yadayada

http://seekingalpha.com/article/2231443-chinas-property-problems

what are some amazing company's operating in china? Like where everything is just right, BYD type company's. Moaty, good management that is clearly honest etc. The ones that are expensive now despite being in China? We should make a list. I only have clear media and BYD now.

is anyone seriously considering those self driving cars a long term threat? Younger people buying less cars etc. I mean in next 5 years or so it probably doesnt matter. But if you assume like 12x multiples here, then you have to start thinking about year 10 and 12. A lot can happen in that time? couldnt that take a serious bite out of the market?

yeah but how large are these ghost cities compared to the rest? Im curious about that. If its only a couple %, then it wont cause a huge crisis.. Also how entangled are the people loaning money for this in the rest of the system? If I can see that building these ghost cities is stupid, maybe other people within that system can too? Also shadowbanking is suposed to shelter the risks a bit from the system right? If they are mostly seperate entities making these stupid loans, then you wont see a huge slowdown.

what about LMCA? Or any of malone's company's.

i think you need to look at average age of cars on the road in a lot of developed countries. That number is much higher then average right? And luxury brands are not a commodity product. Still not in love withh those car company's.

thanks, he lists 2 more interesting sites. http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/ http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/

http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1516212/wikileaks-set-reveal-second-country-under-nsa-surveillance-amid-warnings So within 2-3 days he will reveal what country that is. I really have nothing good to say about these guys, but not over the phone ofcourse :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPQ44RDOAx4

yeah i think that debt ratio is very high if you discount all their empty city building.

There was a mining company that was in a v good spot to provide frac sand. It was highly rated and posted on VIC a while back, but I cannot find it anymore. Was suposed to be very very cheap. Illiquid microcap tho.

If anything he underacted the guy :D Had to turn it off a few minutes in tho. The guy is just dripping with narcisism

scorsese is absolutely brilliant at these narrative movies. Just presenting this person's life uncensored in like 2-3 hours and really getting you into their world. No sugarcoating or trying to make characters likeable etc. Added with amazing soundtrack and getting the best performances out of the best actors etc. I think wolf of wall street really nailed that in this movie. ANd i think the people who don't like it get uncomfortable seeing it. But that shouldnt be a reason to rate the movie as bad I think.

http://m.timesofindia.com/home/opinion/edit-page/Chinas-debt-crisis-suggests-an-India-like-crash-round-the-corner/articleshow/29512055.cms I wonder what all the big macro guys think about this. I got some china exposure, so I wonder if I should be worried and leave some cash to buy lots of cheap asian stocks soon :D .

that is why im liking texhong so much now. These guys pay out almost everything they dont put back into growing the company. And they are really damn cheap. I also own some keck seng. I do wonder what will happen with the cash they get out of selling those macau apartments. I kinda worry that they will just let it rot on the balance sheet. I dont get it tho. What are they going to do with that cash? They can't really steal it from minority holders? Unless you own like 80% of the company, then you can slowly buy everyone out at cheap prices. But with keck seng they dont own nearly that %.

how can you quickly look up performance of these funds? always takes me a while googling Also in the hosts defense, he was rambling a bit. Personally I like to listen to that, but the people at bloomberg got a show to run.

and a 1.5% performance fee on net asset value. With all other costs that is probably close to 2% total? Are there other performance fees if net asset value goes up? I guess there is a higher cost if you personally with a small portfolio buy a basket. there is a 0.2% total fee fidelity pays the broker, and there are exchange rate costs? Plus if you buy and sell stocks that decrease and increase in value to constantly have an optimal basket there will be extra costs as well. If you want to get a portfolio of like 5-6 korean stocks, you pay 80$ per stock it seems. Which is another 0.8% for buying them if you have a evenly weighed basket worth 50k$ total. So that would be 1% for buying. And also 1% for selling. Or about 2-3% total? But this could go up if you try to constantly optimize your basket. But there is a 1% stamp duty on the LSE stock right? But I guess comissions are only maybe 0.1 or 0.2%. And currency exchange fees on IB are similar to that. So i guess you pay 1.2% premium on NAV, close to 2% in fees a year. 1% stamp duty, and another 0.5% for buying comissions etc. So that would be well over 4%. And if it takes long to pay off it can go up to 5-7%? Seems the less you invest in korean stocks $ whise, the more attractive this fund is? Unless there is some 20% performance fee that I missed. If you have like 200k$ or more lying around for korea you might want to do it yourself tho. Sounds right? I forgot, but do they pay taxes over dividends? Because if your getting double taxation here that would be pretty bad and make it not worth it. What does this mean? Is this the amount that would be withheld anyway if you invested directly?

misread, but i only see top 10 holdings. Cannot find an entire list. Seems they trade like 13-14% to net asset value? I wonder how much upside there is in those stocks over the next 3 years. It also seems that they are up a bit since the latest annual report? http://www.weisskoreaopportunityfund.com/documents/FG/weiss/docs/188742_Weiss_Korea_Annual_Report_Dec_2013_FINAL_unsigned.pdf So the discount might be smaller now?

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21600692-reviving-old-brands-sometimes-makes-more-sense-creating-new-ones-hidden-gems

And the dark side leads to more anger becuase i just stubbed my fking toe cos i couldnt fking see anything

Well for one it seems hard to me to find decent liquidity in longer term put options on most stocks. You need really large caps. And even then they don't look v compelling because of the price (in case of CRM). Second is, that most of the aformentioned investors are very large. Most of the cheap names I see are micro or small cap. There might also be institutional reasons, or ideological reasons why einhorn shorts. Maybe his investors want short exposure (for whatever reasons). Maybe he wants to help keep the system honest using his large fund and exposure and also make a buck on it (I kinda got that impression from his book, but i might be wrong). And if you look good you can still find plenty of v compelling risk/reward picks, that are way ahead of even the better shorts out there. I keep seeing how much the edge of being small is underestimated by a lot of people. You really have a huge edge vs guys like Einhorn just because you have under like 5-10 million$ to invest. Personally I copied over 1/3 of this guys stock picks (I suck at finding good ideas myself): http://quinzedix.blogspot.de/ Read any of those, and study those company's and then show me a short with a more compelling risk/reward ratio with more upside. Another bias I see is that people think they are not nearly as good as buffett so they believe they don't deserve high returns. So I think if you tell yourself that, then subsonciously you will settle for ideas with less upside. Because a lot of investors probably still have the notion in their head that the market is quite efficient. So if they see something that looks really cheap, they subsconsciously assume they are not good enough to see every risk and dismiss it too easily. And i think once you fall for this type of thinking and you reach a certain level of returns, you stop learning. Because your not as good as buffett, einhorn etc right? So you are putting a cap on what you can achieve basicly. I saw this all the time with other poker players. They reached a certain winrate, and then just stopped improving because they believed that is all they could do and were satisfied with that rate. Intelligence seems rarely to be the issue. I mean before buffett made the dumb mistake to buy a textile mill and an airliner. he made over 50% a year in his twenty's. So obviously he wasn't that good back then and he did it. We now have a huge edge over him because we have the internet. Just imagine if you want to learn something about an industry and how it works back then. You couldnt look up quick articles or research reports on roughly how an industry works, and how certain players get an edge. Couldnt quickly look up product reviews. You didnt have enourmous amounts of blogs and websites writing up some really good and hidden value ideas like you have now. No online forums with industry experts discussing products in that industry. You didnt have all the books written on investing and moats (he basicly had to invent it). There was a reason why he basicly begged graham to teach him all that stuff. It just seems so much easier now to do what buffett did back then. You can get all the basic information on an industry at your finger tips now. In the 60's that might have taken you months to do it. And only if you knew the right people. And the market is still very irrational at times and very short term oriented. But ill stop ranting now :D

everytime i see someone with these beats, I think they are suckers. It is basicly a big rip off . You can get headphones for less money with noticable better sound quality that are more durable. Same with that bose crap. Shows again that people are not rational agents like economists seem to think. And funny thing is that if they would have priced them lower, those beats would have been a flop :D .

I did think for myself, and it seems if you look at risk/reward ratio, shorting seems almost always irrational. Seems you either have to write calls (taking large downside risk vs limited upside) or buy puts (having to time market) , or outright short a stock (large downside risk vs limited upside)? Im talking about outright shorting one stock you don't own, and not pair trades or things like that. Only thing that seems worth it are buying puts if there is a definitive time limit that is not priced well into put options. Anyway to get back on topic, last year I was able to buy little stock as I didnt had acces to most of my money in a brokerage account, and didnt have enough confidence in my abilities. And it seems almost always better to wait a bit to see if something better comes a long. And also better to wait off buying untill you are really familiar with a company. Sometimes you later uncover details that kind of ruin your thesis.

Im always suprised how most investors seem to ignore buffett's advice to not short stocks. You either need to time the market, or you need to large downside risks. You take on additional unnecesairy risks without additional upside.

Yeah , I think you need stocks with cash flow (or future cash flows) and catalysts where capital is returned to shareholders, unless they can increase earnings a lot. It seems these hong kong stocks mostly trade on dividend yield. So if they hoard all the cash, price won't really go up.