Jump to content

mjohn707

Member
  • Posts

    290
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by mjohn707

  1. They seem to have a lot of debt and not really high cashflow. Why did you decide to invest in them? I really like their watches so I would really love to know. My stated reason was to buy at the lower end of the historical P/B and P/average earnings and all of that, but clearly I was just looking for a 25% loss in a market where everything else has just flown up With the rise of smartwatches I can't see them having a great future. What would be the catalyst for the company to go back to it's higher valuations over the last 5 years ? I just wanted to have some more context to your investment since I am not able to find out how it would go back up again. I would suspect you'd likely need a rebound in earnings to get closer to historical valuations, which may or may not be in the cards. This issue of the smartwatch is certainly a complication, and probably a bigger risk at the lower end of the market, but I'm just not convinced that it means that they can't do well in the future
  2. They seem to have a lot of debt and not really high cashflow. Why did you decide to invest in them? I really like their watches so I would really love to know. My stated reason was to buy at the lower end of the historical P/B and P/average earnings and all of that, but clearly I was just looking for a 25% loss in a market where everything else has just flown up
  3. This particular psychological bias is actually one of the easiest for a value investor to overcome on a personal or internal basis, because in addition to possessing great skill and wisdom in nearly every modality of life, we are also natural stoics completely unaffected by the emotional torrents that bedevil others. And yet one of the biggest issues we face as value investors is not so much our own internal emotional state, which we have of course under effortless and preternatural control, but the curious emotional reaction the practitioners of our art can inspire in others, that infallibly seems to be the very negative emotions, disliking and hating, that we are discussing here. And it is this curious reaction or response that our practitioners engender from others on a social and societal level that is perhaps most worth discussing, to explore what causes such reactions, and to consider what we can do to limit such reactions from others. On the first point, as to what exactly adherents to our discipline say or write when communicating with others that seems to engender the disliking/hating tendency so strongly and consistently, I have carefully examined the reasoning and judgment displayed in my own interactions with others, and I have been completely unable to find any defects in my own logic or arguments. In fact, when I have in the course of a discussion about say politics or race relations referred to the points made by others as “deranged” or “crap,” that has inarguably been the case, even after a second reading and review of the opposing arguments considered in the most charitable manner possible. It can be difficult for practitioners of value investing, that most noble of all disciplines, to understand the great deficits in understanding and conception that most others labor under who have not been enlightened by our principles, and even more difficult to comprehend that some people possesses minds so weak and inflexible that they are unable to see the truth presented there right in from of them, or at least not far behind a stream of our invective and personal insults. As to the second point, what we as practitioners of value investors can do to limit the unfortunate reaction of others to the undisputable truths we alone possess and communicate, this is of course a difficult question. After careful consideration of the indisputably high-quality and second and third-level thinking that practitioners of our discipline produce, and the unimaginable level of ignorance and ill will that most others participating in the public forum seem to possess, it is difficult to imagine an easy solution to this problem. It is perhaps likely that our only recourse and solution to this fundamental conflict is to redouble our own efforts at communicating our own points in longer formats more insistently than ever, and by being even less willing to compromise or read the work of others in any sort of charitable way, and to level insults at others with even less hesitation than we ever have before. And until there is some sort of method or mechanism to prevent the less illuminated from participating at all in such discussions or perhaps any discussions, this is the only remedy that seems available to us.
  4. aren't these all quotes from "The Death of a Salesman"? It also seems to share some of the same terrible stage instructions as well. What a coincidence! Sounds like something out of Dale Carnegie The American tradition of these books apparently goes back even further than Carnegie, but you’re not the first to notice the similarities: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/13/arts/if-willy-loman-read-books-hed-have-read-these.html
  5. aren't these all quotes from "The Death of a Salesman"? It also seems to share some of the same terrible stage instructions as well. What a coincidence!
  6. In the previous thread on incentives I shared an antidote or remedy that I found helpful for combating the effects of that particular bias, so I though I’d share an anecdote or example in this thread instead as per our original instructions. And it just so happens that I had an Uncle, who sadly passed in a tragic way, who made his living in sales during what some might call the golden age of the salesman, when relationships and the personal touch of the occupation were still so important. And I can remember a few things he used to say about the art of selling that stuck with me to this day, and seem to exemplify the bias in discussion perfectly. I can recall today, almost like it was yesterday, that he used to say that “Personality always wins the day,” that “The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead,” and that you only had to "Be liked and you will never want." Finally the line that really sticks out, and that I often heard him mutter to himself over and over when he was suffering from one of those great sadnesses that seemed to overtake him periodically in his later years, was that it was “the wonder of this country that a man can end up with diamonds here, on the basis of being liked.” He would often follow that line by yelling out “Attention must be paid!” while flickering the lights in the room off and on. And in truth my uncle Willy was only a passable salesman despite his apparent deep fluency with this particular physiological bias, and he probably was just not able to get a great deal of traction due to his lack of knowledge of the lollapalooza tendency, which we will no doubt get to eventually in our discussion. And it’s also perhaps true that while my Uncle was liked, he was really never well-liked.
  7. Incentives are incredibly powerful, but there’s one failure-proof way to beat this one. What I like to do at say McDonalds when they ask me to “supersize” my dinner, is to fully and deliberately explain the super response tendency to them, which sometimes might entail a quick remedial lesson in marginal costs and marginal pricing beforehand. In any case, I’ve tested this a few times times and I’ve found that in most cases after five to ten minutes of my explanations the drive-thru attendant not only relented with their spurious extra charges, but often waived the purchase price of my meal entirely. It’s hard to know how much the cars honking behind me contributed to any of this, but experiments in social science are difficult. In any case we can agree that the knowledge itself is an incredibly powerful antidote to this deep-rooted bias
  8. What I like to do is have massive unrealized losses to offset any gains I might have in other names. If you need tips on how to get these sort of losses just PM me for details/stock tips
  9. I know lots about stocks that lose money, and if anyone wants to know anything about those I’m your guy
  10. kraven, yeah that names sounds familiar, but it's tough to know if he ever really existed or was just a legend. I've heard recently, and it's hard to know what is true, two contradictory rumors about his current whereabouts and activities, and I'll present both here for the sake of fairness and in pursuit of the absolute truth: The first thing I heard was that he had taken an unpaid internship with a millennial hedge fund manager, and was working on transitioning his investment style to a high-growth “compounder” approach. The person who relayed this to me is notoriously unreliable however, but perhaps it contains at least some kernel of truth to it. The second possibility, and again perhaps this is just rumor or hearsay, is that he had holed up in some sort of river valley or perhaps gulch, that name of which I can’t remember, with the last holdouts of the deep-value approach, and planned to return someday in some Arthurian way to reestablish that approach to investing forever. In my own judgment, I find it difficult to judge between these two as they both seem equally probable, and of course you can never discount the additional possibility that I’ve been misinformed entirely
  11. All you have to start doing is wearing a lot of gold jewelry, maybe get a gold day date, buy a few tracksuits, and answer that question by saying you work in the "family business." And I imagine you won't get many more questions after that, and problem solved
  12. It's a bit early right now but with higher unemployment, it will be a great time to upgrade the talent without breaking the bank. Every team and company has dead weight. I’m pretty sure I’m the dead weight though. How long do you think before they find me? Once they find out, escape via a promotion and you are good for a couple more years. Good advice, I’m due a bump anyway
  13. It's a bit early right now but with higher unemployment, it will be a great time to upgrade the talent without breaking the bank. Every team and company has dead weight. I’m pretty sure I’m the dead weight though. How long do you think before they find me?
  14. Can you name your top 3-5 that fit this description? Sorry!. Do your own DD SD His stock picks go to another school
  15. I went from 170 to 220. Is this normal, or is losing weight during covid the same as when we self-report our returns?
  16. I'm still going to go to Ruth's Chris, a little graft won't stop me Ruth's Chris is trash, I'll take Sparks, Keen's, and Peter Lugers (I have to deal with the grumpy waiters) any day. :) We don't have that stuff in flyover country. Also Ruth's is sort of indigenous to the region That was me pulling a Marie Antoinette Sorry I'm strictly a first-level thinker, like the wise Howard Marks wrote about
  17. You know it started as a scam years ago, Chris Steakhouse, the predecessor I should say not the family that make it successful later
  18. I'm still going to go to Ruth's Chris, a little graft won't stop me Ruth's Chris is trash, I'll take Sparks, Keen's, and Peter Lugers (I have to deal with the grumpy waiters) any day. :) We don't have that stuff in flyover country. Also Ruth's is sort of indigenous to the region
  19. I'm still going to go to Ruth's Chris, a little graft won't stop me
  20. Parsad is exactly right, there are people that must marshal their courage in the current situation, and people that must marshal their capital, and we must be careful not to undervalue those that marshal capital in this critical time. And as the great bard and moral voice of England said, "They also serve who only stand and wait," although perhaps we can revise the one word to sit instead of stand to take into account our particular circumstances as investors. And unbelievable we do this without applause in the evening
  21. When the accounts of these difficult times are written one simply cannot entertain the notion that among the heroes that are lauded, the brave physicians and nurses on the front lines of this terrible disease, the devoted essential workers that kept the basic services and goods of our society flowing at no small risk to their own health, and the energetic organizers, wise scientists, and selfless charitable persons and organizations who acted to aide those that were most affected by this terrible situation, value investors will stand tall, perhaps even the very tallest among these other giants. And every person would agree that when the call went out, value investors answered, not necessarily with financial assistance as the discipline has wisely chosen to defer those benefits to society for a later date, but with a golden river of knowledge and a veritable shower of golden ideas and analysis on how best others should direct their energies for our mutual benefit. Our contribution and gift of knowledge and right thinking, while perhaps less tangible than what others might have contributed, and granted occasionally only in hindsight and after certain of the principal events of this tragedy had already transpired, will no doubt one day get due appreciation and appraisal, and we shall no doubt be fairly judged by history. And what other tradition, and what other community of people was more prepared for this crisis than we were, not in some rude financial aspect as the occasional investment loss is totally unpredictable and unavoidable, but in a more important moral and intellectual sense. Only the value investor has long specialized in platitudes, a veritable balm of Gilead in these trying times, and by dint of having no unique specialization of knowledge in any particular subject has uniquely and perhaps counterintuitively developed almost an universal expertise in nearly all subjects and topics, which luckily has either included virology and epidemiology or perhaps understood those topics by virtue of omission, as one might guess the shape of a missing puzzle piece by the image of what is already assembled. And what discipline has access to the mental model, the most useful of any mode of thought, which even the lowest among us might employ in the multiple dozens, to bear the weight of the mental calculations necessary to instruct all nations and all of society in how to battle this scourge, and to summon the strength of will to see the task completed? Only the value investor can do it, and only value investing can see us through. And was our discipline content to hoard this knowledge and to withhold the gift of illumination from a darkening world? Absolutely not, and we have saturated the airways and wires of this world with our august counsel and considered missives to an almost sickening degree, which we can only pray that the less enlightened will heed. Of course our discipline remains principally contemplative by nature by virtue of comparative advantage, and the practical work must be for other hands. The critics and other small people might complain that our own record in our own narrow field of investments seems to display a collective history of poor judgment and often drastic underperformance over a multitude of various benchmarks over a great deal of time, but the critic must remember that it is the man in the arena that counts, and if our own faces are not exactly marred by sweat, dust, and blood, we have at least been as inconvenienced as most, or at least as affected as most by our admittedly advantaged circumstances because of our particularly sensitive and empathetic natures. It has almost been an unfair burden, which in addition to making investment decisions our discipline has been forced to study and understand all things and to plug the vast gaps of ignorance in nearly every other field of human endeavor because of the tremendous incompetence everywhere else, and if our own narrow performance in one little area has been unsatisfactory, it is because we have served society too broadly and ourselves not enough. We are selfless and humble, likely among the most selfless and humble that have ever lived, and have done this world much service at no more that fair to high-fair pay, and it is no great wonder than we shall be remembered in the exact manner that we deserve.
  22. Those letters are floating out there and he mentions names he owned and what percentages. And certain of these names have not done great this year, and don’t seem to have recovered as much possibly as the market either. I haven’t done the math or anything, but it doesn’t seem like it’s been a banner final year
  23. I bet many investors would have preferred he was 100% BRK at this point I didn't mean to rag on him specifically - brutal turn of events and obviously he had no way to anticipate in Q4 what would happen - but more generally. I'd be curious to see the number of funds that are at least 15-20% BRK, I think it'd be surprising how many there are. No particular argument there. All I’ll add is if your final investor letter mentions Guerin’s record, it’s not the greatest sign perhaps
  24. I bet many investors would have preferred he was 100% BRK at this point
  25. well played, good sir. All fun and games now, but I’m going to go back and report all your posts to the moderator if I lose money in any of these names
×
×
  • Create New...