james22

Is that a single investment property at 2.4X the value of your home? That's pretty unusual, I'd think? How'd that come about? Commercial, maybe?

? The Size and Value premiums disfavor Large Growth.

"Who asked you to do that?" is the "Show your work!" of the working world.

I'd Like this if I could.

How'd Luca manage to tag your post with Haha, Parsad? There's many a post I'd like to Like.

In a paper published in the arXiv preprint server July 18, researchers said "performance and behavior of both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 vary significantly" and that responses on some tasks "have gotten substantially worse over time." https://techxplore.com/news/2023-07-pains-chatgpt-dumber.html

I'm a little surprised the analytical types frequenting this board wouldn't like lifting for the numbers. After running, boxing, and/or crossfit for 35 years, I first found lifting itself not very fun. But measuring progress against standards now makes it pretty entertaining. https://legionathletics.com/strength-standards/ https://outlift.com/how-much-can-the-average-man-lift/

https://www.runnersworld.com/health-injuries/a20790871/running-preserves-motor-units/

My Planning & Analytics Department used to spend ~80% of our time gathering, cleaning and organizing data. The thought of AI freeing that time for analysis makes me a little giddy.

SPR Has a Refill Problem The problem with refilling the SPR to the tune of nearly 300 million barrels is multifaceted. First, oil prices are still a bit above the level that the Biden Administration said would trigger purchasing action. Most short term forecasts are calling for price hikes instead, so the likelihood of prices falling to those levels soon is not estimated to be a sure thing. Second, 300 million barrels at a cost of even $70 per barrel would cost $21 billion for the oil alone. Now, the Administration would argue that since it canceled congressionally mandated sales that had called for another 147 million barrels of crude oil to be sold from the SPR, it should be counted that it has already replaced 147 million barrels, leaving only 144 million left to purchase at a minimum cost of $10.8B with $70 oil. What’s more, that cancellation resulted in Congress taking $12.5 billion away from the DoE that was to be used to repurchase crude oil, leaving it with just $4.3 billion of available cash to buy. Nevertheless, the Administration is confident that it will refill the SPR, although the anticipated timing of the repurchases depend entirely on who in the Administration is doing the talking. Next up is the issue of infrastructure and feasibility of filling, withdrawing, refilling, etc. of the SPR. Those salt caverns are made of… well, salt, and according to SPR former project manager William Gibson, who spoke to Bloomberg, they were built—in the ‘70s—with the idea that they would last 25 years. They were also designed to be withdrawn and refilled just five times, lest the salt caverns simply dissolve. As one former official put it, the caverns were “not really intended for daily ATM-type operations.” Any buyback program would have to be slow-rolled in order to prevent price spikes—the very thing that triggered SPR sales in the first place. In March, even Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said that any repurchase scheme would take years. https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-SPR-Could-Stay-Half-Empty-Forever.html

https://www.runnersworld.com/health-injuries/a20790871/running-preserves-motor-units/

Thanks, Saluki. I must have a copy lying around. Investing: The Last Liberal Art is another great read: Hagstrom explores basic and fundamental investing concepts in a range of fields outside of economics, including physics, biology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and literature. He discusses, for instance, how the theory of evolution disrupts the notion of the efficient market and how reading strategies for literature can be gainfully applied to investing research. Building on Charlie Munger's famous "latticework of mental models" concept, Hagstrom argues that it is impossible to make good investment decisions based solely on a strong knowledge of finance theory alone. https://www.amazon.com/Investing-Liberal-Columbia-Business-Publishing/dp/0231160100

Most investors today have learned (because they invest automatically into their 401k index fund/s every month) the market is pretty safe over the long-run. Besides, TINA.

Can't find, but once read a study where two groups were posed the question: Imagine you are a doctor and one of your patients is about to die from a tumor. You can’t perform surgery, but you do have a ray gun which can focus a high-intensity ray to destroy the tumor. However, there’s a slight problem. At this high intensity, the ray will also damage the healthy tissue it passes through. If you try to lower the intensity, while the healthy tissue is safe it no longer has the energy to destroy the actual tumor. So the question is: How do you destroy the tumor without damaging the tissue? Very few of the first group (3%) were able to answer the question (Mount 10 ray guns around the patient, and set each ray’s intensity at ten per cent. Then, when you focus the ray guns, the low intensity won’t damage the healthy tissue, but when combined, the radiation is high enough to destroy the tumor). Most (66%?) of the second group were able to after being asked to read several news articles, most unrelated but one of which had to do with something similar (streams flowing into a river? multiple columns converging to attack at a single point? I can't remember). The study's authors concluded we are very good at pattern recognition and mapping across solutions to like problems.

This.

Investor Howard Marks reports that about half of the Nifty Fifty "compiled respectable returns for 25 years, even when measured from their pre-crash highs, suggesting that very high valuations can be fundamentally justified." On the other hand, Professor Jeremy Siegel analyzed the Nifty Fifty era in his book Stocks for the Long Run, and determined companies that routinely sold for P/E ratios above 50 consistently performed worse than the broader market (as measured by the S&P 500) in the next 25 years, with only a few exceptions. Wiki

They feed Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT vast amounts of data on what humans have written on the internet. They learn so well that soon AI-generated output is all over the internet. The ever-hungry LLMs eat that, and reproduce it, and what comes out is less and less like human thought. https://www.samizdata.net/2023/07/we-think-we-are-living-at-the-dawn-of-the-age-of-ai-what-if-it-is-already-sunset/

FAANG worked pretty well for over a decade.

I might have posted this before, but these resonate. Perhaps a couple broader lessons I've learned: first, to try to do a better job of overcoming my natural aversion to ideas that are popular. One of the mental blocks for me was - "if everyone loves this so much, how can it still be a great value?" Going forward, I'm trying to do a better job of focusing more on an idea's merits and tuning out who likes or doesn't like it. Second, and similarly, I've realized that it's internally inconsistent to A) believe that I have no edge in interpreting near-term price action, and B) prefer buying securities that have fallen over the near to medium-term past than securities that have skyrocketed. As with the previous item, I'm now trying to focus more on the "signal" - i.e. the idea's fundamental merits - and less on the "noise" - i.e. whether it's recently up, down, or sideways. https://seekingalpha.com/article/4229722-small-cap-bear-next It was actually reflecting on the first that helped me shift 10% to Tech mid-May after it had already done so well.

Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac Never underestimate opposing forces.

Sobering. What is it about Western intellectual culture, and American academic culture in particular, that has led so many potentially talented people to turn into such blind and hate-filled critics? There is no answer in this book, but it sure makes you wonder. https://newcriterion.com/issues/2004/9/a-disgraceful-career

Here's a start: https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Chomsky-Reader-Peter-Collier/dp/189355497X

Pretty sure I'd be given a time-out if I did.

I like to believe investors will increasingly recognize stocks as less risky than they do now, and so value them more highly than they do now: Glassman and Hassett believed that both investors and official commentators had mistakenly considered stocks to be a risky investment which should require a premium return, when compared to 'safe' investments such as government bonds. They argued that if stocks and bonds were treated as equally risky, the Dow Jones index would be around 36,000. Hence, anyone who gets in now and stays for the long haul, can expect returns of around 300 per cent (in addition to the normal interest rate) as the rest of the market wakes up. Once this historic correction is over, the efficient-market hypothesis will hold sway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_36,000 That investors haven't fled equities for 4% bonds encourages this belief.