boilermaker75

I would respectfully disagree. Could you expand on exactly what you are disagreeing with and why?

I loved that book, especially that passage.

earnings out, http://finance.yahoo.com/news/national-oilwell-varco-announces-first-110000364.html

Richard, Yes the downside of selling naked puts to enter a position you want to hold is not getting assigned and missing the upside. Maybe I have just been lucky, but that really only happened to me once with MCD where I was trying to get it around 50. There are some that never got to my entry price and took off. But I walked away with some put premiums and would have had nothing waiting for my entry price. Boiler

No matter what the price of the option, it is not unprofitable if the position you are assigned is trading below intrinsic value. Then it is no different than buying the stock. I write many option contracts each month. For April I wrote 164 contracts that I held to expiration. Often all the contracts I write for a given month expire. April I was assigned a relatively high percentage, 48 total contracts. These were 16 BBT at 30, 10 NOV at 67.50, 19 BAC at 12, 1 AAPL at 410, and 2 AAPL at 425. I have written covered calls on some of these, the equivalent of writing a naked put. But I have a high-confidence level that holding all these positions would be profitable. So even if I made only a penny a contract, I would still be profitable because I used a value investing mindset to determine the stocks I wrote put options. Of course I do pay attention to the amount I am getting for the put option; my cost basis for the stock is lower by the amount of the premium.

My daughter was flying to NYC for business two days after the Boston marathon bombing. When I got home the evening of the bombing, my wife was worried that my daughter shouldn't go. I told her not to worry that this is the safest time for our daughter to go to NYC because of the heightened awareness.

I always buy before the bottom and need to watch it drop like a rock, then I always sell too soon and need to watch the price of what I no longer own skyrocket. If that was really the secret, I should be a billionaire by now. I think that is what Rothschild was alluding to, that there is more to it because you can rarely, if ever, buy at the bottom, nor sell at the top. The first step is accepting that.

Baron Rothschild when asked how he makes so much money: "I have found an easy way and I stick to it. I simply cannot help making money. I will tell you my secret if you wish. It is this: I never buy at the bottom and I always sell too soon.

Speaking of income tax, Wesley Snipes was just released from prison, http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/wesley-snipes-released-prison-153022942--abc-news-celebrities.html

If you do decide to spend anything in CA, you then have the 9% sales tax. Edit: When I was a kid in IN, there was no sales tax. I remember when it started, at 2%. It is now 7%. They'll probably add a federal sales tax. Start off at something they can push through, 1%, and within a couple of decades it'll be in double digits.

I'm on my 3rd and I'm confident that I'll finish this one since it has my attention and I find it really interesting (Dan Ariely's A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior). It has real life, relatable examples and he's engaging. I've given up twice on Model Thinking since it just doesn't live up to what I had thought it was. I just see a bunch of useless data that neatly fits into a model that they create around it. The problem is more my own since I relate models to Munger rather than University math course. Augustabound, I assume you have a traditional college education? Just curious because these MOOC's are being touted as the salvation of America's crappy education system, and from everything I've read our undereducated don't have the motivation or discipline to complete these courses without some kind of institutional support. Shows great personal dedication to want to improve ones' self. I teach in a top-ten engineering school at a land-grant university. Although we have a wide spectrum in the population of our undergraduate engineering students, they were all near the top of their high-school classes. So you would expect this population to consist of motivated and disciplined individuals compared to the average college student. For about half of them, they still need a forced discipline and motivation. I have a policy where class attendance results in extra credit opportunities. This results in a class attendance of about 90%. If I did not do this, the attendance would be around 50% by the middle of the semester. I doubt those not showing up for class would have the discipline to watch these MOOC's.

Why limit it to retirement accounts? How about net worth over $3 milliion? Look at how much Buffett is cheating the federal government by not being taxed on all those long-term capital gains he has in his BRK stock.

Next step will be to confiscate all retirement accounts and dole out to us what we need each month.

LOL, good one! Always looking for those 50 cent dollars.

Someone is selling T-shirts for the annual meeting at Ebay http://www.ebay.com/itm/Berkshire-Hathaway-Annual-Meeting-Custom-T-Shirt-/190820587295?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&var=&hash=item2c6dcb171f

Some interesting data on completion rates of MOOCs http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html

The book is not available at AMZN, but googling it I found a pdf available, http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/analyzing_and_investing_in_community_bank_stocks.pdf

Boilermaker, What browser on the iPad do you use for viewing these? Thanks, Kiltacular Kiltacular, The name of the browser is "Puffin." It doesn't always work, but works with most web sites. It works with these youtube videos while Safari does not. You can try Puffin for free for a few days so that you can view these videos. Boiler Edit: Here is a link to the web site for this mobile browser, http://www.puffinbrowser.com/index.php

There is some issue with viewing YouTube videos with Safari on an iPad. It doesn't work for me either. But it does work on my iPad with another browser I have just for this reason, Puffin.

I have a concern of this concept of having one great teacher whose lectures are on line and everyone in the world goes to for a particular course. I think it would lead to stagnation. I think on-line material is a great complement to have for a standard university course and something I utilize. It is also great for someone who cannot go to a university. But I don’t envision it as a replacement for brick-and-mortar universities. It is a poor substitute. I have been teaching semiconductor devices and electromagnetic fields for 25 years. I have gotten pretty good at it. I have won the outstanding undergraduate teaching award at my university of 40,000 students. I find that I am still getting better every semester. I still am finding new ways of presenting material, which I believe is better than what is out there. I am still learning every semester I teach a subject, which I wouldn’t have if I was relying for on-line lectures for my students. I believe my students are benefitting. Even with a class size of about 60 students, I see a definite difference in my students from semester-to-semester. So every semester I do some things differently to accommodate, which would not happen with a stagnant on-line presentation. I see these massive on-line courses as just another form of textbook. There is a real problem with textbooks. Every year there are new books published for teaching semiconductor devices and electromagnetic fields at the college level. But they are essentially all the same. They use the same blueprint, repeat the same errors, repeat the same general presentation, etc. There is no reason to publish these new books other than push the other books out and make students buy new books. This is also the same principle behind coming out with new editions where it is often difficult to find the differences between editions. You would think they would change all the homework problems after each chapter in a new edition, but sometimes this doesn’t even happen. If I were ever to write a semiconductor device text, or an electromagnetic fields text, it would look very different than the texts out there. This is all-based on my cumulative experience from teaching the same subjects for 25 years, which again I would not have if students were going to on-line lectures instead. Again I think having lectures on line is great idea, but not as a replacement or sole means of learning. Attention spans are only on the order of 5-10 minutes, especially viewing materials on line other than passive entertainment. So on-line materials need to be on the order of a youtube video in length. They can also augment live class experience by being more than just lectures--demonstrations, animations, short discussions of particular topics, etc. Here is an example of what I mean for undergraduate electromagnetics, http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5ZsENSXOVzI0zHt4i2bZFw?feature=mhee

I had a different experience; my remote students did much poorer than the on-campus students. But this was a graduate semiconductor course, so maybe the topic and student population made a difference. I have done this about ten times. The first time was in 1986. Yes before the internet. We had several industrial sites and our regional campuses that we sent a microwave TV signal to. They also had phone connections so that they could interrupt me with questions, which they rarely did. Edit: I always assumed the remote students did poorer because most of them had full time jobs and families in additional to taking a difficult graduate course.

What do you think the price of your home is to the gross rental you could get? I've heard the rule of thumb is to buy at 10 and sell at 20.

As Charles Ellis has pointed out, investing is a "loser's" game. His analogy it to tennis. The one who wins the tennis match is not the one who hits the most winning shots, but the one who hits the fewest losing shots.

Bill Miller had $200 million of Bear Sterns. He gave a short talk the morning of March 14, 2008 explaining why Bear Sterns was a good investment. As he was talking Bear Sterns was crashing. LOL! Yeah, I remember that. Alot of things were crashing, while alot of people were talking in 2008, though. He's long Groupon, so let's see if that was a canary in the coal mine in a year or two. Cheers! Yes a lot of people were talking the line Bill Miller was. Just a few weren't. Steve Eisman spoke right after Miller. The title of his talk was "This Time is Different" and he talked about the greatest deleveraging in history was about to happen. Eisman made a lot of money the next few days.

Bill Miller had $200 million of Bear Sterns. He gave a short talk the morning of March 14, 2008 explaining why Bear Sterns was a good investment. As he was talking Bear Sterns was crashing.