Milu

Seems like twitter is almost back to being valued at it's original $44b purchase price, obviously he overpaid a lot at the time, but will be fun to see the heads explode when it gets to $100b. The man just continues to win no matter what people think of his personality or politics. Sure he is putting some people off and probably losing some customers for Tesla, but on the flip side he's probably attracting another group of people who traditionally wouldn't have bought Teslas.

I still hold some ETH but am gradually converting this over to my much larger bitcoin holdings. I’m not fully convinced in the future of the asset, at least from a price growth standpoint. I’m not sure I buy the it’s a currency argument and also wouldn’t want it to be a currency. People who want to participate in china will invest in stocks and shares of Chinese companies, sure they may have to exchange their dollars or euros in RMB to do so but its not like they are holding RMB for long term compounding purposes, they just hold it for a few mins before they buy the stock.

Belgium, LOTB.BR

I'm curious how they calculate Free Cash Flow? For 2023 for example I get cash flow from operations of €154m which if you adjust for the €2m of working cap adjustment and €18.8m of maintenance cap ex gets me €133m of free cash. Not sure why they choose EBITDA(u) rather than operating cash flow.

Ya I've been quite tempted too. I love everything except the price, and I have been one of those people who have made a number of valuation exceptions that have paid off in the past. Not sure whether to push my luck or not. Doing something like a 1-2% position and letting it ride might not be the worst idea.

Been on my watchlist for a long time but just can't get my ahead around the price people are willing to pay for essentially a delicious biscuit company.

A machine can now do this in millisecond for every company that has financial data on the web. Ben Graham and Buffett had an edge in the early days when you actually had to manually filter through this info and nobody else was doing it. Any body who thinks they have an ‘edge’ by doing something like this is fooling themselves.

Haha yes. I do find it quite funny how all the 'experts' in the FT and Economist were dissing Milei's policies when he came into power last year, and now that they have started to work they have backtracked massively. Same with Bukele in El Salvador. Surprised people put any weight in anything they say really. I'd trust the opinions of Jamie Dimon, Stan Druckenmiller, Buffett etc over some random journalist/economist. As you mentioned earlier tariffs aren't some new thing and they exist in just about every country in the world to some degree, yet when trump uses them panic ensues.

The thing that I wonder about is that all the supposed experts and talking heads claim that trumps tariffs will mainly end up hurting Americans. If that’s the case then why bother retaliating, just let them hurt themselves.

Sounds like you are enjoying life either way!

I've been wondering about fellow investors here on the board, which ones of you really enjoy the actual process of investing and which ones just care about the proceeds? Personally I really enjoy researching companies, assessing market dynamics, evaluating management trustworthiness, making bets (often contrarian) where you are staking a position on a future view of the world that may or may not transpire. It's almost like the worlds greatest game where you are completing against the smartest people in the world to make as high a return as you can on your correct decisions and as low a loss as possible on the incorrect ones. I'm somewhat addicted to the game of investing and I think even if some Genie could guarantee some high annual compound return by going 100% index fund but the only caveat is you can never research companies or make another investment again I'm not sure I would take it. I'm aware that this is totally irrational but I genuinely just like doing this for the mental stimulation, the money generated on the back end is obviously a pleasant outcome. Just something I've been thinking about a bit and wanted to see what others felt.

So the question is, would this impact your position size or confidence in continuing to hold your bitcoin?

I wouldn't get too far ahead of yourself with too much talk of a bubble burst. Obvioulsy today there looks like there will be a bit of a pullback but you have to remember that Google at Meta are trading in the 25-30 PE range, hardly 'bubble' levels. Microsoft and Apple a little higher in the 30-34 PE range. This is not the 50+ PE range of 2000 tech bubble, no matter how much people would like this to be the case. As I said above Nvidia will likely be hit hard, maybe a few others in that space, but I don't think the growth of big tech is going to be stopping anytime soon.

To take the other side of the argument, couldn't this deep seek development be a positive for many of the big tech companies, one of the main concerns I have with Meta, Google etc is the massive amount of cap ex they are planning to spend to stay at the cutting edge with these frontier models. If it's now the case (as demonstrated by deep seek) that this is not necessarily required shouldn't this result in a downward adjustment of future cap ex. Nvidia would strike me as being the main loser if this type of situation plays out.

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!