Jurgis

Yeah, we moved to Teams fully and removed Skype for Business. People are mostly happy with Teams. Or at least happier than they were with SfB.

Happy post-Thanksgiving! 8)

Because the high market share Is the moat. I know it’s sort of a circular answer. VMW might be toast longer term (let's discuss on VMW thread though). It did have a huge first-mover advantage, great (way better than others) tech, real switching costs, and a real moat through now though. I think ILMN also has a large first mover advantage and possibly better tech than competition and likely switching costs. But I know that area way less than VMW. Like others said, "narrow moat" is still moat. And large market share may lead to some moat (of network effect, switching costs, low cost provider, etc.). And getting capital for head-on competition is very tough. Getting capital for something that is different and may displace the incumbent by a side swipe is possible and easier though. So no guarantees for long term.

No values left for Black Friday 2019? 8) I bought a bunch of Kindle books that are on $1.99-3.99 sale (possibly not just today, I did not check): Leonardo da Vinci Walter Isaacson Pebbles of Perception: How a Few Good Choices Make All The Difference Laurence Endersen Stick with It: A Scientifically Proven Process for Changing Your Life-for Good Sean D. Young Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle This one is on sale too, but I decided to skip it: Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter Kindle Edition by Dan Ariely, Jeff Kreisler Some of the above may have book threads at CoBF. I did not check.

Liberty and LC, thanks for posting papers of NZS guys. They were an interesting read. Although I am not sure if the 50%gain/40%loss coin toss system is really non-ergodic. Maybe I am misunderstanding ergodicity or maybe they are. Or maybe they meant different system than the one they specified. Or maybe I misunderstood their system spec. ;)

I think that's a nice summary of Softbank, and yeah it might fit the bill.

I agree with the sentiment that finding compounders that will compound 15%+ for next 10 years after 10 years of bull market and multiple expansion is not going to be simple. If you are saying MSFT, then why not GOOG and FB? AAPL if they manage to produce attractive huge market services/products. Maybe TWTR. BKNG/EXPE IAC and its parts (MTCH, ANGI). KKR Exor Naspers ( NPSNY / PROSY ) ICE V/MA IPGP (going a bit on limb here). STNE NVDA Disclosure: I own most of the above.

If it did, then prospectus writers would lose their heads. In Saudi Arabia prospectus writes you!

Yeah, definitely. This is being done by a lot of companies in a lot of medical areas.

I agree with you that going early stage might be one way to go. Just a note on biotech/healthcare - I think this is an area that is ripe for AI to outperform humans. Basically you have probability based outcomes for a wide spectrum of prospective drugs/devices. I'd think that slurping in research papers + FDA results/documents + any additional info available ( chemical/bio similarity and related info? ) would provide machine way more info than single person has about the field. And that results in better probability prediction IMO. If I was doing investment AI ML, I'd possibly do biotech/healthcare. ( Klarman might be doing a similar thing by having human biotech team. )

I agree with the author that it will become harder and harder for humans to outperform computers. I also agree with the author (although he might not be saying this much) that outperforming indexes is hard. However, I think that author's arguments why AI can do better in exploiting and removing value advantage vs. growth advantage are weak. The author tries to provide some basis for their arguments, but I don't think the private equity comparison strongly confirms their hypothesis. I'm not saying there is an easy way to validate author's claim. Maybe the right thing to do would be to see how value returns in less-information-available area vs more-information-available area compare to growth returns in less-information-available area vs more-information-available area. But there are many factors that might skew this too. Personally, I'd hypothesize that growth outperformance might be due to (a) zero-marginal-cost growth in software (b) cheap capital. Though (b) applies to value companies as well. So maybe it is just (a).

Thanks vinod1 for your posts. This is a very recommended thread because of your input. 8)

Vinod1, Glad to hear that you are using deliberate practice and you are getting good results with it. I see that you are handling some of the difficulties with deliberate practice application in investing: 1. The important part of deliberate practice is frequent factual feedback. Your approach gives you factual feedback even if it's not frequent. You got it on the spot by using business results for predictions instead of stock price. So you can avoid resulting. I am not sure if there is a way to get more frequent feedback in investing. It might be possible to do more analyses and then get more feedback coming in 2-3 years. But feedback after shorter timeframe is probably difficult to come by. Unless we invest in special situations like writser. 2. Ericsson places a large value on a teacher or coach. This is difficult to get in investing because of couple of reasons: (a) determining who are world class performers is difficult by itself - it only appears in long term and even that might be not very objective (b) even assuming we know great performers, most of them are self-taught © because of (a) and (b) it is near-impossible to find a teacher who has a history of teaching world-class performers. I see you are avoiding this area altogether which is probably a way to go. Some people might be able to apprentice to exceptional performers but that is likely an exception rather than possibility. Maybe another possibility is to learn from Damodaran, though I am not sure if we know whether what he teaches makes people great investors. I had one question to you. Ericsson also emphasizes the pain part of deliberate practice: "Deliberate practice takes place outside one’s comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities.". In other words, if one is not doing something outside their comfort zone, they are not getting better. Do you have any comments on this? Or do you feel that this does not apply to investing and it's enough to find your area/niche and just keep at it inside the niche? Or perhaps you have a different interpretation of constantly stepping outside comfort zone in the area of investing? Another more wide topic: perhaps "investing" per ce is too wide an area and the deliberate practice should concentrate on smaller area. In some sense you are doing that by saying "I'll practice business result prediction" and get feedback on that. This then excludes a lot of other parts of investing like position sizing, buy/sell decisions, etc. Would be interesting to hear what other smaller parts of investing might be amenable to deliberate practice. 8) For example, something like position sizing seems to be difficult to get factual feedback on. Similar issue with buy/sell decisions. Anyway, it was great to hear about your experience. 8)

I am reading through this and I think this is one of the best books about how to become world-class performer in (any) field. Having said that (to wet people's appetite :P ), there's a number of difficulties in applying deliberate practice to investing. Author acknowledges as much for investing and some other fields, though he still thinks it's possible to benefit by getting as close to deliberate practice as possible in given field. I'd be interested to talk to people who have applied deliberate practice to investing or other fields and have achieved positive results. Can do it on this thread or PM me directly. I'd be also interested to talk to people who have read the book and are looking to apply deliberate practice to investing or other fields. Same as above.

The structure and format is worse than before. Loads slower and takes more time to navigate. But it is free through the library, so I'm gonna continue using it. And previously library version did not include analyst reports. Now it does - though they may change that again.

https://smile.amazon.com/Pixar-Beyond-Unlikely-Journey-Entertainment-ebook/dp/B01912OSA0/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1UYGFE37O0NZI&keywords=to+pixar+and+beyond&qid=1573141811&s=books&smid=A1KUURLZXZKET0&sprefix=to+pixar%2Cstripbooks%2C136&sr=1-1 To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History by Lawrence Levy On sale at Amazon today $2.99

This conclusion is not straightforward and depends (among other things) on your portfolio performance vs SP during the put position, cost, sizing, and scenarios considered. While cost, sizing, and scenarios is mostly math, I'd say the expectation that your portfolio will outperform SP during the put position is of (most) concern. Isn't that how Fairfax (among others) screwed up their returns? A lot of people don't outperform SP. Even more don't outperform SP during relatively short time periods that put holding would imply.

stupid comment. if you have single class shares and pick the right guy, he stays and we all make money. if you have a single class shares and you pick the wrong guy, you can fire him and stop losing money. either way dual class shares is stupid for shareholders. I totally agree. Right guy or wrong, guy, the dual class shares make no sense. I disagree. You get a cyclical downturn or some external event, shares crash, activists raise ruckus, kick out your good guy, and screw up business. Or old huge co buys your growing co for cheap and your returns are gone.

The stock is more expensive than the book. :'(

I see the site switched to https. It seems like comment editing is broken though. I can post comment. But when I try to post edited comment, "Save" button throws up warning and pressing "Continue" does not post the edited changes.

She references Kahneman a little. It is absolutely approachable and there isn't much science to the text itself. It is not a "dense" read, so you can think about the concepts she introduces during the plethora of anecdotes subsequently put forth. One detracting item is that the book felt repetitive to me (but I am no expert in cognitive psychology and maybe I just missed the difference between some concepts). I read the book on a flight. It felt like a short book. I wonder if it would look short if I had a paper copy. I think e-book publishing encourages writing shortish lightweight books and charging full price for them. And even with that it felt repetitive. On the positive side, there are couple insights usable in life. If you want to use "thinking in bets" in investing, I think you are better off with Kelly's, since it's essentially the same thing and yet more quantitative. (If you don't quantify, then your "bet" is not really a bet 8) ). The other insights are not really her's, but I'm fine with her providing them even if they did not originate from her. Overall, the endnotes and bibliography is very extensive, which is a plus if you want to follow up on something she wrote. I'd say it's 6/10. Probably worth getting on a cheap and going through fast.

;D Keep those zingers coming.

Spek - you should probably start NOW thread. What I don't like about NOW is 0% insider holdings. Which makes it difficult to decide if leadership is gonna be any good going forward - and possibly explains why CEO jumped the ship. With all the issues of insider control ( We know what We mean ), I'd still rather invest in a company with insider holdings or control. Also it's difficult to decide what high-growth, but no/low earnings companies to buy. NOW? WDAY? ZEN? HUBS? PCTY? CRM? VEEV? TEAM? (I have a smattering of tiny positions in some of these).

https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1335201&_mc=RSS_EET_EDT&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=link&utm_medium=EETimesDaily-20191015 - Brain Implant Enables Thought Control, Mobilizes Tetraplegic My other body is an exoskeleton! 8)

vinod1 and KCLarkin