 15 1.0 0.3 1.9 0.8 1.3 0.9 Top 5 73.4 85.7 63.7 74.5 51.7 92.7 78.4 80.0 62.9 70.9 Top 10 92.1 96.3 100.0 97.2 64.3 100.0 90.5 99.6 87.1 89.7 Top 15 98.4 98.6 100.0 100.0 74.7 100.0 96.5 100.0 98.2 94.8

You think restructuring is on the table, that's crazy.

Rob Kennedy Jr. is my favorite. I was recently overlooking the portfolio of my girlfriend's father, which he currently has sitting at Fisher Investments. They have him in a mix of 40% S&P 500, 40% long term fixed-income, and 20% GT. He worked at Goodyear to get that last one. If you look more closely at the mix of the fixed-income fund, it has all sorts of long dated bonds (30 year maturities) from outside the United States. The largest holding is actually a Mexican government. It blows my mind.

How does Buffett avoid macro factors when investing? It seems almost certain that the right approach is to simply move on and go find a cheap stock, but isn't there some basis for consideration? Shouldn't the overall valuation of a market have at least some effect on decision making? The man has a masters in economics and seems to understand it to a tee, but then almost recommends to eschew that same data. I'm confused.

I don't quite understand why you shouldn't connect to free or open networks. What exactly is the risk?

Corner of Berkshire, Fairfax, Bitcoin and QAnon*

“The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities — that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future — will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There’s a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands.” I think that endings are generally predictable in foresight as well as hindsight, it's just that the clocks don't have any hands.

^ What do you think @dealraker

For over 40 years, our economy has experienced nothing but decreases in the rates of inflation, interest, and taxes. Interestingly, these three factors almost seem to directly correlate: rising inflation increases interest rates, whose expense needs to be offset by higher taxes (and likely spending cuts as well). When valuing a stock, you're not just discounting next year's earnings but rather the projected earnings over the next 30 to 50. Warren Buffett once mentioned how investing involved "huge waves," and how if you could stay objective, you would get very rich. edit: I think it's also good to have discussions because I can always be wrong

I use only one email for almost all of my accounts, keeps it simple. For junkier accounts, I use an old email I don’t care about. I use Bitwarden, a password manager, to save 20-character long passwords for every account I own. The passwords are full of different symbols, digits, lowercase, and uppercase. I use 2FA for the most important accounts such as Apple ID, Gmail, brokerage, bank, etc. The master password for my Bitwarden account is a 4-word random passphrase. They are still secure but easier to remember than a normal password. Credit is frozen at all three bureaus. The passwords I have are probably overkill. It would take 1.8 decillion combinations to brute force one. 1.8 decillion = 1,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

2023 U.S. government financials Total net cost: $7.9 trillion - Department of Health and Human Services: $1.7 trillion, 26% of total - Department of Veterans Affairs: $1.5 trillion, 19% of total - Social Security Administration: $1.4 trillion, 18% of total - Department of Defense: $1 trillion, 13% of total - Interest on Treasury Securities held by the public: $0.7 trillion, 9% These top 5: $6.3 trillion, 83% of total Let's cut more taxes!!! Best of luck to Elon and his DOGE!!!

I'm not a gold bug but this is still super interesting.

I am super bearish. The current financial state of our country points directly toward large inflationary pressure in the future. Given that one of our central bank's primary objectives is price stability, it's highly likely that interest rate increases will follow. Potential effects from such a scenario: - Substantially higher interest expenses across the board, as everyone has to refinance old debt issued during ZIRP - Increased government interest expenses, which will almost certainly lead to large changes surrounding both taxation and spending policies - A higher discount rate for assets In 1977, Buffett wrote about how equities had historically delivered a mean return on book value of roughly 12%. While this figure may be a bit outdated, I still believe it holds relevance. The tremendous increases in ROE we’ve seen in recent years, have largely been driven by historically low debt costs and corporate tax expenses. I believe the market now is more expensive than it was in 1999, and imagine how long a dotcom recovery would have taken if the whole system hadn't been geared toward equity owners. Currently, the S&P 500's P/B and TTM ROE is 5.3x and 17.2% respectively. Remember, this is everyone's retirement account. Buffett is clearly fortifying. He holds essentially no fixed-income, more than half of his portfolio is cash, and the rest is equities. History has shown that assets can experience large price decreases sustained over many years. Inflation included, it could be worse. The last two major financial crises in 2008 and 2020 were both catastrophic, potentially Great Depression level events, where the U.S. government had to step in in to save everybody's ass. My concern is that our past savior might be the source of the next crisis.

All this talk is almost certainly pointless because it seems everyone here is solidified in their own beliefs. It makes me sad that Buffett is as old as he is. This country needs a financial lighthouse now more than ever, but would they even listen?

Trump committed fraud, plain and simple. He mismarked assets so that his company could get better financing terms from Banks. He got caught, was fined $450 million, and what did ole' Donny boy do to save his own ass? He issued equity in a nearly worthless meme stock to raise money. But you guys are probably right. This case, including the multiple other cases that were all presided over by different judges and juries, are all total frauds. Our entire judicial system is a sham overseen by the ghost of Stalin himself. Trump is a moron. I almost certain his ass is gonna cause a financial crisis during the next four years, and the funny thing is he doesn't understand the economic dynamics of which he is now involved. It will be interesting none-the-less.