Jurgis

I find Michael Lewis to be pompous, self important, sensationalist prick. Despite his proclaimed self-righteousness, he fit Salomon very well.

That's Jeremy Grantham I remember: if you listened to him, you would not have made money for the last 20 years. Except for two crashes, perhaps.

Oddball, The funny thing is that if people have to hate, they should hate tech people instead of hating finance people. But they don't - apart from SF Google bus incident, I guess. Anyway, I'm too lazy to write about this, it's more of a conversation over beer rather than message board writing piece. 8) Edit: in short: I disagree with your arguments and your conclusions. Technology is a bigger cause of inequality than finance. They are intertwined though. There is also USA politics... well I should not start on that. ;)

LOL, poor Tilson, he's not a high roller he thinks he is... can't get Palladium card... LOL ;D

I wish we had cards with huge signup bonuses in Canada, but afaik we don't (at least not in cash -- I don't care about points or miles). It was points, but who cares, they are directly convertible to cash, gift cards, usable on Amazon. Cash conversion is below 1:1 though.

When I bought used cars, some dealers allowed to pay some percentage with CC. Worth asking, but expect to hear "no".

Yes, I do, but not very consciously and not very much so far. However, I buy Euro ( and Canadian ;) ) stocks, not funds.

Motorola ... Nokia ... RIMM ... Apple ... ;) Apple is nothing like those other companies in any way. Yeah, sure.

+1 Off topic: when we buy cars, we usually have the "good cop - bad cop" routine with my wife. Not sure it helps, but ... 8) I use it other cases too - of course with my wife's knowledge ;) - I say to contractor/whatever "sorry, I have to check with my wife" or "sorry, but my wife decided to do something else". She's the bad cop usually. 8)

Interesting perspective oddball. +1 :)

I seriously doubt that more than ~20% of these investors will do better than BRK or FFH.

Is it going to be the same "screw the customer" experience as in other auto dealerships?

Motorola ... Nokia ... RIMM ... Apple ... ;)

And just getting more brutal. Although my European holdings have done phenomenally well, I wish I had more in USD. ;) Yeah, the board members in EU and Canada have huge performance tailwinds if they hold US securities.

Great documentary. Nice to see some familiar faces. 8) Yeah, I also bought Iomega in 1995 or so. Sold at a gain... If only I bought BRK or index then and just held. ;) The interesting part is also that this shows 1996-97. There were another 3-4 years of tremendous bull market in the future. So actually both trade-trade-trade bulls and perpetual doom and gloom bears look silly in retrospective.

Say what? Everyone who dollar-cost-averaged into index without looking at valuation has done well. It does not really matter when they started. Of course, it required that you put the money in every year, not to panic and sell. But return has been OK even if you started buying in 1999 (and bought through 2000-2003 ;) ). Japan is the only counterexample I know. Even in Great Depression it may have worked - if you had money to DCA all through it.

MSFT had a moat for 20+ years (maybe 30, depends how you count). GOOGL is likely to have a moat for 20+ years (but ~10-15 already have passed). Some of the non-tech "moats" have collapsed in 20 years.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jamie-dimon-and-warren-buffett-s-secret-party-195155764.html Good last sentence.

Run Financial Times screener http://markets.ft.com/screener/customScreen.asp on high ROE companies and you'll find enough to analyze for a while. Screen with non-USA companies with 5 year average growth over 10% and ROE over 14 returns over 2500 matches :o

There are claims on both sides for this. There are US sodas now that contain sugar. As I've said in my message for vegetarian it is pretty impossible to cut them down too much. What would you be eating, grass? :)

Not in technology. 8)

Malone doesn't have any kids, does he? ;)

Personally, I have stopped drinking soda totally. However, for a vegetarian, it's hard to avoid sugars, overall carbohydrates, gluten, etc. I ate one month gluten free. It was livable, but not a lot of fun and choice. Overall, I now try to limit gluten but I don't totally eliminate it. In terms of sugar, I still eat too much I think: chocolate mostly, dried cranberries (with sugar).

Great letter as always.

Good letter. I liked their thoughts about their underperformance.