LC

You have my vote. Now, I am not on the Nobel committee, so my vote doesn't count. Alas! you say, hopes have been dashed. But not so soon! You see, all those on the committee do, in fact, vote. And as we have already established that I too vote, it can be shown that I am therefore on the committee. So, congratulations.

Given the price action today I would guess he is continuing to purchase.

Investment Ideas threads having a direct link to rocketfinance 10 year financials... I'd click on that all day. Save me the trouble of having to type, make some money for Sanjeev & the RF folks...win/win/win?

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31604-4/fulltext

As the quoted section states, this is really a process vs. outcome question. Or put into COBF terms, investment (repeatable process) vs. speculation (outcome guessing). So, build a good process. Determine the inputs and estimate their value contribution. No practitioner is perfect, so leave room for mistakes. No process is comprehensive, so leave room for luck.

This has happened to me previously. Needed to call the broker and have them adjust my buying power as their programs are stupid and don't realize that spreads and other covered positions have limited exposure.

Lack of compelling investment alternatives, I would say is the largest factor.

WFC and V. Getting to a self-imposed limit on WFC (currently 3.75%; would go up to 4%), so maybe one more opportunity to average down and then we let it ride.

Two jokes from the pearly gates:

:-X What do you think would've happened without pardon power/AG saying can't be indicted by Mueller/not testifying/not allowing most witnesses/not providing financial information/not following subpoenas/no senate that doesn't do its job in trial/clearly telling his cronies they'll get pardoned if they don't cooperate with law enforcement? I accidentally posted in the wrong thread! My mistake!

:-X

One rule of RE in DC is: You need metro access.

I rarely listen to podcasts but will do so only if there is a good guest. And if the host is not good, I fast forward anytime the host speaks.

Bought some V

Kind of. Mortar fire is incredibly indirect. You are not looking to hit your target, you are looking to move your target to be where your shell lands. You shoot ahead to stop their forward escape, you do the same behind - now you have moved the enemy to a known location. Then, kaplow. This is why the old adage was to hide where mortar shells have already landed.

A way to scale images would be useful. I always end up with huge images hosted somewhere else that I wish I could resize quickly, and I don't always have the time to resize locally and re-upload somewhere else. You can do it manually per below: {img}url{/img} {img width=XXX}url{/img}

Yes, if I highlight a sentence and click "quote", the text box should only have the highlighted sentence featured as the quote. Another one is auto-scaling of images (prevents posting an image and having it blow up the viewing screen).

Not a fan of SD’s take but I think some way for the community to provide feedback to each other is valuable. Perhaps simply an upvote button, but no downvote? And unlike Reddit where comments are re-arranged based on votes, perhaps we can maintain the timeline of posts (ie no rearranging). But at least this way you can go into a topic and see what the community thinks the “best” posts on that topic are. And you can make it searchable.

Congrats on the new development! Some comments -Removal of politics is for the best :D And I say this as someone who believes silence is best left "for the dead", but it is distracting here - I can see that point. -Some items to consider would be "saving" posts/threads; upvoting/downvoting comments a la reddit -I would urge you to reconsider how much segregation between members vs. subscribers. Usually the more you fragment a community, the worse it gets. -I know you have tried some of these subscriber items before (events, job postings) with I presume little success (maybe I am wrong here). I do not think having members pay more to access those items will improve their success rate. I would suggest reconsidering how these items are delivered to forum viewers. -One more point: there have been a few threads about the decline in COBF quality. One event which is left out of these threads is the reduction in your (Sanjeev) direct forum participation - naturally due to your duties and legal limitations. In my opinion, you were the best, "natural" moderator of behavior. This site needs a behavioral role model, which you previously were. Just something to think on! Good luck with the UAT and new launch!

How do you think about the threat from competitors like Fastly? Akamai is industry leader particularly for large multinationals, governments, etc. I liken this business to security services, and prefer Akamai for a few reasons: 1) They are the oldest CDN and have the largest customers - for these customers, Akamai's price is a drop in the bucket so to speak. Cloudflare and other smaller players cater to small/med size customers for whom these prices are a higher % of their total costs. 2) This is a business where the longer you are ingrained, the less likely you are to switch. Particularly for the larger clients who have more to lose. It is the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". 3) Akamai has never had an outage, has I believe the most servers worldwide, and is consistently a top performer: https://www.cdnperf.com/ If you google things like "akamai vs. cloudflare, fastly vs. cloudflare, akamai vs. fastly, etc." you will find a lot of good discussion from techies (once u sort past the marketing websites)

I dont have anything sophisticated. Its a great, irreplaceable business, definition of moaty, that Ive always looked at but put off buying. Its recession proof, and has a solid balance sheet. Seems to be managed well. Its a very unsexy stock, but one I have a hard time consistently looking at and thinking I know better than to not own it. I take your comment as you no longer own it? What are your thoughts? Agree on all your points - addition of relatively slow growth (at least in terms of pricing - in the very long term, volume I think it will never stop growing as we are a trash-producing species) . Bill Larson's 13F is what got me interested at first, years ago. I sold it back in Mar/Apr (around $92/sh IIRC) on relative valuation, was buying other stocks (as I'm sure you were too) which dropped in price more significantly and had/have higher growth prospects. I agree it does look interesting now that the market has run up again, and WM price has not recovered (as much). Thanks for the reminder & sharing.

I owned WM for a while - Greg, can you share your short thesis?

Sold 75% of Cloudflare and reallocated this into Akamai.

Bingo. I joined this board in 2012/13 when the financial system had recovered; yet market prices were still under 2007 highs. What a great time for investment discussion! Systematic risk had largely been removed but prices were still depressed. Over the following 6-7 years, we have seen prices rise, and even outpace earnings. Market price was driven less and less by individual company earnings and more by macro policies. Therefore (to me) it is no surprise that the conversation has shifted to those macro factors (including politics, which impacts these policies). Additionally there is some nostalgia you may be experiencing. When I went back and read some posts from 2012-2014, the quality was not as good as "I remembered". Usually we just remember the good stuff, and ignore the mediocre.

His fear is USD losing its reserve status, he says we are pushing that status to its limits. And he says there are 3 factors: -Monetary policy cycle -Wealth gap cycle -China (he says factors underlying this competitive dynamic are things like national education and a fragmented populace) One proxy you can use to evaluate some aspects Dalio mentions is your assessment of how attractive a country is to the marginal and geographically neutral immigrant. Is US the #1 destination for this hypothetical immigrant?