Jurgis

In Fortune's Formula (page 322-325 hardcover) there's a story of Ed Thorp's crowd making multimillions in sports (horce racing mostly) in 1980s using stats and Kelly. Not clear if inefficiencies are still there on large scale. Like the author says, if someone finds inefficiency that can make millions they are smart not to talk about it. 8)

OTOH, even if you have self-driving trucks, the likely transportation model will be something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RORO for long distance onto BNSF and then self-drive remaining shorter distance. Why not?

OT? I prefer GLOW ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5770786/ ). 8) Can't invest in it though...

Thanks. 8)

Interesting talk. The risk of trying to make person both number cruncher and storyteller is that instead of intended checks-and-balances you might get a reinforcement. I.e. instead of story checking the numbers or numbers checking the story, you get double confirmation bias: "not only numbers(story) but also story(numbers) support my investment thesis!!!" Damodaran makes both sides look easy. Neither side seems easy to me. Yeah, sure, it's easy to create fantasy stories. But it's not so easy to create what he calls "probable" stories and distinguish them from "(im)possible". Yeah, sure, it's easy to write up a bunch of (ir)relevant numbers. But it's harder to create a numerical model that is indepth, both conservative and realistic, and made from numbers that matter. And then you also have to connect the two. I see only few people who do what Damodaran suggested in his talk. And I don't think this is because people think his approach is bad. I think it's because it's not that easy. Another issue is that ultimately he does (his own version of a bit more complicated) DCF. And DCF has its own set of issues that may not be connected with business and story (large part of value ends up being terminal value, which is difficult to predict; discount rate affects DCF a lot and what Damodaran uses - weighted cost of capital - is IMO controversial; etc.). Anyway, Damodaran's approach is pretty interesting and might be a good set of tools for some investors.

Anecdote fitting the Oncor acquisition situation: from this week's Barron's article "Warren Buffett's Best Advice" http://www.barrons.com/articles/warren-buffetts-best-advice-and-why-he-doesnt-own-gold-1503115174

Or unless you're an alien... but then I repeat myself... 8) ("This explains a lot of things" - Men in Black)

I hope you got to see some of it, what did you end up doing? I took my wife and kids up to Menan, Idaho along with a big group of neighbor friends (we drove around 4 hours to get there) Camped out Sunday night, then played sun / moon / eclipse songs all morning while we waited. I took a few videos: one with a DJI drone to see the 360 degree sunset, and one from a small camcorder on a tripod. When C2 hit and there was a big black disc where the sun had been... my brain blew a fuse, and all I could do was scream like I was at a cosmic rock concert. I saw the 2012 annular eclipse in Saint George, Utah, but it was nothing compared to a total. We didn't go. :( The weather prediction was pretty bad (although ultimately it seems there were some openings in the clouds). We saw the partial (63%), which is of course not comparable to total. Well, another time... 8) Glad that you guys had a great time. 8)

Could I not buy something and get 270M for it? 8)

Thanks Sanjeev! I'll try not to read Politics Board. If someone needs my thoughts or support there, send PM anytime. Peace! 8)

If it was a Lear Jet, I'd redirect it to Nashville pronto. :-\ 8) Too cheap to dump $2K to change tickets to Nashville... Oh well, I won't tell anyone I'm cheap. Just gonna say it's all for adventure! 8)

Yeah, I have a car... but also have a flight back that constraints how far I can drive... and it's not clear how bad the roads gonna be. There's a map that shows "closest totality point by car" using road network. Kansas City is closest for all of Texas... If they decide to come, it's gonna be gridlock for hundreds of miles. It's gonna be an adventure... 8)

Maybe this is gonna be a more fun thread for General. 8) <--- oh, look these are my eclipse glasses. 8) Anyone's going to watch? Going to path of totality? I have tickets to Kansas City and clouds are predicted. :'( :'( :'( What to do, what to do? Try to change to Nashville, not to go at all... :'( Ah those investment decisions about the future. :'(

Suppose that he bought WFC in his personal account rather than JPM. And then, suppose after a couple of years, he decided that, amid WFC's recent scandals, the bank had lost a significant part of its competitive advantage and it was time to sell. He knows that Berkshire selling would likely have a negative effect on price, which would hurt the position in his personal account. So, what does he sell first, Berkshire's stake in WFC or his own? Since his personal account potentially benefits from front-running Berkshire, that's a conflict of interest. By ensuring his personal stockholdings don't intersect with Berkshire's he can avoid this issue. I know what you're saying, but it's not that simple. If he buys WFC for BRK and JPM for himself, people can accuse him of conflict of interest because why he bought JPM for himself, is it better than WFC? Why did he not buy WFC for himself, does he not believe it's a good buy? Why did he buy it for BRK then? I think that's why he said he bought Seritage in personal account, since it would not move needle for BRK, so presumably there's no conflict of interest then. Although you could argue that there is even in that case... To be clear: I don't care what he bought where much. Just showing that it's not simple to be completely impartial or whatever the word should be.

I finally read through these and I am pretty impressed. If I was not picking stocks myself, I might just buy SEQUX. 1% fee is a bit high.

Feel free to start a discussion and maybe people would be interested and will get involved. :) For example, apart from the ones you mentioned, what are in the 1% of funds that you don't think are pointless? Maybe by different areas? We could start a mutual fund thread or resurrect one so we don't OT Sequoia thread too much.

Good article. I liked that his answers were more nuanced than index-and-FANG-bashing common by some. He gave a non answer about his selling discipline though (or perhaps there were pieces cut out). Some of his ideas might be attractive for people with access to the markets he mentioned and willing to do DD there. I'll put his book into my Amazon list and might buy it at some point.

I'll assume you mean "US stock mutual funds" (If you mean "bond", the answer is yes. If you mean "international", the answer is likely yes). It's a tough question. Last time I looked, you still could find non-super-situational (e.g. not just bio/tech only) mutual funds that outperformed indexes for last 10 years. And you can definitely find value mutual funds who underperformed and who argue that the things will change sometime soon (this is the whole long discussion on various threads if value managers are kaput or just having bad time in hugely bull market, etc.). It is very hard to say whether you can pick mutual funds that will do well in the future. IMO, this is possibly as hard as picking stocks ... and very different from picking stocks. So in some sense CoBF is a bad board to ask. People here are either great at picking stocks or think they are great at picking stocks or at least have spent a lot of time and effort to pick stocks. Very few people here spent much time at picking mutual funds. And people who invest into mutual funds here mostly do that because they somehow "know" the management of the fund, i.e. they've read the books, watched the CNN/youtube/Bloomberg, they've met them at BRK/whatever events, etc. Which might not be the greatest way to pick mutual fund - or maybe it is - but who knows... Edit: if you're asking for concrete suggestions, I don't have any. Some time ago I looked a bit at finding good mutual funds to invest into, but I did not spend a lot of time and pretty much gave up. Currently I have no suggestions.

A lot (all?) of their outperformance before VRX debacle was due to their VRX position. In other words, if they have not invested in VRX, likely they would have underperformed too. (Ideally they would have sold most/all VRX near the top or even within 2/3 of the top. Of course it's all coulda shoulda).

As if they don't do that now without collision avoidance. ::) Anyway, you might be right somewhat. At this point I would not change my investment behavior even if I was invested in a pure auto insurer. They definitely have 10+ years of mostly-not-much-change business conditions. And anyone who tries to predict what happens after 10+ years is likely deluding themselves.

It's good that they encourage people to donate directly as that cuts down on how much goes to a second overhead. Curious why you chose to go w/ The Gates Foundation rather than going direct. We probably should move this to charity thread (I'm pretty sure there was one at some point). You are right that donating to Gates foundation makes your donation suffer second overhead. OTOH, you might be benefiting from their expertise in picking organizations to support. Also some organizations that they support might not be accessible for you to support directly. You may also benefit from their "asset allocation" decisions - in terms of how much money to put into poverty, how much into education, etc. If you want to make these decisions yourself, power to you. If you don't, there's nothing wrong to get them to make these decisions for you (as long as you like/agree with their priorities). I'm not a concentrated investor and I'm not a concentrated "charity donator". I know that most people advise to pick a single (or couple) charity to donate to and stick with that. I don't follow that very much. If I concentrated to single charity, I might go with Gates just because of the arguments above. As it is, I do a scattershot with a bit of forethought and planning but also with a bit of random/emotional/etc. decisions. ./shrug Can I ask you to follow up on charity thread if you want to continue this discussion? Edit: we can use this thread I think: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/charity-recommendations/msg284871/#msg284871

I think people are making mistake thinking that you need level 4-5 autonomous driving for the number of accidents to drop significantly and impact insurance companies. IMO, active collision avoidance systems are likely to drop the number of accidents almost as much as the level 4-5 and they will come much sooner. Of course, you still need 10 years+ for the whole auto inventory to get collision avoidance, so I'd say there are ~10 years+ for insurance companies. Also, there will be time IMO when the insurers still charge higher premiums and get extra profits even while the accidents are declining. (The corollary though is last year when Buffett said that Geico had lower margins due to more distracted driving (presumably)).

This might be OT, but Gates Foundation now accepts donations from anyone. This was not true some time ago, but people have been bugging them to take their money 8), so they have relented. I have donated some. I may donate more. There are caveats: a large chunk of your money gets redonated to causes/organizations Gates Foundation supports. You can see the list on their site. They still encourage you to donate directly to these organizations (but they will take your money and redonate).

Datorama updated: http://www.dataroma.com/m/holdings.php?m=brk Baupost also bought SYF... did any of these guys talk about what/why they like it?

Partially OT: Rocketfinancial people should figure out that there's no LMCK anymore... ::)