LC

Agreed. Same situation - mortgage, car payment, refi'd student loans, and any other loan i can get below 4%. We have the entire world to invest in, and the hurdle is 4%.

Bought Compass Minerals and a weee bit of Ethereum

LOL savage...do you still work in the models space? That's where I am.

Compare the cost of the mortgage with the cost of (IB loan + put to protect from margin call).

my favorite was the piece on whether to hold cash or not.

One criticism is the paper takes a "worst-case" perspective: we will live longer lives with lower expected returns. In that world, wouldn't inflation also be lower? Technology will continue to advance, making it cheaper to simply live. Better medical care. Take a look at retirees now vs. 40 years ago, when rates were higher. Who has the better standard of living?

Most sketchy story/product/person/deal you worked with? :D

Yeah, but how valuable can that real estate be if it's next to a latex factory? You guys are forgetting the hidden cash cow - bottle collection and transport to Michigan for that 10cent recycling windfall. $$$

Ok thanks - just read thru this thread....very interesting stuff....more for me to read... :D

So (correct me if am wrong) the technology is a distributed ledger? To simplify, it's pretty much bittorrent for transactions (or even more generally, any records in general)? The value is that, if party A makes a transaction with party B, and then both party A and B sends a signed receipt to everyone else in the world...well nobody can come by later and say "well no, party A still has not transacted with party B". I can see how this adds another level of security, for sure. So my thoughts are, the technology and the coin aspect are two distinct things. The technology is just a record keeping platform, which is stronger the more people use it. You can't generate profit from it, correct? The coin aspect is only as valuable as people make it. So, the more people who transfer their wealth into bitcoins, the more valuable bitcoins are. Until of course, the last marginal person converts their dollars into bitcoin. So to value the coin aspect, you have to have an understanding on how and why people will move their wealth into bitcoins. What drives this behavior? Is it security (i.e. people fearing the bank holding their money)? Is it ease-of-use (i.e. a completely digital society where everything is bought/paid for digitally?). Some other reason? Curious to your two cents on these thoughts, particularly the last one...

That's fair...I presume you say that because bitcoin is a better technology overall. I still don't quite get what real world applications these things have. All I see are digital currency (is it that hard to send money via Venmo?) and "smart-contracts". Not sure how much $ there is in smart contracts. Or what a smart contract even is. I'm getting old I guess.

I wouldn't say I invested in Ethereum, so I am not the person to answer that question. But my reason for throwing money at it are as follows: My buddy turned 10K into 300K with bitcoin over the last 4 years or so. I have no clue about the technology, the winners/losers, the this, the that...this is purely speculative and either I'll lose it all or it will balloon to something. Tiny % of my portfolio, it's like gambling to me: figure out how much money I am OK with setting on fire, and go from there.

I bought a tiny bit of etherium today

Withdraw some capital & buy a house mortgage free ;) The portfolio will have some margin, you have incentive to use your CF to wipe it out asap, and you get paid while you're waiting (no interest on the margin you've paid off). The 'Itch' now becomes an asset. SD Did that last year...very good point on paying it off early. Reduction of interest/mtg insurance + appreciation can be thought of as a nice dividend. Cheers :)

The trouble for me right now is this: I bought a basket of (what I think are) blue chip companies with decent relative dividends (they're in my signature if you care). Prices on most of them (except Nike) have gone up quite a bit (15-20+%) At the same time, I constantly have money coming into my brokerage accounts (ramping up savings). So here I am thinking three things: -What the hell do I purchase? It's tough to keep adding to these companies when the prices have gone up relative to where I purchased them (anchoring bias) -Instead of adding to these companies, should I be selling instead? Again the anchoring bias. -For the one company that would be seemingly easy to buy more of (Nike - since it has decreased), instead, I am thinking "well the market must know something I don't since the price has gone down"

Thanks - I tried looking thru ur twitter for it but there are so many tweets...it was entertaining at least. Funny seeing COBF screenshots being on twitter :D

Higher educated jobs are also at risk. Finance, engineering, medicine...I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years many of these jobs are run by computer programs.

"I would tell people,'Lester is the man that made me rich,' " Leprino says. Notably, though, Leprino never gave Kielsmeier any equity. While Leprino got rich, Kielsmeier — who came to work every day right until his death at 95 in 2012--would have to content himself with being very well paid. The moral of the story is finding someone who can revolutionize an industry who will let you leverage their work for relative peanuts.

my interpretation of SD speak is: the permitted short is the amount the whistleblower (and the guy he's calling bullshit on) makes. the whistleblower walks means he leaves the company. shit happens in other context too. here's a story: Founders A,B,C all with their hands in the till. Feds find out, Founder C is the unwitting fall guy. Feds rake him for everything. Pre-SOX so he's spending a little bit of time making friends at camp. Few months later the Feds approach him: want to get back at A & B? "Come back in a week" C has to go talk to the crew. Whistleblower laws are different in different contexts. He explains the situation, the crew gives him the OK. A & B get raked too. The civilized route is to play nice from the start so everyone gets their fair due/

Invest in RBC? No, but I think overall my reliance on company filings to determine investment merit is decreasing, and my reliance on other pieces of information is increasing.

Thanks nate and uccmal - you guys fleshed out the idea I had, in ways I could not. I think your posts are two sides of the same coin: The financials can 100% be red herrings. The financials can look great, or terrible, but the things uccmal mentioned are the REAL drivers of the investment success/failure. If the filings for RBC are sub-par compared to another (less protected) bank somewhere else, you may be tempted to drop RBC. But if you start by ignoring the financials and look at the business environment, then you can realize well maybe I am not getting the juiced up returns of the bank of greece for a few years, but RBC is still a superior investment because I am going to be raking in an increased cashfow for decades.

Here's a thought experiment: Imagine having to find an investment without using any company filings. How would you do it? Where would you look first? How accurate do you think you would be, versus if you had used all company filings. Sometimes I think having all these filings at our fingertips makes us lazy and therefore ignore non-company sources of information that may be more important or insightful.

I like the part about the moving goalposts...when the goalposts move, you've got two options really, continue grinding to match the new goalpost, or change your perspective.

Thanks for the recommendation on the audio version, this is one of my top 5 investment books. I'll give Mosely's narration a try

I think you might need to get over yourself...people care about themselves (and their portfolio) way more than personalities on an internet message board :) Otherwise, pharma is not really my wheelhouse. I don't quite understand all the industry dynamics...but I think there is value in the distributors (CVS, Walgreens, etc.) that is easier to understand than the insurance side. The insurance part is so damn complicated. There must be value there, just because it is such a huge part of the entire "value chain", but I don't quite know how to identify it. I'd definitely be interested in learning more, though. Don't really know where to start.