LC

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.

Can someone paraphrase what the thought experiment we are talking about?

Context and an anecdotal story: Mother's side (Italian) went thru Canada (7 year rest stop) to NYC. Father's side (also Italian) went straight to NYC. I wound up as a dual citizen and lived in Montreal for ~7 years (college and beyond). NYC, USA in general from what I've seen, is definitely more entrepreneurial. There is something about "making it for myself" in the USA. In Canada it was more "let's all enjoy this lovely country we have". Here's the anecdote about entrepreneurship: About four years ago I was browsing reddit and came across this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/ Here is the (dated) description: "This sub-reddit was created by u/LocalCaseStudy in early 2012 to show people how he launched his cleaning company, MaidsInBlack.com. Less than two years later, his company is now doing over $1 Million dollars per year and at least FIVE more companies that were founded from this subreddit are on pace to hit that in 2015 as well. You've stumbled across what is probably the most transparent case study you'll ever see for a local business." It followed the story of a dude who built a new app/website to book cleaning ladies (and gentlemen), and then started hiring out. Pretty much the story of how a guy built a small business from scratch, except he narrated the entire process online for people to watch. Everything from hiring, quality control, scheduling, insurance, payroll, website building, online advertising, customer service, etc. etc. It TOOK OFF. Everyone reading it thought, "well that doesn't seem TOO hard, I can probably do it too". And they did. At first it was pure clones, then it expanded to other home-services (gardening, etc.). Most were relatively successful, moreso depending on the hustle of the owner/operator. Then came the consolidation, the selling of ancillary services (automated advertising, website/app-in-a-box, automated customer service). Anyone in NYC and elsewhere may remember those "Handy" cleaning services ads on the subway. Well, this online forum is where it all started. Truly amazing if you think about it, the entire lifecycle of a business from start to finish, all documented. What really got me was how instantly, other people reading it immediately copied it, like within DAYS. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in the US, I think, more than anywhere else I have ever been.

Scott, what is your lifetime IRR?

I think it's a bad idea. I would rather keep it to a few threads in the general forum, or wherever it is relevant to a particular company. A dedicated forum will just make more of a mess of things IMHO.

I used to request hard copies of 10Ks, read through them, and write in a sharpie on the cover the price I thought the company would transact for at arms-length, and then compare that price to market price. My price was usually lower, which I guess means I was wrong or overly conservative. But even moreso, I realized how much information in the 10K was unneccessary, and how much good information is left out. Like, the 10K will describe all the product lines. But you know how you really get an idea of what someone sells? Think like a buyer, check out their product page online and prices, and compare it to others. If you were a buyer, why would u buy from these guys? The 10K doesnt tell you that, but it is a much more informative exercise than reading 100 pgs of financial disclosure notes. Valeant will say, "Jublia has a revolutionary product, with pricing power above competitors and best-in-class sales and distribution systems, and revenue is therefore growing X%". Then you go online and say "well F$*K this, they're just charging $500 for toe cream" Also, you can eliminate all the financial notes reading if you know management isn't sketchy. Your judge of character is 100x more important than financial disclosure details. For example, if you think the guys at Valeant are honest, then no amount of reading the financial disclosures will convince you otherwise, you will just find a justification for what they are doing. So these days I don't read the 10K, but I take a look at overall financials and breakdowns and do other digging to make sure I know (or think I know) how the company functions. At the end of the day you can usually distill the company into less than 10 pieces of information that are most important.

I remember something about being unable to dive into equities due to insurance restrictions.

Have these guys spoken about the rationale behind allocating their $10B? I never heard of them prior to their anointing, did anyone follow them when they ran their own funds?

Ted Weschler is one odd dude, lol. But good to see them getting their faces out there.

In the hobbyist CPU market, people literally track which factory and production run the chip was assembled in to determine quality. I wonder why people don't do this with cars. There must be a german factory somewhere still pumping out quality BMWs. Same with toyota, honda, jeep, etc. And the same with some factory from the same automaker which is assembling garbage.

We're all unlucky that we were born now, and not in 4000 AD when the secrets to cellular degeneration have been uncovered and reversed, and everyone lives forever in total comfort and splendor across the entire universe.

SD, just write your damn memoirs already, you've always got the craziest stories ;D As to luck vs skill....who cares? All we can do is try our best regardless.

DIS

Relatively, I think you can skew the odds in your favor...the key is to remove the current price (or current multiple) from the equation entirely. The only way to do that is to think on such a long-term horizon (decades) that price becomes more irrelevant. Which reminds me of that Ben Graham documentary quote (spinoza): "You must look at things in the aspect of eternity" And, maybe even more importantly, by doing so you can generalize a lot more and make arguments based on industry and economic dynamics rather than daily minutia. Take the SP500 constituents. Imagine they are all trading at the market multiple. Can someone make relative claims on the value/"moat" of one company vs. another? Which company has a better chance of being around in 20 years vs. another? I think so, maybe not conclusively but you can make a strong argument of one vs. the other.

Hey folks, Does anyone remember a report/article/whitepaper from a few years ago that tracked blue-chips from the 50s/60s? Essentially it looked at PG as one example, and the P/E multiple it was trading at in say 1950. Then it took the next 50 years of earnings/dividends/splits etc. and discounted it back to that same point in 1950, in order to figure out what P/E it *should* have been trading at. Essentially making the point that quality companies are undervalued over the very long term. I thought I saved it on my computer or google drive but I can't find it :( Hopefully one of u guys remembers or has it saved. Cheers LC

For every Chinese city which has grown exponentially out of poverty based on manufacturing and engineering, there are 30 cities which have done the same based on critical reviews of Shakespeare and the next great American novel. Nobody is saying these degrees are worthless, but hard sciences have higher average salaries with less variance. Who would you lend 150K to?