yadayada

I think he saw it exactly for what it is . It is a only money ledger that solved the double spending problem. What he also said was that it was indeed a revolutionary tech, but not practical to use as money because of the fluctuations. And it is also difficult to value. So he stays away from it. http://blockchain.info/nl/charts/n-transactions If you look, nobody is using it to actually transact with other people, despite the hype. It has the same number of transactions in the block chain then when it was virtually unknown.

I meant, to see if you will get rich by that random email you get, you need to fact check like half an hour. And to see if your doctor is really a doctor you would pretty much have to go through med school. So that is why he needs his license. Big difference. Also a big difference between random people following some newsletter and these guys targetting some demented old lady. I guess the thing that annoys me more is that we are moving too much away from our traditional world where we survived for a long time. Back in the day you used to be responsible for yourself to not get fked over, and if you did you were just a dumbass. But we are moving towards a world where you are less and less expected to take responsibility for your actions. This is all because of politics, helping out some duped group by making stupid laws (like the zero tolerance one in schools) gets you some easy votes. Zero tolerance policy is the perfect example where this is taken way too far. If you get bullied in school, you now cant do anything or else you get the same punishment. What kind of bs is that? You dont need laws and policies for everything, arrest these guys if they target old ladies, and if they send around letters to random people, just let them be. I supose back in the day there was common sense, and sometimes it feels like we are slowly losing that.

come on there is an obvious difference between the two. One relies on common sense, the other one on expertise. You dont have to know much, also half an hour to read if the facts check out, or going through med school to see if your doctor is capable. Huge diffence. agree with above poster, they should determine wether the person was capable of having commons sense. If you are a 40 year old doctor, or you are the local mcdonalds manager, you should just be shit out of luck. But yeah I guess 95 year old grandmothers who have early signs of dementia should be protected. I guess hard to implement that in the law tho.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/0ca06172-bfe9-11de-aed2-00144feab49a.html#axzz2wvgm4BLM Not the one, but enjoyed reading it anyway.

I generate lots of good ideas from blogs. ill start off, listed in random order: dont really get much good ideas out of this one, but learned a thing or two from his thought process: http://expectingvalue.com/ actually he finds lots of good ideas, and his thought process is more advanced then mine. Im gonna steal a few ideas of his i think http://quinzedix.blogspot.de/ Read his lated post, and thought it was interesting http://oraclefromomaha.wordpress.com/ Same as above http://moatology.com/ This guy is not updating much now, but got a few interesting ideas of him in the past http://thevariantview.com/ Not really sure why im still on this one. http://grumpyoldaccountants.com/ and my blog, i mostly recap ideas i like best and that i see elsewhere tho. http://treasureinvesting.blogspot.nl/ Problem is , msot delete their blogs after a short while. And please a short description would be very nice :) . If you have a blog yourself feel free to post it as well.

IRM doesnt look v cheap? will there some very large costs be cut if they convert to the reit? you really need more then 500 million in income for that one to be cheap?

why get married at all. I dont understand this. You have the wedding which is expensive, and then when your other half gets sick of it, she gets to have half your shit. Even with a prenup you probably end up bleeding. It is this ridicilous contract that adds really no value to the relationship at all.

I think emeco holdings is sort of like that. Except it is trading a little bit under liquidation value. Once mining picks up again, it could be a 3-7 bagger roughly.

Isn't the problem that they often lie and make up facts about the company? If you would just say what is in their annual report, that should technically be legal right?

I got lucky that a friend told me to check out Conrads because he knew I had invested in many similar-themed stocks in the past: small, tightly controlled (possibly founding family), owner operator, cheap, businesses with long track records of success. At the time I looked into Conrads It was 2x earnings after backing out cash, and fit the aforementioned bill for the type of businesses I like. a little tip, find investing blogs. Usually every name i research i put in google with 'investing blog' behind it. Conrad for example was written up on several blogs when it was really cheap. You can find alot of great ideas like that.

this kinda shit should be taught in high school. There should be a class like 'the basics of life' or something. Where they teach you how to avoid all the basic pitfalls.

Honestly couldnt feel less sorry for the victims if I tried. You were a greedy dumb pig, and thought you could get rich easy. You took a dumb risk and lost money. Even when I knew next to nothing about stocks I knew better then to throw money at some of these penny stock promotions. Just seems weird these guys get punished for it. I mean you have the responsibility to not do dumb things with your money and to actually check if what they say is true. How are these people suddenly victims? It literally takes like an hour to actually check annual reports etc to see if they are not lying. If you cant be bothered to invest like a fking hour to get rich, you deserve to lose your money. :o

whenever I see people looking for multibaggers I am reminded of tournament players from my poker days. The lure of turning your 215$ buyin into like 250k$ draws alot of players. But in the end you wont make much on average. For something to be a 10 bagger, the market needs to very badly misprice it. That kind of mispricing seems pretty rare. Unless they are like 20m$ microcaps. But then volume sucks, and often your married to your idea. And in most cases there are serious risks, or there is simply little info available to make a very informed decision imo. I rather have something that is almost certainly worth like 100% more right now with alot of visibilyt and pretty high certainty. Then something that only if alot of things go right, with not much visibility might be worth 10x as much. I mean, how am i, by reading a few annual reports, going to know so much more about a stock to determine it really is worth 5 or 10x more then the people who will sell it to me. They have to be pretty big suckers to sell it for that big of a discount.

valueinvestors always love to say that you can only make money with the value aproach in the markets. But i do think there are a few people who are killing it with other methods over longer periods of time. It just is harder. Even Munger agrees with me here. I think that is one of the few things buffet and munger actually disagree over. I mean the 95% figure doesn't say anything. I used to play poker, and there almost everyone breaks even or loses money. But it is a skill game, and it is very much possible to win money with it over the long run. All it says is that alot of people are just idiots or cant be bothered to put in the work.

http://www.routinesandorgies.com/ wow i cant wait to read this amazing book by this amazing Financial Genius/Philosopher/Philanthropist/ Philanderer! he sounds like a guy who takes himself a bit too serious.

it just seems that worrying about wether or not you time the market is counterproductive. Just try to find those cigar butts with like 20-25% cash flow yields, or find companies with very nice moats for a 10% earnings yield. If you cannot find those, just dont invest, and if you do find enough of those, you should be fully invested. Your goal is not to be invested, so dont loosen standards when the market goes up. The upside is that if you do find those cheap ideas in a bull market, they go up much more quickly to fair value. So your returns will be higher because it takes less time.

i dont think he is that popular. He is being tolerated by the russian people. There is rampant corruption, worse then ever. And the economy relies more then ever on oil and gas. For example, his campaign where he is shown playing the piano, riding a horse with his shirt off and doing other macho shit wasn't taken very well by the russian people. It is really difficult to start a small business and the majority of the russian people work government jobs. For now russia is probably safe, and i dont really know what could happen to shake this fragile balance. But russia mostly imports stuff, it doens't produce very much. So with like 7% inflation, buying power is going down rapidly with so much dependence on exports. I think if the economy collapses, then you could have lots of social unrest. And alot of entrepreneurs and smaller businesses fleeing the country, it doesn't look like the future of russia looks that rosy. Especially if some scientific break through is reached where we will rely alot less on oil and gas. But that is probably at least another 10 years away.

I wonder, did you ever forget to write cheers! after a posts?

Seems conrad was a really good idea a few years back where pretty much everything lined up for a really cheap price.

The answer to the original question asked in the first post is "Yes". True there exists politics, there also exists private thieves, gangsters, and murderers. That doesn't change good and bad, nor right from wrong. There seems to be two objections to what I've said. 1) "Investors are no better than cab drivers". My answer to that is yes, but so what? The world doesn't need more heroes, it just needs more people to go from doing net negative things to net positive. If you draw a line in the sand and put everything on one side that is a net positive and everything on the other side that is a net negative. Investors are on the net positive side with the cab drivers and landscapers, not on the net negative side with the con-artists, thieves, murderers, tax collectors, and politicians. 2) "Profits are good is too general a statement". Yes, which is why I qualified it with profiting without initiating violence against others. If you profit by lobbying the government to protect you from competitors or to protect you from being held liable to those you harm, then you are initiating violence to get your profits and are clearly on the "net negative" side of the line. This could be applied to shareholders as well, which is why there are companies which I won't invest in. I want to try to stay away from that line if I can. What about martial arts :( , MMA is bad? ;D Agree with you tho, but i think this issue is somewhat complicated and can't be wrapped up in one nice looking quote.

It seems being general with a statement like that is grossly oversimplifying it. You basicly need to be in some perfect free market fairytown with perfect law for it to be true. In reality there is such a thing called politics. So it is not a very relevant statement imo.

Isn't the stock market an exit place for alot of earlier investors in for example private businesses? Those businesses would have a harder time getting capital if there wasn't the option of cashing out on the public market, and we provide liquidity in those markets.

Not to be lame, but most of the time when you make a profit its good. There are plenty of ways you can make a profit and be bad for the world.

i think with aircraft leasing it is reputation and capital needed. Seems that airliners wouldn't look at cost alone if there are safety issues involved as well. There are like 2 big players in that industry eating up the small ones. When i read about AIQ when packer suggested it, it got me thinking. As I couldn't understand how their margins wouldn't be crushed to almost zero. They lease large medical equipment to hospitals btw. And buffett seems to like railcar leasing. I think size is interesting when it comes to moats, as it obviously allows you to be the lowest cost provider, but how they got there is interesting as well. And when does geography starts to matter, if the equipment is really large and moving it is expensive? You could have a moat in some local state right? Emeco is another interesting one, there you have size and safety issues. Looks that once they captured some local market, it will be harder for a competitor to move in, because of transportation costs of equipment, and some stickiness regarding safety issues and quality of equipment and services added. You dont switch to just any random competitor with large pockets that is a bit cheaper, because that has some risks.

What are some possible moats for leasing companies? I am having some trouble understanding that. Some leasing companies get high return on capital, and others are barely doing better then break even. some quick thoughts: -average sale price of the units leased matters, higher better (but why?) -How much resale value it has -size of equipment leased -possible services being provided next to the equipment that can make a difference -size of total business, in case of shipping containers it provides free brand recognition anyone know a good primer or book for this industry?