Ham Hockers

Not sure if anyone else follows his blog, but here's a nice summary article about him. I find myself repeating "never reason from a price change" multiple times per day. http://www.vox.com/2014/7/8/5866695/why-printing-more-money-could-have-stopped-the-great-recession

No taxes?

Haha Latin nerds. 6 years of Latin. Stupid Aeneid and Catullus AP exams still haunt me.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/13/yahoo-is-selling-over-100-domain-names-worth-up-to-1-5m-each/

[amazonsearch]American Railroads[/amazonsearch] Ok, I'm only on chapter 3, but this is turning out to be a very good book. Meyer is considered the father of transportation economics (he died before this book was finished, unfortunately), and I think there is much that would be useful to investors in here. If you've ever wanted to dig into the history of American rails to understand what happened to drastically improve the economics of this industry (beyond just taking Buffett at his word), read this book.

hmmm am I the only person on this board who like Marty Whitman

i'm a top rated seller on ebay. in my experience, you can achieve top status despite having packages lost by the shippers on occasion. i'm guessing what ebay primarily cares about is whether the rate at which you lose packages is above the norm.

Please click through to his book link. Cannot recommend more highly.

I like Guy, but I wonder how much of this is because he's afraid of being challenged

True. That time isn't now, though, IMO. If you are living in it - might as well be now - this is like waiting to buy Berkshire A in the 1970s at low valuation. Here's the competitive advantage of real estate in Vancouver (i can't speak for the rest of the country): - the warmest city in Canada - protection from the US (real or not - that's how Asians perceive this) - 1st world country - decent education - within 10h to Asia (where healthcare wait time is 1h) - diversity The condo market will definitely correct - but if you think about where the top 1% of the world wants to live -- you know, those sitting on over $50M in asset no where else to spend - they don't mind dropping $5M for a piece of land in Vancouver most of these buys we are seeing are all cash purchases too - so it's not 100% leveraged like it was in the US. I agree things are expensive; but if you look hard there's still "reasonable" prices out there and can be a good long term tax free investment..... Gary Also best Chinese food in North America?

It only takes a few percentage points of underperformance to offset the small state income tax benefit, so it might be easier to just put your own money into an index fund. Isn't the major benefit that the gains are untaxed if used for qualifying expenses?

This is a modern day minstrel show. It is a disgrace. Old white guys telling young black men how to be. The irony is delicious. Nothing wrong with a little NWA in the morning to get your day going, in my opinion.

You mean in addition to what they're issuing, or in lieu of shorter duration bonds?

depends on your pedigree and connection/how much you are starting with/how good of a salesman you are/and a big dose of luck. assume you can raise 10-50 mil from yourself/family/connections, you basically have 3 years to show strong (30%+) and consistent returns. If you are still in the business after 2-3 years, your fund should be at least $100 mil by then. Then you are investable to the institutions. Good fortunes can snowball from here. That's my understanding of the state of the industry right now. Vast majority of the potential investors are outcome focused and only care your performance so luck plays a big part especially you only have a year or two to show good performance yea the thing is, Im pretty confident about my picks. ANd I think i could with little extra work invest like 10-20 million$ in those stocks. My goal isn't really to make enourmous amounts of money. Just leverage what I am currently doing, with little extra effort. Even 5 million$ would be ok, Im ok with living everywhere, so i figure I could cheaply set up a fund for that. I guess I would first have to try and get my family in then. All the non-investment stuff has the biggest potential for sucking away your time. What for example? You give a presentation once a year on all your holdings and how it is going, and that is that. If they constantly harrass you about stupid day to day market movements you just kick them out? Investing in a fund really seems like a catch 22 tho. If you know how to pick a money manager you might as well manage yourself with those skills. And if you cannot manage your own money actively, then you also don't really know what to look for. I bet a lot of those underperfoming hedgefunds talk the talk really well, but dont walk the walk. You can throw around EV/EBITDA and warren buffett and talk about competitive advantages in a way that looks very professional, while your stock picking ability's are just speculative and undisciplined. I would invest in a fund who follows buffett's and graham's principles, but if they then turn around and proceed to make all kinds of risky crazy attacks and shorts on company's like OMEX... You are running a business, an asset management business. You have clients who want details on how their money's doing, you're not just managing your funds. So you have calls to take with current clients. Then you need to prospect for new clients, maybe this is with marketing, maybe networking. Maybe it's writing letters or articles for magazines, but it's something. You also have the legal and compliance aspect of everything you do. Don't underestimate the paperwork involved in running the fund. You also have a lot of special situations and requests from clients. Writing the quarterly letters, measuring performance, preparing statements for clients. Then you have to research and invest the actual fund. I don't believe you need great performance to be successful, you need to be great at sales. There are some well known hedge fund managers with high AUM's and terrible track records. Why haven't all their clients fled to all of the up and coming guys with 30% a year returns and $3m in AUM? It's not a visibility thing, it's because investors believe the story of their manager. You want to craft a story, there's a reason investors should invest with you. You can't guarantee great returns. So you sell by saying you're an expert on airlines or on distressed credit. That niche that you're an expert in is why investors invest with you. If you're an expert and you've giving exposure you're not released from the performance grind. Investors want distressed credit, as long as you can do well compared to your specific index, or give diversified exposure you will be able to retain investors. I know there's this feeling that all you have to do is hang your hat out the window and $10-15m will come flowing to you, but I'd posit it's much harder to raise a substantial amount of capital. Unless you're from a wealthy family it's going to be really hard to get money if you don't have an audited track record, great connections or a seed from a well known fund. If it were easy then there'd be no small funds. If you ask around you'll find a lot of people on the board here running small funds with excellent performance numbers. If it were only performance then they should be running a lot more money. Asset management is just like any other type of business. There is a product to be sold, and someone who needs to sell it. Apple can make the greatest device in the world, but unless they tell people about it, tell them why they need it, and create a product out of the device it will never sell. Engineering creates devices, marketing makes products. Asset management is no different, investment managers invest for performance, but a marketing department needs to create a product out of the manager. Agree with all this. People also usually think they can outsource all the administrative stuff (calculating NAV, investor performance, handling redemptions/contributions, etc.). But even if you hire an outside administrator, you remain responsible for all of this at the end of the day. So practically speaking, you're probably running a parallel process and spending time doing these things anyway. I'm not saying you can't do it. Just that it's more work than you think and you will always have plenty of non-investment work.

depends on your pedigree and connection/how much you are starting with/how good of a salesman you are/and a big dose of luck. assume you can raise 10-50 mil from yourself/family/connections, you basically have 3 years to show strong (30%+) and consistent returns. If you are still in the business after 2-3 years, your fund should be at least $100 mil by then. Then you are investable to the institutions. Good fortunes can snowball from here. That's my understanding of the state of the industry right now. Vast majority of the potential investors are outcome focused and only care your performance so luck plays a big part especially you only have a year or two to show good performance yea the thing is, Im pretty confident about my picks. ANd I think i could with little extra work invest like 10-20 million$ in those stocks. My goal isn't really to make enourmous amounts of money. Just leverage what I am currently doing, with little extra effort. Even 5 million$ would be ok, Im ok with living everywhere, so i figure I could cheaply set up a fund for that. I guess I would first have to try and get my family in then. All the non-investment stuff has the biggest potential for sucking away your time.

Is your life insurance in a trust now?

We already have a "what are you buying today?" and a "what are you selling today?" thread. So we might as well be thorough. Today, I am not buying anything. I am also not selling anything. Thanks

Higher One

Doesn't anybody watch Parks and Rec? Rent-a-swag?

How long are you planning on sticking around? -CM I think my actuarial life expectancy is another 45 years or so, but I'm planning on at least 70 more years :)

I'd be shocked if BRK didn't sell/spin out some of its businesses during my lifetime.

Short blog entry about China's debt expansion: http://houseofdebt.org/2014/03/13/china-and-the-dangers-of-debt.html

I'm taking that too. Or more accurately, I've signed up to take it but haven't started yet ...

"“One of my friends used to work for J.P. Morgan in New York, and he’s now at Google,” Siddiqui says. “He’s a total chick magnet. He walks around with Google Glass on, and girls go crazy."" False.

I have the same gut reaction, but just to play devil's advocate, how many Whatsapp users are non-FB users currently, and how many will become FB users after the acquisition? That's worth something.