LC

I like this thread...so many diverse methods of dealing with conflict :D BG, you've got to give us an update, this is pretty decent drama for a value investor board! I remember guys (and girls) smoking crack in the stairwells of my old brooklyn building. You never saw them, but crack is one of those things that you have no idea what it smells like, but you catch a whiff of it for the first time, and you immediately know EXACTLY what it is that you're smelling! Pretty wild. And now I'm getting nostalgia...to me, nothing screams the city like repeatedly slamming a hardcover copy of Ulysses against the shared wall at 6 AM, screaming "Shut the F#(* up!!!", because the cracked-out neighbor's grandmother (sober) is screaming at her 7 year old grandson to "be a man and get dressed!" So for a guy smoking a joint at midnight...I mean c'mon :D

Looking forward to it, thanks for sharing your excellent work!

What the problem? Just spark up next to him ;D

Just finished the first season of Hajime No Ippo, which is a Japanese manga/anime about amateur boxing. Not the deepest stuff ever but if you are into combat sports it's great for the gym. You can find the first season on youtube which makes it convenient to watch.

Reminds me of NBA players and shooting the ball. In practice some of these guys put away shots with 95+% accuracy, in game conditions this drops significantly. Occurs even for un-defended shots such as free throws. They are constantly devising methods to better transfer practice knowledge to game time situations, i.e. 'meaningful practice'.

That too. Back to the topic: anti-aging :D

LC, I believe you are referencing the cause of IVF. I don't have any back up for that stat. But it was something that an older successful female PE executive told me. She has an autistic child and told me that. I have no reason to not believe her. She mentioned that there is an active network of female PE executives who meet as a support group of a sort to talk about raising autistic children. In my late 30s, my parents' nagging of me and my siblings to get married and have children early doesn't seem so unreasonable. These are the contributing factors of autism, as well as a host of other potential problems: Any women here will know the dangers of pregnancy as they age. I doubt there's an exact age despite my previous post but the point is the older the worse :(

Old sperm (post 35), old eggs (post 30).

Solvay also makes some materials used for lithium batteries, but not sure how meaningful. Good luck!

You can use excel but have to manually enter monthly balances and cash inflows/outflow per account, then combine to calculate IRR. It’s a pain so I just do it for the largest accounts.

I would imagine so, similar to how stocks price ex-dividend. But, I could be completely wrong as I usually avoid spinoffs on the dates of trading. If there's trading specifically for shares without distribution rights usually there is a specific CUSIP and ticker as well, not sure if you have any mention of that.

I believe it is based on the date. The shares are the same, but before the record date is “regular way” trading and so the market prices will be 100% ie reflecting ownership rights to SpinCo shares. After the record date will be ex-distribution pricing which will be at a discount because it does not include rights to SpinCo shares.

BorgWarner perhaps? Doesn't seem too expensive, but tied pretty closely to the auto market.

https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Year-in-Review-2019 Bill Gates "year end letter".

Cronin's passage trilogy was great.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-decade/from-opioid-deaths-to-student-debt-a-view-of-the-2010s-economy-in-charts-idUSKBN1YZ0AS Interesting look at how the US has changed over the past decade.

23% in the main account...the other IRAs/401Ks etc. are all invested in SP500 index so that will lead the overall number towards the index return. I should probably just dump it all into an index :D

To truly answer the question, we can likely deduce the average value investor is not an Uber driver but rather a white collar worker who earns a reasonable amount more than the Uber/lyft driver. Therefor, the answer is Lexus and Acura’s. Toyota still hasn’t fixed the automatic acceleration problem, and even in 2019 there were cases when the driver pressed the brake and the car accelerated out of control. Toyota==Russian Rullette. Damn I was not aware. Good advice would be make sure to check the recalls for your VINs and even not the full recalls but also the service bulletins. Also check some car owner forums. My 2013 CRV hasn’t given any problems (knock on wood), bought it 3 years used with 20k miles. So there some anecdotal data if at all helpful. 2013 CRV is fine but don’t buy a new 2019 one. I heard their new engine has serious problems and the engine oil level increases as time passes by. However Honda is known for the poor quality of the transmission. They build their own tranny which uses a weird technology and a lot of Honda Odassy drivers say the tranny won’t last over 80k miles. Not sure if the CRV uses the same tranny. Alright, well you’re fuckin killing me here ;) No problems with the tranny (yet). Biggest problem is the actuator in cold weather. There’s a service bulletin out on it but based on my review the severity does not seem super high. Worst case it’s a 600$ fix. But I’ll look into the transmission- thx for the heads up. What do you drive Btw?

To truly answer the question, we can likely deduce the average value investor is not an Uber driver but rather a white collar worker who earns a reasonable amount more than the Uber/lyft driver. Therefor, the answer is Lexus and Acura’s. Toyota still hasn’t fixed the automatic acceleration problem, and even in 2019 there were cases when the driver pressed the brake and the car accelerated out of control. Toyota==Russian Rullette. Damn I was not aware. Good advice would be make sure to check the recalls for your VINs and even not the full recalls but also the service bulletins. Also check some car owner forums. My 2013 CRV hasn’t given any problems (knock on wood), bought it 3 years used with 20k miles. So there some anecdotal data if at all helpful.

Toyota or Honda. Look at what the Uber/lyft drivers use.

Not at all. If you find attractive 'lottery ticket' stocks or options and make some very basic assumptions about them the Kelly criterion will show you that you should keep your position sizes small, completely the opposite of what you are saying. The Kelly criterion also shows you that, in terms of position sizing, it is very important to look at downside protection if you are wrong, rather than solely looking at the upside if you are right. Something that a lot of investors tend to overlook. In general, I think the Kelly criterion can be a useful tool to challenge your own position sizing in certain scenarios. I think that that is a useful exercise every now and then, to avoid getting too attached to your own preconceived notions about sizing. The alternative is solely relying on gut feeling and experience. I should have been more clear: "Best" being defined as a scenario with (1) a higher probability of winning and (2) a higher payoff ratio. A lottery ticket has (2) but not (1). An investment with both of those characteristics (i.e. maximum expected value) should be the higher priority. It is very useful to break out investment opportunities into these 2 factors and do your best to think about them objectively. "What is the chance I am right or wrong here?" "If I am right, how much am I going to make?" In which case it’s really no more insightful than anecdotes like “buy low and sell high”. Giving greater weight to your highest conviction ideas is really just common sense. But it’s also again, subjective. Buffett, Icahn, and Tepper all have different top ideas. Some will do better than others. When all else fails, look at your results. Yes it is common sense and all Kelly did (really Bernoulli before him) was quantify it where you can explicitly define the odds. As you correctly mention it is subjective in other areas outside of a casino because in these areas we cannot discretely identify the odds. You can make assumptions to help (i.e. measure various historical volatilities to define both p and odds) but now you are transferring the subjectivity not to the odds themselves but how you are measuring the historical odds. This is what cherzeca alludes to above or more accurately is essentially a barrier option. Pricing barrier options is how the financial industry has attempted to re-define and price these scenarios using different probability distributions/density functions. Slightly more accurate but still subjective: E.g. if we are both taking a side on a 1-month vanilla and I am using historical monthly local vol and you are bootstrapping using weekly or daily or even hourly, well then we will be on different sides of the trade all else equal.

In the world of investing, all the Kelly criterion tells you is that to maximize your expected wealth, you should concentrate in your best ideas. That is the only lesson. In scenarios with finite solutions it can tell you how much you should concentrate, but these scenarios are rare outside of casinos and can be largely ignored for our case.

Not sure I would agree but perhaps a step down memory lane could be useful: https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2013/02/27/what-is-the-difference-between-investing-and-speculation-2/ I think I'd agree with the above. Occasionally the horse races may present a great opportunity but by-and-large the house is the winner.

Great decision buying AMD. It continues to surprise me how some (only a few) companies can re-invent themselves. My son (who is in grade 12) alerted me about 2 years ago to what was going on at AMD; he and his buddies are into technology and he explained to me that AMD was a company on the rise. Alas, i was too busy thumb sucking to do anything about it. I use it as an example with him to how small investors can do well if they do what Peter Lynch advises: take advantage of what you see in your circle of competence. I would argue you are not totally in the wrong here. AMD has over multiple times threatened to seriously compete with Intel in the chip space. 75% of the time they fall flat on their face. I think unless you are a chipset or cpu engineer and you have specific knowledge, or they are trading at silly valuations... then it's a bit of a crapshoot.

Merry Christmas everyone!