writser

Why? Apart from 401k's and other stuff that I don't understand being non-American I would say this is excellent advice for 90% of all people. Just pump excess money in a Vanguard targeted retirement fund (or something similar) and forget about it.

Get a life :) Seriously - non-finance related stuff. If you stare at your screen all day it's hard not to get suckered into the action by mr. Market.

IMHO it depends quite a lot on the liquidity in the stock. If you want to trade MSFT I don't really care, but with some illiquid stuff it is not advisable to lift the offer straight away.

Haha, you sure sound like the typical bitter poker professional :P Used to dabble a bit in that as well. Don't take offense!

HFT

That's great. Such a simple idea. I hate scrolling through edgar. Thanks. Agreed, very nice find!

Definitely this. Not sure if it's a good thing :)

On that note, anybody playing chess here? I like the game, recreational player, not very good :)

I'm also wondering whether the users that posted the jaw-dropping returns for this year have big or small portfolio's. I.e., if you are a student with 10k net assets I would guess it is easier to take a bit more risk and make >100% than if you're 40 and married with two kids. Either way, if you keep compounding at these levels your portfolio should be big quite soon anyway :)

I guess most deals fail because of a combination of overconfidence / hubris and wrong incentives for the decision makers (ego boost, big bonus) and decision advisors (huge fees).

The idea isn't that auto insurance will disappear-- even if all vehicles are autonomous. It's that premiums will fall dramatically because the probability of an accident has fallen so much. But then payouts will fall dramatically as well. Ok, you have less float to play around with but it doesn't have to spell the end of the industry. Also, shipping and flying are largely automated (correct me if I'm wrong). What has been happening in the insurance sector over there?

I read an article about this a couple of months ago. Did some digging and found it back: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/business/even-cupid-wants-to-know-your-credit-score.html?_r=0 Only in America :P

Second date a day later? Picking up the pace, nice work! Some nice momentum there.

Is that true? It would seriously not surprise me if a decent number of people on the poor side of the equation would rather have a cellphone than some of the above .. Whether that is good or not is another question.

No Al, I am certainly not macro investing. Comparing prices with real earnings is not macro investing… even if you use a bunch of 2000 companies, instead of 10-15… It might be less precise, of course… but it is not macro investing. And at the end of Q2 2013, as you can see in attachment, US small caps were already priced to deliver negative returns on a 7-years time horizon… giofranchi Isn't that exactly what macro investing is? You look at the average of 2000 company valuations and you base your investment decisions on that, instead of looking for individual securities. On a sidenote, I've been thinking a bit about the following: lots of forum members don't 'do' macro investing. However, some of us do invest a lot of money with owner/operators who happen to have identical views on the economy as we have (including me). Gio, isn't one of the reasons you invest in Fairfax that you like their cautious view of the economy? So if Fairfax loses 8% of book value during a quarter because of their hedges and your portfolio loses value because of that , aren't you effectively macro-investing? Are we sometimes deluding ourselves about the reasons we invest in specific companies? I.e. a bullish forum member might invest in Berkshire, a bearish member in Fairfax and we both try to rationalize it by looking at completely different metrics afterwards.

I currently don't even have a television :) . Lended it to my parents, turns out I don't really miss it. Though thinking about installing a beamer for the occasional movie / sports event. Unfortunately I still have cable .. Most providers here (Netherlands) have a standard Triple Play package, I can hardly get internet without cable television.

I see a similar thing with my portfolio and agree with your sentiments but frankly it's just a huge distraction to look at the daily performance of your holdings (and especially the daily performance of the market). Just focus on the underlying value and your thesis. But yeah, that's sometimes easier said than done. Unfortunately (?) that's human nature. For some reason this reminds me of the 'What are you buying topic'. It always seems to me that when the market trends up nobody is posting there, but when the market is 10% up and there is one bad day there suddenly is a flurry of activity. We start hoarding stocks even though we would've been far better off buying them before the market was up 10%. Value investor instincts :)

Would you mind to share some info about the fund to be launched?

Yep awesome.

I also read 90% of everything from Rose George. Can recommend it. It makes you realize that there is this huge business going on which is essential for our society and we know absolutely nothing about it. It's like the wild west on the seas :) . It was a nice read, my only complaint being that it was a bit 'popular / shallow' and not really focused on the financial side of things. After that I bought (and just started reading) "The Box" from Marc Levinson, about the history of the container industry. So far it looks like it is a bit more in-depth but I only read a couple of pages, can't give a verdict yet. On a sidenote, I also enjoyed watching a couple of episodes of 'Mighty Ships' on Discovery Channel. You can find these on Youtube.

I think it was easy money only in hindsight. Most situations were hairy either way, long or short and by the time it was clear-cut what to do the stocks in question were already hard to borrow and valuations very low. Not to mention that the shortsellers were actually sued by some companies. Some of these funds might have bet the house and got lucky, but there was definitely some skill involved. I'll gladly consider myself "any idiot" but I didn't make any money there.

VWO?

If only it was that easy. I agree that this is probably a terrible strategy in the long run, but it can do pretty well in trending markets (and the other way around: you can get killed shorting both). Take the SSO (leveraged long S&P) and the SDS (leveraged short S&P) and put $10k in each anywhere the last 5 years; your short would be close to worthless but you can lose only $10k there and the other leg exploded in value. If you did this in 2009 you wouldn't do that bad ..

A friend of mine pointed me to this fantastic SF-reviewer a couple of weeks ago: http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/ . Looks like a good source for new reading material. The Harry Potter reviews are quite funny. Somehow this guy has a real problem with the series!

I'm sorry I offended you. ;)