yadayada

If he would have stayed in the US, they would have taken the information away from him, and he would be locked up in a undisclosed location. They would use the media against him full force to discredit him every way they can. And releasing all the info at once would cause most people to look over most of the info. And it seems the NSA is mostly used for corporate espionage. Terrorist networks are operating in the stone age anyway. It just seems like they laid the groundwork for a police state with this, and he uncovered it. What are they protecting the country from? Bin laden didnt even have power, let alone internet. The people who they are trying to catch know by now not use facebook to plan an attack. the protecting america argument is a bunch of crap, because 99% of the people will never benefit from that. what you are basicly saying is that he ruined a chance for the US to get ahead by cheating. what I am saying is, he let the people know there is a very powerfull organization that has seemingly unlimited budget, and that no one really keeps an eye on. This seems pretty dangerous to me. If the government plays dirty, why shouldnt he do so?

Also thought it was interesting reading hedge fund wizards. Alot of geniuses making money in different ways off the market were all pretty pessimistic in 2007. But they seem to all be more optimistic now. Or at least little over a year ago. Not that you can read too much into that tho.

Happy new year, and would like to add that this board is awesome. Learned a ton of things already. Lots of smart people here.

Well one thing it taught me is how ridicilously biased people are, including myself. Either you become more biased, or less biased. But its a constant fight, and if your not actively challenging it, then you will become more biased over time. That book by Kahneman explains this really well imo. Learned this the cheap and fast way through poker. You really gotta admit quickly your wrong when you are, or lady luck will kill of your bankroll. To expand on that, there are different stages in learning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence You could probably add a fifth between unconscious and conscious competence. Seemingly conscious competence. Lets say you need a check list of 30 things to effectively determine if something is a good investment (pulling that out of my ass). Alot of people get stuck when they know 15 things. They think, they know alot compared to people that know nothing and get lazy. Their subconscious brain lures their conscious brain into not learning more to conserve energy basicly. If you know what ebitda means, and you know how to read all the financial statements, its really easy to think that you know enough already. That is why guys like Buffett are so succesfull, they are always convinced they dont know enough. Same thing goes for poker, but there you are quickly punished if you start to think this way. This could take alot longer with investing. Also desensitized me to money a bit. I wont get too stressed out if my positions are worth 20k$ less the next day. And there are loads of idiots in every field. A disturbing amount really. But you probably learn that if you operate in any competitive field for a while. And it is mostly because of laziness really. Knowing this helps to be a bit more confident being a contrarian.

yeah it seems with all those stocks out there, there are better picks. MOOCS would destroy paid for education. Especially since this is targetted for older people.

The way i saw SBLK before it was up 60% , was as a company that would be trading at a 4x FCF multiple in 2015 (with rates at 20 year lows). And potentially even cheaper if the market goes up. Since they are good at operating ships cheaply, and have some cash flow from operating third party ships, you always make money on this. And you have the free option basicly of a shipping boom. If that happens they start selling the ships for a huge profit, and they would go from a 200 million something, to a billion$ plus marketcap. Even if that is 4 years away from now, the ships will be worth 4 times as much. Together with the cash flows you get before that happens, You dont need to care taht much about the macro side of it. And either they pay a % in dividend of those cash flows, or they pay it towards paying off the ships (so share holders get more when that boom happens). And it will happen if the market stays bad for long enough. And if shipping rates go from their 2013 bottoms (but not a major boom), that FCF multiple would be even lower. And fwiw, I dont think we get another shipping boom now. That MS report oversaw a few things and a shit load of ships came on the market after the 2008 crisis. And China is pumping out loads of ships, allthough alot of them are low quality. A boom that can come close to 2007 might be another 4-5 years away.

Interview with malone. I think some people here will like it.

you did it for a living? I played cash games for a few years. But kind of burned out with it now (the swings are v stressfull and wear on you eventually), and looking for a fun replacement game.

acw

Used to play poker. To people who played both, how comparable is it? How much bigger or smaller is the luck factor?

Any thoughts on the inverted yield curve? When overnight rates spike above long term rates (especially if this spike is significant), it basicly means that the large players in the money market think there is a good chance the FED will interfere soon. I supose that trick wont work anytime soon tho with these rates. Also interesting if you read that latest hedge fund book by schwager, almost all these guys were prepared for it and saw it coming in different ways. Even one of the value investors. So i guess you cant really call it a black swan event. I read a study that whenever this happened, a recession followed somewhere within 6-18 months more then 50% of the time. If you read the big short and listen to burry you will also hear that alot of large players in the mortgage industry knew what was up almost a year before. That also happened to be when you saw the large inverted spread. Thoughts? Oh and I supose you gotta keep your eye open on what is happening in the economy. I wasnt investing back then, but one thing I hear is that alot of people saw that there was a real estate bubble going on. Getting curious in situations like that could really pay off.

Your life sounds so amazing, 70% return, and sunshine al year around. :o

I usually write up the idea. Forces you to go through a check list. Every time I dont do that I make mistakes. And I sit on it for a while (because I might be overly excited and biased without knowing). Then read some more. You always miss things if you just read them once. But writing it out, and writing up the numbers of the last 5-10 years in excel helps the most by far. If you are forced to put your thoughts about it on paper then all the vague subconscious misunderstandings will dissapear. Or you will find out it is simply out of your circle of competence. Also helps if you want to review for mistakes later.

When do you weigh this heavily? Same goes for when a fund with a v good track record is involved and is buying heavily. I saw a study where on average you would beat the market significantly. My pc crashed and i lost it tho :( . I will try to find it again. I hear people saying that net net investing will yield a nice return, but i have trouble find 10 or 20 good net nets nowadays. So I wonder just looking for insider buying (or not turning most of their options into cash), or funds with excellent long term performance buying should probably yield at the very least some good ideas? With the latter you want to focus on the smaller ideas probably. Examples are ACW with coliseum capital being involved and holding 20% of their fund in ACW. They started buying like crazy after it dropped that much. Im reading all the 10k's now. Looking at the numbers in 2006 and 07, and at Bain capital involved in this in the 90's this looks v promising. ZINC, with pabrai heavily invested in that. (when looking at large funds, you probably want to focus on their smaller holdings. They hold the most upside, or otherwhise they wouldnt bother with a smaller idea like taht) AMNL, Taft holding 25% there, and increasing his stake and being involved. MYGN, insiders are being compensated mostly in options here and not turning large amount of shares into cash. I think the principle here is that when tech companies with smart insiders and like 1bn$+ market caps have insiders being that confident you want to take their side on it. I think the key to a insider strategy would be first market beating funds (over the long run) being interested in small ideas and buying heavily. And When it comes to insiders, they need to buy alot, and they need to be smart and competent. Here is the study : http://lsvasset.com/pdf/Insider-Trades-Informative.pdf difference of 10% annually.

I think security is possible the biggest problem that Bitcoins face. Fact: the average person is unable to keep his computer secure. Implication: the average person cannot ever keep his bitcoins on his own pc, so they have to rely on third parties, but using third parties negates many of the positives of bitcoins: it wouldn't be very different than using fiat money. yeah and there is the problem of volatility. Who wants to use a currency that shoots up and down 50%. Most people on this board are well off, but most people have a tight budget. ANd losing 50% of your money overnight could be pretty bad. And when that problem exists people wont use it as a currency. I havent seen one single good argument against this. It will exist as a currency for illegal things to buy over the internet, and as a daytrading commodity. But not much more I predict. The other day I bought a game of steam, and i was able to use literally like 7 different payment methods. And they are all insanely easy an cheap to use. They are all easier to set up and use in every way then bitcoin. And also cheaper (except creditcard). So it doesnt really fill a need. I think the reason it is so popular now is because people like the concept that the FED cannot fk with it. But once that blows over like 2 or 3 years from now, and inflation stays at a few %, and the economy is steaming again, bitcoins popularity will go down alot.

I saved alot of money already on diapers by holding my shits.

the guy who wrote the AMNL idea I put up has a v stellar record. Had a bunch of others too but lsot them. Now i just read every idea that comes up. WHat you guys think of MYGN? I really liked the write up, bought some and having second thoughts now lol.

You are completly missing the point here. Volatility is a problem because it directly interferes with practical use. You think google would have succeeded if they randomly decided to take down their server every other day? We would all be using bing now. You cant compare the value of a currency with a freaking stock price lol. They are 2 different things. People ddidt have to use google stock to pay for stuff for google to be succesfull. And i claim overvalued because of this: https://blockchain.info/nl/charts/n-transactions Before anyone besides some hackers and online drugbuyers had ever heard of bitcoin, transactions were pretty much the same as they are now. And no you cant just exclude popular adresses. With 2 periods of big exposure this year, almost no one is using it to pay for stuff. Another thing to prove my point is that bitpay only had 100 million$ in transactions. This may look like alot but consider this chart: https://blockchain.info/nl/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd?timespan=1year&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= 100 million$ in volume is literally 4 easy days in july. Or maybe 5 days in january. So if it was like 2 or 3 billion, that would actually show adoption. But everyone i just buying to hoard, and no one buys to pay for stuff. And with 15k merchants accepting it and all the coverage, there is really no excuse for that. My prediction is that this wont become any better next year. Gold has been very successful throughout history but must have been very volatile at the start. So volatility is moot. Transaction volume is a very weak proxy to determine the amount of sales (at the very least right now possibly ever). This includes every transaction, so also me shuffling my coins in my own wallets as part of general bookkeeping, but also moving them to exchanges to sell or trade them (which causes the huge peaks in the graph on the 3 times in history Bitcoin price has risen super-exponentially) and gambling games. The gambling games create a single transaction for every bet made (not just for depositing and withdrawing). It's unfair to use this to determine general purchasing volume as such a purchase only produces 1 transaction in the blockchain. (oh and btw: I'd use this smoothed graphs myself so: https://blockchain.info/nl/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=7&show_header=true&scale=1&address= and https://blockchain.info/nl/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd?showDataPoints=false&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&timespan=all&scale=1&address= ) The sales volume of Bitpay is a much better proxy and still low indeed. It did grow substantially. In the end, Bitcoin is greatly undervalued even if no-one will ever use it as a currency (which isn't true today) because merely replacing gold requires a valuation of $300,000 per Bitcoin. And as you may recall: Bitcoin is better than gold http://evoorhees.blogspot.nl/2012/04/bitcoin-libertarian-introduction.html ) Anyway, I really doubt we'll come to agreement (see how I just repeated and summarized my argument that volatility is fine?). Let's just let time decide who's right, but we both made the points we wanted to make, now others can do their own due diligence if this sparked their interest :) yeah but gambling is relatively stable. And still, its not much of a difference. And neither graphs really filter out transactions to vendors really well. But id say that with trading gone up, gambling probably at least stable, there is not much of a rise. The number of vendors accepting bitcoin exploded, yet you barely see a rise. I supose we will see in 2014 whos right. The year bitcoin will show wether its usefull or not. Regarding gold, i dont think you understand the value of gold. First reason its valuable is because as a kid you read about pirates searching for gold treasures. People say something is a 'goldmine' when they come up with a new way to make money. And it has been used to exchange value for centuries. Untill we see popular childrens books with pirates looking for bitcoin treasures, bitcoin wont replace gold. It is too ingrained in our culture. Just like you cannot ban alcohol, but you can ban weed. Even though weed is worse for you then alcohol, it just has been around for too long. And besides, bitcoin is not 100% secure, gold is. You can lose passwords with bitcoin, or lose your paper wallet on your USB stick, but its hard to lose gold. It doesnt need an infrastructure. It also function of a way against doomsday scenarios. Bitcoin doesnt have this feature. And the reason people used gold back in the day is because they had no other choice. And its value wasnt as volatile as bitcoin. Why do you think they invented paper currency in the end? Much easier to transact with. And no you didnt answer how the problem of volatility is going to be solved. You remind me a bit of those dot com people back in the day when you asked them about earnings. It will just take care of itself they said. Dont worry about it! So if you consider that bitcoin has all but proven it self as a currency, and that most of the value is because of speculators and emotion, id say bitcoin is pretty overvalued right now.

you could hire someone to translate them if the numbers look interesting. There are freelance websites where you could do that easily for a couple 100. Probably under a 100 if they are like 10-20 pages long.

Thoughts on XPEL and FLIR? Im not sure about the moats of both. If their moats are at least v decent then these companies are set up to gain a v nice market share of an industry that has some massive growth potential in the next 5-10 years.

No, maybe a little bit, but I think it is v unlikely we are seeing a large boom anytime soon. Maybe 5-6 years from now. Im searching for companies to bet on when it will happen tho.I think these companies are usually misunderstood, and I just want to make some money on them :) . If you look at the order book, it is crazy. Look at page 10: http://www.aya.com.gr/pdf/stopford2013.pdf . Amount of new ships that came in the past few years is crazy. And when I hear super succesfull macro fund managers like Ray dalio talk about the medium term then it doesnt sound that positive. Over 10-20 years it is probably safe to be optimistic tho. with the amount of supply that came in the last 6-7 years and with the chinese backing their shipyards, your going to need some serious demand to see a shipping boom anytime soon. Historically tho, there is on average a boom every 7 years. Some bad periods last 12 years and some only 5.

You are completly missing the point here. Volatility is a problem because it directly interferes with practical use. You think google would have succeeded if they randomly decided to take down their server every other day? We would all be using bing now. You cant compare the value of a currency with a freaking stock price lol. They are 2 different things. People ddidt have to use google stock to pay for stuff for google to be succesfull. And i claim overvalued because of this: https://blockchain.info/nl/charts/n-transactions Before anyone besides some hackers and online drugbuyers had ever heard of bitcoin, transactions were pretty much the same as they are now. And no you cant just exclude popular adresses. With 2 periods of big exposure this year, almost no one is using it to pay for stuff. Another thing to prove my point is that bitpay only had 100 million$ in transactions. This may look like alot but consider this chart: https://blockchain.info/nl/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd?timespan=1year&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= 100 million$ in volume is literally 4 easy days in july. Or maybe 5 days in january. So if it was like 2 or 3 billion, that would actually show adoption. But everyone i just buying to hoard, and no one buys to pay for stuff. And with 15k merchants accepting it and all the coverage, there is really no excuse for that. My prediction is that this wont become any better next year.

What is your favorite industry that you know more about then most investors? And explain why it might be more interesting then first sight. Its alot easier reading about a industry when you are interested at it. And give us some reading material :) . Mine is currently the shipping industry. At first sight it appears as a boring commodity industry. But if you look further it is actually a pretty exciting and almost zero sum industry. Reminds me a bit about poker. one's 20% return is someone else's -18% return. And ship owners are more traders then buyers and sellers. Its much more then just simply capturing the spread between interest rates and shipping rates. And just like with poker there are a select few who are consistently winning at this and generating fat returns, mostly taken off the dumb money when times are really good and really bad. SOme reading if your interested: good intro and quick read. http://www.amazon.com/Shipping-Man-Matt-McCleery-ebook/dp/B005S4FTHW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387564572&sr=8-1&keywords=the+shipping+man maritime economics: http://anzaliport.pmo.ir/pso_content/media/digitallibrary/2013/4/book15/15.pdf Thick read tho. Post away.

I can't see a one. But to be fair I'll respond to your entire post now. Bitcoin is massively undervalued, so it's not a bubble. It might go down a lot from here still though. That does not make it a bubble. I definitely would not mind being paid in Bitcoin. Although I'd prefer the be paid multiple times per month then to Dollar cost average a little better :) It's more secure than any other store of value I ever used or seen. The decentralization is the thing that makes it secure (so if you start using a centralized approach you know where you've gone wrong). The security is in your own hands, so as a highly educated IT professional I can tell you I have decent security ;) Don't know how to do that yourself and need it? Hire me or someone like me. That's because volatility isn't a problem. If you start something from scratch is going to be volatile. What do you think the prices of any huge ass company of today would look like in the first years after its inception (Think MSFT or GOOG for instance). That's just the way it goes when 1. something truly valuable starts from scratch and 2. The value is actually being expanded as you go. The more massive something is undervalued to more massive the price fluctuations. again your kinda ignoring my points really. First bitcoin is massively overvalued. If you say it is undervalued then you dont understand what the fundamental value of bitcoin is. When it was 30$ it had the same amount of daily transactions at 1k$. It means people arent really using it much to pay for stuff, but mostly to speculate and day trade. So hence its massively overvalued. Everyone is hoarding it, and that is why the price is so high now. Even most bitcoin fanatics agree with this. Bitpay had like 100 million$ of transactions total now. Given its daily volume, and given the fact iv seen a bunch of merchants basicly saying that barely anyone uses it to pay for stuff, it means people dont really use it yet. And at some point everyone is going to look around and realize, everyone is speculating, and nobody is using this for stuff! And then the price will crash to like 20$ again. And second, the whole point is that if it is volatile and risky to use, people wont use it. And so it will not stop being volatile. You need widespread adoption to stop this. You basicly said, naaah google was volatile as well. But that comparison is completly ridicilous because google's value could be volatile, because it didnt get in the way of its use. And really you want to be paid in bitcoins?? What if you have to pay rent. You get paid when they are worth 1k$. And now they are at 600$ and you have to pay your living expenses from a salary that is worth almost 50% less. Im not sure anyone but gamblers want to get paid like this. So again, because I think you dont understand this, most regular people dont like to use bitcoin, because it doesnt really offer a big advantage, and you could lose like 30% before you get to pay for your stuff. And if you just keep dollars in a bitstamp account or something, and pay with those, then why the hell use them in the first place? Why not use paypal. Does exactly the same. And it is actually free to use. And finally alot of bitcoin's usefullness is really only because banks are still inefficient in certain areas. If it really becomes a thread, they can just band together and become more efficient. But yeah i guess these problems will just magically take care of it self. You're just reiterating your previous points without really reading my responses. I could do the same but that wouldn't really be valuable :) If your this sure Bitcoin is overvalued I'd direct you to https://www.bitfinex.com/ to short sell Bitcoin and put your money where your mouth is. You basicly said, well no your wrong, it is udnervalued. And no volatility is not a problem! Without responding to my points, or saying why. That is like only putting the final answers on a math test without showing how you got there.

I can't see a one. But to be fair I'll respond to your entire post now. Bitcoin is massively undervalued, so it's not a bubble. It might go down a lot from here still though. That does not make it a bubble. I definitely would not mind being paid in Bitcoin. Although I'd prefer the be paid multiple times per month then to Dollar cost average a little better :) It's more secure than any other store of value I ever used or seen. The decentralization is the thing that makes it secure (so if you start using a centralized approach you know where you've gone wrong). The security is in your own hands, so as a highly educated IT professional I can tell you I have decent security ;) Don't know how to do that yourself and need it? Hire me or someone like me. That's because volatility isn't a problem. If you start something from scratch is going to be volatile. What do you think the prices of any huge ass company of today would look like in the first years after its inception (Think MSFT or GOOG for instance). That's just the way it goes when 1. something truly valuable starts from scratch and 2. The value is actually being expanded as you go. The more massive something is undervalued to more massive the price fluctuations. again your kinda ignoring my points really. First bitcoin is massively overvalued. If you say it is undervalued then you dont understand what the fundamental value of bitcoin is. When it was 30$ it had the same amount of daily transactions at 1k$. It means people arent really using it much to pay for stuff, but mostly to speculate and day trade. So hence its massively overvalued. Everyone is hoarding it, and that is why the price is so high now. Even most bitcoin fanatics agree with this. Bitpay had like 100 million$ of transactions total now. Given its daily volume, and given the fact iv seen a bunch of merchants basicly saying that barely anyone uses it to pay for stuff, it means people dont really use it yet. Daily transaction volume was like 20 million early this year. So that is exactly 5 days of volume before the two bubbles. And at some point everyone is going to look around and realize, everyone is speculating, and nobody is using this for stuff! And then the price will crash to like 20$ again. And second, the whole point is that if it is volatile and risky to use, people wont use it. And so it will not stop being volatile. You need widespread adoption to stop this. You basicly said, naaah google was volatile as well. But that comparison is completly ridicilous because google's value could be volatile, because it didnt get in the way of its use. And really you want to be paid in bitcoins?? What if you have to pay rent. You get paid when they are worth 1k$. And now they are at 600$ and you have to pay your living expenses from a salary that is worth almost 50% less. Im not sure anyone but gamblers want to get paid like this. So again, because I think you dont understand this, most regular people dont like to use bitcoin, because it doesnt really offer a big advantage, and you could lose like 30% before you get to pay for your stuff. And if you just keep dollars in a bitstamp account or something, and pay with those, then why the hell use them in the first place? Why not use paypal. Does exactly the same. And it is actually free to use. And finally alot of bitcoin's usefullness is really only because banks are still inefficient in certain areas. If it really becomes a thread, they can just band together and become more efficient. But yeah i guess these problems will just magically take care of it self.