bargainman
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Posts posted by bargainman
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22 hours ago, rkbabang said:
The percentage of people who play video games all day that make millions doing it is quite small.Yeah I was pointing out extreme cases, but esports and video gaming is a huge industry and only growing. Virutal money, virtual worlds etc. It was a big driving force for CPU and GPU development as well before LLMs
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-20-most-valuable-esports-141434303.html
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On 1/12/2024 at 9:06 AM, ValueArb said:
There are 500 men in the US who are paid $200K a year to just practice with the 1,200 men who dress for game days in the NFL. Then there are 3,000 people who work as trainers, coaches, medical, front office and support staff for those teams, at very high median salaries. Then there is the NFL itself, with thousands of other high paying jobs organizing and managing games, broadcasts, operations, drafts, etc including 120 full time refs making $200k/year. And that's just a single sport.
Anyone who tries to simplify the US economy down to Finance, Tech and the rest bullshit service jobs is doing it to avoid dealing with the real complexity and strength of our economy. If I stood by the bathroom line at our local NBA games, and asked the men in line what they did for a living, I guarantee I'd find out about a number of jobs that I'd never heard of before, and some making insane amounts of money. Of the friends I know who have become wealthy, they all did it in incredibly different ways.
1) Placing and caring for plants at offices and restaurants, employs 40-50 people from account managers to accounting.
2) An SaaS that insurance agents use to reduce the work of bidding out small business medical coverage by many hours, created a half dozen jobs.
3) A mobile apps company that securely stores passwords and other private information on your phone/computer, created about a dozen jobs.
4) Another mobile apps company that securely stores passwords and other private information on your phone/computer. Parlayed that into a mobile software development company where he hired 30 people.
5) Studied to be a chiropractor, pivoted to mortgage broker, built an office where he employed a half dozen brokers working for him (until the market collapsed), along the way poured all the profits into buying single family homes to rent and now owns 30 of them.
6) Specialized into product marketing, led key marketing initiatives at various tech firms until he retired as head of mobile at Ebay.
7) Bought a ranch in Colorado with money he made as a male stripper in Vegas and started mining aggregates from it making him many millions of dollars and bought a five million dollar home in Scottsdale he flys back and forth to on his private plane.
8 ) Moved to Phoenix as a bricklayer to get away from cold Detroit, he and his wife saved every penny until they could buy his own property, used the income to buy more properties, died at 86 owning a good amount of downtown Sedona, Arizona.
9) CFO for tech companies, was the key man in getting a very important one sold for $20M before it went bankrupt (thank you forever Doug), took over as CFO for a Healthcare VC where he added value to every single investment they made by helping them manage costs and investments intelligently, retired to live in a massive home on top of a mountain overlooking downtown Bend Oregon while he fly fishes every day.
10) Led marketing teams at tech startups, when his last one was sold he started his own to sell organisational tools to Mac and iPhone users, creating about a dozen jobs.
11) Took bets as an illegal bookie for decades making millions. Stiffed other friends of mine for hundreds of thousands when he realized they were sharps.
12) Parlayed a few thousand dollars into roughly one million by playing poker, and arbitraging other opportunities in NFTs, sports cards, etc.
13) Parleyed a few thousand dollars into at least a half million by playing poker, ended up playing at the highest levels in Bobby's Room, then rolled it all into creating a startup to sell healthy breakfast drinks where he just raised $20M. Employs over 100 people now in production, marketing, testing and foods research.
14) Made hundreds of thousands of dollars playing poker, when boom faded he took a web development bootcamp, now makes six figures in web development.
Obviously these people are all well above the median in terms of income. But some of them have also created a lot of six figure jobs.
Ha that's a great list. Years ago I read that the entertainment industry was the USA's greatest export, more so than manufacturing.
I know lots of rich people but lots of poor and struggling folks as well, so I never take things for granted. We are all fortunate to have time and money to invest.
I think a big challenge will be just the mathematical nature of inequality. Once you have 10 million, you can can sit on your butt all day and just earn about a million a year for doing nothing. The next year it's 1.1 million and onwards. Got a billion? ok, you earn 100 million a year for sitting around.. and so on. You can claim that those folks might build jobs but I don't think that always happens especially for passive investors. But time will tell how this shakes out.
I agree about the dirty jobs/construction jobs. I was just talking with folks in Vancouver about how hard it is to find trades people, plumbers, electricians etc. No one wants to do those jobs apparently, and the ones who do only want the big contracts with large construction projects. It'll be tough to automate those things with robots etc....
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On 1/12/2024 at 1:28 PM, Spekulatius said:
On to the next calamity.
My wife told me flu season is pretty bad. Nurses have to wear masks again.
Yup wastewater is showing covid high spikes again. Lots of friends and coworkers sick all over.
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Well I try not to be violent in any circumstance. I've been trading options for over a decade, everything from butterfly spreads to iron condors to broken wings, diagonals, collars, calendars, delta neutral, you name it. The most I've made is from holding great compounding machines and living my life.
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yeah apparently Gates would have 1.2 trillion had he held
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-could-trillionaire-today-163852659.html
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On 11/17/2023 at 1:59 AM, Xerxes said:
^^^^
Here is the actual podcast. As it happened I listened to it several days ago not because of the comment about AI, but rather because it is Brad Gerstner speaking. This guy is my hero. Upbeat, willing and able to make an impact, outside the investment world. It is nice to listen to someone who is on the same wavelength as you.
You seem him coming on CNBC now and then. Big bull on Booking (for a long time), Snowflake and others.
On 11/13/2023 at 10:11 AM, ValueArb said:We've been eliminating work for ten thousand years and somehow there is more work to do than ever. Robots are just another in a long line of automation machinery that increases our productivity and output.
And there are infinite amounts of available real estate, in space. And in some ways vastly superior real estate, with nearly infinite solar power, flexible gravity levels, controlled environments, etc. At the $100M/ton payload costs of the Shuttle that's just a fantasy, at the $3M/ton payload costs of SpaceX it's intriguing, once we reach the $300K/ton cost level that a fully reusable vehicle like Starship is capable of it will start the gold rush.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6-hkbarMKw
"Overpriced in the short term, underestimated the long term impact" <<< that is the story of technology
wrt "we've been eliminating work for ten thousand years"... yes but the rate of innovation in some areas keeps increasing... it used to be that new innovations might wipe out the old/retiring generation. now people are getting wiped out of careers and jobs potentially every few years. The societal impact has one big giant experiment TBD.
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On 11/13/2023 at 12:49 PM, rkbabang said:
Sure some people will just lock themselves in a dark room and play video games all day,
Some of those are making millions doing it
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On 11/20/2023 at 3:23 PM, Munger_Disciple said:
What are you talking about? Bezos is an engineer. He has dual degrees in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from Princeton. People have no clue how hard that is! Just getting a BS in one of the two disciplines is damn hard; getting dual degrees in both is almost unheard of. And he graduated with a 4.3 GPA! He is off the charts smart.
yeah I can't find the original post, but here's an article describing it.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-presentation-2011-10
"People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs." LOL
I would add "aliens with 500 million dollar yachts" lol
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On 11/21/2023 at 7:18 AM, dwy000 said:
While state based wealth is out, what is most interesting is that, probably for the first time, every one of them is self made and there isn't an oil baron or real estate person on the list. Usually the list is filled with family dynasty wealth or the kids of oil/real estate barons.
Well you've probably seen one of those market or revenue visualizations ... it's pretty apparent why.
Also with regards to "it is still possible to come from nothing and make a fortune. "
yeah sure but you gotta be really lucky. everyone on that list probably has an IQ above 140. then on top of that you gotta have the willingness to want to work hard and make a difference...
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Any top takeaways from this book?
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On 12/18/2023 at 5:41 PM, cofabmd said:
Mr. Housel, having written The Psychology of Money, a book that has sold around three million copies worldwide so far, invests all his money in a Vanguard total market ETF. He says he lets compounding do all the work.
that's kind of amusing considering he used to work for the Fool, a stock picking service. But I always did enjoy his articles.
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I have been listening and watching his podcasts and interviews for a while. Boy that guy's smart.
He definitely has a interesting, more grounded approach to longevity, which makes sense given his MD background. It will be interesting to see if some more of the "out there" approaches gain more traction. Whereas I appreciate his protocols, I just can't really exercise for as long as he does, at least not while I have all the responsibilities I have. Which sounds strange given that he's probably got a lot more responsibilities than I do, but maybe not.
Some takeaways from interviews I've heard from him
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he starts from the place of "these are the four horsemen of death", let's go one by one and try to prevent them. I forget all of them but off the top of my head
- metabolic disease - insulin resistance and diabetes and those sorts of things
- cardiovascular disease - by far the largest and least predictable... he once said that his medical professor asked them "what's the number one predictor(?) of heart disease?". after many people suggest things like chest pain, radiating pain, etc... the professor said no it's "death". it will be interesting to see if the diagnostic tools here get better other than just looking at lipid levels all the time. he talks about APOB as the goal standard for that, and apparently has a protocol including statins that knockout his risk
- cancer - other than some of the obvious ones ( alcohol, smoking) it's also kind of unpredictable but, again if you catch it early there's a much higher chance of survival.
- neuro genitive diseases
- he also actually mentions car accidents which are pretty high on the list, so be sure to take whatever precautions you can there, and get a heavy car!
he doesn't really go into life extension much, but a lot of that has yet to be proven.
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he starts from the place of "these are the four horsemen of death", let's go one by one and try to prevent them. I forget all of them but off the top of my head
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Is there a standard place to find warrants for sale? The last warrants I bought were AIG and maybe another bank stock back after the crisis, but they always felt like one offs.
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Whereas in the past I found trading options a interesting distraction, I don't think I ever found them particularly profitable other than just simply buying leaps on occasion to make sure I didn't miss out on the upside in a market I didn't trust on the downside. And when I say 'particularly profitable' I mean after all of the time finding credit sales, managing positions, and then paying the short term taxes, never mind the bid ask spread/slippage. I mean it's kind of a fun math exercise I just don't think it really consistently adds that much value.
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S&P or total stock market fund.
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By the way regarding all of the construction and manufacturing, I wonder how much the inflation reduction act has been having an effect. It's a huge investment if it sounds like a lot of it is going into stateside manufacturing especially around green energy related enterprises.
I'm not sure how reputable FT is, but this is definitely an interesting overview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfaubxeS5HU
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5 hours ago, ValueArb said:
I just quit an app developer job where base pay was $170k in the US, + stock options, + up to 20% annual cash bonuses based on employee/company performance, with great benefits (all jobs remote, paid healthclub memberships, free biometric sleep trackers, lunches every fridays, counseling, dental, medical, vision, quarterly onsite parties, etc).
The point is there are a huge number of great paying jobs we aren't even aware of that have been created by, or increased in numbers, because of outsourcing. And the increasing wages for the average worker are very clear in our ever rising median real income levels.
Well there's all sorts of jobs that have been created that one would never have even imagined. would you believe there are people making millions of dollars getting a ball and running it to the end of a field? and then there's also people making not quite as many million dollars trying to stop those people from getting the ball to the end of the field
heck there's even folks making millions of dollars playing video games! And get this, there are people travelling around the world living like royalty, making their living by telling others how ... They travel the world living like royalty for under 50K/year. I mean I'm not even kidding. https://www.youtube.com/@GroundedLifeFinances/videos
Anyway with regards to someone's comment about dermatologists, I read somewhere of that the main medical body of the USA very specifically limits supply because they don't want too many doctors because of well you can imagine... Supply demand right?
There also seems to be an undercurrent ifyounger folks leaving the us a for some of the european countries because they are tired of the work work work culture and would rather work to live than live to work.
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55 minutes ago, Paarslaars said:
Some more Jan '26 17$ PACB calls.
what is your thesis on this?
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I usually like my coffee just black plain black... no hints of caramel, fruit, fluffy stuff...
But I gotta say that nespresso nocciola ain't bad.. not bad at all...
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On 12/28/2023 at 5:59 AM, Castanza said:
Depends how you transact. If you’re doing it right in chain with BTC it’s expensive. If you’re doing it on Lightning network it’s negligible.How does a lightning network work?
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My post was a reaction to the "complete idiot" moniker, which clearly he is not.
That said I know many many brilliant people who would not take stock advice from
that doesn't mean they're complete idiots though.
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Looking at my records I purchased FFH shares 2007-2013.
So basically during the time where they looked like geniuses for making a billion dollars by purchasing credit default swaps... but then promptly lost that billion dollars by purchasing puts on the equity markets that had already dropped by fifty percent. At the time when Buffett was making deals left and right.
Or at least that's how I remember it.
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On 12/28/2023 at 6:50 AM, Sweet said:
What’s the ticker? Are you talking about PKW?Yes PKW
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The reason I ask is because many years ago I decided I would invest with Buffett and his acolytes in value investing. I purchased Berkshire, Fairfax, Markel, Leucadia(now, Jeffries), fairholme, wintergreen even.
Other than Berkshire, they have all significantly underperformed.
30 Year Portfolio
in General Discussion
Posted · Edited by bargainman
Have you watched Tony Seba's recent video on projections for the next 5 - 10 years? Going to be wild.. It's worth watching some of Ray Kurzweil's presentations on exponential change as well. Things start so slow but once they hit that curve... acceleration...