Jurgis

All my wishes @ http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/festivus-value-investing-edition/

IB does statement is csv Yeah, I think there are ways to import into TurboTax standalone, but not into TT Online. If someone knows a way, please let me know.

I'll go meta: https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org I donate to: http://www.seva.org/site/PageServer http://www.worldwildlife.org/ Plus some organizations that are more personal, etc.

All my accounts except the one that I SMA'd to a manager are on Fidelity. SMA'd account is on IB. I love Fidelity. However, there are drawbacks: 1. They don't allow you to buy "No Info" OTC stocks. 2. They may not allow you to buy "Grey Info" OTC stocks. This varies I think. You may have to go through broker. 3. You may have issues buying penny stocks, may have to go through broker. 4. Foreign markets accessible are not the same ones as IB. There's significant overlap, but YMMV. 5. Foreign commissions are high. 6. XXXXF shares sometimes have added $50 fee for trade. YMMV. 7. You cannot buy foreign stocks on foreign exchanges in IRA/401(k). Some people here say that they can, but I never got Fido to allow me this. 8. People say that bond purchases are better on IB, since they sell you bonds cheaply from some kind of market (???) while Fido mostly sells only from their inventory. But then bond market is a separate f&ckup discussion. I'm sure I'm forgetting something more about Fido. Will post if I remember. I still prefer them to IB mostly because IB does not directly import to TurboTax Online which is a f&cking pain when your SMA manager trades like heck. Entering 200 trades manually at tax time - I'll kill myself in April. :'( IB report interface also sucks to high hell. IB to Quicken import is a bit painful too, but that's a lot because of the trades in foreign currencies.

Rules, we don't need no stinkin' rules! Wishing everyone kvetching Festivus or something like that! Dance yourself a wall.

Haha, my hate on IB is on IB thread. I think someone else had bad experience with opening IRA with them, should be on IB thread too. Yeah, IB should die, kkthxok. 8) But all SMA managers use their platform :'( :'( :'( :'( :'(

I agree with Schwab711: this is a tough problem to tackle. Couple observations from various angles. Like Schwab711 alluded, everyone wants to be evaluated long term. So if we do evaluating using 1-3 year measurements, even this board would rise up in protest. Come on, how many threads did we have about known investor underperformance in last 5+ years and there's always a defense that this is too short, it's all bull market, blame indexers, blame FANG, etc. But if we go for 5-10 year timeframes, the number of data points shrinks a lot. The universe of managers shrinks a lot too (assuming your goal is to pick a great manager). Related to last sentence, your goal probably would be not just to find a great manager, but to find an underappreciated great manager. I.e. if manager is obviously great (20%+ returns for decade, minimal drawdowns), everyone would want to invest with them and they'd either be running superhuge monster fund or be inaccessible to new investors or both. If your approach just tells that Seth Klarman or Stan Druckenmiller are great investors, it is pretty useless. How would you find an underappreciated great manager? Are there measures that show superlative managers while conventional measures miss them? Maybe the paragraph above is less applicable if we evaluate just mutual fund managers and limit the analysis to funds open to new investors. Then perhaps it's enough to find great manager. The next question then is how you separate the results of a fund manager from the results of their organization. Perhaps this is easy for solo hedgies. But for a mutual fund, there will be analysts, etc. who contribute to the fund stock selections. If analysis assumes everything is done by a fund manager, but in reality most work is done by analysts, what happens if some of the good ones leave? Anyway, possibly it could be an interesting project. However, even if someone did it - likely on behalf of some big client - they'd never announce the results, since that pretty much kills their competitive advantage. Maybe if Morningstar did it... To ask a side question: if we are talking about sabermetrics on investment managers, why not attempt it on companies or CEOs? Figure out a way to measure successability of a company (or CEO), invest in the great-but-unappreciated, ... , profit. 8) There's probably more data and payoff might be bigger. And then we wouldn't need 10 or 100 page threads about XXX and XXXX. Anyone game? 8)

Possibly OT, but you may know that someone's height has a correlation to their success in life (I forget if this was done for business people only or some wider population). We have a positive bias for tall people and they have a positive bias (confidence?) for themselves. Same for some other physical attributes. ::)

I think this is way one sided. A lot of entrepreneurs don't do what oddballstocks described. He described a subset of businesses exploiting arbitrage opportunities. If you create a business (ok, startup 8) ) to create new product, you're not building it as a value investor. Even if you create a business that provides a service, the arbitrage part (buy low, sell high) may become much lesser part of the game. And if you're building out business running at a loss to size it up or capture some market, that's definitely not value investing.

Great story.

Yeah, that's why most markets are getting more and more efficient. There are edge cases where people still can make money. And the more it's physical world vs. online computer-processable, the more edges there are. But even physical world edges are getting smoothed out somewhat. Not totally though.

Yeah, it does. I should stop reading oil threads and investing in oil cos. (Almost done). I should stop reading macro threads. (But what to do with FFH? ::) ). Perhaps I should review all my stock holdings and see if I suffer from endowment effect and should rather sell them. But... the trouble here is that I might be also suffering from novelty effect (new girl stock might look better than the old one...). So... tough. 8) And yeah, the job interviews. Most of them are worthless?

LOL, that's how I make money in online games. The markets there are hugely inefficient. Oh the margins... you can make 2x-5x on things in matter of days if not hours. Of course, there's reason for that: the "money" is really pennies if converted to US$. So part of the reason why markets are inefficient is that there's little point for people to spend time exploiting the inefficiencies. I do it for fun - but it is a waste of time ;D You learn some of the things you mentioned above: market arbitrage (buy in one place, sell in another), time arbitrage (buy when item is plentiful wait for shortage, sell), quantity arbitrage (buy 1000, sell in 1-10), etc. Most of these don't apply to stock market though or at least are much tougher to find and exploit. BTW, some games have market systems that lead to quite narrow margins with barely if any profits. Some have "trader's paradise" markets. I never could do this well in real life, but I knew some people who did.

Whatever you say about Lewis, he can collect some nice one liners and zingers. I think I'll have to get the book... when it comes out... and gets down to $1.99 8)

Yeah, but even with the latter there is some reflexivity. I.e. "we are optimistic that things will be good, so we'll invest in businesses, spend more and things will be good". Not saying that reflexivity will win, but it could.

Yes, invest in your mother-in-law and in your sister-in-law. It's a good investment.

I'm sure Buffett & co will talk to Dow about that. Whether Dow will be willing to part with anything worthwhile for BRK is another question.

$1.99 kindle version now on Amazon https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00YMUODKM

We agree on that. :)

Agreed. Tell that to MSFT, AAPL, FB, GOOGL multimillionaires. ;) Practically everyone who diversified out ended up multiples less rich than the ones who did not. ;) Yeah, I know, tell it to MOT, RIMM, etc. employees who lost most if not everything... ;) Edit: I guess the most ironic one is AAPL. I know a bunch of people who got fired from AAPL in the dark days ... obviously did not keep their "worthless" stock ...

Hmmm. That might be a bit of a confirmation bias. How about the following obvious, excellent opportunities for which professional expertise would have triggered a massive buy signal: Research in Motion in 2007 Countrywide Home Loans in 2004 AIG in 2004 Motorola in 2003 Not saying that professional expertise is worthless, only that I know lots of very smart engineers who lost scads of money by investing in their area of expertise. I explicitly said that this is from Monday morning quarterbacking standpoint. So yeah, it's obviously biased by post-factum analysis. However, I can say without any bias that Motorola in 2003 or RIMM in 2007 would not have been no-brainers to me. I knew about them and I did not invest in them. In fact, for me both of them were pretty clearly uninvestable at that time. I have no opinion about AIG or Countrywide Home Loans. I have no clue why you would even consider them to be "in-profession" for engineers. ::)

I've made this argument about small caps in the past. In nanocap you might not be trading against a mutual fund with 10 analysts, but you might be trading against oddballstocks, otc adventures, Travis Wiedower, Schwab711, Picasso, etc. (forgive me if I did not mention someone else personally). Are you better than them? I'm not. ;) Will you get more info and faster than them? Not me.

Anyway, here are couple "in-profession" "informational advantage" gimmes (from Monday morning quarterbacking standpoint) that I missed in the last 20 years or so: GOOGL at IPO FB at IPO Mobile providers in 2000s Apple at iPhone Nvidia last couple of years ARM(H)(Y) in 2000s INTU in 2000s For pretty much all of these, it was clear that the company has a huge technological/market advantage. For most the issue that tripped me was valuation. For couple it was thumb sucking - I knew, but I did not do anything. For couple, it was not enough confidence to buy and hold (sometimes coupled with valuation, but in case of ARM I just sold for some stupid reason).

OK. You have a point there. Although sometimes people in-profession can have a counter-edge exactly because they are close to the area/products which gives raise to a number of negative biases because they know what's in the sausage. In general I agree that more knowledge is better than less. I still question how much of this is an actual edge.

This is somewhat commonly held belief, but in reality very few people have knowledge deep and wide enough to have an edge even in their profession. Even if you're a doctor, you don't necessarily have knowledge and mindset to analyze the drugs and competitive advantage of pharma company X. And likely if they have competitive advantage, the stock is already expensive, so you have to have a level 2 or 3 insight to do better than that. There are some situations where you can have level 2 insights by being in profession related to what company does. But these opportunities are usually few and far between.