Milu

Quite the outlier in Europe. Wonder what the background is on that, has there ever been a cgt tax in Belgium before, and is there some other rules where they end up getting their cut somehow? Might make more sense for the wealthy Europeans to start moving to Belgium rather than Monaco or Switzerland!

Europe is generally a very hard place to build wealth through investing due to these types of taxes and levels. Looking at how Denmark do things it almost makes me thankful to live in Ireland with our 33% cap gains rate, and no exit tax if you decide to leave. Might just keep sitting on any unrealised gains and eventually move back to canada in 10-15 years to retire and live off portfolio. Even through canada is seen as a relatively high tax country, if you aim to live solely off capital gains with no income, the tax rates are quite low.

I often find these types of predictions tend to be overblown as they don't consider the second order effects such as canada finding new trading partners or other adjustments. Similar doom mongering went on with Brexit or when russian gas supplies were cut off to Europe. The world and canada will adjust quickly to any new reality.

Fellow ‘lazy dude’ checking in. I’ve always optimised my life around doing the least amount of work I can for the highest amount of money. For my day job this means going as far as I can as an individual contributor, avoiding any management roles even though I’ve been asked multiple times to go that track, just do good work from 9-5 and don’t bother with anything outside of that. Investing is my main hobby so while I do spend a decent amount of time researching companies, I generally have just settled on quality 8-10 positions that I expect to hold for decades. Might make a couple of trades per year around the edges. The need to always put money to work is a big flaw of the type a personality. I’ve thankfully never had the urge to ‘do something’ when there is nothing to do. Currently have a 25% cash position that would be nice to put to work but will wait for the universe to present me with a no-brainer like it inevitably does. (Apple in 2016, Berkshire in 2020, Meta in 2022). Always another one around the corner if not in a rush.

That sounds great, is this something that is possible right now or just a vision of how things will play out down the line? How would it work in practice, let's say a person has 500k in bitcoin, how much can they borrow against it, what rate, and how is it paid back?

Ya maybe you are right, I suppose it depends on what liquid assets the person has. For example in my case I have about 15% of my wealth in bitcoin right now, and about 20% in t-bills. If I was planning to buy a boat or some other expensive asset this year I would be using my t-bills rather than selling down my btc and paying 20-30% in cap gains. In circumstances where somebody has no cash or cash equivalents in their portfolio then I suppose you're right that they would have to sell some assets, pay cap gains, and then use the funds to buy the boat.

As long as the there is a capital gain triggered anytime something is purchased using bitcoin then nobody is going to use it for any purchases. It will just be used to store long term wealth but cash will still be used for purchases. Obviously if the law on this changes down the line then different story.

Be careful consuming too much Hussman, while he is undoubtably a very smart and well read guy, his performance as an investor has been shocking. “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” Winston Churchill

It's the 'still beats the market' bit that I think people have the issue with. Any track record history I've come across of Pabrai shows a failure to beat the market over any meaningful timeframe, yet he gives the impression that he is when he talks about compounding at 26% per year while napping. Happy to be corrected if somebody wants to point me to the data. If he's taking naps and lazy while trouncing the market then I'd have a more favourable opinion of him

41 here. Bought my first stock aged 12 with my confirmation money, like a good Irish catholic should. Total investment was 500 Irish pounds, as this was in roughly 1995 so pre € being introduced. The stock was a bank called Anglo Irish Bank and I ended up with 250 shares at £2 per share. Over the next 12 years the stock was roughly a 20 bagger as it rode the boom in Irish and global real estate. I was of course an investing genius who had turned 500 into about 20 grand. Then the global financial crisis hit and I enjoyed the lovely ride down from 20k to zero over the space of about a year before the bank got nationalised by the Irish government. Was a painful but very helpful lesson for me to learn at the very start of my investment journey. Been investing ever since and started formally tracking my returns for the last 9 years.

That's a good amount of skin in the game so for you. I'm along same lines, essentially about 99% of my net worth is my portfolio, only thing outside is a checking account that I pay my day to day expenses out of and keep some extra funds in for holidays or other one time purchases. I've come across a number of investors over the years who've gone into big details about how they run a focused portfolio of 3 stocks, following Mungers advice, and are crushing the market each year. Then you realise most of their assets are in real estate and bonds, and the portfolio they are managing is really just a fun money account comprising of about 5% of their net worth!

At the end of the day the investment returns don’t care if you are a nice guy or an asshole. I also don’t think a short term period(less than 5 years) of underperformance or overperformance matters either. All I care about is most recent 10-year CAGR as a minimum, after that 15, 20 year or longer. If anybody can point me to the returns data of Pabrai, Chou etc where they have demonstrated outperformance on such timeframes then that might change the story from nice guys to good investors.

Another datapoint that could be helpful is how does your portfolio fit as a percentage of total net worth? For example some people could have a business, house or other asset that comprise of the vast majority of their net worth. If person A has a fully paid off house worth $1m, a business worth $2m, and then have a ‘portfolio’ of stocks worth 500k that they trade in on the side I’d look at things slightly differently than person B with a $3.5m stock portfolio and no other assets. A 50% return for person a would be $250k and represent an increase of less than 10% on their starting net worth, whereas for person B it’s an increase of $1.75m. Person A could likely take a lot more risk and possibly look like a superstar if it pays off due to the fact that any mistakes would not damage their net worth too much, whereas person B could blow up after a few bad years.

Mohnish Pabrai is one of these supposed 'legendary' value investors. Never made sense to me. I'm sure he's a nice guy and all that but I've never been particularly impressed at any of his insights or talks. Looks to be a good businessman who grew and sold a successful business, then decided to become an investing guru. His lunch with buffett was probably his best 'investment' as he did end up building quite a good career on seemingly mediocre returns.

That's great, congrats! I guess you didn't get the memo to put most of your money in bonds and low risk stocks and get your high single digit retirement returns I'd say not too many retired 60 year olds knocking out 100%+ returns on what I assume is a decent nest egg. Look forward to see how the returns progress over the coming years, I assume you are quite concentrated in certain positions so you'll be dealing with lots of volatility. Should be a fun ride!