rmitz

Dang, you pipped me on the medium link--I think the distinction between commercial and residential supply chains could be key here, and the fact that there may not be much headroom to trivially increase output...

I bought some ATSG for the first time in many years. It was down ~50% from the high.

Agreed. Same situation - mortgage, car payment, refi'd student loans, and any other loan i can get below 4%. We have the entire world to invest in, and the hurdle is 4%. Well, you won't go broke doing this, but when we actually hit a serious downturn, I can say from experience that it really feels shitty to be in the situation with your equity decimated and all these loans hanging over your head. It does work out in the long term (assuming you haven't done something really catastrophic on your investments) but it doesn't feel good at all.

2016: 45% over 10 years: 15.9% My large legacy ATSG position wags the dog this year. I haven't done much for a while now and all new funds are invested conservatively due to lack of time.

Gotta post on this due to all the negativity. I certainly have had some issues over time with IB but they are by far my favorite broker. All of my personally managed large accounts are there. Their main drawback is that they have been working in certain spaces and are not focusing on a lot of these deep interface issues. Also they do not handle niche account types because their philosophy is so heavily tilted towards automation. Over time they will support more and more, and we've already seen this. The most recent example is them taking over IRA administration from their previous third-party advisor and hopefully allow better integrations over time. I love the smartphone two-factor authentication--they've finally gotten that working smoothly. I've not had any trouble with configuring the reports interface to get done what I need to. I've actually had good experiences with customer support in the past, but this definitely seems like another area for improvement. I have had the annoyance with the IRA conversion as I do a yearly backdoor Roth IRA, which is much more painful than via other brokers. But while it's annoying it is straightforward. (If they would just let me keep open the traditional IRA as an empty stub account with no fees it'd be just fine). I think a lot of it comes down to your particular needs and how much they've focused on those particular needs so far. I wouldn't open any small accounts there (<100k) for example, unless you're going to do a lot of trading.

Jurgis - how were you able to get a mortgage with no fees? Appraisal, underwriting, title insurance, legal fees - all mandatory as far as I know. Would love to know your secret. In reality they eat the fees so it’s effectively lowering the interest rate slightly.

It's not quite as insane as it looks. The difference is in that Coke had continued to push more, more more via advertising of all sorts, even when Americans drink vastly more than they really should anyway. There's no problem in Europe as far as I saw where you don't really have fountain beverages (or at least no free refills) and you often get a traditional 8oz serving. Here in the US, often 20oz is now a "small", 32 very common and even 64 available. Should it be illegal? No, of course not, that's a straw man. There's really no issue with making it available in general. I think a lot of this was incentivized by the emphasis on the # of 8 oz servings metric. Even Buffett used to tout this metric in the annual letters. This created vastly larger drinks in the US. It is entirely possible that with a different focus, economically Coke could make just as much if not more money with a higher price paid for fewer servings--I'm speculating on this point though.

Just to add to your whole post, it’s probably not necessary to add back much in deferred taxes because the holding period is so long, which opens up many opportunities for essentially deferring the taxes indefinitely. Just look at what happened with the Gilette stock purchase. Gillette -> P&G -> Wholly owned Duracell - the capital gains ended up deferred indefinitely (I am not an expert but this might actually lead to a big book-value decrease—gotta ask an accountant). The US tax code is purposefully tilted in favor of those with long holding periods, especially very long ones (though the latter is much less obvious at first). Another option that could happen under new management, would be directly spinning off the shares. The individual owners would become liable for the capital gains, but at least under current rules, this would be a significant savings. In addition, any individual can still keep holding, and eventually could pass on the stock at a stepped-up basis to their heirs, essentially tax-free (up to the estate exclusion). That’s without even getting into trusts and stuff like that.

But what is the Total book value. Is it: 15.5 billion / 6.4% = 240billion? Is so, the mktcap is 330 billion. It seems a much bigger gap than the per share numbers? Your calculations makes no sense. Total book value is equal to total shareholders equity ex. non controlling interests [M USD 255,550][Annual Report p. 37] The missing piece of his calculation is that 15.5B/6.4% = 240B, but that is the starting point for last year, so you re-add 15.5B, which matches your number.

Sorry. I sometimes forget that the government can solve all problems. Please continue. Nobody said that. But apparently some people believe that any government involvement is evil. Yes. It is like a cancer. "Just a little" involvement grows year by year until it overwhelms everything else. People like to say, we should reduce the cancer over here and have a little more cancer over there, or we need a different type of cancer, and proclaim that they are for small-cancer. I like to just come out and call it what it is and advocate cutting it out completely, saturating it with chemo or radiation, then watching closely to make sure it never comes back. No.

I use TaxAct to get an idea of what my taxes are going to be, and I seem to recall when playing around with it last year that the CSV export from IB worked quite well. TurboTax online might support that as well.

If the apple pay with the watch actually worked (mainly that it hardly is usable anywhere I go, and even then NFC readers are not consistantly working) it would be more convenient. It’s…not near that. But in most cases it’s faster to use a swipe card than cash for me, between cashiers who aren’t that good with it anymore and trying to get the cash back in order in my wallet and so on.

If you max the 529, you probably shouldn’t worry about not getting financial aid. There will be too much money for them to get any need-based aid anyway.

Both time weighted and regular returns come out to 11.5% this year (USD). This is the only account where I invest without restrictions. This brings down my long term annualized return to about 13% since 2006.

That’s because a car crash is an accident, and a shooting is terrorism.