yadayada

This story needs to be watered down a bit, and then turned into a movie. The colorfull characters are perfect for this. Kind of like that credit crisis movie with kevin spacey.

such a waste. Probably moved from the hallway to the fridge to bedroom most of the time, too busy to be there most of the time.

Another interesting fact is that investors who outperform the market pretty consistently, dont cause the stock price to go up. You could have easily ghosted buffet in the 90s with quite a delay and emulate his performance. If a guy has been right many times, and does 25% a year for a long time, shouldn't that cause the price to shoot up almost right away when the info gets out they bought a certain stock? If all the sellers would be rational, they should now charge a premium whenever someone wants to buy after this superinvestor bought it. Yet the price can stay flat or go down for an entire year. But when some stupid quarterly earnings call comes in badly, it can affect the price badly? Even though you could easily reason this is only temporarily. That looks like a pretty irrational, or at least short sighted market. Same argument goes for insiders. I saw a study where you would outperform the market by a pretty significant margin if you bought after insiders. Yet it doesn't really affect the price much. I guess ego is the biggest cause for this innefficieny.

before all my important decisions I masterbate. Highly recommended.

aww you chicken

The concept of eliminating one's ego, to allow flow of creative innovation and ideas, sounds like a great value and a good principle to instill. His quoted comments and described attitude seem more like Scientology than merely the words of a man encouraging objective discourse. ??? I think it means that when throwing around ideas you can call your boss an idiot if you can make a good piont. And that if you start acting butthurt you get fired. And that there are no politics, no managing big ego's etc. Sounds like a pretty fun enviroment to work in really.

I have a tax question for you :) . Let's say one earned most of his money outside of his european home country. And now doesn't want to pay really high taxes on it (probably more then 60% at this point). Would living in cyprus, and opening an offshore company somewhere in Hong kong be a good idea to be completly safe? To let's say invest it and spend it from that account, and pay no capital gains taxes? And would asking about a lawyer in one's home country be a good idea? As it might be in a grey zone. Not sure if they are obliged to turn you in, and I am kinda paranoid about this. Because I really don't know what is legal and illegal at this point. My last tax advisor couldn't even tell me how much I had to pay, because I made it gambling. The legal alternative would be to give most of it away to the government :( . Thx

well this is a value investing forum? The check list posted above you is usefull for any value investor. Unless you talk about day traders as well. I guess a value check list is useless there. I do think a check list can be dangerous if your too strict with it tho. Sometimes if a company is cheap enough, it can easily fail on alot of levels probably. But still worth buying because the market is too pessimistic about the risks.

Like to add: Dont invest in something where both the bear and bull side make compelling arguments, and where you find it hard to prove either of them wrong. means you should throw it on the too hard pile. And so should the bears and bulls of this company if they have common sense.

@infinite, thx for the analysis. What if Flir was trading at 12-13 PE levels tho? It looked interesting to me at those prices because it seems infrared will be going into the main stream with prices coming down so much. There are alot of practical uses for cheap infrared, and they seem positioned to profit from that a couple of years down the line. It seems one advantage is cost because of scale right? If they manage to increase their market share above 60%, shouldn't that give them some kind of cost/quality advantage? Even when chips are no longer being improved much technically. Which seems to also be part of their edge. And interesting about the buybacks, You would say that the CEO would be aligned, owning about 70 million$ worth of stock.

@infinite: thoughts on the moat of FLIR systems?

Didnt realize I sounded that bitter :) . I guess the game wears you out after a while. Was fun while it lasted.

If done responsibly, what's the difference with drinking? If it was legal, you'd probably see a lot more "respectable" people do it. Right now we only see the eccentrics because they don't give a crap what others think. The peple who care what others think because they are respectable either don't do it even if they'd like to once in a while, or hide. I don't smoke, and I don't drink much, but I don't see why one should be illegal and not the other, and why addiction should be treated criminally first rather than as a public health issue. I'm not arguing against legalization (even John McCain is starting to come around to legalization), just against its use. I wouldn't want the CEO of a company I owned to be a pot smoker and I think most people would say the same. Pot can make you lazy, but it cannot make you better at your job. I'd prefer it if the CEO didn't drink alcohol or eat processed/GMO food either, but those are socially-acceptable behaviors that have more to do with fitting in/being social than anything else (for alcohol, at least). What can I say? I guess I'm a traditionalist. I don't mind if the masses are allowed to smoke pot -- please clear the jails for more worthy inhabitants. But I wouldn't respect my father if he started smoking pot and I'd be hesitant to go into business with a pot smoker. It probably comes down to the values I grew up with and the values that people whom I admire share. Still, at least in my circle of friends and my parents' circle of friends, I'm not aware of any ambitious person who smokes pot. I would prefer my CEO to not eat and sleep as well. And then drop dead from exhaustion at age 40, right after I sold the skyrocketed stock. But I guess you cant have it all. Didn't steve jobs smoke pot?

Used to play poker online mostly. If you think there will be another pokerboom in the US, your probably mistaken. I saw a topic on VIC on it. Seems like the online poker market is heading for a cliff, because every country who regulates only limits their players to themselves. So not much traffic and games to go around. And there are so many part time pro's now who destroy all the profits by quickly killing all the fishes. And who dont play each other. game theory dictates that the more efficient everyone plays, the less they make off each other. If everyone would play optimal, only the site would win through rake. And rational players would quickly quit the game. Poker sites try to limit this by separating player pools. But that doesnt work very well. Too few fish to go around now, popularity of the game dwindling. And if some company with a almost non existant profile in this market is claiming that they will make alot of money off that, they are lying or clueless. V difficult to get into without spending large amounts on marketing, and with no big pro's you barely make a dent. Most of the business goes to pokerstars with their big name pro's that attract fish.

Actually, it is quite the contrary. It is known to be much more damageable to the brain during your teenager years, when you are still growing up. It would be much less damageable if people started only when they are adults! Anyway, I think it could be comparable to alcohol, but what I have seen is that it more often leads to more damageable paths (tougher drugs) or higher frequency consumption (but I don't have any data about this, just empirical observation with my bad own sampling!). You would have to do it alot tho. I seriously doubt smoking weed every 2-3 weeks when your 16 is really hurting. Agree doing it twice a day is probably bad.

Im just curious, how much risk do you have when you are with HSBC hong kong? And have larger amounts of money there if something happens? Im a complete fish when it comes to banks

people in the netherlands actually smoke less pot then people in the US. For some reason when it becomes legal, it is less cool all of a sudden. And personally I get paranoid and weird most of the time when I do it now. I think people love talking about it, and doing it is actually kinda overrated. Also think that it is not dangerous to try when your below 18. Unless you have some sort of mental illness, or other problems. Actually most people try drugs a few times, have fun with it, and then dont do it again. The risks are really overblown. Personally I had the most fun with it when i was 16-17. One time we got extremly baked to the point we could barely walk, and went to a movie, I ended sitting backwards in the chair, staring laughing and talking to the people behind us half the time. Never was this fun again with weed after that.

This seems sooo easy to do if you have connections and manage large amounts of money. Especially if you dont babble about it on the phone. Kinda disturbing really.

If we have a break through in battery power and solar, which both dont seem unfeasable, it would largely replace natural gas, coal and oil. I think another argument is that you risk not making money on those oil assets. What if there is a break through in 40 years? And oil drops like a rock. Technology moves crazy fast, especially if we have a few billion people in the east now also getting shots at higher education. millions of people thinking about solutions, seems likely enough break throughs will start to happen soon. Seems v likely we will have another Einstein within the next 100 years, with so many people having acces to information now. And remember, scienctific discoveries is also a function of chance. Alot of breakthroughs were discovered by accident.

apparantly alot of people pay for HD porn. Or for those webcam sites. It is still tens of billions of $ large.

You have any experience playing poker at all? Seems like an awefull idea unless you have experience and at least 6 figures earned on your name.

seems like bitcoins are perfect for the porn industry tho. That could possibly be v large. Any ideas what caused current rally? Thought it would crash with china out, instead it goes up lol. Crazy markets.

Thought EZpawn was interesting , but a few buts: what will FCF be like when they are not expanding like crazy? If you add Loans made, Loans paid and Recovery of pawn loan principal through sale of forfeited collateral That is a negative number. Is that because of growth? Because it should be positive right? Also arent you worried about shady management? You can clearly see what happened at ABM, incompetence and non alignment with shareholders. And why is revenue suddenly going down this year? Why did they over expand in mexico? They seem a bit careless, only caring about earnings that wont materialize into FCF because they have to shut down stores before they can go into harvest mode. Also their rates are much higher then ABM's rates in the UK for example, almost twice as high. You could see some regulation risks here. As there is alot of room for downside pressure here before they cannot operate anymore. Seems taht all those risks kill most of the upside here.

The hour glass looks interesting, Luxury watch retailer with amazing management, highest inventory turn over , best margins etc. Trading at 7 times earnings. But I cant get comfy enough with the possible cycle of the luxury market.

the woman who was a whistleblower about some bad stuff in the CIA about how evidence for WMD's didnt exist and the CIA knew about it, got murdered by the media. They completly destroyed her life, and tried to discredit her every way possible on tv. And you couldn't even remotely call that treason. If you do this from inside the US, the media will largely ignore you before your locked up in an undisclosed location. The only way to do it was to do it from outside the US.