CorpRaider

http://blog.alphaarchitect.com/2011/07/09/taxes-are-more-important-than-alpha/

DIS EL MDLZ (or KHC)

How do you guys and or Warren and Charlie (if they have commented) set up for all your marathon reading? My neck kills me. Do you have one of those reclining zero gravity programmer chairs or something?

Are the 3rd and 4th Poorvu books sufficient? It looks like the first and second are out of print and would have to go used (which is ok but no prime shipping and no kindle) at least on amazon.

ARCP? I think a few around here were pretty enthused about it prior to the blow up, if memory serves (I'm long VER but from ~ $8). I guess a lesson there is common to VRX; avoid debt fueled massive roll-ups with shady (well known in Schorsh's case) CEOs? Energy stocks....what are you going to do? Its in a commodity space and that happens every decade or two. If you don't profess to be a "quality" investor you probably knew that you could have a rough couple of years. The P/B guys also got smoked in the financial crisis but they were all rounding back to form by 2014.

I read op as getting at the bond allocation. Bogle has some rule of thumb about your age in bonds minus 30 or something like that. Personally, I figure I might stick around 70-30 or 80-20 when I'm retired, assuming a 4% withdrawal rate that is like 5 to 8 years in spending that I would have in intermediate treasuries (not counting any defined benefits) and I could rebalance via my withdrawals in a crash scenario while I waited it out. I figure I don't want to get too conservative with inflation in healthcare costs being insane. I could see doing 90-10 if I was going to be like Astrid, with millions and living like a middle class, Midwestern gal. I'm sure Mr. Buffett will be comforted by my concurrence. ;D

I agree with the magical fox. WSJ is now like >50% stuff I don't care about or find offensive that they would presume to opine to me upon. Honestly, I would probably sign up for some of their promotional rates, but they make it difficult to cancel if I'm not feeling like I am getting good value. I still take Barron's although often times I just scan through it. Fortune has an article that interests me about once every 3 months. I get Bloomberg BusinessWeek as well, but generally just peruse it. Sometimes it has awesome articles but I've usually already read them online. FT doesn't deliver paper where I live and not sure I would pay that much unless it was like superb U.S. coverage with a lite version of their excellent intl coverage.

Apparently health insurance premiums were flat to falling for the 30 years prior according to some. What's best for our allies is Americans fighting and dying in their various proxy wars (potentially even while a large portion of their society funds terror attacks against us) or otherwise paying the price for their defense while they enjoy lavish social welfare states. I have no problem with being more thoughtful, rather than continuing to "lead" that way.

Not as interesting a question as whether Coke gives you diabeetus?

In 10 years time he may be judged as amongst the GOATs.

Put an excise tax on sugar, high fructose corn syrum. or Aspertame (perhaps one that goes into the Medicare and Medicaid trust funds) or don't, what's the big deal? He invests (or has) in petrochemical companies who are subject to excise taxes (maybe some of those should go into Medicaid/Medicare funds as well for cancer caused by their pollutants). You better be ready to apply these taxes to beef and milk and fried foods next. You will soon be voted out of office because you have nannied and ticked off every american. Isn't democracy grand? Maybe the Chinese can blaze the trail on this path, assuming they can get the air pollution low enough that you can see your hand in front of your face.

I know this is nothing new but what do you guys make of this endorsement of index funds? His rationale seems centered on the costs argument, which is what Bogle's arguments now focus on (as opposed to an acceptance of the EMH). I wish someone would ask him about low cost value index funds or fundamentally weighted funds. I could see him preferring the SPY given his quality bent (it is already kind of an alternative/fundamental index given the screening and selection (and ejection) of stocks by S&P), then again I think he still holds to value as a general proposition and those index funds would satisfy the low management and tax cost concerns. He would probably be concerned about tracking error and the potential for investor performance gaps if he mentioned those to his wide audience though.

I thought it was a stupid question 100% designed to try and highlight his mad trading skillz.

I enjoyed that a lot. Good job by Yahoo.

ETFs. Are open end mutual funds obsolete for taxable investors?

Read any of the biographies (or just their titles, or virtually any article about him like....ever) and you will know why.

He's going to be on squawk Monday morning for 3 hours too. If you feel like watching him politely dodge asinine questions and comments from Kernan for a couple of hours. :D

Yep....RPV....FTW

Finally read the transcript last night. He said banks are now regulated utilities and BAC should spin off Merrill and U.S. Trust, which are nothing of the sort. Yes, please. Also interesting comments on DNOW and MRC. Has taken positions and believes they should merge.

Sounds bit like Bogle's "low cost hypothesis".

"Margin call gentlemen."

I get what you're saying. Some would say he's really "financially independent" as opposed to retired, because he generates passive income that far outstrips his annual spending, even backing out the $400K (which is a recent phenomenon, btw). He could probably never post new content again and would still generate substantial income for years to come. But I think most would say he retired early from his career to go manage his personal investments (mostly real estate at the time) and then turned a hobby/evangelism (about stoicism and limiting consumption and the attendant impact on the environment disguised as a personal finance blog) into a huge business on accident. He really doesn't even post all that often now, maybe once every month or two.

I think he did and this touches on an important point which I feel has not been stressed enough in this discussion. Steinhardt did those things to gain an informational advantage. Without this advantage he would be a lesser legend or not a legend at all. The key word to investing is edge. You need to have an edge, otherwise your results are not good. There are perhaps four kinds of edges: informational, analytical, behavior, and financial. Insider trading is informational. WEB buying into Geico is analytical (and informational because he was able to grill Jack Byrne before his investment which no one else could have). Behavioral is self-explanatory - patience, fortitude, etc. Financial is when things are down and everyone is poorer, you still have money to invest but others don't. Few of us have financial edge - we are just not rich enough. We try to improve behavior, but we are only human. Most of the investment effort is around gaining informational and analytical edges. Without such edges which come from hard work, there can be no good investment. Think about what we are doing here - reading the posts and typing away. We try to learn. We learn lots everyday, but most of them are not good enough to become a money-making insight. Good post. I suppose bribing/pumping sell siders for information is research, but I wouldn't expect Boesky to hold forth on fundamental analysis. Personally, I wouldn't dismiss the behavioral edge based on shared humanity, but I'm not a professional who has to field calls from investors and give quarterly and annual reports. I think the incentives (career risk/herd safety, pressure to justify fees by activity, etc..) are what is going to drive the behavior. I think the financial can be a huge deal too. For example ensuring one has durable capital seems to be key. Getting slammed with new funds when everything is expensive and having to sell positions based primarily on liquidity to meet withdrawals in a downturn has got to hurt performance in a major way.

Didn't he make most of his returns by front running orders, analyst upgrades, and other stuff that would probably land him in federal "pound me in the ass" prison, today? Just like Cramer.

Since the Mexicans are paying for it, they may use Mexican suppliers.