rmitz
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Posts posted by rmitz
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I have really had very little problems with IB's customer service. I can get someone online for chat immediately if there is an urgent issue. The main issue I have is ongoing fees, which have caused me to move the most inactive accounts (mainly smaller tax-deferred accounts) elsewhere. I went with Tradeking for these accounts, but it sounds like I should have explored larger firms and negotiated the fees.
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It has been something I have been meaning to do for a while. I like how Buffett has been saying from the 70's that the returns are likely to shrink in the future. Here it is 40 years later and he is still saying it.
That was the first thing I noticed when I started to read them yesterday.
To be fair, they have. The downward slope was just rather more gentle than he expected.
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The same procedure costs $106,385 at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services."
Crazy.
Slightly off topic, but stuff like this makes me think that places like China, India, etc are going to be responsible for some awesome cost savings across a range of industries during the 21st century.
A bit like the story (true, as far as I know) that during the space race NASA spent 1 million dollars developing a pen that could write in a zero-gravity environment.
The Russians took a pencil.
Not that that is generally representative of American industry by a long shot, but when I see needless expenditure somewhere that tale usually pops into my head along with Enron and a few other stories from throughout global history.
That story is not true.
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
Summary: private industry did the research, sold the pens to NASA cheaply, and sold a bunch to people who wanted a "Space Pen". As well as the russians, since there were real drawbacks with pencils in space.
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I keep watching lots of things that I've been involved with, but two of the ones I'm watching most closely right now are PVD and PKX. AAPL may be interesting too.
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Feed Wrangler. I like the simplicity, though it needs a couple features. I mainly expect to use it through other apps though, so the interface isn't something I cared about too much.
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Is it just a coincidence that the people who invested their life savings with Buffett during the early years never splurged and led a simple life?
Contrast this with lottery winners, a bulk of them declare bankruptcy after few years
First one, i dont think there was any restriction on investing in HF like it is now. I think if you want to invest in an Investment partnership now, you need to have $1mm or high earner. During 50s-60s, i guess you would these middle class earners as your clients.
Second, lottery winners dont earn money over time like buffett's clients. Plus there is survivorship bias with buffett's investors. I am sure there are so many who held BRK for couple of years and sold it for various reasons.
Of course, calculating inflation that 70k then is like 500k today.
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It seems to me that continued decline in the Yen is pretty certain. Anyone have any experience owning YCS (2x leveraged short yen ETF)?
It has seemed obvious for 10-20 years. Beware the widowmaker. :)
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I read the website mostly through an RSS reader. One idea that would be helpful to me is to put the name of the poster on the feed for the post.
The RSS view doesn't seem to show me the author of the post.
Currently I see something like this:
Title: Re: I Worry About "The Shot Heard Around The World"
Source: from Corner of Berkshire and Fairfax
Post.
It would be helpful to see
Title: Re: I Worry About "The Shot Heard Around The World"
Source: from Corner of Berkshire and Fairfax
Author: whomever
Post.
Actually, just use the atom feed, it shows the author and should be compatible with any modern rss feeder. I don't have the URL handy but a quick search on the board should find it.
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Just an FYI. Whether a person has logged in or not is not really private info in bloomberg terminals. Any user can find that out. User profiles even used to have phone numbers.
Whether they are logged in while you are logged in is not private. But, when they last logged in is indeed private - as far as I remember.
Yes WarrenWatsa, you are correct. Which answers the question asked by Valueorama. It was a privacy breach...the reporters should have known that...unless it was sanctioned by Bloomberg. Cheers!
If that is true, though, by having a bloomberg terminal connected all the time, it would be very easy to set something up to log whenever certain people were online or not. There's no logical difference.
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I wound up changing my options to the Performance model. Fully loaded, every single option. Might as well do this well if it's going to get done. Decided to go with paying cash instead of financing it -- keep my debt/income low for when I shop for a home mortgage.
Crazy week. Up 20% in 3 days and now this impulse buy.
Congrats. I think it'll be a ton of fun. :)
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So, I personally feel we're just as easily in the early stages of the rise here, as having any sort of "shock" with a turning point. I have lost significant money in the past trying to hedge the overall market with s&p puts--I was more than a year early, so I don't play that particular game.
In terms of individual stocks, I agree with Cardboard completely. I also agree that it's a consistant problem.
I have not changed anything in my directly-managed portfolios except I have only bought into special situations with new money for a few months. In my 403b, I cannot invest in individual stocks, and I just recently cut back my markets allocation by 10%, and new funds are just going to stay in cash. As things rise more I may cut back farther, but as I said we're just as easily early as late.
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Gives a certain perspective on aging, doesn't it?
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I expect to be there as well.
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Thanks for the thoughtful response, rmitz. You bring up valid points.
I will respectfully disagree about marriages though. I feel that people give up way easier now. Perhaps it's my rose tinted glass (and perhaps because I didn't live in the time), but it seems to me that people use to try a lot harder to keep their marriages intact. Happiness is a choice. It takes sacrifice from both parties. Now, it's so socially acceptable that people, many times, aren't willing to sacrifice when they can simply trade in their spouse for a new one...kind of like a car.
There is an element of that, particularly what we see in some politicians and movie stars. Liz Taylor had been rotating marriages for how long, though? Henry VIII? I'd say getting into new marriages is always something people have wanted to do, but most couldn't, for a variety of reasons, starting with the ones I previously mentioned (economics, or not strong enough to deal with societal pressures).
Happiness *is* a choice, definitely agree with you there. With the right compatibility it shouldn't feel like sacrifice very often, and I am personally very lucky in that area. I also had the luxury to not get married for a while. I don't think moral problems are the core of the issue--or maybe it's exactly the opposite of what people think. If you date a number of people, practice safe sex, never think you "need" to get married, then you learn what you can and can't live with, and your chances of a good marriage goes way up. Be well educated, your chances go up again, and so on.
I don't like the "old" viewpoint on marriage because I have seen too many cases of marriages where at least one of the parties is abusive and/or unstable, where it is damaging to the other person (and/or their children), and it's hard enough for them to get away even when they *can* get a divorce, because of emotional abuse and baggage. This issue has a very long history as well.
Our culture would be better of if most people didn't feel that getting married and having kids is just "the thing you do."
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I've always been confused by the notion that one system or another is destroying our morals. Looking back at history I don't understand how anyone can say things are getting worse not better...
Have you looked at what's on TV? Divorce rates? Single and unwed parents? Acceptable drug use?
A book that talks a bit about the change in culture is "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking." She goes in some depth about how, at one time, we were a culture of character (Buffett's generation and prior). Doing the "right" thing was championed. Now, we are more of a culture of personality (people like Kim Kardashian). Where we value what gets are attention compared to what's intrinsically motivating.
I don't see a lot of value in unhappy marriages. Divorce rates in the past would have been much higher if it weren't for two things: 1) a huge stigma against it, and 2) marriage having far different purposes than it does now (i.e. economic rather than a relationship). Single and unwed parents have much the same cause.
TV may in fact be a moral decline, but a different one than you may think; I think it's the willingness of the corporations and producers to make whatever crap that sells to make money. The almighty dollar rules above all. In our recent past, the evils were simply different; let's not whitewash things. It wasn't that long ago, historically, that women were nothing but accessories to men, with few rights as people. Do I need to go into slavery, racism, and so on? Look back at chicken and dog fighting being much more common. Not that these things are gone now, but the areas, the emphasis was different.
The main reason people think things are so awful is sensationalism, and a rose-tinted glasses look at the past. Drug use--depends on the drug. Alcohol has always been a hugely popular drug in this country, and it has much more harm than does something like cannabis. We tried prohibition before and it failed, we were just a bit slower this time since it isn't *quite* as huge a section of the country that uses weed.
Harder drugs do have bigger negative effects, but we have gone about solving the problem with guns and prisons rather than trying to rehabilitate and remove the need for the drug. Guess which one would be cheaper and more effective?
Overall though, crime is in a multi-decade downtrend, though you wouldn't think that if you watched the news. There are real problems in this country, but we *have* come a long way, in fits and starts.
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For my kids I've set up two accounts each; a Coverdell (which I fund) and a regular taxable account. When they have earned income I would look at a Roth. All of these are at Tradeking--I can't say signing them up for the esoteric accounts was the most straightforward thing, but after they're up I have no complaints. I was able to associate all the accounts with my login ID so I can access them via my account.
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Cracker Barrel shareholders have certainly done well, with shares up nearly 50% over the past year. During the same period, BH shares are down 10%. That's quite a disconnect considering that BH, whose market cap is $462 million, owns $386 million worth of CBRL shares. Each share of BH represents ownership of nearly 4 shares of CBRL. While BH's book value has increased significantly over the past years, the share price has not followed; yet anyway.
I'm seeing BH's market cap at $543 million. Do they really own that much CBRL?
I would like to say that Biglari is starting to reap what he has sown (a lack of trust). But it's probably just the usual market randomness.
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Yes, it won't affect a great number of people, but it kind of completely obliterates what a free-market capitalist society is fundamentally based on. I don't know about Romney, but I do know that Eric is the one who absorbed all of the risk. He could have very well lost everything...he accepted the risk, and then he received the reward.
Now Eric's IRA should be taxed if he passes it on to his children, but I don't understand how it could be taxed in his hands or his spouse's. I would much rather they increase the estate tax on assets outside of the principal residence, rather than tax someone's IRA or other retirement account. Silly rule and very disappointing! Cheers!
I don't like it either, but I really doubt it will happen; it's political posturing and meant as a negotiation point to be given back (I think).
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I must say that I reacted badly to hearing this, but after running the numbers, particularly if the 3M is indexed to inflation, it does not look like something which will be very common; it really seems like a pot shot at Mitt Romney and his engineering of his kids' accounts with dramatically undervalued private equity holdings.
Let's say you started at 21 with two earners and magically were able to contribute the maximum to your 401ks and Roth accounts. I'm simplifying a bit; I'm going to assume that inflation is 3%, and that contributions are allowed to increase at the rate of inflation (not historically true). I'm also going to start from today's contribution numbers, which are 17500 and 5500 per person per year. This also does not count employer contributions which can vary a great deal; the maximum employer contributions per 401k are 33,500* per year per person; that's a quite rarified level indeed if you can get that.
At age 65, with a 10% growth rate (something many people would be very happy to get!) These two earners will not max out the inflation-adjusted 3M cap (though barely; 11% and you're above the threshold with three years to spare). If that's actually supposed to be 3M per person, then you've got a ton of room left.
While there are people out there like eric who have done exceedingly well, I really don't think this is actually targeted at them. I hope one day I'd be in that crowd. :)
Regardless, I doubt this will pass.
*Edit, corrected employer max contribution*
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following on from another thread, how about:
Mr. Buffett, you have said in the past, in your letter regarding the stock market in 1999, "you have to be wildly optimistic to believe that corporate profits as a percent of GDP can, for any sustained period, hold much above 6%". Corporate Profits are now greater than 10% of GDP--how should we think about this? Do you think there will be a compression in profit margins?
Does anyone have data on the percentage of corporate profits of all corporations vs the GDP of the earth? That would eliminate a rebuttal. GDP also has some things in common with those accounting fictions Buffett was talking about in his letter this year.
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There are tons of better RSS readers out there on every device. Google hadn't improved Google reader in years. Not surprised they're ditching it.
Well, the reader website had not been glitzy, but it has always been very fast and very reliable, and a large number of client applications use Google Reader's API as a way to synchronize state. Personally I do more of my reading in Reeder than any other application, so I'm waiting to see what they are going to use for a backend, and will likely just switch to that.
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Finally, I must admit I didn’t understand very well what you called the 3rd scenario: could you please elaborate a little bit further? I got it presumes some sort of US$ devaluation… Do you really see that?! The US$ has already devalued for 10 years… and it is a much undervalued currency, if compared, for instance, to the Euro… Exchange rates must make economic sense! The cost of life in Europe cannot be higher than the cost of life in the US, when the average US citizen earns 20% more than the average European citizen… A further devaluing of the US$ against other major currencies would wreck havoc around the world, at least surely in Europe!
I just want to point out that in the US, a great deal of prices/cost of living have been kept lower by keeping worker salaries lower, particularly at the lower end of the service economy; much lower than comparable salaries/benefits in Europe. Huge differences in vacation time, the US workers normally have no health insurance, etc., etc.
Also, regarding Warren and Prem's different views, I think I've said before that it's readily explained by a different time scale.
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Tesla put options.
1- They are losing a lot of money.
2- Management says that they are going to lose money (read their press releases carefully). They will not be GAAP profitable next quarter, cash flow will be awful, etc.
3- Imminent catalyst: the DOE loan is due in around a year.
4- Valuation is high.
5- The options, while not cheap, aren't crazy expensive.
Almost everything you can ask for in a short position.
Regarding the loan: http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/early-repayment-tesla’s-atvm-loan
Or is that a different one?
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Not sure if you have an axe to grind, or just think I'm greedy or something with this project. My hope is to get this information out to the widest audience possible. For some the thought of paying the website cost yearly is too much, but a one time book purchase is more stomachable.
In terms of the site I'm satisfied with where it's at, but I'm not exactly rolling in cash. Given the time and effort I've put into this thing it's probably more of a non-profit once you consider my time investment. There really isn't much money in the book, I just want to do this to get information out there. Maybe I'm crazy, it's possible, I also write an investment blog where I give away ideas constantly. Some investors hold all their cards close to the vest, I've gained more value by throwing everything out for free. But I love digging into these unlistedstocks. I first and foremost built a site that I wanted to use and then gathered the information to get it there. There is a charge because this information is valuable, at times very valuable and rare. Yet it's also a very niche thing. There's a reason there have been two publishers of the Walkers Manual, and it's not around, it never made money, the audience just wasn't big enough. By going digital and self-publishing on a book I've eliminated most costs, making this feasible.
In terms of contributors the guy typing this post is the biggest by far. I have some, but most subscribers are consumers, which is what I expected. I have some plans with the book, I'm not worried about stepping on toes, I think subscribers will be happy with what they receive.
Please don't misunderstand; I have no axe to grind at all; sorry if it appeared that way. But I do spend a fair bit of time dealing with some areas of intellectual property (though I'm not a lawyer). All you need to make that work properly is to note in your agreement with contributors which indicates there are more ways their input/data/contributions may be used.
Retail Anecdote
in General Discussion
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Ridiculous. But kids will look for any differentiator they can find to construct "in" groups and "out" groups--it's natural and unless the parents talk to their kids about this sort of thing it's going to happen.