writser

I'm sorry I offended you. ;)

Nice, that looks a lot like my SF bookshelf. :) The Hyperion series was excellent, as are most other books by Dan Simmons. A fire upon the deep (Vernor Vinge) is one of my favourite SF novels. Iain M. Banks has written some excellent stuff as well (The Player of Games comes to mind). I've read Hobb too, also very good. In fact, I bought the Mad Ship trilogy a second time last month (for some reason I thought it was a new trilogy I hadn't read before. Any takers?). Thanks to this forum I started reading Guy Kavriel Kay. Also really, really good, will buy a couple more books from him. The George R.R. Martin books were also very nice, though I found the later books in the series not as good as the first ones. The one writer I am missing in your post is Peter F. Hamilton. The Night's Dawn trilogy was great. His latest book, Great North Road also very enjoyable. You might also like Alistair Reynolds. Regarding the classics: I occasionally try one. Currently I have lying around here: Don Quixote, Lolita, Atlas Shrugged and something from Kafka. But most of this stuff is so densely written that I tend to stop halfway (if not earlier). But maybe my picks are just unlucky.

I'd like to make a distinction between lazy smart people and industrious smart people instead. To be extremely succesful (at least in business, games) I think you need both.

Wouldn't surprise me if he ends up in jail.

Annually or startup fees?

They have probably 1000x more AUM than the average investor on this forum, hence the universe of stocks they can pick from is much smaller. If they don't see interesting opportunities that doesn't mean there are none for you.

@Kraven: wise words :) Lots of posts on this forum are being spent on macro-economics, interest rate forecasts, the sustainability of facebooks economic model, Apple vs. Microsoft, emerging market cooldowns, currency wars, etc. In the meantime, heroes like Packer and PlanMaestro (first two names that pop up) do the hard work and come up with some really good ideas, stocks that have doubled, tripled and quadrupled regardless of macro-economic forecasts. Salem Communications, Alliance Healthcare, Alaska Communications, Awilco Drilling, Air Transport Services, just to name a few. While everybody was discussing the next market crash, the money was right there for the taking ..

Still a decent amount of money for a college fraudster!

Visit the RIMM thread. Intrinsic value is a moving target, like an ocean wave... What is your point? If RIMM opens 30% lower you want to sell your long-term investment automatically?

It might be useful if you believe in some form of technical analysis / momentum trading (but in that case you should use a stop-limit instead of stop-loss order)

Regarding Camelia: very quick glance shows that they have a lot of cash but also a current liability of "amounts due to customers of banking subsidiary" for roughly the same amount. Haven't digged much further but I'm not sure that the cash on the balance sheet is actually "excess cash".

It is never safe to use stop loss orders anywhere .. As a smart trader / investor you should be happy with flash crashes because they are an opportunity to get filled at ridiculous prices. Unless you use stop loss orders, in which case you will join the fools and crazy algo's instead of profiting from them.

I have an Aeron. Sits great but it doesn't look as classy as the leather one.

@ Boilermaker & Gio: awesome stuff. Gio: the chairs look a bit uncomfortable. Shouldn't you invest a little bit in an awesome chair? I could be mistaken though :)

I agree. http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/26/us/new-york-nanny-deaths Useless fear mongering.

Congratulations. Nice track record!

As far as ETF's go, just buy the liquid stuff, physical replication, lowest fees. Most Vanguard products, SPY, etc. Dollar cost averaging into these is probably a strategy that beats the majority of retail investors. These funds have a expense ratio of 10 - 20 basis points, hard to beat. If you don't want to put any effort into investing I'd say that this is your best bet. The problem with most (actively managed) funds is that they charge big fees (like 10x the ETF fees) so you have to be pretty sure they will outperform. And how do you do that? Now, instead of selecting securities you have to judge the outperformance of portfolio managers. I'm no good at that. Also, you will probably do fine with a fund from Berkowitz or Chou, but why bother paying a management fee if you can just look up what holdings they have and buy them yourself?

No way. A Lannister always pays his debts.

Who cares about the market :) Always disappoints me to see a topic such as this one get more posts in a day than the entire Investment Ideas forum.

Looks like they removed a bunch of indices from their (free) website. This still seems to work: http://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXTR

Anybody here looking at KPN? Stock is getting slaughtered after the rights issue.

- A recent TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_mind_behind_tesla_spacex_solarcity.html . - Another cool interview in which is discussed how he crashed his uninsured mcLaren F1 and then hitched a ride to get to a meeting: . Is there much overlap in these talks? Guess there's only one way to find out. This guy is like the cool version of Warren Buffett.

I might misunderstand your phrasing, but the yen isn't really strengthening right? USDJPY went from 80 to 100 in a couple of months so the yen has actually depreciated 20% or something. The current Japan rally is a lot less impressive in USD terms. But I guess you ment exactly that.

http://image.bayimg.com/7fad3268e22cc8e67d58f4bcbc3f5859fd1b16ae.jpg Doesn't look like a store of value to me. More like a tulip mania. But I might be biased because I'm angry I never went all in :). The concept is very interesting though.

Parsad, did this guy ever mistreat you or your friends? Lots of criminals out there, but every time Stevie hits the news I see you opening a topic. It starts to look like a personal vendetta :) . Care to enlighten us?