Jurgis

I agree with your other points, but you are really misrepresenting the situation there. I'll flip your argument completely: if you are the best worker, it does not matter that you are fired, you can find another job easily, possibly even better one with better pay. Your example only makes sense if employee is in bad business field (e.g. even if they are best street sweeper, they could be fired and be unemployed for long time). But that's because they chose bad business and not because they chose to work for employer. A person choosing to be entrepreneur in bad business will suffer similarly. A lot of people in the world can do quite well by working for employers. They can do above average if they choose profession well. (It is tough to choose profession well if you lack skills/training/education, etc., but that's also tough position to be in if you want entrepreneur.)

Clothes don't rot. :) I still have some clothes that are 25 years old. Yes, I know. 8) (I do have most "things" that typical person uses.) I have paid for experiences in the past (travel mostly). This attracts me less nowadays. I do pay more for convenience nowadays. Of course, this is complete waste of money: it is fleeting like experience and it's not even experience. :)

My first step towards overcommiting less is going to be not reading the book. ;D

It was possible to record the whole meeting and I believe some people did. Whether they will transcribe and post, I don't know. I did not record the whole thing: I did not plan and I was not prepared and too lazy to transcribe afterwards anyway. :) There was nothing earth-shattering IMHO. The theme was mostly that competition in various businesses (AXP, China vs. West, etc.) is getting stronger and moats perhaps will be harder to maintain and investing and beating indexes will be harder too than it was in his investment lifetime. He expressed a couple opinions about specific companies that I won't try to paraphrase: wait for transcribed notes. :)

Right, they were eating at a buffet when Marie Antoinette told them to eat cake. 8)

He writes entertaining novels. There. Fixed that for ya. 8)

Exactly my feeling about him.

Contributed to this. 8)

Tesla IPO'ed during the financial crisis and almost went bankrupt. Musk basically made it survive through sheer will (and putting every cent he had in it, borrowing money to pay rent). That was a much bigger trial by fire than they are likely to get, since at that time they were a small startup selling a few hundred $100k two-seaters during the worst crisis since the 1930s. They're a much more solid company now. Maybe the stock will go down a lot if multiples compress, but the business itself is more solid than its ever been. Saying they've never been through a downturn is incorrect. They have never been through a downturn. Startup pains when you have no product and no sales is very different from a downturn. You might be right though that Elon will deal with downturn just fine based on his startup and other company experiences.

I have not read the book. I might though. I found innerscorecard's review to be too abstract. innerscorecard talks about tradeoffs but does not get into details: which tradeoffs were mentioned and whether they seemed real, worth taking, etc. I guess loneliness was the one mentioned, but even that I found abstract: why is it unavoidable? At which wealth levels? I believe that you can have stealth wealth for quite high wealth (up to $100M at least?) and very few of us will be more wealthy than that. Anyway, not a critique of innerscorecard. It's hard to write good reviews especially for people who have not read the book. :) Peace.

Oddball, You assume that "fool" just means low intelligence and then you make two mistakes: First, of course CEOs are not necessarily Stephen Hawking intelligence level geniuses. But they are not fools either. They are above average in intelligence. Second, "fool" in the quote meant "not a good leader, manager" too. And you say yourself that the CEO has to be a good leader and manager. Furthermore, I disagree with you that above average intelligence and above average people management skills are enough to make a great CEO. It is actually a rather unquantifiable mix of the two and some other things including being in the right place at the right time with the right mindset. I agree with you that CEOs are not superhuman. But good ones are not average schmoes either.

Most of the people who have to go to office aren't very good at filling their time with things that bring deep satisfaction either. Stopping for a moment to consider the meaning (or meaninglessness) of your life might be harder and quite uncomfortable compared to just chugging along to the office ... or to a golf course. ;)

Good observation bizaro86

Any company can be destroyed by inept management. If not destroyed, at least the capital can be squandered, moat diminished, and shareholders can suffer permanent loss of capital. There are companies where mediocre management can keep company running and even outperforming benchmarks a bit because of moat. It is still not clear whether it's worth buying stock in such company at a "good" price. (At "great" price - sure ;) ). But overall, the bigger issue with "even fool can run" statement is that it draws attention away from evaluating the management more precisely than fool or not fool. It's relatively easy to say whether management are fools or not - most of the time they aren't. However, evaluating if they are mediocre or great is much tougher. This can be witnessed by various opinions about Dimon, Moynihan, Ballmer, etc. I can think of the following situations where management evaluation is tough: - "Stable" company: i.e. company is chugging along, there is no big loss or big gain, but perhaps with great management it would do much better. Boring examples are in insurance: AXS, RE. Perhaps not boring example: MSFT. :) - "Super" company that has not experienced downturn. Most people think that Musk, Page are great managers, but what happens when TSLA, GOOGL go into downturn? Would they be great then? (Both of these examples might be controversial :) ). - Company that hits externally caused downturn. Is the management great but suffering because of things they can't control? Or are they lousy because they did not position the company correctly? Examples: MSFT again perhaps, oil companies right now (NOV - wasn't the management "great" so far, but now BRK is selling shares and nobody thinks management is great anymore?), banks in banking crisis, perhaps KO now - is the current CEO mediocre or is the soft drink crisis unavoidable?

I still think that you are about 4 years too late. (Not that I participated: I missed HD and I missed cheapo Florida houses). I have not seen anything cheap and with long term potential recently. But I am willing to listen to ideas. :) Home builders might be a trade since they have not run up. They are not hold-forever investment IMHO.

Aren't you guys about four years too late? Shoulda bought HD in 2009-2010, no? http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=HD+Basic+Tech.+Analysis&t=10y Is this thread just "I missed the run up of great housing stocks, so I want to buy crappy homebuilders instead"? 8) Serious question. I am not trolling :)

Great article. This still suffers from a "trend" fallacy: that there has to be a trend to which the prices (or numbers in general) revert to. In fact, linear trend is completely artificial artifact of finding least squares linear approximation for series of numbers. It does not represent a causal or explanatory law (or even a theory). Like author shows himself, the numbers are not linear and only adjustments to numbers make the linear approximation more coherent. So unless there is a reason for the line other than "we took least squares approximation", there is no law that prices have to revert to it. They likely will, but it's possible that they won't and the least squares approximation will shift a bit instead. Edit: note to myself: I have to remember the "the massive drops seen in 2003 and 2009 were the result of the application of accounting standards that were not applied to prior eras and that do not reflect true earnings performance".

You have to grow your investments exponentially, not linearly man. 8)

I always found the attitude of raising and managing family/friends' money amazing. There is a saying to never do business with a friend, since soon you either won't have business or you won't have friend or both. At least if your anonymous clients are not happy, you can tell them to go and screw themselves. ;D And they will only take their money when they leave. Family and friends on the other hand can leave you with a decades of hurt feelings and other crap. Oh well, shows why I am not in marketing and I don't manage other people's money. ;)

An African or European swallow? :D I meant USD or CAD? ;D

In current rate situation, bonds are not obviously better than cash unless we talk about short-term bonds held to maturity. Very few people hold actual short-term bonds to maturity. So the roboguys are actually suggesting that bond funds are better than cash. This is a bond market call at the time of super low bond rates and not necessarily true. So suggesting someone to hold cash instead of bond funds is not automatically stupid. It might be quite smart for some possible scenarios. Shannon strategy would make money, but so would a stock/bond-rebalancing portfolio. In normal times when bond rates are rather high, stock/bond-rebalancing portfolio is likely to outperform Shannon stock/cash-rebalancing portfolio handily. However, currently, that might not be true. I like Graham's suggestion of 50/50% stocks/bonds up to 75/25% stocks/bonds with a twist that now I'd go for 75/25% stocks/cash unless the investor is enterprising enough to pick their own bonds and their maturities accordingly. This is what I suggest to my non-stock picking friends when they ask. :)

But you have to admit, someone just had to ask, it was too obvious :D I wish I did, I would not have to hang out on this forum then. Just roll in moolah. ;D

So you work in HFT, eh? I don't have to answer this, but no. And my opinion about him was the same before "Flash Boys"

Pray tell how you made money from listening to his "7-10 predicted returns of various assets over the past 15 years". Some facts please. I'm not sure about the interim predictions, but if you followed their forecasts from late 90s you would have bought REITs and emerging market equities and done very well, avoiding the S&P which they predicted would have a negative return for the decade. Their return projections in the depths of the recent crisis would have led you to re enter the U.S equity market. I am sorry, I think you are data mining here. But I agree that it's a tough question to ask since everyone will data mine to support their opinion. I withdraw the question. 8) Peace. :)

Pray tell how you made money from listening to his "7-10 predicted returns of various assets over the past 15 years". Some facts please. Edit: question withdrawn as not quantifyably answerable.