writser

Business as usual is good, I would assume. Especially when business as usual is the way that Buffett has compounded money over his professional lifetime. Sure. I was not criticizing Berkshire's performance or Buffett's business acumen. I just think the letter was bland and mostly a rehash of his pet issues. He avoids all sensitive / controversial subjects.

My 2cts: bit of a boring letter. Float is good, high fees are bad, issuing Berkshire stock was bad, America is good, not expensing stock options is bad. Stock buybacks are good or bad, depending on price. And please insure your car at geico.com, thank you very much. Not much news if you've read the past 20 letters.

A lot of you internet buffs probably already saw this but this is an epic read: . Cliff notes: guy burns a 2.5m inheritance in a year of trading and now goes all-in with options on todays Apple earnings to "go big or go home". Live stream: https://www.youtube.com/c/FSComeau/live . Is this real? What a train wreck ..

the good news - probably not an opening move in a carefully orchestrated plan to manipulate the flow and reception of information. the bad news - probably not an opening move in a carefully orchestrated plan to manipulate the flow and reception of information. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-first-days-inside-trumps-white-house-fury-tumult-and-a-reboot/2017/01/23/7ceef1b0-e191-11e6-ba11-63c4b4fb5a63_story.html?utm_term=.e2bc985113fa Couldn't have said it better. Occam's razor.

Yes, if you imagine a company that stops growing in 2038 (and stops earning money after 2060) and discount all cashflows at 15% you will get a graph that goes up and then down. That is just basic math and has nothing to do with disproving the EMH. It just proves that you don't seem to understand the logical implications of stuffing some values in a DCF model. Think about this: your company is worth 315m in 2018 in 2018 dollars. But what's the value of a 2018 dollar in 2017 if you use a discount rate of 15%?

FWIW I've read quite a lot of books on investing but after you've read like three of four the upside of reading even more of them is marginal (it still is enjoyable though). Very quickly you reach a point where getting your hands dirty is far more valuable: i.e. dig down in annual reports and try to understand/model/valuate a company. If you don't understand something, google it or ask for help. You don't become a good soccer player / programmer / pianist by reading all the best books out there. Same for investing - you need deliberate practice. That said, here are a couple of books I liked best: Security analysis: the classic on value investing. Reminiscences of a stock operator: first of all a very enjoyable read. Second of all it gives a great insight in the psychology of the market and its participants. You can be a stock market genius: title is way too catchy but actually a good book. Lots of examples on how to identify and evaluate potentially interesting situations. Quality of earnings: good book on how to spot 'dubious' accounting. I wasn't particularly impressed by the Whitman book.

I thought it was a good read, can recommend it. Liar's poker meets Silicon Valley. Maybe a bit on the technical side for alpha people. The writer is witty but he's also a cynical asshole. The FT wrote a decent review: https://www.ft.com/content/47d1cd50-4aa5-11e6-b387-64ab0a67014c . I mailed a few quotes to a friend of mine after reading it: If you like stuff like this: read the book. Otherwise I wouldn't recommend it :) .

I own a very modest chunk of LMB warrants. I don't have any high-conviction idea (I never have) but I hope Conduril does well in 2017. I'll write a small update there.

During the year I collected a lot of obscure stuff: CVR's, shares that are in escrow, unlisted warrants, and receivables from liquidations. All this stuff doesn't show up in my brokerage accounts, which is good as I have to pay a wealth tax. According to my brokerage statements I am up ~38% (in EUR). If I include all receivables and value CVR's at zero I am up approximately 45%. Happy with that as I am a big wuss and run a diversified, conservative (Schloss-like) portfolio. My biggest position never is >10% apart from two corporate actions this year. 5 year CAGR now 23% with low volatility. Running hot! Euro depreciation helped a lot this year. Still lots of things to improve though. As in any year, my results could and should have been better. Investing is so difficult ..

This year I participated in CCSC, DATE, DKSY, EFUT, GAI, MCOX, MOBI, MR, QIHU, RBM (Canadian one) and TAOM. All these deals worked out and were profitable (timing was important in a few ones as they took longer than expected). I didn't invest in any going-private deal that failed to close. That said, there are some risks with China deals - especially the larger ones. I dabbled a little bit into FGL. Not really a going-private deal but it failed / was postponed nonetheless. My trading was still profitable as the stock made huge swings either way. I also made a handsome profit on CTCM and a bit on Pharmstandard (both Russian deals). UTSI was a deal in making but it failed because the chairman blew up. Roughly break-even on that. Aixtron was the only real disaster of the year - but due to Obama blocking the deal, not because of a supposed crisis in China. Currently I am invested in SYUT (I like that deal) and TSL (which could be another blowup). KZ looks moderately interesting. Spread is decent but insiders have been trying for years now to take it private, they adjusted the price downwards (big nono for me!) there is no timeline yet and insiders own "only 25%". AMCN has a hairy history - not touching that. I haven't really looked at ZPIN yet. Here are a couple of other interesting situations: http://seekingalpha.com/article/3964667-chinese-squeeze-outs-need-protect-u-s-investors . For years people have been saying China is going to blow up, all Chinese businessmen are crooks and all Chinese companies listed in the US are frauds. I think this is a bias of US investors that distorts prices and that this is exploitable in a lot of cases. You do have to be careful though.

In the VW case the key question is: do you think you are one of the wizards who could've foreseen the emission scandal before the stock cratered? As for myself, I wouldn't bet my portfolio on it. I agree that the others are bad examples. Especially Valeant was clearly a case of 'caveat emptor'. The VRX topic on this forum even opened with the question "Is this a fraud?" .. p.s.: Valeant was clearly the Titanic among ferries.

Tell him he is asking the wrong question.

That's the generous view .. I'd say he is doing very well - only the clients who were lured into his bullshit funds aren't.

I expected this forum to be way poorer. Maybe the poll is biased but looks like people here are doing well for themselves. Nice.

While I would like that to be true, I don't think it is. There's a large group of angry people out there, disappointed with politics, immigration, growing income disparity and angry about Wall Street and job losses due to technology changes and competition from China. These people are not going to think in four years: "well, we tried Trump, that didn't work out, let's get back to Jeb Bush.". They hate Jeb Bush almost as much as Hillary Clinton because they both represent 'the elite'. Both parties, but especially the Republicans, have grown completely out of synch with their voter base. Their leaders are living on a completely different planet than, for example, a fired coal miner in Virginia. The Bern and Trump are symptons of this problem, not a one-off event. Chris Arnade has written a couple of nice articles about this. This is not only true for the USA. A similar thing is happening in most developed countries (UK: Brexit & UKIP, France: Le Pen, Germany: Pegina, the Netherlands: Wilders, Italy: Beppe Grillo, Austria: Freedom Party). I'm certainly no expert on politics but I think that globalisation, immigration and growing inequality are serious issues that is not going away in a few years and there will be more demagogues who will try to take advantage of this.

If you fail to establish a track record with a ~$100k portfolio you lose one year of your life? Please, keep things in perspective. If you're a full-time investor and you blow up you might have to sell your house, can't take care of your family, can't afford a retirement home and/or a good school for your children, just to name a few things. On the other hand, how your portfolio performs the next few years is mostly irrelevant in the greater scheme of things because the vast majority of your future net worth will come from labour, not capital. You can blow up $100k once or twice and still get a great job, your quality of life wouldn't be affected. You say you can 'earn it back quicker' after a blow up but a retiree can't earn it back at all.

I am a big wuss too. I have ~30 core positions and 10-20 small positions on the side. I do a basket approach in some areas, if you group those together the number goes down somewhat but I can't imagine going below 20 positions. I'd rather err on the side of caution (i.e. not outperforming) than risk blowing up. Additional upside: it prevents me from getting bored. It's the Walter Schloss approach. And yes, I think quite a few of the concentrated posters here are young, early in their career and run small portfolios (not that there is anything wrong with that). Anecdotal evidence: the topicstarter owns 6 shares of Google. Concentrating is easy for you, you run OPM. Gotta gamble it up!

+1. ETN's are unsubordinated bank debt with a funny flavour (a total return swap). So you basically pay management fees to let a shitty bank borrow your money at 0% interest .. If you are lucky your loan is collateralized with Japanese bonds, Brazilian bank stocks and other trash said bank needs to get rid of. If you are unlucky it is not collateralized at all. Products like these didn't trade around NAV in 2008/2009 and won't trade around fair value during the next crisis either. Would recommend to stay away. ETN's are designed to clean up bank balance sheets - not to make money for investors.

As Picasso pointed out on Twitter the most amazing thing is that he made only a couple of million trading APL. He's already worth 10 digits. Why the **** would you starting fooling around making super-obvious option trades for a sum that hardly moves the needle? So he's a billionaire and will probably find a way to settle this thing but if you read the complaint (link) you can't help but think it is super clear cut. And that Cooperman is incredibly shortsighted, stupid and greedy.

Greg hit the nail on the head. I used to work at a trading firm. Made good money but didn't really enjoy it anymore after a few years. Still it was a surprisingly hard decision to quit for a few reasons: 1) Golden handcuffs. If you stay for a few years extra you (hope to) earn exponentially more. Seniors get a bigger bonus, share grants vest over multiple years, an IPO is looming on the horizon, etc. Always a reason to work a few more years. If you stop you have nothing. No money incoming! Even if you have decent savings it 'feels' different. 2) Lifestyle inflation. If your boss and colleagues have huge mansions, vacation homes on Ibiza and expensive cars your view of life gets skewed a bit. The first year you think: "if I have x I can retire". After a few years x has suddenly tripled. Or quadrupled. As Greg pointed out: it's hard to scale back. It's hard to trade your Ferrari for a Honda. 3) Social pressure. "Quitting is for losers and losing is for quitters". "Winners don't quit". "What will my family / my friends / my colleagues think of me? After lots of thought I quit and while some people probably think I am crazy I have absolutely no regrets and am still very happy with my decision. Now I'm a full-time investor / lazy guy (so far). I am healthier and happier. Beats the extra money.

You must be a broker.

Welcome. My tip: ignore all threads about politics, religion and stock threads with over 1000 replies.

What was the opportunity? The package deal had exactly the same value per share as the cash-only deal. Maybe there are tax advantages for US citizens I am unaware of.

That's Hielko's website :) . But yeah, a few other people managed to buy shares. Liquidity was very limited anyway, idea was only suitable for a handful of small PA's.

Bought as much as was feasible in the beginning of june ($139.11 average), sold a little bit around $150 a few weeks later, got cashed out yesterday at $159.82. 15% return in 8 weeks for a low-risk merger. I hope a few others managed to pick up a few shares as well.