rmitz

I think this is the best point. It's quite possible at this point that Buffett keeps going for another 10 years. It probably wouldn't be anyone we've heard of at that point.

My argument is basically the inversion--Ajit Jain is simply *too valuable where he is* to make him the overall CEO of Berkshire, which would take him farther away from the insurance decisions. I also suspect he wouldn't be interested, but that's purely conjecture. Sokol seems reasonable, but I have nothing specifically wedded to him.

So, there are two keys to this situation to me. 1) These kinds of currency destruction scenarios are extremely unpredictable in the endgame, which can be drawn out for many years. I have no idea when that could happen. People have been saying that it was imminent for over 50 years. So therefore.. 2) The people who are claiming that it's going to end "this time" are the ones who are claiming that "it's different this time". I totally understand the overall argument, but I can't say that THIS is the time when we hit hyperinflation or some other major event.

I'm not in a position to do the research, but that kind of money would be tempting just to have a vacation place on the water. Plenty of trouble in upkeep though. That might just get a crappy lake house around here. I wouldn't view it as an investment though.

That the recent surveys have bullishness going down does give me some comfort. And to Myth--the natural tendency of all those stock programs is to bullishness. It sells, it's entertaining. No one wants to watch a bunch of bears. :) I think you'll only see a moderate tone on those programs when the market is just getting completely killed.

I know this wasn't addressed to me, but I think that the amount probably fluctuates based on the current market environment. I think I'd be OK with 2M in open, taxable accounts. I would be expecting to take out 100k/yr, so that should account for pretty significant downturns. My comfort level goes up rapidly after that point, and I'm sure it could be done with less, but that's about where my comfort level is. Realistically, I would have other sources of income (perhaps startups, or part-time work) so it's a conservative number.

There's tons of uncertainty in any stock--doesn't matter what the situation is. You don't even have to be wrong, given the current knowledge and situation. At the very least you have timing uncertainty--which is why you'd want some number of deeply undervalued stocks. You don't know when the catalyst may come. Otherwise, you have the vagaries of life throwing wrenches in the way.

I mostly agree, but there are two factors I think left out of this. One is tax concerns. Sometimes tax churn could tip the scales in favor of holding the lower-appreciating security. The other is risk. Having some portion of your portfolio in the lower risk categories makes sense to me, especially if, as discussed in this thread, you are willing to sell once the securities are overvalued.

I think a lot of us here aren't looking at this not in terms of retirement, but in terms of having the option to drop out of the rat race. The sooner one has the option to do that, the better.

I also find myself grappling with these same sorts of questions, though my portfolio has a different sort of long term/short term bent. The main stock I purchased as an "owner manager" stock is Berkshire, which is mostly via options. Ironically, that's the one where I actually have a firm target range where I want to sell most of the holdings. Everything else has started as a deep value or special situation. However, many of them evolved into interesting growth possibilities, such as ATSG. I am leaning towards the "sit on my ass" approach with these situations, as the tax benefit involved in holding and letting it continue to compound is significant, especially given the continuation of the 15% long term gains rate. There's also value in keeping some of these highly appreciated shares around to use as charitable contributions. Beyond all that, I find determining full or overvaluation for my stocks to be difficult at this point. I'm not seeing that many huge opportunities right now which would make me want to liquidate my holdings; though that is partially because I'm not looking that hard. I have been playing around with small arbitrage situations and what not, and I suspect I will continue that.

People were talking about that only in terms of the health/economics per capita situation, as in the video. Not overall stagnation--clearly that is not true. It's actually not that true in an absolute sense either--it has been going up slowly, it's just that much of the rest of the world has been playing catch up in both dimensions.

What, exactly, were you disagreeing with? I can't understand your point here, since it seems like you're actually agreeing somewhat with your quote.

Obviously I don't have details on exact FICO scoring, but I can say I have a very high score and I pay my credit cards in full every month, and have paid off various loans early in the past. This seems like a correlation argument to me; perhaps it was just that there were a bunch of "new" short loans on there. Even though they were paid off, they had a short payment history, so they don't increase the credit score much. The length a credit account is open *IS* taken into account...that's why old credit cards are more valuable than new ones. But saying you're penalized for repayment...that's really twisting things a bit.

Microsoft has gotten much, much better over the years; a lot of their reputation really comes down to crappy third party drivers, and historical problems with windows 95 and 98 (and previous). Though to be honest, my XBOX crashes an awful lot, probably due to heat issues. That said, I use the mac because I need the unix underpinnings; for me, it's a commercially supported unix, and that is what I'm used to. (I also loved the old NextStep machines which OSX is based on.) The hardware in my experience also has tended to be better, but that doesn't mean there are no lemons; memory issues have been the one problem I've ever had (though that was with some additional memory I purchased for a later upgrade). I also ran into issues with an old machine after it had been upgraded a few times--a fresh install of the OS solved those issues. For PC hardware I used to use various versions of Linux on Thinkpads, but the build quality is not as good now that they're run by Lenovo.

Of the above factors, I think Depreciation is the hardest one to work out. All the others really can be quantified very easily as cash values, but depreciation can be difficult; it is usually better tax-wise to try to depreciate aggressively, but then you may have assets down the road carried at basically nothing which are still providing value. In addition, the replacement costs may be either higher or lower than the original investment, sometimes dramatically, due to changes in the underlying business and/or technology.

Not sure what all the options are here, but I'm going to probably accelerate taking some long term gains unless we hear that the previous cuts are extended. I fall under the 250k cap but it's not clear they will extend the long term gains rates for that class either.

Or people are just being as conservative in their expectations as they should be in their estimates of fair value. :)

I don't buy Apple products because they're cool. I buy them because they simply work better; I can get my stuff done quicker, more reliably, and more easily. The hardware is easier to deal with. Mac OS X being UNIX under the hood is also a bonus for me. Cool is just a small bonus after all that; if I could run OSX trivially and legally on non-apple hardware, I would.

I don't really care for MS products (and don't really use them anymore) but I have to say that a competent sysadmin running windows servers doesn't need to randomly reboot nearly as often as you say. While I personally don't feel it's as stable as various UNIX variants, I have routinely seen multi-year uptimes with modern windows servers, which is OK in a standalone, protected environment.

I know you're kidding, but if they used that 18B in 2003, that would have been more than AAPL's market cap at the time. :)

To be accurate, it's important to note there are things that Apple used to do which they don't do anymore, like the actual Manufacturing. It's not quite as simple as "do it all".

There were better mp3 players than the iPod in terms of features, sure. In terms of usability and design? Nope. Polish matters, and it's not easy. While I vastly preferred some of the other mp3 players available at the time (shout out to the empeg team), they were too complicated for most people to use. There's a place for geek oriented products, but sometimes the hard part of design is knowing what to leave out.

Not nearly as much as I would have if I hadn't needed to learn two lessons at the beginning of the downturn: 1) Don't just invest on coattails (do your own due diligence--always--and try to kill the idea) and 2) don't go crazy with leverage. My results were only +3.6% over that time period because of those mistakes...and very volatile. Though honestly (2) was the bigger lesson. My performance has continued to improve past that end date though. :)

Unfortunately, there's no certainty that it will be coming out with the Retina display in January. But, if it does, I'll be running out and buying 3. :) (I have thus far held off mainly for that reason).

However, it's an asset because you don't ever *need* to maintain exactly the same "quality of life" in exactly the same location. That is a choice as to how you allocate your assets.