rukawa

I wasn't trying to be pedantic. I was attempting to point out a fatally flawed assumption of most big-government liberals. The idea is that government is somehow special. Above and beyond mere mortals. It has no biases, no interests. It does thing based on the "common good". Its this neutral arbiter. Basically its God. That is your essential argument. You find me pendantic because I questioned your assumption and since the assumption is so ingrained in your thinking you think I am being pendantic. All I am really doing is pointing out how ridiculous your assumption is. I don't hate Government. I don't hate Corporations. I don't believe in anarchy or even libertarianism. I find these philosphies ridiculous and I do think rkbabang's ideas are insane. But I find the ideas of modern liberals on the way Government works to be hopelessly naive and completely ahistorical. How did it come to this? The classical liberals were far far smarter about all these issues. Adam Smith lived three hundred years ago and he was way smarter. Its in the News. Its on TV. Do you read about how corrupt Chris Christie is in New Jersey. Or do just say, "oh its a Republican" and so it doesn't count? I don't get it. You live in Canada. Maybe youv'e read about Dalton McGuinty and the cancelled Gas Plants. The corruption and horrendous decision making surrounds us. I don't get how you don't see it?

For me its: 1. Devil Take the Hindmost 2. Snowball 3. You too can be a Stock Market Genius

Evidence? The free market history of medicine is a history of butchers, crackpots, charlatans and patent medicines filled with arsenic and cynaide. Medicine before the 20th century was ridiculously bad. Food and waterborne illnesses were enormously prevalent. And the government did an incredible amount of good by improving public health.

So are you proposing that Britain should regulate the United States? Because the United States regulating the United States is self-regulation just as much as a corporation regulating its own behaviour is self-regulation.

I think you vastly overestimate the expertise of the people at the top. China will crash and the crash will be really really bad. The sexual dynamics are also important because they will cause big problems. Too many men, too few women, men's families investing hundreds of thousands of dollar in overpriced houses for extremely materialistic brides. I don't really know how something like that plays out but I can predict it will be unpredictable and very messy.

I was reading yesterday's Globe and Mail and they were talking about how Encana is shifting away from Natural Gas and towards Liquids. But what I found interesting is that the article criticized Encana for investing in Shale Gas because its unprofitable. The conclusion for me is that many shale gas plays are unprofitable and eventually nat gas prices will rise a lot. Conventional shale gas producers should rise in value too. Encana which is increasingly diversifying out of conventional nat gas is making a huge mistake. But now I realize how much companies are driven by quarterly earnings.

Sure. I consider the basic paradigm of QM to be largely settled and very solid. This is because there is spectacular agreement between experiments and predictions. And there are thousand upon thousand of really nice experimental predictions. Also every single prominent skeptic was forced after loudly kicking and screaming to admit that QM is correct!!!!!!!!!!!!. I have a special place in my heart for QM skeptics like Bohm, Jaynes and John Bell. Bohm hated QM and you can read his book on QM to see him poke holes in it. Jaynes hated QM so much that he came up with an alternative "less quantumy" theory to explain photon emission and absorption. These guys spend their lives attacking QM and coming up with alternatives. But the evidence was too much for them and both conceded defeat. This is NOT true for climatology. John Christy, Richard Lindzen and of course many of the greatest forecasters the world has ever known, weathermen, are prominent skeptics.

Climate is not influenced by human psychology. But science is because it is a human endevour. And scientists are actually human. All of us are armchair analysts of the industries we invest in. And very few of us are experts.

When a car speeds up its tires sometimes appear to go backwards due to aliasing. Your eyes/brain are unable to register rapid changes so they "sample" the car tire at one moment and the next time the sample it the car tire has made nearly a whole revolution but not quite and thus appears to have moved backwards. This "aliasing effect" explains several scientific findings that in my opinion are completely wrong. The problem is that if you observed something using a measurement that is low frequency you will often not see a lot of things that are happening. This is particularly problematic in historical measurements because they are almost always low frequency. Two great examples are given above by you. The first is evolution where all that you have is the fossil record. An interesting finding is that the higher frequency the measurement the fast evolution appears to occur. I think a similar thing is true for temperature measurements. Consider for instance the divergence problem for tree rings. There are a number of temperature proxies that are not registering the present warming. If they aren't doing it now than it makes sense that they didn't do it in the past. This is why historical temperature measurements are extremely misleading especially when you compare them with modern temperature records using thermometers. But then this is basic elementary scientific common sense. You should always be careful when comparing the variability of measurements obtained using different methods. This is obvious. But it isn't obvious to climate scientists. And that is because climate scientists are hacks. The hockey stick isn't bad science...its complete utter garbage. And the fact that a lot of scientists still defend this, is very very scary. You cannot have a graph where the first part of the graph is temperatures from tree rings and the second part is temperature from thermometers in a Stevenson screen. Its wrong. Its a lie. Its pure evil. And this is why I don't trust climate scientists.

Investing always involves stepping outside your circle of competence. Most equity analysts are infinitely better at understanding their industries than anyone on this board and yet we disregard their advice every single day. And CEOs are far more informed about their industries than any of us are and yet we don't listen to them. Value investing isn't about knowing more than others. We don't know more than others. Its about not following the herd/crowd. Having better judgement. Experts DO NOT have better judgement. They never have and they never ever will. This is as true in investing as in everything else. Scientists are exactly like equity analysts. If you don't listen to equity analysts when they provide price targets then you should about apply the same skepticism to climate projections and everything else scientists tell you.

97% of peer-reviewed papers are complete garbage. Actually make that 431/432 = 99.76%. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all "They quickly discovered that the vast majority had serious flaws. But the most troubling fact emerged when he looked at the test of replication: out of four hundred and thirty-two claims, only a single one was consistently replicable. “This doesn’t mean that none of these claims will turn out to be true,” he says. “But, given that most of them were done badly, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

1. OddballStocks 2. Ragnar is a Pirate 3. Whopper investments 4. Can turtles fly 5. ShadowStock 6. Greenbacd 7. Geoff Gannon 8. OTC Adventures 9. Fat Pitch Financials 10. The Brooklyn Investor 11. Barel Karsan 12. Share Sleuth

They are probably not the most hated....but I really am starting to warm to traditional natural gas producers like Encana. They have been hammered due to low gas prices which I think are unsustainable. I guess this depends on what you believe about Shale Gas. I personally believe the decline rates are huge and that current production levels are unsustainable without a lot of capital investment.

I prefer the word cheap. Frugal is a word that gives in to the dumb culture around us. And about the wife...seems to be a frequent occurrence http://www.businessinsider.com/but-my-wife-made-me-buy-this-crappy-overpriced-house-2009-5

Is shale gas a bubble? Do people think that shale gas reserves and sustainable production is overstated. And if this is the case and natural gas prices are going to increase what are the best companies to invest in? Gazprom? Encana?

Putin doesn't seem to be addicted to drugs and he hasn't suffered a stroke like some past Russian leaders. I'm betting people will forget Crimea as quickly as they forgot about Chechnya and Georgia. Putin can't go too far. I actually think that Putin is good for investors. He is not a socialist. He is extremely popular and so there is no risk of regime change or revolution. He is rational. The people who have a lot of the input into the regime are oligarch's with huge business interests that will effectively act as a break against hugely irrational economic decisions.

"After spending the last six years promoting the benefits of the "wealth effect" it is hard to believe that the FED would sit idly watching the market collapse 50%..... I am not saying markets are not over-valued but isn't the FED trapped? At this point central bankers around the world can not afford to allow the markets to collapse." The true and most important mission of the Fed is to act as a lender of last resort for banks. In the case of the most recent credit crisis they did this by buying an enormous quantity of questionable assets held by banks in order to keep the banking sector from collapsing. Now that banks are lending again the FED can and should allow markets to collapse. They can't and should never allow banks to collapse.

I agree and its quite possible that the large cap etf is cheaper if you take into account the higher quality and strength of larger cap companies.

I think value investors do zero good for society. Generally social utility comes from innovation like for instance driverless cars, or the airplane. And often these are horrible investments. I also think making a lot of money and then donating it to charity is kind of ridiculous. Its basically the equivalent of government taxing people and then using it to fund social programs except that it is a far greater waste of time and energy from the social point of view. Its seems stupid to me. I came to terms with all of this awhile ago. I invest because I want to be free to live my life the way I want.

Avangardco does look very interesting.

\ I will answer this with a quote from a brilliant investor who I avidly follow: "When something is cheap enough things will happen, always has and always will"

"Right now, I figure there are a handful of businesses in places with rule of law, accounting standards, currencies and so on where I'm confident of getting my principal back together with a decent return and so as interesting as various Russian opportunities seem to be, I can't help but remind myself about my not-insignificant general ignorance of the place and why that shouldn't ever be substantially discounted when I'm trying to arrive at a final decision." Interesting. I originally wrote a much longer answer to your question that answered this point. I too am similarly extremely ignorant of Russia. And I agree with you that individual Russian stocks are in the too hard category. But I don't think this is true for the ETF. I actually think the ETF case is quite straightforward given valuations. My basic strategy is classic Templeton. From his wonderful book, the Templeton Plan: p. 64-65: "he decided to buy every stock on the exchanges that was selling for no more than a dollar per share.....He asked his former boss...to place the order...He warned Templeton that he would do so reluctantly because 37 of the companies on hist list were in bankruptcy. "That doesn't matter," Templeton told him. "Buy everything, whether it's in bankruptcy or not" p. 67 "an investor from New York who is an expert in Argentinian stocks observed to Templeton that because of Argentina's serious inflation and political instability, prices of their stocks were remarkably depressed...Templeton agreed to put up the capital, opened and an account with a bank in Argentina, and bought 800000 worth of Argentinian stocks at bargain prices" And finally Warren Buffett on diversification: "“Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing.” I am ignorant and mean to go on being ignorant about Russia. So diversification makes a lot of sense.

I really like this website. The thesis is very interesting however I am strongly against investing in individual Russian stocks (changed mind about Gazprom). This is one case where diversificaiton is your friend. There are several reasons for this: On the website itself the author describes a situation: This is the peril of corruption in Russia and its a big danger when investing in individual stocks. Corruption/No Rule of Law results in very large and unpredictable idiosyncratic risks but has a much smaller effect when you diversify. In addition the RSXJ has a P/E of 4.19 and a price to book of 0.31 (see attached RSXJ factsheet). That is a difficult hurdle for any individual stock to exceed. Sistema for instance is more expensive and has far greater idiosyncratic risk. The only way investing in an individual stock can be justified given the huge idiosyncratic risk is if it is extremely cheap. And then you have to make sure that its investible and the better risk/reward characteristics of the stock have to be large enough to outweigh the additional research effort involved. I would argue there are probably no individual Russian stocks that satisfy this criterion. RSXJ-Factsheet-0214.pdf

"Cant give a good answer except that well run family companies that know the Russian market better than most of us recently put up their Russian assets for sale.. That is enough reason for me not to invest in Russia no matter the price tag" Good. I am counting on people thinking this way. Too me price tag ALWAYS matters. Second investing in a stock vs a family business are not the same things. Its quite possible that the family is making the right decision but that it is also true that stocks in Russia are undervalued. And the reverse may also be true. For instance an industry may be extremely profitable and yet stock valuations are unrealistically high.