yadayada

he actually seems to make some v good points.. Seems like you are ignoring all the good points in this thread. They are compared to tullips because values of cryptocurrencies are massively inflated right now, They are both in a bubble. And who the fk wants to get paid in bitcoin when buying power can crash 50% the next day? Ill add another one. The security is horrible and forces you to essentially use a centralized wallet with an extra layer of security. Since you can brute force, it wouldnt take long to crack the weak bitcoin passwords, meaning, the use of like less then 8 or 9 truly random characters and numbers. With most password protected things it shuts down after x amount of failed tries. But that is not the case with this. So in a way to be secure you have to centralize it. Or you have to use very long pain in the ass passwords. Allthough that is not necessairy in small quantities. But even with like 10k$ you dont want to use words. And they are generally easiest to remember. So there is the added risk that you lose or forget your password and forever lose your money. ALso not a single bitcoin fanatic has adressed the problem of volatility. We have a real chicken and egg problem here.

to be honest some of the ideas are awefull. They should also screen ideas once people are in. I suspect that quality control goes down after the first idea. Sometimes they barely give any info. It would be better if they did one idea, and just screened every idea. If its not up to par then your membership is not renewed.

nobody is using gold to pay for stuff. But they wont ban bitcoin directly, they just make it a pain in the ass to use. How will it get stronger the more they fight it? You forget that emotions dont last, and in the end it needs to be practical. Right now it is not practical. How will this change? What problem will bitcoin solve? that whole 'no more government control' angle doesnt count. Since they control exchanges, they control bitcoin basicly. What if they make it even a bigger pain in the ass to get money on exchanges? They can use excuses like moneylaundering to make this even harder. They basicly control bitcoins lifeline. If it is twice as easy to use a credit card and pay like 2%, people will just do that. Or they use paypal or something. And honestly do you use bitcoin now? I still find it a pain in the ass to use. Let alone random people who dont really care much about what it could represent (ie: most people). So basicly to survive bitcoin needs to work with decentralized exchanges. But then how do you know who to trust? If you crack that problem then yeah, governemnts cannot fight it. Also gold's value comes from the fact that people have been using it for ages. Literally. Just like they cannot ban alcohol, but they can ban weed. If it has been around for very long it will have value. You could argue that the value of other rare metals should be through the roof as well. But only gold is really overvalued compared to its practical use. Bitcoin doesnt have this advantage.

Because it takes power away from central banks and governments. yeah but the banks can so easily kill this right now. it still needs healthy liquidity between fiat currency and bitcoin. Once they ban exchanges and turn the media machine on it, bitcoin doesnt have much of a chance, besides being used on the silk road or speculators. It is already a big pain in the ass to use bitcoin. Look at China, they banned it and the price collapsed. Unless some p2p exchange comes up that makes it easy to find buyers without a centralized system then bitcoin is pretty much doomed. And even that has serious issues because of trust problems. How do you build a system that lets you know with a v high certainty the other party wont rip you off? People compare this to bittorent, but that is a bad comparison. The weak link here is that you actually need to exchange fiat for bitcoins, and untill that is decentrazlied then bitcoin can be easily killled by governments if they want to. They dont even have to ban bitcoin. They can just make it a major pain in the ass to use it, and make it v unattractive as a currency. Just look at the daily amount off transfers. Pretty much confirms that most people dont use it as a currency. Zero growth this year. Imo bitcoin fanatics need to lose the ideological fantasies and get practical, 90% of the potential users dont care about that ideological crap. Untill maybe we see 15% inflation per year.

yeah but it is all based on hype. Im already having doubts about bitcoin. And the price is probably 90% hype. Transactions per day didnt go up from januari this year to now. But for example litecoin had a 700 million$ market cap, and had basicly zero practical use. And was actually a worse product and less secure then bitcoin. At least bitcoin could have some potential fundamental value. There are coins that have a 100 million$ market cap that I havent even heard about lol. If you look at reddit bitcoin then you see how insane this hype is. You get downvoted into oblivion if you say something remotely negative. 100% agree, something that gold bugs always miss. As gold it is useless. Either you buy stocks , or civilization collapses and your better off buying bullets and canned food.

its not really wastefull. Bitcoin could potentially add value, ad its not that much energy. Think of all the people who leave their pc on at night! that must be just as much energy. Or all the people who leave their phone on when they could turn it off. ALso computers make different kind of calculations. That require different kind of chipsets. those ASIC chips are many times better at making just this bitcoin network calculation, and arent necessairily better at other calculations. And because of the network effect I wouldnt hold a basket of bitcoins. it needs a giant moat, and that is being known and having processing power to protect it. None of the other currencies have that. And if the concept of cryptocurrencies completly fails to the point where bitcoins become worthless, I doubt another one will have the potential to become big anytime soon. It would pretty much prove the concept isnt safe. And all those currencies dont really differ in quality anyway. they got it pretty much right at the first try. That said I sold all of mine. The number of transactions per day stayed pretty much the same since the beginning of this year. People arent really using it to pay for stuff. I am no longer bullish on this whole thing, and it just doesnt make sense to me anymore. I also cant make sense of the valuation, and at close at 1k$ it seemed pretty damn overvalued.

im curious how many money managers are on here?

I have one, discussing crap ideas like JCP to death and giving interesting small cap ideas barely any discussion. Is this parkinsons law at work? I looked up a bunch of these multipage threads, and they mostly didnt perform very well over the past few years. Is it because everyone has an opinion about these things?

from a guy with 1100 posts lol *rolleyes*

yeah abbreviations really irritate me lol. Because of your laziness i now have to look up what it means.

its pretty illiquid, and im not fully invested, ill make a post about it in a month or so. It has about a 320 million$ market cap. srry for the tease lol.

http://replygif.net/639 Well I went through alot of net nets with a filter, and generally they are cheap for a v good reason. And not just because the business didnt have a moat. Wouldnt want to hold 10, and wouldnt want to hold 1. If finding them is as simple as a few mouseclicks , then obviously this is now nowhere near as easy as it was even 20 or 30 years ago, when you had to request for some book work with financial statements, and manually go through them. Also being able to just buy up the commpany and dismantle it is a pretty huge advantage. Especially when costs of liquidation were lower back in the day. If there are better strategies out there for a small enterprising investor, why the hell do net net investing? Even buffet didnt advocate it in this day and age. He basicly said, look for small companies in the progress of building a moat if your a small investor now. to have any kind of significant impact on your portfolio you need a basket of them. And finding a basket of decent net nets is really hard. Because it is made so easy now. I know of a guy who bought liquidations in the pink sheets, and did v well. But even he wouldnt touch those without catalyst somewhat quick. I mean nowadays you have the internet, and you can look for great ideas that are misunderstood by the market on a dozen good blogs and sites like VIC and this. It is much easier to really dig into a company. And even easier to find other people who already did before you. They were out there in 2008 and 2009... Im not saying they are out there now. ALlthough I know of one that trades at 7.5 currently with a pretty nice moat and share holder friendly management. Also didnt buffet switch to fisher in the 70's? Why the hell would he do that when he was still pretty small, and really cheap net nets were all over the place? He still quotes graham because he tought him the principle of buying a 1$ for 50 cents, but the majority of his career was not actually net net investing. His method of buying a 1$ for 50 cents just changed. Is that data really different then the regular google stock screener? I looked for companies by that criteria, and couldnt even find 5 good ones. Let alone if i would rank for something by insider ownership. Or was this after a large stock market drop? FWIW if i pick the ones with at least positive ebitda margins, price to book of 0.7 and lower and market caps of over 9 million to 1 billion$ with positive Ebitda margins, I get about 200 results. But alot of them have intangible assets or v shareholder unfriendly. Alot of them are bleeding money like crazy, or are just shady (chinese) in general. About half way through I found 2 that didnt even much upside potential. Would love to know where to find enough to make a basket?

Pretty much every study on the matter disagrees with your hypothesis. Net net investing still very much works. I agree many net nets are hideous companies with poor management, but the strategy still works. Simple strategies based on valuation almost always outperform the broad market over time, even if they are widely know and followed. yeah but you still need to find a basket. Gl with that. Unless you want to go through the pink sheets. But then you really want to find a catalyst. I mean sure in bear markets you can find 10, but why would you if you can buy companies with a moat for a PE of like 7 or 8. Id much rather have those. Just seems with all the opportunities out there, why the hell bother with this outdated strategy. You had great returns when markets were less efficient then they are now. But I searched in the US for net nets, and I could find like 2 good ones. But that would only be a v small portion of your holdings then. I supose it could work in like Japan now. And it probably worked in Korea like 8-9 years ago. Yeah but a much better strategy is to have a watch list of like 100+ good to great companies. And then buy the ones you like when they get really cheap. I would rather put 100% of my stock portfolio in that when everything is cheap, then in some v mediocre company trading at 20% assets. If i can buy a growth story with a PE of 7 or 8 I will make more on that, and it seems less risky.

The whole idea of net net investing doesnt work anymore. Its too easy to screen for them now. In graham's time you could find 10 companies that were trading at like 25% of their assets. Nowadays every net net has something seriously wrong with it. Maybe in Japan you can find a few, but even then the attractive thing is that they are trading at a discount to cash flow. Seems like speculating, your holding some asset that might or might not be worth alot more indefinately, that is barely generating any cash. Or losing money. Your basicly waiting for a liquidation or turn around, or a greater fool bidding the price up.

bitcoin needs a really secure wallet where you dont have to hold bitcoins. But then it seems you might as well use paypal or moneybookers.

isnt singapore sort of a dictator ship? Or like half a democracy where the guy elected stays in power for like 16 years? It works pretty amazing there. I guess if you have the right dictator alot of great things can happen. If you have democracy you will always have mediocracy.

I like to think of the chinese as sneaky. Not really a nation to make big decisions purely on emotion or pride.

What you guys are also forgetting is that we actually had sort of a third world war. The cold war. There was a reason no side attacked the other side, and everyone was bluffing. Here is how a war would go now: Hey 50k tanks and 400k troops marching towards our country! *throws nuke* Aaaaaand its gone. Hey A giant fleet of chinese ships sailing to our nation! *throws nuke* Aaaaaand its gone. It seems superiority mostly means having that airplane or submarine that will be able to sneak a nuke in. And then having enough back ups in case the enemy tries to sabotage them. There isnt really a shortage of nukes laying around.

yeah i thought that was interesting as well. In some industries if you have to modify your goods, it could be cheaper to load them into a container ship and have it done in some 3rd world country, and then ship them back again. Pretty crazy. Imagine if the oil runs out or becomes really expensive before they find an alternative way to power these ships. The world economy basicly runs on the shipping industry.

just bought a bunch of myriad genetics. Seems really misunderstood by the market. Now lets hope the news is positive today!

I think Greenblatt has this charity where he sets up schools and allow kids by lottery. He basicly improved these schools, and average grades went up quite a bit. Education can be alot better and cheaper if you centralize the teaching. Make the kids watch short videos where things are explained by amazing teachers. Also tease them with what you can do if you have an expertise in those areas. Then they get interested. And have the kids practice on these things in the classroom. And just do away with classical teaching all together. 75% of my former teachers were all complete garbage at it. Elon musk compared it to watching a movie in the cinema where you see the best actors playing out those roles vs watching that same play in the theaters with local actors. I personally watched the physics videos on Khan academy, and you learn so much faster and in a more fun way, then if you had to listen to your local boring semi burned out physics teacher. And you can easily skip back when you missed something. If you didnt pay attention for like 3 minutes in class, you missed information that you need to get what the teacher says next. And then you dont get that, and it becomes just a large waste of time. And learning this way is also not fun at all, unless you are llike a really smart future college professor. Those are the types that do well in this enviroment. But ofcourse doing it like this will hurt alot of teachers ego's, so the unions just block it every way they can.

hes also saying oil will bottom out next year below 70$. ANd then peak big time in the years after. I could see how it peaks, but not sure how it could bottom.

Im not sure how a war between countries will happen. But read parkinson's law. He studied how bureacracy gets bigger and bigger. The government is essentially getting more innefficient and more expensive every day. Some day this will come to a stop. When people making 50k a year pay tens of thousands in taxes and dont see much of their money back, you will have uprising. So I think he might be on to something there. Not sure if this will happen soon tho. But the government is essentially a huge monopolistic corporation that is getting bigger and more inefficient. And nothing is making it stop because it doesnt have to compete with anything. It isn't really held accountable. Corporations will go broke, but what happens when a government cannot handle things anymore?

After Obama goes on TV and explains why America has no choice but to go to war and pulls on all the patriotism strings that where installed in every American's brain during their 13+ years of government indoctrination. 60+ percent of Americans (including many here on this list) will agree. Once again there will be American flag stickers on every pickup truck and the military will have a field day recruiting all the lower class kids right out of high school. Talk of bringing back the draft will turn serious. While no one is paying attention to anything but the war government at home will increase in size and scope in all kinds of ways.... Even many years later after the unmitigated disaster is years in the past, the veterans will be honored as some type of heroes for their "service". It's the same old story. The same old song and dance. We will be fooled again. --Eric Yeah but there has to be incentive. Middle class has gotten very rich and much better informed over the past 90 years. I cannot see an incentive in the immenent future for attacking a large country. It would completly destroy the economy, and there are enough liberals to block this. I can see how the US can attack some shitty small country, but not another first world economy. There were huge incentives before world war 1 and 2. You dont have that now. Maybe if the US falls of the cliff tho, but then it seems more that China has incentives to attack the US. But then you have to explain to your people why its good to get half your country nuked. And im not sure if it can get bad enough in the US to make it worthwhile for china. Did you know 2500 nukes were exploded between world war 2 and now? Both countries have super advanced stealth bombers, and it would be a question of time before one got through and manages to nuke like 8 huge cities in a row. You didnt have that in world war 2 (except for japan, and see what happened there). This would also make land on land battles vs two huge countries impossible. And once you win the war you would have a giant problem supressing all the guerilla attacks and rebuilding your economy. So there would have to be a waaaay larger incentive to start a war now then 60-80 years ago.

probably because the corporate ladder favours sociopaths.