mbower

Great quote from Tepper last summer on cash - "I'm not short, because I'm nervous about the liquidity. The market can go up, so that's why I have this cash, which is a great hedge. I'll tell you this: it's the best hedge; nothing else is as great a hedge. You can learn anything you want at Carnegie Mellon, I'm telling you right now, you can't hedge yourself like being only cash at a time."

Going along with Liberty's posts, here's an interesting article in the NY Times about the CEO of a private credit card processing company that will now pay all of his employees at least $70,000. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/business/owner-of-gravity-payments-a-credit-card-processor-is-setting-a-new-minimum-wage-70000-a-year.html My favorite part is this excerpt - "The happiness research behind Mr. Price’s announcement on Monday came from Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist. They found that what they called emotional well-being — defined as “the emotional quality of an individual’s everyday experience, the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one’s life pleasant or unpleasant” — rises with income, but only to a point. And that point turns out to be about $75,000 a year."

There's so much information to absorb. 10Ks, 13Fs, and countless threads. Markets are supposed to be efficient but how do you explain AAPL over the last 2 years? If you're not going to index, how do you generate alpha? Warren Buffet says to read 500 pages every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. And Todd Combs reads a 1,000 pages a day. We have 600 pages on Sears. Either you believe in Eddie and Bruce and you're buying real estate or it's a declining retailer competing against Amazon. Do you buy or sell? Sometimes the easiest decision is right in front of you. How would you summarize some of your highest conviction investments, long or short, in a sentence or two? Here's a couple: IBM - capital allocation story, 2% dividend, growing EPS every year, how sticky is their revenue? shorts (Druckenmiller) say they can't grow their revenues or adapt to the cloud MA - network effect, tollbooth on global economy, % of plastic to cash transactions globally is tiny, will only grow. compounder, paying for growth, PE of high 20s is value given long runway and low cost of capital