Jurgis

I don't remember: is the college-saving vehicles tied to particular kid? If they are, then tough. (If not, then it's easy for you: save for 1.5 kid ;) ). What else can the money be used on? What are the penalties if you don't use it for college? Edit: also what's your other tax advantaged account situation? Are you maxing everything else?

Re: Heartland. Yet another QQ against indexes. The problem with most of these complaints is that the authors are just underperforming. And not just against the "overvalued" (perhaps, perhaps not) market weighted indexes. And not just last year. http://www.heartlandadvisors.com/Products/Mutual-Funds/Heartland-Select-Value-Fund - they compare their performance against Russell 3000 Value Index. That's a crappy index. And they don't even perform well against that. Compare their fund against RSP (hey, I don't want to compare against overvalued SP500, I give them an edge by comparing to not-market-weighted index) - they suck. Compare it against PRF - they suck. It doesn't matter that their arguments make some sense. Ultimately, customers withdraw money because funds are not performing. (I did not review every single fund they run, they might have better funds, etc.) It's also annoying that complaints keep coming even when SP500 is flat. Active managers complained 2012-2014 because SP500 was running up too fast for them to catch up. Now they complain even in the year when SP500 was flat. So is the conclusion that they can only outperform when SP500 tanks? What if they don't? Will they say that they will outperform during next bull? Look, I underperformed SP500 last couple years too. It's not my fault, it's those pesky evil index chasers, just give me your $$$$ now, I'll manage it based on "value investing" for next 10 years, I swear, KKTHXOK?

I've become much more relaxed since I started driving a tank. ::)

That's possibly true. I was not writing about costs. OTOH, IMHO the costs are often unoptimized by kids (and parents) the same way majors are unoptimized. Like you said "don't study art history", I can say "go to instate public school, live with parents, get part time jobs" to optimize the costs. A lot of people don't do that. Edit: clarified sentence above.

WEBs opinions about politics are not outside his circle of competence. Considering that he is wrong everytime he opens his mouth to talk about such things I would disagree with you. Oh, yes, I know that you would disagree with me. I did not expect anything less. And actually WEB was not wrong about anything in politics so far. :) Hey Jurgis, you have to admit..., well anyway, I will admit that if the situation was reversed my opinion of his circle of competence on the matter would be reversed. If WEB was an anarchist and always said everything I agree with when speaking of politics, I would be saying that he was some kind of genius and that we should all listen to him. I suspect you would be questioning his competence on the matter and saying that he should just stick to investing. Possibly. :) IMO, Buffett has a good understanding of the political situation, he offers pragmatic solutions that have a chance of going through and working, he acknowledges the difficulties for even pragmatic solutions (from both sides of the bench). This in my opinion marks him as competent in the area. However, you are right that I might consider him incompetent if most of what he proposed did not agree with what I consider to be reasonable solutions. I might even consider him nuts if he supported some irrational beliefs that some wildly successful politicians (who obviously are "competent" by the definition of being wildly successful) do. Take care

I think the generalized-university-education vs. focused-needed-for-profession-knowledge is neverending discussion. :) There are arguments on both sides (and usually neither side changes their minds). :) Where I have worked ( in CS ), we had zero people who never graduated. IMHO, a lot of self educated CS people have giant holes in their knowledge (e.g. algorithm complexity) that bite them and their projects. Good ones figure out the issues and self educate, bad ones... well. Regarding writing - actually I was going to post that this is something that "worthless" humanities degrees teach, which is actually valuable: reading, analyzing, writing, communicating with others. Even in investing you may get people with humanities degrees that do well because they know how to read, how to analyze, how to write. My advisor has said that writing proficiency may affect your career more than your thesis topic. I don't agree with him totally, but there is some truth in what he said.

I think this is a very interesting subject, wrote something once about it once: http://alphavulture.com/2015/09/02/how-hard-or-easy-is-it-to-outperform/ But I do think you are mostly wrong. You don't have to be a genius, but if you just have average intelligence you're just not going to be smart enough to recognize the bullshit from things that are a good idea. I think I agree with Hielko on this. However, I think that outperforming overall is likely to be very hard. Probably <1% (maybe even lower - 0.1%?) of active investors outperform, probably <10% of this forum outperforms over 5-10 years. With such low selectivity even over-average intelligence won't be enough. Likely you'll need intelligence and the "talent" or "physiological" (sic) makeup. I could start a poll for 5 year and 10 year outperformance on the board. However, there will be a huge survivorship bias.

Can you say who you consider to be current Outsiders and invest into? Thanks

"The Outsiders" likely suffer from survivor bias and possibly selective selection bias. This does not diminish of what the Outsiders from the book did. But it's likely that identifying Outsider in advance is harder than people think.

What are good jobs/careers that average Joe and Jane can pursue based on "on the job training and/or other non-degree training"? Is this really something that can cover a significant percentage of middle class? I doubt it, but I'm willing to suspend my disbelief if there are wide ranging good examples. :)

I think a lot of people believe that other people should close their accounts and start indexing. 8) To be fair, writser never said which side of the coin he is or should be on. This was not a dig at writser. ;)

WEBs opinions about politics are not outside his circle of competence. Considering that he is wrong everytime he opens his mouth to talk about such things I would disagree with you. Oh, yes, I know that you would disagree with me. I did not expect anything less. And actually WEB was not wrong about anything in politics so far. :)

Bull...crap. College is still the best salary enhancing option available for majority of people. Of course, a lot of people select crappy majors, but that's not college's fault. And BTW few exceptional cases of people who never finished college does not mean that college is a bad deal for 90%+ others. College is a great deal for Math, Engineering, Medicine, or other Tech majors. It isn't a great deal for almost everyone else. Certainly not for 90% of people who go. To be loaded down with debt and end up doing a job you could have done without college is not a good deal. As more and more realize this, you are going to see a shift away from traditional colleges and more toward on the job training and/or other non-degree training. That is just my opinion. If my kids wanted to go to school for women's studies or art history, etc, I'd tell them that they were nuts. OK, so women's studies or art history majors are crap (not for everyone, but for 90% attending - I agree). So your solution to this is "don't go to college"? In other words, you are saying "you gonna get a crappy job with degree in crappy major, so don't go to college and get a crappy job without a degree"???

WEBs opinions about politics are not outside his circle of competence.

Bull...crap. College is still the best salary enhancing option available for majority of people. Of course, a lot of people select crappy majors, but that's not college's fault. And BTW few exceptional cases of people who never finished college does not mean that college is a bad deal for 90%+ others.

I think a lot of people believe that other people should close their accounts and start indexing. 8)

It's sex, drugs and parties man. For WEB too. 8)

Altima/Maxima, Accord, Camry are all great. Still have 2003 Accord with 70K miles on it. Bought 2012 (I think, I can't remember) Camry with 36K miles couple years ago. It wasn't certified and buying experience was not great, but we like the car. My friend is looking to buy a car and he loved new Camry. However, I'll tell you the same thing I told him: there's a lot (A LOT) of new great features coming up. If you can, hold on for as long as you can before buying. I'm sure you'll get things like collision avoidance and adaptive cruise control ( or self driving superlite ) in two or three years. But if you have to buy, you have to buy. ;) GL

IMHO, none of the ROwhatever measures are a proof of the moat. They may help you screen for companies that may have moat, but you'll have to review them afterwards to see if that's really the case. YMMV and all that.

2 401(k)s biweekly = 52 transactions 1 ESPP biweekly = 26 transactions Misc ins/outs in taxable account(s). Almost gets to 100. But you have a point. ;) Especially if I want to look at performance without 401(k)s and ESPP.

Re Uccmal and oddball - buying house at the market top is usually great thing. Not counting 2007 of course. I bought my first house in 2000 - great timing to sell some stocks ready for Internet bubble burst. Not that I did it on purpose. It's great to be lucky. ;)

First of all, people should not plan to use money they invest in stocks for holidays. They probably should not even plan to use it for bigger house, but that's more of a "depends" situation. If I had a significant amount of money, I'd be living from it (and not working), so losing a lot of it would impact the lifestyle a lot (force me to work again, plus I can't replace lost money easily by earnings). I am talking portfolio of $10M+ here. If I lose little money, it is actually rather easy to replace it by working. I am talking portfolio of up to $200K or so here. Between $200K and $10M is a grey area. As you go up through it, it gets harder and harder to replace lost money by working&saving. It is also getting harder and harder to get to the next step by just saving + having a conservative portfolio. So there's a tension between the two and IMHO that's the area where it is important to invest for outperformance. You may disagree, although it seems that you are too emotional about it. ;) BTW, if you go over $30M or so, you are right, you get back to "you can afford to lose a lot without any impact on your lifestyle" zone. Of course, it depends on individual circumstances and all that. Take care

If I had significant amount of capital, I'd go with 50% stock index(es), 50% conservative bond fund (possibly Loomis Sayles)/cash. Reasoning: outperformance only matters if you have insignificant amount of capital. If you have significant amount, you're much better off trying to preserve it than trying to outperform with it (see also Buffett if you need authority ;)).

OT? I've seen others think this way and I have thought this way in the past, but no longer do. Why is high ROE a measure of a business with a moat? If you insist, what is the moat of, for example, COH? (I can post probably over 100 companies with >15% historical ROE that have pretty much no moat). Or are you saying that business with a moat should have high ROE? But that's not necessarily true either. BRK never had high ROE.

You don't think that Dan Loeb kinda lost it? His performance has not been that good recently. Not that a lot of managers have had great performance lately.