Jurgis

Schwab711, I completely disagree with you. We will have ~100% penetration of no-human-in-loop cars in 30 years or less. As an aside we will have some form of human immortality in 40 years or less. Also superhuman level AI in similar time frame. (Unless we have a civilization extinction even in the meantime). The future's so bright we gotta wear shades. 8)

+1 agreed.

Is the blame on the service provider or the investors not validating their numbers with regulatory filings though? Service providers should provide good data. Investors should validate the data. It is somewhat easy to validate data against SEC filings. It might be tough if company does not SEC file (OTC, foreign - excluding some countries that have easy SEC-equivalent access).

Second link is broken. The correct link is: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-to-start-and-run-a-mastermind-group.html You already have CoBF - why do you need a mastermind group? ;) If CoBF not good enough? ;) Theoretically, it's a great concept. Whether it works in practice depends on you and your network. IMO, it's not easy to create a great mastermind group, the same way it's not easy to find your personal Charlie Munger. Personally, I think that great friends and masterminds are easier in fiction ( four musketeers, Harry Potter/Ron/Hermione, etc.) than in real life. But then it's me speaking and I'm sure other people have different experience. So try it. :)

I think that evaluating CEO from inside might be as hard as evaluating them from outside. Most people on the inside have no clue about company's position/moat/competitiveness/competition/financials/etc. Even people who know and understand these things, don't necessarily have an ability to tie these metrics to what's happening inside. E.g. is it good if X people are cut in division Y? Is it good if project Z is promoted and project W is closed? To be honest though, I have never been a good evaluator of CEOs. I never worked for great CEOs. The ones I worked for usually looked good when company was doing well, but looked like crap when company was performing poorly. In some cases, the situation changed and the CEO could not change. In some cases, they just continued the trajectory when changes were needed. Also, in large organizations sometimes it's hard to see CEO vs. division politics. CEO might talk about X, but changes below their level are quite different and you just don't know if CEO is spinning or if they don't know what they division VPs are doing or if there's politics/infighting/etc.

My spoiler'ish comment: (Don't read before doing the puzzle) One thing that the explanation does not mention is that examples can only disprove something, they cannot prove anything. And actually, both "nos" and "yes"es can disprove a theory. In this particular case, both "nos" and "yeses" are useful. Ultimately though there are infinite number of nos and infinite number of yeses, so we can never know the rule by just doing experiments. The right way to approach this problem is to throw a large number of random experiments at it and only then make a theory.

No, they don't. I just checked. 5 year data for free. Clicking on 10-year data lands on the $199 a year subscription page.

Out of curiosity, what data service(s) do you subscribe to, Nate? Bloomberg Terminal, had Morningstar for years prior to Bloomberg. Just to doublecheck: was "$100 tool" metaphorical or did it refer to some specific tool for this specific problem (10 year financials)? If it did refer to specific tool, which tool was it? I'm pretty sure it wasn't Bloomberg Terminal. :)

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/03/upshot/a-quick-puzzle-to-test-your-problem-solving.html I've got some commentary on the explanation, but it has spoilers, so perhaps I'll post it later. 8)

+1

Right. This is sad.

Europeans (Germans really) are shooting themselves into a head. #ThisIsACoup http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/13/thisisacoup-germany-faces-backlash-over-tough-greece-bailout-demands

Voted "For"

IMO, we should make Chinese invest in Greece and we'd solve two issues at once. Never mind if they don't get their money back.

I doubt that you will learn how to be a better investor from Buffett vs. Singleton comparison. First of all, both of them invested by buying whole businesses and running them. Are you going to do this? If so, then, yeah, probably your question is valid. But for most here, we won't buy whole businesses and run them, which kills half of Buffett's performance and almost all of Singleton's. Also IMHO, Singleton was more looking at how to run a great successful business, even if he also did great financial engineering, instead of looking to invest/compound at the best rate for longest. Second, like others have said, both Buffett and Singleton are genius' level. This is something that you can't achieve by just doing something. Sorry to say, you either are or are not. You can get OK/great returns even if you're not, but you can't do things that are "obvious" to them, while they are not to us. There are other things that are mostly connected to the first two points. Like someone said: float (connected to point 1). Some points that might be possible to learn/replicate: networking. Of the top of my head, I think Buffett is better in networking than Singleton was. And focus on investments/return rather than on business. Though that should not be misconstrued as short term thinking or return chasing. (In other words: does it make sense to ask how Buffett outperformed Gates (which he might not ;)) and what can we learn from it. I think that would also be a wrong question to ask 8) ) Take care

I believe Singleton's Teledyne had very similar performance to BRK - BRK just did it for longer time. See http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.com/2013/10/is-next-teledyne-old-teledyne.html for possible numbers. Though it's possible to cherry pick early BRK years and then it outperforms TDY. Munger might have been implying the longevity. I think you are asking bad question though. If you manage to find next Teledyne and invest into it, you'll become very rich. There is no need to find the next BRK even if it would make you super rich. 8) Especially, since it's quite likely that there are Teledynes around, but quite possibly there won't be another BRK (as Munger has implied couple times). ;)

Which is definitely illegal for foreigners and possibly illegal even for natives (depending on the company I guess).

Is there something there in particular that you find funny/objectionable/etc.?

Thanks, Scott.

ValueAct? But even that is not completely "Buy Good Business". MOAT is probably closest, though it also has dogs like WTW ::) if I remember correctly. Edit: They don't have WTW anymore. Looking at the holdings, I am not sure I can classify them all as having "moat". But probably it's as good as it gets in non-active portfolio. http://www.vaneck.com/market-vectors/equity-etfs/moat/Holdings/

This is one of the big benefits of Buffett style. You can sit in Hawaii Omaha and sip mai tais Crappy Cola instead of spending days and nights researching yet another company. 8) I'm trying to get there too. I still have a portion of portfolio in theme cheapo stocks (oil and MU) and lottery tickets (Fannie+). I'll see if I will keep doing these or whether I'll get out of these totally at some point. Research: - CoBF - Silicon Investor - Barron's - Some blogs I think international screeners are worthwhile since markets internationally are less efficient than US (IMO). But even after screening international research takes a lot of time, so I never did thorough DD on international screens. My biggest question now is sizing of the long-term holds. As theoretical example, I don't want to sell some BRK to buy some FFH - if I do, that's no longer long-term holding. On the other hand, if I don't, I might have not very good ratio of the two... :/ Ideas how to deal with this?

Nah, I got that. Although it's not clear what the agreement with Walgreens is, so we don't know if Walgreens are paid per test or per hour or nothing or whatever. That impacts your marginal cost. Also test sorting in the lab is not free in marginal POV either. But this is not very important, so I think we are fine. :)

ARTH http://archtherapeutics.blogspot.com - This looks hyped, possibly pump and dump. I have no idea if the claims are true. Might be interesting for someone who knows this field in depth. Disclosure: no position, no plans for position. Posting just because I'd be interested to hear opinion of someone knowledgeable.

People should stop equating EU with just Euro. You should realize that EU is much more than Euro.