rukawa

Your employer pays for your gasoline, internet, cell-phone bill and car?

I feel like your answer to 1) was just to strongly exaggerate the point. I don't think you need to spend anywhere close to $5000 to get this information. With a time, networking, research and calling I'm pretty sure you could get this info for free.

I am writing a research paper and was wondering if anyone knows where Benjamin Graham first proposed his net-net strategy of buying stocks that sell at 2/3rds of NCAV.

Your link supports my argument. From the third sentence of the link you posted: Additionally from the link you posted https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Matriarchal_Prehistory The evidence that matriarchies ever existed is extremely poor and the idea is mostly a wholesale invention and feminists and marxists. Second the current definitions of matriarchy need not even contradict the idea of mostly male leadership since many anthropologists/feminists/marxists redefine matriarchy to mean social roles are relatively egalitarian. This would imply that North America is matriarchal since social roles are relatively egalitarian...however it still has mostly male leadership. Leadership is the extreme of the distribution....not the average.

If X varies enormously and Y is invariant then you can't use X to explain Y. Societies vary enormously but the outcome of mostly male leadership is an invariant. It can't be explained by arbitrary social factors since these factors are arbitrary and therefore will vary enormously across societies. It could be explained by a social factor that every society has in common but then the logical question is WHY every society has the social factor in common. My claim is that every invariant social factor that every society has in common is either due to basic human nature or some fundamental aspect of reality that is very difficult to alter. Otherwise you would find a society where it was altered. Saudi Arabia is one society and if it was the only society ever studied your claim about restrictions would make sense. But it isn't. Polynesians had far fewer restrictions on woman...but they had mostly males in power. Same with Native Indians, modern Europeans, ancient Egyptians, Chinese across their whole history, Romans...you name it. Given the enormous variation of these societies in all kinds of things: beliefs, religion, philosophy of life, mode of living, environment, technological ability the obvious question is why? And societies change enormously over time...there are wars, famines, disease, massive cultural shifts...isn't it odd that these "restrictions" were able to survive across all this tumult. The idea that males subjugated females is a common explanation. But it still begs the question of how and why? How and why did males in every single society ever known manage to subjugate woman. And why don't we observe it? In other words why have we never observed a society where women were in leadership positions and then spontaneously the men all decided: hey lets subjugate woman and then passed a whole bunch of restrictions. And then of course the next question is why didn't the powerful women leaders stop them? We never see this. Instead all we see is societies everywhere where for some reason men just happen to be in power and it seems like they always have been. There is no coherent explanation that isn't biological for the exact reason that biology is invariant and social factors aren't.

In every single society that has ever existed historically for which we have good records or been observed directly by anthropologists its always been the case that men dominate all roles with high formal social status and power, regardless of what those roles are. My view is that the simplest explanation is that men are biologically wired to strongly desire to ascend status hierarchies. Thus they are much more willing to sacrifice to do it than women are. Consider a guy like Warren Buffett. He spent most of his life, holed up in rooms, reading financial statements. I think Susan Buffett, his first wife, commented on how this was a poor way to live life. I completely agree with her. This isn't uncommon. I remember reading about Julius Caesar as a young man seeing a bust of Alexander the Great and feeling like a failure because he realized that when Alexander was his age, he had already conquered the known world. Julius Caesar wanted to be a great Conquerer, Buffett and Rockefeller wanted to be enormously rich....same underlying motivation (ascend a status hierarchy) but filtered through a different society with very different values (military conquest vs money). In India, men dominate the "spiritual guru" role. Does anyone really think men are more capable at being spiritual than women. Or better at cooking than woman. Women also tend to prefer to date men who are likely to or end up ascending a hierarchy. So men's mating strategy is "ascend the hierarchy". Women's is to get noticed by and marry the guy who ascended or will ascend it. This actually provides an extremely good explanation of one thing I have always but puzzled by...why women put so much effort into their appearance when in other animals the male usually is more colorful and tends to do more visual displays to attract the female. I don't really think women are any less capable or intelligent than men. I just think the priorities are way different and dictated by different mating strategies.

Chris Christie is going after Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey to give $300 million to fund state addiction treatment fund. https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-jersey-governor-seeks-more-control-over-big-health-insurer-1494759602 Not sure what is really going on here.

Its a very odd thing to say if you assume our banking system is responsible for housing markets. I don't. Right now there are housing bubbles occurring all over the world and the common denominator is not Canadian banks. We are behind the US on nearly everything...generally every consumer market in Canada is less competitive, has less options and higher costs than the States. You choose your poison. You can have competitive banking and repeated bank crises with huge bailouts. Or you have an oligopoly with nice fat profits, limited risk taking and no bank crises. Personally I think Canadians are getting a great bargain. You could of course try and have both no bank crises and competition but that is another story.

What is the call feature?

And there is absolutely no responsibility from Canadians for any of this? The people who keep telling me I should be buying a house aren't the banks...its other Canadians. I don't really see why banks should be blamed for any of this. The government and the regulators are another story. I think Canadians actually get a good deal on banking. Sure the banks make high profits but at least we don't have banking crisis like the States does that require huge government bailouts. Even Europe has problems. The Canadian banking system is the only one in the world that actually works.

I use screener.co. There are still false positives. I usually have a list in a spreadsheet of net nets from screener.co. I go down the list one at a time. Look up their current financials at the investor relations website or edgar/sedar, look up any news on the company (prnnewswire/IR website/google news), market price. And I go down the list stock by stock. You really only need a screener to filter stocks out. Once you have done that my view is that its best to get data directly from their financials and just go stock by stock.

Wow the government of Belize sucks.

What are your thoughts on Ripple and XRP? Ripple truly is the largest scam around. It's a company releasing a currency which the can inflate infinitely and assign to themselves. On top of that it's not even a cryptocurrency, there is no mining either through POW or POS. Reminds me of this

Free markets don't work well when they are primarily based on OPM (Other people's money). As far as I know every single service/product market which is dominated either by insurance or by loan financing is fucked up in some way. Examples are education, housing, medicare, car repair. In all these markets you find that prices don't make sense, massive information asymmetries, dumb consumers, shady producers. But I don't really see how any of these products/services are more complicated and difficult to understand than other products and services where markets appear to function more rationally like for instance consumer electronics, automobiles etc. Does anyone really understand how an iphone works? Or their car? Lee Quan Yew has an anecdote about observing people who would get diagnosed with an infection at NHS hospitals, take a partial course of anti-biotics and then stop taking them. Finally they would go to a private hospital and pay for anti-biotics and then take the full course and be cured. People, for whatever reason, are more careful about things they pay for than things they don't pay for.

It appears that the revolution isn't AI at all. The big thing here is increasingly powerful alternatives to CPUs. CPU's have hit a dead-end and so the whole industry will evolve sideways. The GPU is only the beginning. We are going to see more and more very cheap alternatives to the CPU that outperform CPU's by orders of magnitude on specific tasks.

All the returns are in the small caps < 50 million. Most of the people you hear about are fund managers. A real money implementation of this strategy would only work for small time investors with probably a few million bucks to invest. You basically never hear about these people. The people you hear about are people that are interesting and often the result of survivorship bias etc. They tend to be dominated by concentrated investors who often appear to be geniuses because they had some amazing insight no one else had. Often though they were just lucky. Net-net investing is simply not that exciting, interesting or a good display of someone's genius. Positive earning companies have substantially worse returns than negative earning companies for net-nets probably due to mean reversion. Screening for quality generally lowers returns hugely. Quality works well for large caps....not so much for small ones.

Thread below covers the fees pretty thoroughly. Basically inactivity fee is $10 per account per month...so unless you generate more than 10 buck commission through trades you will pay this. Fee is waived though if you have more than 100k USD (which currently translates to 134.5K CAD) in the account. In addition RRSP has quarterly fee of 12.50 on top of the inactivity fee. TFSA no additional fees. RRSP and TFSA as rb stated only permit US/CAD stocks. And in order to buy US stocks you must convert into USD dollars. Normally IB allows you trade in any currency and automagically creates a loan in the currency you traded which hedges most of the currency risk. But this feature does not exist for TFSA or RRSP. http://forums.redflagdeals.com/interactive-brokers-now-offers-tfsa-rsp-1663613/3/ https://www.interactivebrokers.ca/en/index.php?f=rsp_tfsa_information

Thinking of using IB for RRSP and TFSA (2 types of registered Canadian accounts) mainly because they have superior currency exchange fees compared to Questrade. Anybody have experience with them for registered Canadian accounts?

Looking at Tweedy Brown's: "What has worked in investing" and other investing literature there are 3 deep value strategies I have found that have returns significantly greater than 20% (usually around 30%): 1) Negative enterprise value. 50 percent returns over a 40 year period according to Alon Bochman 2) Grahams net-nets 35 percent returns over 30 year period according to Tobias Carlyle and Oppenheimer 3) P/B < 30% of market cap 30 percent returns over 10 years. See table 4/5 of tweedy brown study. My view is that all 3 strategies tend to very heavily favor very small cap companies. Probably 70 percent of the companies have market caps under 50 million. I am looking for additional deep value screens with similar return characteristics. Any ideas?

I don't fully trust non-company sources of info with the exception of market prices. Google gets market caps wrong. For instance, for this stock: https://www.google.ca/finance?cid=89447611849247 Google own info says shares outstanding is 45.53 million and share price is 0.09. So mcap should be 45.527*0.09=4.097 million but Google reports 2.75 million. I remember Packer reporting similar problems with Cap IQ and Bloomberg. Screener.co gets all kinds of things wrong and it sources its data from Thomson Reuters.

This reminds me of the embarrassing situation where I was put on the select team in Soccer even though I sucked because they confused me with a much better player who has the same first name. I think you are confusing with the far more intelligent poster Roark33. I have one comment on Ocwen and it reads:

Got a contracting position with a Canadian bank. Wondering whether anybody has been in a similar position and considered the decision between incorporation and sole proprietorship. I'm a bit worried about the CRA..it appears they have been going after contractors lately.

An interesting idea indeed! Thank you for alerting us to it and sharing your research! Mcap: 30 million earnings: 0.7 million Revenue: 13 million So they currently trade at nearly 3 times revenue and the whole case is based on them growing. Seems expensive to me.

You sold me. I'm definitely getting this book.

My interpretation of those graphs is that the US has the ability to increase its interest rates and that we will try to keep our interest rates low since the government will try to avoid putting more pressure on hugely indebted canadians. The result is that the US/CA exchange rate should continue to get worse....I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually reach 50 cents on the dollar or even less...lets say 30 cents on the dollar. That should make Canadian housing even cheaper which will raise foreign demand even more. The real interesting question will be...at what point does the Canadian government cave and raise interest rates. Because I don't think the divergence between Canadian and US rates can last long.