Jurgis

I got what you said. Perhaps I was not clear in my post. But overall the answer is that purely passive (market cap index) investing cannot cause prices to go from 50/50 to 75/25. They cannot cause relative market cap change. In market with active investors, the active investors cause the price changes. It depends on what you mean with "reinforce" and "stabilize momentum", but you may be right that indexing supports or enlarges the influence of active investors. In a sense that $1 actively invested in a company with $99 index investment could drive up the price disproportionately, because indexers are not selling at any price and if they sell, they sell proportionately all stocks in index. Edit: Also active investor selling active positions and buying index causes the index skew towards the stocks they did not own. But it's their selling that's causing the skew. If they sold and went to cash they would still cause the same skew.

vinod1 and chrispy are correct. 8) When incremental money comes in, it will buy the percentages based on weight. But who does the selling? racemize argues that it is easier to encourage small percentage (25%) stock sellers to sell without price going up while the big percentage (75%) stock sellers will be less willing to sell, so price for that stock would have to go up more compared to the small stock. Which would result to big stock becoming 76% and small one becoming 24%. But this means that sellers are active investors choosing what to sell. If the sellers are index investors, then this does not happen. And even if sellers are active investors, racemize's argument is not very grounded. Why would the active seller choose to sell smaller company rather than bigger? Yeah, you can think of some anecdote like racemize did (smaller company had worse results...), but I can think of anecdote in the opposite direction (smaller company is cheaper based on some metric). 8)

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/chuck-feeney-the-billionaire-who-gave-it-all-away-1.3413084 New article, but not much new in it.

Bitcoin is better than sex: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/business/economy/bitcoin-electricity-productivity.html 8)

I would not invest in Uber/Lyft even though I posited that they might have some kind of moatiness. There's definitely a number of outcomes some of which are pretty disastrous for Uber/Lyft.

Autonomous cars will kill Uber/Lyft. Why wouldn't I take out a loan, have the car drive itself for the 22 hrs/day when I don't use it myself, and capture that $ myself? A company that owns a fleet and optimizes routing/scheduling will kill your one car operation. Although you could try to limit your car to profitable airport routes... but then everyone else will try this too. And if company optimizes to predict good locations for its cars, your car will always lose the pickups. Also, people will order through some portal, so you'll have to pay for your car to be included in one. So perhaps portal with no car fleet will win. Who knows.

But what is Uber’s edge running a large fleet of cars exactly? I would guess scheduling and routing algorithms are not trivial. Is that enough of a moat, I don't really know. 8)

Yeah, talk about a memorable flight! I'd imagine it would go down as something like this- Hey, I think I sat next to that guy on a flight once. But then all these old white guys look alike... 8)

Thanks for shout out. Bought it. 8)

Browder saga is a great link to give to people who plan to invest in Russia. Though nowadays I usually don't bother. 8) Been there... no actually been there.

Not Europe or US, but we had the "spray tourist with ketchup and then rob them blind while pretending to clean your clothes" attempt in Buenos Aires. I knew about it, so I got away from the "good cleaning samaritan" asap. I've recently heard a colleague lost his backpack with laptop, documents, etc. like this. Italy is nice. Have fun. 8)

People doing expensive remodeling are driving the economy. ;D So thank your wife for doing it for all of us. 8)

Their past 5 year compounding was very low. But 2017 bumped it up to ~9% (ex divs, so perhaps 10% with divs) by a sub sale and the rest of 2017 results. So I guess it's your call to decide whether to treat that as a legit contribution to 5 year book value compounding or not. And to decide if they can repeat that going forward 5 years. 8)

It's the world we live in... where clicks are all that matters. Some members here may hate pretty hard on the article, but they still clicked on it to read it. That's all good in the eyes of the author. Mission accomplished. The funny part is that likely most of the people here (who presumably do the real-value-investing-DD ) did not even bother to click another link to the real (long) article (on thenation website) and just posted their opinion based on Marketwatch summary click bait. ;D Not that I endorse thenation full article. 8)

I thought other tech companies also self-insure on the money basis, but still contract with healthcare companies (United/Aetna/Cigna/etc.) for actual handling/benefits/accounting/etc. So that would be no different from Amazon and would have the same two points. Amazon/JPM/Berkshire project IMO is interesting only if it does more than above: does not contract with healthcare companies for service? But perhaps tech self-insure is something that comes and goes. I can't quote how many companies do this year to year.

http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/events/djco-annual-meeting-2142018/10/ Live now

IMO, don't ask abstract or meta questions. Have fun. 8)

Great Falcon Heavy launch.

Investment ethics? "Greed is good" 8) If it's your own money, you pick whatever ethical stances you want. If it's OPM, then still probably pick whatever ethical stances you want and decide whether to tell your investors or not. SRI/ESG ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_responsible_investing ) might make sense for large® funds, but not sure if it's a good strategy for small funds - unless you really know your investors and they share your principles. Most ethical stances (mine too) are inconsistent and politicized, so not really worth posting here. (PM if really interested 8)). "Money corrupts" I won't point fingers, but read almost any controversial thread on CoBF and notice how "ethics" goes out of the window the moment someone has money on the line. Almost any company behavior can and will be justified once someone invests into it "cheaply enough". Especially if/when investor starts making gains. 8) I am guilty of this myself too. Have fun. 8)

Strippers declined to take cryptos for lapdances? Bitcoin conference motto: "Invest in crypto and get screwed!"

Search this site. There have been at least couple of threads about this.

Forrest Gump

Did they get ahead of themselves? ;D

Great message, but then we are back to the way he's treating his car... I know, I know hamburgers and coke are God's food. Period.

Thanks for a thorough review. I had the same feeling as you did to “Guns, Germs, and Steel”. I'll put this book on my (long and hopeless) reading list.