writser

Up approximately 12% in EUR (so ~flat in USD terms). I am quite disappointed actually. My portfolio resembles Hielko's one but he somehow manages to squeeze out an additional 8% of alpha. Makes me feel stupid. On the other hand, I was quite heavily invested in emerging markets & commodities so I guess I shouldn't complain too much.

Glad to have you on board, Jonas. I love reading your blog. Merry Christmas +1. But please consider switching to English :)

Serious question: why did you start this thread?

Since when is forest near the Russian border considered a current asset? :o

This, or the trade will be cancelled (I've had 4-5 trades cancelled on stink bids / asks over the years... always the cancels were not to my benefit). Ben Indeed, that is the main problem.

The latter .. Fishing traders.

A quick glance on Morningstar would make me assume the recent profitability is temporary. Terrible ROE, no buybacks, tiny dividend, book value decreased during the past seven years. I'm not touching it. But yeah, it is cheap based on NCAV. In general, given that it is almost impossible for us foreigners to understand anything about obscure Japanese stocks except for the most basic numbers I would always take a diversified approach. In other words, I don't see why you would want to double down on this name when you can buy a second net-net instead. It's not like we have an information advantage. Gotta give the market some credit.

Nice blogpost by a forum member giving an overview of his current Japan basket: http://www.valueinvestingblog.net/japanese-net-nets-update/ . Thanks to this post I also stumbled upon a blog I hadn't seen before with some new Japan ideas: http://www.deepvalueideas.com/.

Interesting that market orders are still ok but GTC orders are not .. My guess is that the former is far more dangerous for retail investors.

Because it is a quick and easy way? If you have a sudden panic attack or something horrible happened and you own a gun you can probably kill yourself within 10 seconds. If you want to suffocate yourself in your car you have to do preparations and have quite some time to reconsider things and/or to be interrupted. You approach choosing a preferred method of suicide as if it is a rational decision making process - that's probably not the right way to go.

Ming Fai: http://alphavulture.com/tag/3828-hk/ .

Agreed. Also, it might be that US executives get more compensation in the form of options than their European colleagues and thus have an incentive to get their stock price higher. That's just guesswork on my part though.

I get what you are saying, I just don't agree with you. Using your example of a $5m portfolio with my current family situation (single guy, no steady girlfriend, and I better not have any kids in 9-12 months). So I probably would take on bets of ~40% allocation with that amount of money and probably more than I currently do. It's not like I want to be so concentrated all the time and with every bet. When it comes to position sizing, I'd bet age and/or family status plays a much larger role in risk tolerance then the amount of money you have. Which is why it's unfair to blindly dismiss returns of aggressive investors just because you may have kids or the strategy isn't for you. We wouldn't dismiss the results of conservative/diversified investors who lost less than the market in 2008/2009, regardless of their actual underlying performance. So what is a representative time period and how do we determine skill quantitatively? Hope you don't mind some disagreement. First of all, by no means did I want to imply that investors running a concentrated / aggressive portfolio are gamblers. I'm just talking statistics. People with a small portfolio are on average young. Young people can afford to run a high-risk, high-reward portfolio. Again, I'm not saying that is a bad thing - it is probably their best strategy. But that does imply that the variance of their results is higher. And thus, that they are more likely to 'run hot' in a short timeframe. And thus, that they are more likely to be up 20% and post that in this thread. Compare that to a retired couple with a bond portfolio: they would never reach the required hurdle to post in this thread. In other words, the young people (and thus the small portfolios) posting in this thread are more likely 'just lucky' due to this selection bias. If you look at it that way, portfolio size is a proxy for investing acumen. A very bad proxy, but still useful imho. It's nothing personal - just statistics. With regards to a time period: I don't know most posters here so I can't verify their track records anyway. I mostly try to focus only on the quality of their analysis. That's why I think threads such as this one are a distraction - they put you in a mindset where you think "whoah this guy made 40% this year I better copy his strategy" instead of "he posts sensible stuff about XYZ, I have to look into that". That's dangerous, especially because the selection bias I just described makes it very easy to think you are being too conservative. Anyway, it's all getting a bit philosophical :) .

Schwab, I think you are missing an important point. If you are young, have a good job and a small (<$100k) portfolio you are probably investing with an aggressive mindset. Tom was mentioning he had 40% of his portfolio in Intralot. I am pretty sure that if you have a $5m portfolio on which you and your family depend for income you would never, ever make that bet (unless you have the balls of Ericopoly). What I am trying to convey is that portfolio size is actually important because you want to filter out the people who are gambling with a small amount of money and are bragging about their results in this thread (for the record, by no means am I implying Tom belongs in that category - that was probably a bad example). People with a small bankroll are probably taking more risk -> standard deviation of their results is higher -> they are probably overrepresented in this thread. In fact, people using risky (for example, high concentration) strategies are probably overrepresented in this thread, again due to the combination of a high variance of their results and the tendency to post only if one outperforms. Another reason why you should be extremely skeptical about any conclusion inferred from threads such as this one. Not to mention that we are looking at a ludicrous timeframe, as others pointed out.

Cassette players? At first I thought wow, this guy is oldschool but now I get it - you can play them at double speed.

The danger with threads such as this one is that they focus on (short term) results rather than thought process. Anybody up > 15% this year so far is a) likely holding a concentrated ( = high-risk) portfolio, b) likely just lucky and c) more likely to post in this thread than underperformers. So consider me skeptical of the information content of this subset of posts from a subset of investors. Probably you are better off analyzing companies rather than trying to determine which poster in this thread is the next Buffett. In other words, if you opened a thread such as this one repeatedly in 1997, 1998 and 1999 you would arrive at the conclusion that the optimal portfolio would be a concentrated mix of Enron, Geocities and Pets.com shares.

I own the almanack and think it is great but let me be the devil's advocate: it is probably overrated among value investors. Sure, Munger is a cool guy and a self-made billionaire but nothing in his book is earth-shattering. Basically it's just a collection of smart stuff other people came up with, nice proverbs and some common sense your grandfather could've taught you too. If you already are infected with the 'value investing' mindset and watched one or two Munger speeches on YouTube then there's not much you didn't already know. In other words, the advice Munger gives is mostly important to those who never heard of him in the first place (and probably never will). The almanack is a nice coffee table book and gives a light introduction of several interesting subjects but if you are truly interested in them I would recommend other literature. For example, if you are really interested in human biases read Kahneman. Checkists: Gawande. Investing: Graham. If you have to choose between the Almanack and the Bevelin book I'd take the Almanack. Far better written. I found the Bevelin book disorganised and a bit too pedantic given its introduction-level content. An unrelated remark: there are many good books about value investing (Charlie's almanack, Intelligent investor, Security analysis, Margin of safety, The most important thing, You can be a stock market genius, etc. etc.) but after a few books the added value of each additional one is steeply declining in my opinion. At some point you understand the concepts and while these reading these books is enjoyable, to get better you just have to get in the trenches and do the dirty work, i.e. analyzing companies and burning your savings :) .

Exactly. That's not fishy. It is market making - has been going on for centuries. Scenario 2: do you mean a limit buy order or limit sell order?

I wouldn't really worry about that. Imho, the cheaper and easier it is to trade, the more people will trade. Human nature. And trading has become MUCH cheaper and easier during the past few decades. I don't think this trend is a fad - it just wasn't possible before.

I just found out that there is an option to ignore topics under profile settings. I've spent an hour trying to get topics in the ignore list but I can't figure out how to do this. Is this functionality disabled / work in progress? Or am I just too stupid to figure out how to do it? Any help would be appreciated.

The Dow is a price-weighted index, you should not use it for any macro analysis / comparisons at all.

So to summarize: you had a leveraged account, averaged KORS down until it was 60% of your portfolio and sold your stake after seeing the light thanks to Buddha. Now you open a topic at the worst market day since 2008 stating that you sold all your position because: Value investing at its best .. Based on this topic you are probably best off moving your assets to a savings account.

Just don't watch CNBC. Who cares what the clowns say.

I live in the Netherlands and only pay a flat wealth tax (1.2% annually). I'm not sure under which tax code I would be better off if I optimize my trading decisions to minimize taxes but I strongly prefer a flat wealth tax. I guess it takes an outsider to realize how convoluted the U.S. system really is. For example the concept of "tax loss selling" is just completely bonkers from my perspective. The US tax code skews the whole market. Investors can't just analyze companies (as they should), they have to constantly take into account how taxes affect the profitability of their decisions. The administrative part also seems a huge headache to me (both for the tax payer and the government). I can just buy and sell whatever I want whenever I want and at the end of the year I calculate my net worth and pay a small tax. Way, way easier.

Would you care to elaborate? I've been looking at Dickson Concepts as a possible net/net but I'm not fully convinced yet.