Rainier

I agree, no need to get into a long discussion about this in a book thread. I would just say that, I don't think what you are describing is really related to free will. You're describing almost animalistic programming (I think). And since we aren't basic animals, I am not sure how that would apply. If there is no free will, then it is difficult or impossible to come up with an explanation for morality, which nearly all humans possess an innate understanding of. Without free will people can't make moral judgments, can't apply reason/logic to problems, can't choose to be non-normative eccentrics or hermits, don't simply have the ability to veto their instinctual responses, etc. And beyond that, the existence of free will is a philosophical question and not a psychological one. You are probably alot smarter than I am and you are definitely more well read regarding psychology than I am. I have no background in evolutionary psychology, and to be completely honest I have no interest in researching it. I personally don't think that psychological study beyond what can be observed at a very basic level is very useful due to the extreme complexity of the human brain/consciousness and the specificity of how individual brains adapt to the near infinite range of events and outcomes that a human can experience (not to mention the fact that the brain can also hypothesize about and be molded by an infinite amount of counterfactuals that didn't happen). Basic understanding of psychology makes sense to me (i.e. understanding financial motivations, understanding fallout from abuse or trauma, studies of cult members, etc). But beyond those types of things, I think it becomes alot of supposition and navel gazing. Also, the basic idea of "evolutionary psychology" sounds contradictory to me - since any psychological analysis (if it can be assumed to be accurate) could only apply to an individual and not a species, and evolutionary biology (if it can be assumed to be the correct understanding of biological history) relates to genetic differentiation and has nothing to do with the interior mind of an individual within a species.

Yeah, that is the weird part about it. There isn't anything inappropriate that happens during that portion of the book (and if I remember correctly, I think the character goes out of his way to try to make sure of that), but it is definitely a strange choice.

Funny you mention that. Lonesome Dove is up next after I finish Winslow's border trilogy. I've had numerous people tell me it is one of their favorite books.

I haven't read Suttree, but I get what you are saying about the non-goal oriented way the plot unfolds (or at least it seems to be non-goal oriented on first read). The thing I love about New Sun (and the rest of the Solar Cycle) is the fact that it's like an iceberg in terms of both plot and symbolism. You see the plot of what is happening with the characters and you can tell that there is a lot of symbolism going on. And you may eventually realize that there is actually a massive amount of symbolism. But you also may realize that there is an absolutely massive amount of plot that requires re-reads and analysis to tease out. And there are so many theories about what is going on behind the scenes. For my own theory, I think I am the only person in the world who probably holds it (or at least I've never met anyone else who holds it). And there are so many cases of that regarding Wolfe's works. Alot like Borges in that respect.

I would both agree and disagree with you on this. I agree that the idea of "romance" is almost completely devoid of any real meaning. Likewise, the idea of being "in love" is almost nonsensical. However, people are definitely capable of loving each other - with the word "loving" describing the acts of kindness, caring, self-sacrifice, etc. toward another person. And I think, to the extent that there is any subconscious direction going on regarding relationships, those are not genetic or evolutionary. They are simply societal norms that are so ingrained that people don't question them. They could question them but choose not to. If you were able to look at the "romance" of different areas of the globe now, or the same areas at different times, or go back to ancient Greece or ancient Egypt or however far back, you'd see that the "romantic" norms were completely different, therefore contradicting any possibility of an evolutionary factor. I disagree with the idea that people don't have or are almost devoid of free will. There's no evidence for this and it is an avenue of philosophical thought that ends up in either dead ends or circular reasoning. And I wouldn't be so quick to disregard your own thoughts or consider them outside of your own authorship, as it is very easy to train oneself to think in different ways. We choose to allow societal norms to override our own thought processes on a million little or big things every day (and most of the time this is fine and usually beneficial). But that doesn't mean that you should give your brain a free pass because it uses the norms as a crutch or assume that you couldn't easily think a different way if you wanted to.

The only romance book I've ever read (that I can think of) is The Time Traveller's Wife. It is a decent book and possibly worth reading if you are researching romance genre meshing with other genres (light sci-fi in this case). Very easy to read and the romantic relationship in the book is both very weird in some places and very realistic in others. The only other things I can think of as romance that I've read are a couple of Jane Austen books at the request of my wife - Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion. The writing in both is good, but I would say Austen is slightly overrated (but keep in mind that I am the opposite of the target audience for this type of literature). The plot of Pride & Prejudice is good, and probably everyone knows what the plot is at this point either from the actual book/movies or the fact that the plot has been copied in about 100 other movies/books. Persuasion is much different and I would say it is probably the better novel overall, despite being far less well known than all of her other books. In particular, toward the end of the book there is a philosophical dialogue between two characters regarding the differences of love/commitment capabilities in men compared to women that is top tier - almost certainly the best thing Austen ever wrote. That section should probably be assigned to high school kids to read. But you have to read the rest of the novel to get there, which is a slog, and I am not sure it's worth it.

Today: More MELI Started GDDY Started HRB Last couple of weeks: Decent amount of NFLX Expanded the exchange basket to include ICE and NDAQ. Also bought more DBOEY and JPGXY Small position in ORCL AMZN More NTDOY More ZS, DT, QLYS, GTLB

I read Old Man's War through Last Colony. I liked them as well.

I have been reading more fiction lately. Recently read: True Grit by Charles Portis. Quick read, but very good. 9/10. The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch. It was ok, like a 6/10. Very hyped and highly praised sci fi book, but I'd say it was slightly above average. Ender's Game - Still a classic 10/10 Currently Reading: The Power of The Dog by Don Winslow (this is the novel about the DEA and the border drug cartels. It is completely unrelated to the netflix movie with the same name)

Those are really great books. Don't see alot of people mentioning Harrison and Pohl very often. A couple of questions: Have you read Forever Peace (the spiritual sequel to The Forever War)? If not, you might want to check it out. I thought it was a good follow up on alot of the ideas in the first book. Have you read Saint Leibowitz and The Wild Horse Woman (sequel to Canticle for Leibowitz)? I haven't read it and have never met anyone who has. I've always wanted to, but haven't gotten around to it. Curious if you think it is worth reading if you have read it.

A few recommendations based on the sci fi stuff you listed: - The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (the sequel, Forever Peace, is also very good) - Sphere by Michael Crichton. Similar to Blake Crouch's style of writing, a very tight and interesting thriller. - Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. I re-read it a few months ago and it still holds up. - The Passage trilogy by Justin Cronin (really underrated recent series; there was an awful network tv show adaptation - don't hold that against the books) - Book of The New Sun by Gene Wolfe. Since you liked Dune Messiah. I consider Book of The New Sun to be the best novel ever written (or the two best novels, or the four best novels, depending on the format you get). Wolfe's writing is on par with whatever western all time great you want to put him up against (Tolstoy, Nabokov, Shakespeare, Dickens, Orwell, whoever). The books are pretty challenging in terms of peeling back the onion of meaning in them. If you like rabbit holes, it is the definition of a rabbit hole. Regarding Watchmen - I don't know if it matters to you, but most people are unaware that the author, Alan Moore, is a fairly outspoken proponent and practitioner of occultism.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-05/anthropic-updates-ai-model-to-field-more-complex-financial-research https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-6 The press release was only from 2 hours ago

I've got a basket of these cybersecurity companies that I think will be hard for AI to replace (or at least hard for audit/risk/cyber committees inside big companies to justify switching from). My basket is currently ZS, DT, FTNT and I added QLYS this week. I sold off a position in PANW a few weeks ago to buy something else. Turned out to be good timing, but I'll likely buy back into it this year. ZS, DT, and PANW have been getting pounded like all other software stocks. FTNT has held up fairly well. In my opinion,free cash flow is extremely strong in these companies and I don't see how that really erodes. If anything, AI tools will speed up the development of malicious software.

I'm not an expert in this space. What is the case for MGNI vs TTD?

Any thoughts on the news this morning on AMPG? https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1518461/000149315226003533/form8-k.htm

Thanks, that sounds like something worth looking at. This will probably sound really stupid, but I think I saw the name Ferrovial at some point (without any context) and assumed it was some type of metals/mining company.

Thanks. Good point on the waste management companies. Didn't think of that; they're basically like utilities. Also a good point on pipelines. I've avoided them because I don't have the desire to file K-1s for taxable accounts. I did own AMLP (an ETF owning MLPs) up until selling about six months ago. It did pretty well for a 3-4 year period along with an 8-10% yield.

I love finding companies that operate basically like a tollbooth - i.e. a company that provides access to some type of service that is both critical and difficult/impossible for their customers to replicate. As such, the tollbooth can can charge a fee to essentially every user who wants access to that service. I would also add that I think they need to be fairly immune to near-term technological disruption (nothing is ever completely immune, but difficult for known technological advances to disrupt the toll collection). So, something like MS Office or ADBE's suite of products don't really qualify for me (although they probably would have 10 years ago). Alot of software that I would have historically thought of as a tollbooth is not really in that category now due to the unknown disruption of AI software development advances. I was thinking about this because I started looking at GDDY and I thought about starting a thread on it (I still might do that). Then I started looking at my portfolio and my watchlist and realized was thinking about the types of businesses I gravitate toward. I realized that a large percentage of my mental bucket of long-term buy and (hopefully) never sell companies (that I either own now or want to buy at the right valuation) are what I would consider a tollbooth. At this point, that personal portfolio/watchlist consists of a basket of the several financial exchanges, MELI, EBAY, V, MA, CPNG, SE, VRSN, railroads, GOOG, MCO, SPGI, VRSK, and a few utilities. Does anyone have other good examples of tollbooth businesses? I am sure there are lots of niches that I've never heard about. Examples of decent businesses I would consider tollbooths: Financial Exchanges - Why they are tollbooths? Because market participants want third party exchanges for price transparency and liquidity. They don't necessarily have insurmountable moats (new exchanges pop up now and then), but a company cannot really issue public shares without the existence of some exchange. (my list now includes CME, CBOE, NDAQ, ICE, MKTX, OTCM, MIAX, HKXCY, JPXGY, LSEGY, BOLSY, TVAV, ABAXX, TMXFF, ASXFY, DBOEY, EUXTF, HEXEY, MSCI's index and etf business probably best fits in this category) Rating agencies - Similar to the financial exchanges; if you want access to a broad range of bond buyers, want your stock rated, or want a consumer credit score, then you have to utilize a small number of third party firms to do it (MCO, SPGI, TRU, EFX, EXPGF, VRSK) Ubiquitous payment networks - Massive infrastructure in place that allows extremely fast and reliable payment transactions. The cost benefit analysis of any single vendor or bank creating their own is unlikely to make economic sense. Would be an enormous undertaking to recreate what these major networks have in place. (in the US I would probably only put V, MA, PYPL on the list of true tollbooths and possibly COF. Would love to know of others) Airports - Customers, airlines, governments all have a laundry list of reasons to insist that air travel be regulated and transparent. (I am ignorant of good publicly traded airports, although I am sure they exist) Ubiquitous retail sales platforms - Essentially scale and name recognition is why I would consider them tollbooths. Having one account allows the customer access to a huge number of sellers/products and sellers to have access to a huge number of customers. Ease of transactions and reliability. (EBAY, MELI, ETSY, SE, CPNG, BABA, JD) Internet infrastructure companies - They provide some type of service that is critical in operating a website. (GDDY, AKAM, VRSN, NET - there are probably alot more of these, but I'm not well versed in this area) Other types of ubiquitous marketplaces - Same as retail sales networks - recognition, reliability, safety, payment consistency, etc. (ABNB, UBER) Advertising - This primarily has to do with scale and infrastructure. (the best here is obviously GOOG, but the only pure play I know of is TTD and I am not sure how durable it is) Railroads - Rail is very cost effective in many cases and it would be nearly impossible to replicate the large rail systems. (CSX, UP, CN, NS, etc) Utilities - This is obvious and there are a million of them There are also tollbooths buried within conglomerates (GOOG's advertising, MSFT's Azure, AMZN's retail site and AWS, BNSF inside BRK, etc.). I'd love to hear of other examples. Large or small.

Thanks for the info. I forgot to mention CNQ. I actually bought a small position in a tax-free account back in August. Essentially all of these I’m holding in tax-free accounts due to the dividends/buyout potential.

Will do, thanks.

Thanks alot for the info. Gives me some food for thought and another company to study.

I think the IP at Nintendo is a moat and a pretty strong one, but I kind of view entertainment IP as constantly depreciating. If you don't have consistent output of stuff that is both popular and of high quality, then I think the moat is just gradually shrinking all the time unless it's constantly bolstered. But they've been excellent caretakers of the main brands, better than almost any other entertainment company that I can think of. To the point that I think they are in a class by themselves in terms of the perfect blend of IP protection and monetization. The consistent protection of quality they've shown with Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon is almost 100% stellar. This is why I think negative or cynical viewpoints regarding the Switch 2's prospects and launch are kind of missing the point. The Switch 2 is just the vessel by which the best run entertainment company in the world pushes out its IP. The games will come and they only come on the Switch. And the thing that might get a little lost in the shuffle is that they are getting much better at this over time. Today, their more niche IP get treated extremely well (stuff like Animal Crossing, Pikmin, Metroid, Splatoon, Smash, Xenoblade, even closely aligned second party stuff like Fire Emblem). They are very good at curating this stuff and making sure that it is all extremely high quality and marketed correctly. So, 20-30 years from now, I expect all of those second tier IPs will be extremely valuable because the company isn't just putting them on the back burner like they did in the past. There are laundry lists of poorly managed video game IPs. Even within Nintendo, they haven't always done a great job. I could probably name 20 instances of very high quality games (not crappy games) that Nintendo developed and failed to turn into anything that meaningfully added to the moat. This type of high quality IP management did not happen back in the SNES, N64, GameCube eras (examples being stuff like Star Fox, Pilotwings, Wave Race, Advance Wars, Golden Sun, Earthbound, on and on). Even if you look at a second-party company like Rare (that Nintendo basically seed funded with an unlimited budget and then bought a 49% stake in). I think that the Nintendo of today would not think twice about acquiring Rare outright when the time came. That partnership had produced Golden-Eye, Killer Instinct, Donkey Kong Country, Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, Blast Corps, on and on. At the time, Rare's batting average was almost 1,000 and the games were mostly mainstream hits. Today, Nintendo acquires Monolith Soft for a niche product like the Xenoblade games and would never allow Intelligent Systems (the company that makes Fire Emblem) to be acquired by anyone else. But the Nintendo of 25 years ago allows itself to get into a situation where Rare goes out for bid and then they lose Rare to Microsoft. I'm sure there was some type of calculus that went into that decision, but in retrospect it seems absolutely ridiculous that Rare was bought by Microsoft instead of Nintendo, especially given the fact that alot of the IP basically died on the vine at Microsoft for a lot of different reasons. And it is more ridiculous after Nintendo had just made a calculated decision to spurn a perpetually popular second party developer (SquareSoft with Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger) because Nintendo wanted to stick to cartridge based consoles versus moving to CD based media (the irony is that the cart vs CD decision was made in part because of Rare and their commitment to Silicon Graphics style graphics production). And all of that bad judgment led to Nintendo losing Square to Sony exclusivity (which immediately resulted in the release of two Final Fantasy games that were uber massive hits and helped solidify the Playstation's #1 position in that and future eras) and Rare to Microsoft. Just epically stupid on all fronts on the part of Nintendo. I have no inside information, but I get the sense that that era of Nintendo's history (after the massive success of the SNES and going into the N64/GameCube) bred a lot of hubris and resulted in some bloat in the management team - specifically with Nintendo of America getting an outsized share of influence over the high level decisions of the company. Iwata taking over and his extremely game-quality focused mentality (he was the CEO/president of the company from 2002 until he died in 2015) was really critical for the company and I don't think you have the current setup without his leadership (which I am personally very optimistic about from an investment standpoint). Rant over, but my point is that today's Nintendo seems almost fanatical about protecting and nurturing their IP (at least to a much greater extent than companies like Disney or Warner or Microsoft).

I’ve been researching western Canadian OGM companies over the past year or so. I’ve been trying to focus more on the management teams and/or equity sponsors rather than deep dives on the reserves and production. I’m looking at the production figures at a high level, but I’m not an engineer or geologist and I’m not on the ground in western Canada, so I feel like it makes more sense to bet on the jockeys with good capital allocation/discipline history rather than trying to underwrite their production. That has been my experience spectating on the banking/finance side of OGM guys in the Eagle Ford, Barnett, Permian, East Texas, Woodford, etc. The really smart and disciplined capital allocators always seemed to do well over extended periods, whether they were extremely opportunistic buyers of working interest during price collapses or royalty accumulators or just serial acquirers who buy and hold in their family and do their own operations. The guys who were very disciplined were constantly growing net worth and only took temporary hits to their dcf when there were massive macro oil price events. Otherwise they just compounded really well (and hardly ever paid taxes). Anyway, the western Canadian sands seems like it has really solid macro economic tailwinds for the next 5-10 years, barring some kind of miracle in venezuela. I’ve been reading these boards and reading management letters and trying to watch Fairfax for several months. I’ve taken some smallish positions in Cardinal, Strathcona, and InPlay over the past year that have done well. I’ve also started looking at Greefire. Long story longer - my actual question is: Are there other companies (besides the ones I mentioned above) with high quality management teams or equity sponsors (like WEF or Fairfax) or special situations that are worth looking at?

Thanks for these graphs, very useful. How do you get the time series stock price and financial data for the graphs.

I just posted this in the 2025 thread as well. But I have been buying quite a few software companies over the past 6 months or so. My basket right now is: CNSWF (and smaller positions in Topicus and Lumine), ZS, DT, PANW, FTNT, SLP, VEEV, SNPS.