matts
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Posts posted by matts
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I admittedly know little (nothing?) about blockchain technology. Was a tongue-in-cheek comment ;)
I was referring to the blind faith in the government and the indirect condemnation of those exposed in the paradise papers (who are not criminals while those releasing the papers are).
What are you talking about? A tax resident of the US or Spain for example, not declaring their income that they hid offshore is against the law in that country, hence by definition said person would be a criminal. I know that does not apply to ALL named in the Panama Papers, but would apply to some (many?).
Based on your attitude towards the government and taxes, the IRS should be auditing you every single year :P something tells me they would find some interesting discrepancies.
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finally
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I think your idea is really interesting Cardboard. I don't think I have ever heard a proposal for China to annex NK, although I'm sure it's not entirely new. My view is that over the next decade or two, China will become a global power comparable to the old Soviet union. They will consider most of Asia under their purview. It's likely that 20 years from now, China controls NK anyway. So they might as well start acting like it now and prevent a potential nuclear incident.
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I'm going to sound like a real jerk here, but oh well. Personally, I thought the book was crap. It was a total rip off of 'thinking, fast and slow.' Some citations were verbatim from Kahnemann's studies. Lewis' book certainly is easy but lacks the depth. Was previously a M Lewis fan. Lost faith.
Nah, you're on point. I would also add that this book was very dry. Not nearly as readable as his other stuff. It's like he didn't bother to make sure the stories were engaging before putting them in the book.
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My vote would also be for a separate board.
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Imagine if the ratings showed that almost no one watched the debates and imagine if on election day less than a million people showed up to vote. How could these idiots even pretend that they have some kind of mandate to rule?
Do you really believe that? Politicians would love that scenario as they could better concentrate their resources on only that million. And then they would care even less about what is best for the majority of the country.
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Did I say that I was in favour of the various tax breaks that exist?
No! That is another form of punishing one to helping another and have some middle man somewhere to manage that and take a cut.
When oil & gas got expensive that is when you started to see all kinds of energy related ideas emerge. Am I opposed to that? No!
This is not government intervention. That is human ingenuity at work to solve problems. Is it government that made Einstein a genius, Tesla to develop AC motors, Bell to develop the phone, Galileo to look at the sky?
And who am I to try to convince a bunch of socialists of the benefits of freedom when a man like Buffett himself can understand the concept of frictional cost in money management but, cannot understand that same concept magnified by 100 times in government via corruption and mismanagement? Unless he does and appreciate the benefits of being plugged in?
Cardboard
Yes, because we are all socialists on this board. Value investors are well know for their communist tendencies of course.
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If I was Yellen, I would immediately contact my Chinese, ECB and Japanese counterparts and mount an operation to prop up the price of oil or at least remove the short punch bowl from Goldman Sachs and some others. I would also call Obama and ask him wtf he is up to with the Saudis.
This never ending decline in the price of oil is very negative for many reasons:
1- Can`t normalize interest rates. With zero inflation or no fear of it, it is very hard to increase interest rates to a more normal level. With the oil price being so weak, everyone fears that something is wrong and we are at 5.0% unemployment!!!
2- This low oil price is going to make S&P earnings negative for the first time since 2008. The implications cannot be clearer: when S&P earnings go down, the S&P has a really hard time staying up which is at some point bad for the economy: wealth effect, fear, etc.
3- The longer this continues, the more bankruptcies there will be related to the oil patch. A junk bond panic is not a desirable outcome IMO. While I favour market forces to sort out what is viable and what is not, a 2008 style crisis and the risk of contagion to other markets is not good for anyone.
4- Despite strong consumption, with oil being this low you cannot but, wonder if China is about to enter some kind of calamity. If oil was to only go back to $40, a lot of fear would be removed from the Chinese stock market giving them time for their own wealth effect to workout and help their transition away from an entirely export driven economy.
5- $40 or $50 oil won`t bring any new supply. You may get some uncompleted wells being put on stream but, there will be no gold rush whatsoever and with what has been cancelled already in the $100`s of billions and decline rates, supply should still come down.
As you may guess, I have a vested interest in oil going higher from here. At the same time, I have a vested interest in this World not self destructing itself because of some greedy short idiots or some other conspiration going on (bankrupting Russia?). Moreover, the creation of a massive supply crunch 2 years down the road is going to really hurt the global economy.
We are starting to see the unintended consequences of a collapsing oil price. I think that stability is required here and that $60 oil is a desirable outcome: no supply crunch, no depression.
Cardboard
I mean no offence, but this just seems like a bitter rant from someone who has been wrong on oil and has lost a lot of money doing so (I could be wrong, but am I?). Central banks should come together to "prop up" oil? Really?
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One of the opportunity costs of not doing what Adam is contemplating [ i.e. by investing in a low cost index fund, as the alternative to Adams proposal] is that you never learn to invest, thereby not learning a lot, most of all about yourself by taking on some risks, and by the personal process of developing your own investment style over time.
[ In the topic on this board "Ask Kraven AHA!" Kraven talks a lot about this].
Well, in my opinion, if one really wants to learn to invest - one can't say I am going to pick some stocks and then forget about them for the next 10 years. He explicitly said the following: "Do you think these companies are worthy of holding for a decade or two? I don't want to switch/monitor them all the time." Unfortunately, buy and hold does not mean buy and forget. If you really want to buy and forget, then a low cost index fund is a reasonably good choice that is as good as (or better than) anything else.
If I want to learn to invest, then that's a separate thread. I would not start by trying to pick winners I can hold for a decade and be unwilling to monitor them. Isn't it?
+1
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I agree that closed end funds can be problematic. But that not always the case. For example, Templeton Emerging Market Income (TEI), which I own, trades at a 16% discount, yields almost 8%, uses little to no leverage and has a modest expense profile - slightly more than 1%. Generally speaking you guys are correct, but you're painting with a broad brush.
Thanks
Mark
I strongly recommend you read Stahl's latest paper.
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I just wanted to add that I emailed Darren Gee a couple straight-forward questions about his capital allocation policies on August 20th and still have not heard back. I know he's busy and there are other factors that affect his ability to communicate, but I'm still disappointed he did not reply to a shareholder's simple question (nothing that would even come close to REG FD).
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Interactive brokers has a prime broker platform.
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I would look into Tricon Capital (TCN.TO). Traded in Canada but almost all of its business is US residential real estate. They bought single family houses for renting, master planned communities, empty lots, and they also have a management business, running 3rd party capital in the above strategies.
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This is my favourite part...
8) (I'm serious here) What was your investment rationale for buying COS?
-Buy low sell high.
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Other than that, of course they make mistakes.
Yeah, but you don't expect them to keep making the same mistake year after year. This is why I think it is bad capital allocation decision as opposed to an honest one off mistake made by management.
Exactly. The dividend isn't a one time decision. It's ongoing sub-optimal capital allocation that has never been explained. We need to stop treating poor allocation as a single mistake in the way that me spilling coffee on you is a mistake. "Oh, my bad. Stuff happens. Besides, look at all the other nice things I do for you"
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To me it shows poor capital allocation skills on the part of management to on one hand issue a tax disadvantaged dividend to shareholders (who are forced to pay tax on it) and then turn around and raise new equity diluting the same shareholders. If they need cash for acquisitions, why bother paying a dividend?
+1. I'm continuously surprised how biased this board is towards FFH despite the moves of the past few years. I wonder if it partially linked psychologically to some of you making a fortune thanks to FFH after the bear raid.
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As a sidenote, have you ever considered doing the trading in-house? In my experience most brokers don't add much value for on-exchange trading - especially if you only have small orders. Discretionary instructions are typically interpreted as: ripping the client off as much as you can get away with. Long term you're probably cheaper and easier off opening an IB account.
If you have smallish orders in liquid stuff the best option might be to instruct MOO or MOC and compare to the official prints. The easier it is to check your executions, the better your pricing will be.
My general philosophy on this is similar to yours. The firm's feeling is that the traders have a "feel for the market" and can "find liquidity". I'm skeptical, but it's a small first and I'm fairly new so that's why I'm hoping to gather some data instead of just sounding like I'm paranoid or cynical. We are small but large and active enough that we get 1 cent/share execution from the brokers (this is in Canada) whether it goes electronic or worked by a trader. So it's not a cost issue, more of a question of which broker is doing a better job or if we could do a better job ourselves. If the trade is small relative to volume we'll just send an electronic vwap, but sometimes it can be 3 times average volume and the broker "works" it over a few days so we stay below 20% of volume. That's the general instruction, but we don't have much visibility into what the broker is doing. Just get an average fill price at the end.
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I know most board members don't trade very large blocks of shares but for those that do, how do you evaluate the execution of your broker?
I work for a very small asset manager and we typically give our broker discretionary instructions and he fills the trade within the timeframe we specify (usually by end of day). We also sometimes tell them to fill it electronically throughout the day using vwap. We have 2 brokers but the whole trade goes to one of them so it can't be directly compared. So how would one evaluate which one is better at execution? We sometimes compare our average price to the vwap price for the day, but of course that is pretty meaningless when our instructions are to fill at vwap.
Thanks in advance.
Matt
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Someone will correct me if I am wrong, but I think that phrase concerns primary offering of shares (new shares created by the custodian). As long as it's traded on NASDAQ you should have no problems buying it in the secondary market (off someone else).
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I've been doing some thinking about this subject and one issue I'm confronting as I bootstrap a fund is charging a performance fee. I'm confident that I can raise money from my friends and family but the majority don't qualify as accredited / qualified investors. One solution that I thought about was charging a 3% management fee but refunding 1% if performance was less than 14%, refunding 2% if performance was less than 10%, refunding the full management fee if performance was less than 6%. [similar to Buffet's 0,6,25%]
Obviously this is far from ideal but wanted to see if anyone had encountered something similar to this they looked at investing in or starting an investment management business.
Thanks
I'm certainly not a lawyer, but it looks like you just engineered yourself a performance fee structure. I doubt the regulators would have trouble making a case against you if they decided to put any effort in.
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I worked next to someone who was very into fantasy sports but wasn't that into investing. But I could tell by the amount of analytical thought he put into his hobby he would be a great investor. So I mentioned it to him, "Hey, if you are going to spend hours and hours each week outsmarting people, why not try stocks which could also make you financially independent?" He did try and he is very very good at it. Whenever you see someone enjoying a hobby with deep analysis that involves probabilities and handicapping, chances are they will be decent investors. If they have the right emotional temperament that is.
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so one guy sneezes, it goes into the airconditioning and then easily several people could catch it.
This is the kind of comment that panics people. Ebola is not airborne and is extremely difficult to transmit through the air.
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An this is the story why I have a shitload of cash doing nothing in my margin account and none in my tax free accounts. Adding a criteria that the stock has to be a super long term holding greatly diminishes the available companies available. Catalyst almost become your enemy.
I don't understand why the article says even a index fund has taxes tough. If I hold an ETF for 20 years, I ouly have to pay taxes at the end of the term. Regardless of the actual constituents of the ETF. Does the ETF get taxes on it's turnover?
BeerBaron
My understanding is that most ETFs are legally funds. So yes, the fund will be taxed for all it's income (dividends, interest, realized gains ect), even if you don't get taxed until you sell the instrument.
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I've been thinking of how to play this without going into specific companies. The best I could think of was shorting FDN. Any better ideas?
Short Renaissance IPO ETF(NYSEARCA:IPO)?
Who's at Fault for the Opioid Epidemic?
in General Discussion
Posted
thank you for your excellent rebuttal.