Jurgis

It's interesting to see very little activity from T&T. They are usually more active.

I think Hielko and Sunrider capture two different and opposing forces that affect the final result: Let's simplify the example a bit first: Company A spins off a sub, 1:1, i.e. after spin there remains the same amount of A shares and Aspin shares. What would be the prices of A and Aspin and does the company influence them? Well, even at 1:1 spin we need to know how much ops (revenues/earnings/FCF) goes into A and Aspin. Also how much of balance sheet goes into A and Aspin. Here is where the situation becomes hairy. In super simple case both A and Aspin gets 50%/50% of everything. Then both will trade at 1/2 of the pre-spin A price (assuming the businesses A and Aspin gets are "the same"). But in reality this is not what happens. A might get 80% of revenues, 30% of earnings, 10% of FCF, 60% of cash, 20% of debt. Aspin gets the remainder. What now? That's where two factors come in: Company does indicate where it thinks A and Aspin should trade. Clearly, this is only a guess. It may or may not affect the tax side of equation (I am not sure, I am not expert, all that). OTOH, Hielko is right that once the trading starts, investors may decide that company's guess was total crap and the shares should trade at a very different price. You as investor may or may not be able to sell/buy at the company indicated price. It depends how fast the price moves and if it even starts at the company-indicated level. Edit: BTW, the 10:1 spin ratios is mostly a company trying to indicate that the spinoff is ~1/10 of the original company. In reality, every spinoff could be 1:1 in share count and the price would just be 10:1. But companies try to "lead" or "guess" or "indicate" the price by doing the 10:1 ratio and making investors think in terms of spinoff being 1/10 of original company that way.

Can I get $1 every time someone mentions flowers and weeds? Or just the weed... ::)

Yeah, great find LC - although it's quite a bit more depressing to me than it is to the author. Although probably that's the outcome of realization that "Science is hard — really fucking hard." or that humans are really not well prepared to do the research (or analysis of research) in areas with large complexities, numerous influencing factors and hard statistical analysis. Or like another quote from the article said: “There are so many potential biases and errors and issues that can interfere with getting a reliable, credible result.” Venturing a bit farther afield, I wonder how many people - both in research and outside - grok the statistics even if they were available and well calculated. Probably >99% of general population would not be able to deal even with rather simple probability caveats like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_of_the_inverse . But even taking the population of people who should know this, there's apparently high percentage who don't or at least don't grok it offhand (i.e. they would get correct result if they spent time on it, but usually they won't, so incorrect result becomes default "conventional wisdom"). Talking about p-values, I'd guess the percentage numbers are even worse both in general population and specialist population. And that's not even getting to p-hacking, etc. I am not optimistic that humans can learn to do much better even if everyone on the planet wanted to (which clearly isn't the case). It seems to be hard and our brains are not great in dealing with complex and non-intuitive information/data/models. I'll probably fall back on my default position that we need something like Elon Musk's Neuralink ( http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/27/15077864/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-computer-interface-ai-cyborgs ) so that a human could run (replicate) all the stats for claims/research/whatever with minimum effort and within seconds or less. Even then perhaps the brain would explode trying to make conclusion on the problems that have huge number of factors and possible methods to use. We might need not just an interface, but a wholesale integration with something that can handle all of this. 8)

When I looked at this, it seemed that a lot of news are from finance.yahoo.com which is itself a syndication of news sources, some of which are quite crappy. It's gonna be hard to achieve news quality if site points to finance.yahoo.com. Good luck

Honestly, maybe it's just me, but I find the whole portfolio stats part pretty worthless. Yeah, I know you did this site partially because you wanted these stats... There's at least couple issues with it: 1. Why does anyone care about portfolio P/E, ROE, etc? These are company metrics and aggregating them into a portfolio metric is IMO close to meaningless. Assume my portfolio is a company X that currently loses money, GOOGL and FCAU. What is the portfolio P/E of this and is it meaningful in any way? Not to me really. 2. Related to above: how do you average P/E, ROE, across companies? Do you account for position size, market cap, what? Or do you just simply average? (Academic questions somewhat, since I still think 1.) 3. Sorry to say, but I don't trust FCF calculation of even Morningstar and they are probably the best in doing it. I would not trust FCF calculation of random website at all. Mostly because FCF calculation really depends on what you subtract to get FCF and there's no agreement on that. To say something positive: 8) - Holdings by Value is a nice visualization. Regarding paying for a site: sorry, Dataroma is free. Morningstar is free (with free US library card). So, no I would not pay for this... Same for the news/etc. Hope you wanted negative feedback. 8) All the best. You might find others who are more positive and would pay. :)

I've only bought used in the past (not as good as some pros on this board), but with the great new safety, automatic/self driving features coming up, the target now is to wait as long as possible and to buy as new as possible. The features are just exploding.

Thank you, rukawa.

Not much of hurricane season left: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Atlantic_hurricane_season But who knows... 8)

Have you guys tried/used SMF addin? http://ogres-crypt.com/SMF/Install-the-addin.html Yeah, bunch of services are killing their APIs lately (Microsoft, Yahoo), but I believe this still has a ton of functioning sources. Especially for something as trivial as last price. I need a market cap and that's getting tough. There was time where there was no market cap data anymore through SMF. There's one functioning now, but not sure for how long.

Not necessarily. I am pretty sure I buy some products from flippers on Amazon. Sometimes you can feel that as a customer.

Interesting. I've done all of this in online games for virtual currencies. Same flipping principles and opportunities. Have not done it IRL though. I can see how it works on Amazon where some products that are not available through Amazon directly sell by third party merchants for 2x-3x the prices on Walmart.com or local store. If I had time, I'd probably try it. ;) Good luck 8)

Belongs to a separate thread. Please start one. 8)

A guy told me to sell Internet stocks and buy fruit companies. I googled him and it seems he's a bit bananas. ;D

Yeah, I was thinking I could send it to them. There's a ton of really cool stuff that could be done, but it requires a lot of decent web programming. Of course, then I'm just handing it to them, but oh well. Well, if you think that it's something you can make money off, you can do what oddball did and roll out your service. Or just talk to oddball and make him roll it out and you get percentage. ;) (and you guys can send me a beer for getting you together ;D ). (Edit: there might be other guys here who would be interested to try to roll out a service. oddball just seems like top choice since he kinda knows the market, possible business size, probably has a lot of software that can be reused from his other project, etc.) If you are not gonna do it commercial, then IMO making it public and promoting it to Morningstar or whoever (Bloomberg?) is a way to go. They'll probably not gonna do anything about it, but c'est la vie. If they do, then good free publicity to you and some benefit for investors. 8) Take care.

Nice essay. Perhaps you should persuade someone like Morningstar to adopt this methodology for performance evaluation. ;) Edit: I probably should look at my own performance based your methodology. It's just seems like a lot of work. Plus looking at rolling window returns in private account will probably raise up the issues of capital inflows/outflows even more than looking at a (single) very long term IRR number. Also in my particular case at least, I used quite different investment approaches 5-10-15 years ago than I do now. So the data is dirty, the older data is not so useful and therefore there's not much of 10-y rolling windows overall. So, not sure I'm gonna do it. It seems interesting though.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/25/einstein-note-about-happiness-of-a-modest-life-sells-for-15m Assuming the tip would have been $1, what was the compounded rate of return on the note? Assuming the note would have been sold for expected $8000, what would have been the compounded rate of return? Is Einstein's theory of happiness right? No peeking... 8) ... 16.2% rate in the first case. 9.92% rate in the second case. So, it appears the note was a great tip. 8) And it appears that not that big difference in rate of return yields hugely different results after 95 years. (But all of you already knew that ;)). I'll let others debate if the happiness tip was also great tip. 8)

More fun info on Algorand. Seminar is today, so I removed time/date/location since I doubt that anyone will make it. I'm sure there's more info online. ---------------------------------------------- Algorand: Scaling Byzantine Agreements for Cryptocurrencies Seminar Series: CSAIL Security Seminar 2017/2018 Speaker: Yossi Gilad Speaker Affiliation: MIT CSAIL, Boston University Host: CSAIL Security Seminar Algorand: Scaling Byzantine Agreements for Cryptocurrencies Abstract Algorand is a new cryptocurrency that confirms transactions with latency on the order of a minute while scaling to many users. Algorand ensures that users never have divergent views of confirmed transactions, even if some of the users are malicious and the network is temporarily partitioned. In contrast, existing cryptocurrencies allow for temporary forks and therefore require a long time, on the order of an hour, to confirm transactions with high confidence. Algorand uses a new Byzantine Agreement (BA) protocol to reach consensus among users on the next set of transactions. To scale the consensus to many users, Algorand uses a novel mechanism based on Verifiable Random Functions that allows users to privately check whether they are selected to participate in the BA to agree on the next set of transactions, and to include a proof of their selection in their network messages. In Algorand’s BA protocol, users do not keep any private state except for their private keys, which allows Algorand to replace participants immediately after they send a message. This mitigates targeted attacks on chosen participants after their identity is revealed. We implement Algorand and evaluate its performance on 1,000 EC2 virtual machines, simulating up to 500,000 users. Experimental results show that Algorand confirms transactions in under a minute, achieves 125× Bitcoin’s throughput, and incurs almost no penalty for scaling to more users. Bio Yossi Gilad is a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and Boston University. His research interests include designing, building, and analyzing secure and scalable networked systems. Prior to this position he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a research staff member at IBM Research. He is a recipient of the IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize (2017), the IBM Research Inventor Recognition Award (2015), and the Check Point Institute Information Security Prize (2013-2014).

I guess the only way to hedge this is to own some real assets? 1. Prebuy RE once announced 2. ... 3. Profit? 8)

1995 or so. Peter Lynch stuff + Grahamy + Buffetty On SI since 1997 or so. Excursions into options, semiequips. 401(k) from 1999 or so. Mostly unaffected by 2000-2001 crash: not too much money + my company did not crash + sold a lot to buy a house. Luck is better than smarts (but then I coulda/shoulda hit some tech 10x+baggers from there so...). More money, more serious investing in 200X's. Some windfall cash coming into 2007-2009 GFC, some great picks for huge 2009 (2010?) return. Luck is still better than smarts. In 201Xs tried to cut down on number of positions - did not happen. Tried to move into long term hold (almost never sell), owner operator, Buffetty positions - still work in progress.

Maybe. Though circuit breakers will kick in, the websites of brokers will crash... I think you are right that any flash crash would be faster and more severe. OTOH, a drawn out downturn probably would not differ much from previous ones. Anyway, maybe. 8)

There was never a time (let's talk about last 50 years or so) when a large percentage of people held shares knowing what they hold and behaved as you outlined. People did not hold ETFs, so what, they held mutual funds or whatever their broker sold them. Not sure what "everyone" who you met is, but majority people were in the same boat before. Not with ETFs, with funds or whatever. The same as before. Do you have some research that confirms this or is this your anecdotal guess? Do you have research on what percentage of holders "hold actual shares" and how that has changed over last 50 years? Not different from past crashes.

8) Clayton Homes: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/berkshire-hathaway/very-negative-article-on-clayton/msg217386/#msg217386 CEO salaries/bonuses: I don't have offhand. There were couple through years: He never voted against compensation when he was on boards of companies; he said something that he was never selected for compensation committee because he spoke against excessive comps; he said that he'd pay Jamie Dimon more than his current salary if he came to work for BRK. Not scientifically. ::) Berkshire/MidAmerican seems to be greenish apart from Nevada controversy. BNSF and rails are mostly greenish compared to trucks. Buffett hates firing people, so mostly he does not. But perhaps he just delegates. Mostly there have not been huge employment-related scandals like exploitation of workers. I like Buffett's charitable donations. It's obviously not BRK as company, but it seems like he would be consistent with the attitude both as CEO and as a person. BYD is arguably green investment. Yeah, I try to think about this a bit, but it's tough. I don't invest in cigarettes, guns, arms, mostly not meat production (this is tough if you buy any conglomerates). I invest in booze though. I also have some TDG. I vacillate on pharmas. I invest in banks, but not WFC. I bought some MCO although I think it was complicit in the GFC. I probably would buy KO if it was cheap although I think sugary-drinks is not good (but I'll try not to go into that discussion again). I invest in GOOGL, FB though I think both are partially evil. I invest in cable co crap monopolies. I gave up on not-investing-into-excessive-CEO-compensation-companies, since that leaves just 2-3 companies to invest into. So... shrug. ::) Peace. 8) I reserve the right to disappear from this thread at any time

IBTL ( http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-before-the-lock-ibtl ) - or actually "IBTP" - In before the politics 8) Clayton Homes - was discussed in the past. Coke purchase and Coke defense - was discussed in the past. GenRE - well, that was more of a mistake and overpayment than "evil company". NetJets - probably also more of a mistake than "evil company" (Disclosure: I'd fly private if I could afford it). Wells Fargo's somewhat defense. DVA - not Buffett IBM - support of crappy management? AXP - support of crappy management? Salomon Brothers way back. Overpriced pushy Kirby vacuums way back. Support of huge payouts (salaries/bonuses) to CEOs while calling it a problem. ------------------------------------------ Ultimately though one can accuse any (successful) company of evil deeds. If you invest, you have to accept that as a reality and just live with it. Berkshire is still better in social/environmental/financial aspects than a lot of other companies. So. 8) Edit: sorry if this list is partially OT and LC intended only BRK subs to be discussed in this thread.

That's a nice writeup, Dynamic. 8)