Jurgis

If you're really sure company won't go BK (and won't dilute you to heck), buy stock. Otherwise, buy bonds or not invest at all. This year so far the right decision has been not to invest at all. :-X Of course, you can also make some kind of probability based spreadsheet calcs. 10% stock goes 10x, 90% it goes to 0. vs. bonds 25% goes to par, 40% goes to $.25 work out, 35% goes to 0. Probability guessing is hard though. Speaking about energy, in 2008-2009 the right decision was to buy stocks, since pretty much no company went BK. This year, it was to buy bonds or nothing. Distinguishing the two - V recovery vs. U or L - is hard. That's why a lot of people think commodity company investing is lost cause. :) Good luck. It is getting painful out there.

I lol'd at oddball, but your question is the relevant one. Like Morgan said, this kind of military style might work for some people and some companies. Wouldn't work for me, though I do see value in being more thrifty, more organized, more detail oriented, etc. There is recognized psychological value both for the person doing it and for the clients. As long as it does not blow back killing growth/innovation/etc. I.e. they might not have invented glass ceramic ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._Donald_Stookey ). But perhaps they did not need to. :) Not a company for ScottHall, definitely. 8)

Ah, yes, Citi. Missed that one. I have Capital One and it's Visa. Maybe they offer both. Maybe they will stealth-switch either mine or yours.

Haha, when I was reading the post, I was wondering what will Scott say about this. ;D Yeah, military way to run things baby.

Honestly, any binary outcome securities will be volatile like heck. They can only be valued based on success/failure probabilities and humans are notoriously bad in assigning probabilities. Ask on this thread - no actually don't, since it might raise a crap storm ;) - and if people don't see previous answers for anchoring, the probability distribution will be all over the place. Also, if market overall declines people look at their holdings and sometimes dump the binaries because it's not clear for them if continuing to hold makes sense. It's not like a business where you are getting incremental owner's earnings (well, you could argue that you do, but only in the case of success, so not really).

Fluctuations. :P

T-mobile. Global roaming for cheap FTW (edit2: I think Google fi uses T-mobile's cheap global roaming). I think I am paying ~$80 with all taxes/etc. included for 2 lines with very different plans (not family plan). I thought that the plans were $50 and $20 (that's limited minutes/no data), so I guess $10 is taxes or something. :) Google fi is great but they only support Nexus 6P (edit: and Nexus 5X) and you have to buy it. If you're in the market for new phone, it might be a good choice. Otherwise, not so much.

Anecdotally it seems that MC pretty much lost most US. I always try to have at least one MC just in case (haha) some place does not take Visa. Through years, pretty much all big US banks switched to Visa usually without even telling me. I've got Barclays MC, but that's pretty much it. There might be smaller US banks still offering MC. AFAIK situation is different internationally. It seems MC is more prevalent. I don't know if it will change now that Visa got Visa Europe. I've already written about AXP on AXP thread, so no point rehashing. I agree with rishig's opinion.

That's a pretty balanced and level-headed article compared to most that are agenda and emotion laden.

Of the companies/leaders in the book GD is the one that I remember the clearest of a less can be more strategy. I think the speed and aggressiveness with which he went about it was what left such a strong impression on me. It's an important point, so maybe that's part of why he chose that example. Yeah, OK. But. :) It seems rather messy as a lesson for investors. :) What is exactly the lesson here? - Bet on a CEO who comes to do a turnaround, sells a bunch of businesses and improves efficiency in remaining ones? Wouldn't you have ended with Chainsaw Al Dunlap with this strategy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_J._Dunlap - Get rid of the CEO who does the turnaround as soon as turnaround is finished? (In 3 years) - Bet on the next CEO who comes after him? - And then the next one after? ;) BTW, looking at Buffett's behavior is a bit instructive here. He bought when Anders was on the turnaround way, so he either knew/liked Anders and/or saw the results of what he was doing. He sold when Anders left - so he was not sure CEOs after Anders will do well. So it seems that Buffett also bought into Anders-as-outsider-CEO figure (while kinda dismissing CEOs who came after). But that's still tough to learn something from. In other words, if you see a company that brings Joe Ceo for turnaround, how do you know if he's Bill Anders or if he's Al Dunlap? Note that you don't have 10 or 5 years to decide, since he's gone in 3. Doesn't that sound like "too hard" situation? Anyway, just my thoughts on this. ;)

LOL. +1!

Is that very important/useful? He hasn't bought anything in open market, which means he doesn't consider anything super cheap. ( see http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000937797&owner=exclude&count=40&hidefilings=0 ) He hasn't sold anything in open market, which does not mean much, since a lot of his holdings is supervoting which he won't sell. And he's very rich, so he doesn't have to sell even if he thinks something is overvalued. You could look at where he got rid of his supervoting shares, but he only did it for LTRPA/B, so that's not very interesting either. You could argue that he likes LBTYA/B/K and LILA/K since he's gonna take the shares in C&W merger. Does LGF purchase by Discovery/LBTYA indicate that LGF shares are very cheap? I don't know. IMHO, you just go through the Liberty soup and pick what you like. Or just pick everything and mix it up like he does. ;) I doubt his proportions are "best" in terms of future returns. Probably someone will answer your question directly though. 8) Take care

OK, so somebody explain Bill Anders and GD chapter to me. Anders comes in. Engineers turnaround by selling divisions, reigning in costs, returning cash as divvies. Retires in 3 years (4 if you count a year as a chairman). How the heck is he considered an outsider CEO and responsible for 17 years of outperformance? OK, I get it, he did a great turnaround and I applaud his work there. But isn't the book about CEOs who had outstanding long-term performance? Hand waving that his successors were picked by Anders is not the same as him having the record himself. Anders wasn't even involved with the company after 1994. If we allow for "outsider" CEOs with 3 year records, this book would be 10 times thicker (and less interesting I'd say). Also what about acknowledging Mellor and Chabraja - how do we know that they are somehow "lesser" because of the Anders' shadow (although Mellor's tenure was also short; Chabraja might be the only one who would stand as a real "outsider" CEO with 11 years longevity). I understand the attractiveness of writing about Anders. There's the Army/NASA fighter pilot angle, there's the Buffett angle, there's the turnaround angle, there's the cold war angle. I'd salivate when writing this chapter too. But isn't consistency more important? ;) 8)

Wasn't me. 8)

I don't like Mike Lewis, but this article is pretty good.

I won't argue with that. ;)

Although I hold TJX stock and we shop there, you should not seriously suggest that TJX, ROST, WMT, and COST cover clothing needs for middle-high income shoppers. It might be fine for some, but if my wife needs something specific, good luck finding it in TJX/etc. That's where M, JWN, 21 Forever, Anthropologie, Free People, etc. comes in.

So someone takes a loss on my 2% cash back card? The 1.5% fee is net to Visa though and there are other layers on top of that. I think merchants pay 2.5% of the transaction value on average, but I could be incorrect. Spek, please read the upthread of how the fee is split. :) ~1.5% does not go to V/MA. It goes to the issuing bank. If new entrant displaces V/MA, they would displace only 0.2% of the fee. They would need to displace issuing banks to get rid of the 1.5-1.8% of the rest of the fee (well issuing bank and the clearing bank, but you get the picture). Displacing issuing bank is another can of worms and it's hard. Who's gonna take credit risk, etc.? And if they are already displacing the issuing bank, then they should just displace the issuing bank and keep V/MA. ;) Why not pay V/MA .2% if you just saved 1.5% from getting rid of the bank? ;)

V/MA strength beyond their network effect is that they charge only ~15bps. That's peanuts for the convenience and reach. New entrants could probably displace V/MA only on basis of convenience/features, since competing just on price - even if new entrant goes 0bps - is likely to be losing proposition. OTOH, V/MA can't raise fees much. This would likely draw more antitrust attention and would raise motivation for competition.

My guess is that this year cloning results were probably not great. Of course, that's short term and all that.

I vote for Naked Fairfax Financial Shareholder's Dinner! 8)

Lot of people here like Interactive Brokers for their low commissions. I prefer Fido for a bunch of reasons ( search for IB thread if you want to read old discussions ). I don't DCA with small sums though.

I wonder how much this is due to the fact that we had very few cats in recent years. You average over 10 years, but last 4 years are still .4 of the weight... OTOH, few cats kinda equals soft pricing, so it's still good that they dropped below 100. :)

Grocery stores. That's where I always get my pr0n. 8)

That's somewhat a fallacy since there's no way to take money out of the game. It's a one way conversion. And some Eve ships cost thousands of real world dollars... ;)