LC

I am in the ~25% bucket. Picture this (mental exercise, not a prediction): Buffett and Munger gone. Existing Berkshire businesses and CEOs continue running their respective businesses as usual. All excess cash flows are dividended out. As these existing businesses CEOs retire, etc. they are all sold and proceeds dividended out. Essentially a slow portfolio runoff of the life work of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. What is Berk worth in that scenario?

Fiat Chrysler needed to go thru BK to rationalize their business. They’re doing Ok now.

Just stick to the top left (or bottom right depending on how you arrange it) corner and you'll be OK :) For bad biz - good mgmt examples, wasn't it the designer from Apple who went to JCPenny (or Macy's - I forget which) for like a week? Eddie and Sears come to mind.

My point is that it was a period of time where market pricing would have made things worse. Credit was incredibly tight. If the market had set rates, they would have risen or stayed at spiked levels: https://voxeu.org/article/credit-conditions-and-great-trade-collapse Interbank rates (here, the one-month rate) spiked in September 2008 in many economies, as banks became extremely averse to lending and the supply of financing tightened. There are nevertheless key differences in the severity and timing of the credit crunch. In countries such as Germany and Bulgaria, the interbank rate was on an upward trend until an abrupt reversal in November 2008. In contrast, these rates were declining from a much earlier date in Canada and Singapore, reflecting earlier interventions made by central bankers there to cope with the impending downturn. Our results suggest that the impact of credit conditions was sizeable. The decline in trade volumes would have been about twice as large in percentage terms had interbank rates instead remained at the high levels of September 2008 throughout the rest of our sample period. Central Banker's/Avocado's decision to cut rates has been universally acclaimed and is evidence of a Central Bank's positive contribution.

Mine are a bit sloppy to calculate as I liquidated to buy a house in Jan. Will try to calculate and post for completeness' sake Looks like I'm up somewhere between 5-7%. Pretty much sold everything late Jan and started reinvesting in Dec, so not really useful.

It's outside the feds circle of competence too. Interests rates, the time value of money, are a market phenomenon. You might as well have a government board set the daily price of Avocados. Can I ask your opinion on the Fed slashing interest rates in the 2009-2013 period. This was most certainly not a market phenomenon, as credit was drying up. The Fed's action essentially re-started the US economy and prevented a depression. Beautiful deleveraging and all that. Do you think they were wrong, or lucky, or something else?

That's true and on retrospect my comment was a bit harsh. I don't think the mental latticework whatnot is useless - it certainly is not. Combining disciplines can and has produced novel ideas and inventions. But - I think if we are going to look to examples of that for emulation, we should pick from successful ones that truly embody the principle. Elon Musk for example build a payment processor and now look what he is doing. Or Bill Gates who built one of the greatest companies and now charitable funds. CM, while certainly a great guy and teacher, did not (as far as I know) take his investment billions and develop some incredible technology elsewhere. And to be fair, he is an incredible investor and in my opinion that is enough in itself to deserve acclaim - but to characterize him as some polymath investor-philosopher...this is stretching the hero worship a little too far for my taste. Of course I still asked him to sign a copy of his book for me! ;D

Munger has some antiquated opinions and this is one of them. Important to realize just because these two are investing geniuses, does not mean that extends to other aspects of life. Which is to be expected considering stories of WB’s fixated personality. And to Munger being a generalist - in the best sense you can say he is, but only as it applies to investing. In the worse sense, well it is just not true. Finally and this last bit is just my opinion, but I think the whole “ mental models / latticework” is a crock of baloney. And you can look at the examples CM used to illustrate as proof - they are all primative. More good has been done by people specializing and becoming an expert in a certain field than by amateurs jumping around trying to form a “latticework”. Frankly IMHO it’s an arrogant statement of his, probably stemming from the same place his comments on Chinese superiority come from.

I disagree a bit with the above posters. Take a college level accounting textbook and you're 90% of the way there. The other 10% you learn looking at specific companies and trying to figure out their P&L. I certainly don't think accounting is a lifelong process and I don't think management accounting was worth much of anything. But that's my two very zinc filled cents.

Ideal yes but difficult to establish that position. In my position probably education/consulting is the lowest barrier-to-entry option. Difficult to gain access to royalties without developing the specific implementation - and difficult to do that without structuring an incubator as you say. Well, Cheers and happy hunting ;D

I agree. The technology exists, eventually it will be adopted where applicable. The question is how best to position yourself to profit.

Exactly. Goes beyond voting as well - although I do think it will be useful in that area. Can be useful in the tax field, tracking shell corps, and trying to draw a clearer line between tax evasion vs tax reduction.

Thanks SD. I also did some further reading and it seems promising. There is some work being done at Carnegie-Mellon on this specifically. There are some items which are still drawbacks, one being you still need an "in-person" location to hand out and verify keys. Second, it is not "unhackable" but it is very difficult. Also I think one of the Carolinas used some form of blockchain voting in a primary election this year. I think it's the way forward...hopefully could provide some lift to voter turnout, increased accountability and traceability.

To all the experts here - question for you. So for anyone who has mistakenly clicked into the Politics section and read a few incoherent threads there, one topic that comes up is voter fraud and voting turnout. I would think the that in a perfect world, everyone could vote online, everyone would have some identity token, etc. Obviously In reality this is open to all kinds of fraud and hacking vulnerability. My question is, could some distribute ledger technology be employed to solve this problem?

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays to the COBF family...and to everyone's real family too :D

I don't think you have to be an expert here. To use the WB quote about being approximately correct: From a birds eye view the economy has been doing great under a low interest environment for what, 7 years? Therefore, time to start raising rates. That's my "approximately correct", 1000 ft view. Regarding the minutiae as to "well they should've done XYZ 6 months ago or whatnot", well just seems like noise...trying to figure out if the guy on the scale is 200 lbs or 205 lbs.

Yes and this is reflected in a one-time change in NPV.

It was just an example. The question is really, how many intangible-driven companies can a society manage without owing hard-asset driven businesses. Will we all be Facebook employees, importing our cars, clothes, and food from Mexico? Has the balance permanently shifted towards the FAANGs of the world, or is this temporary? As the initial question asks, "what will drive both the economy and the market forward over the next generation."?

What’s happening now is a debate about what the drivers of value are—of what constitutes value in the 21st-century economy—and what will drive both the economy and the market forward over the next generation. This is the key questions. IMHO there are only so many intangible asset driven companies that society can handle. By that I mean, there can't be 100 Netflix clones, and nobody to produce TV shows and movies.

Three construction workers: an italian guy, a chinese guy, and an irish guy are sitting up on one of the beams of the empire state building during its construction, thousands of feet above the street below, having their lunch. The italian guy opens his lunchbox. "Ah spaghetti and meatballs again! If my wife cooks this one more time, I'm jumping off this damn beam!!" The chinese guy opens his: "Lo mein again!! Dammit, if my wife cooks me this one more time, I'm jumping off too!" The irish guy does the same, sure enough: "corned beef again! Dammit if my wife cooks me this again, I'm jumping with you guys!" The next day, sure enough: spaghetti and meatballs - off goes the italian. Lo mein - off goes the chinese guy. And shortly followed by the irishman and his corned beef sandwich. A few days later at the funerals, the three wives are grieving together. "Oh my god", says the italian's wife. "I knew I shouldn't have cooked him spaghetti and meatballs again." "It was all my fault", says the chinese guy's wife, "If only I hadn't cooked him lo mein!" Finally the irish guy's wife: "I don't get it... he makes his own lunch!"

A Buddhist goes up to a hot dog stand and says, "Make me one with everything" He gives the guy $10 bucks and gets a massive hot dog back. "What about my change?" The hot dog guy replies, "Change comes from within"

Very interesting, thank you

MC is most useful for convergence testing for derivative pricing models. Little to no use in 'value investing'

Bitcoin has been in the public eye for 3? 4? years now and has relatively no breakthrough public product to justify all the time and energy spent. Where is the value?

Ditto on learning to code it yourself in python or R