Jurgis

Stoned again Scott? It's legal now in CA 8)

OK, I probably should shut up, but: I believe that MMM and similar early retirees have not enough allocation for medical/long term care in the old age. MMM will be fine since he's now blog-rich. But in general don't retire in 30-40s expecting great health forever.

I Bing'ed it and got this: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/04/21/no-retirement-savings/26070017/ Last two lines of the article talk about retirees. It doesn't give average (which would be mostly meaningless anyway, you really would want median I'd think). It is bad. Very very few have 500K, forget about 2M. Assuming they own a house, they may be able to survive on social security + medicare... (medicaid might not apply if you have a house, not sure).

Yeah man, I time traveled back in time to 1902 and bought some of that Standard Oil. Now I could retire if I could just persuade idiots at JP Morgan that the safe deposit box with stock certificates is really mine. Not planning to sell anytime soon in the next couple hundred years. We'll need oil to go to the stars I'm sure.

Right. BTW, I used 3% since that's conservative estimate for "never go to zero". Some studies have shown 4% to be a bit risky especially if downturn strikes in the beginning. But anyone can make their own assumptions. I'm being (very) conservative.

Even with Superforecasting predictions are pretty useless for >5 years. Without Superforecasting most of them are useless even for shorter periods (see Tetlock's previous work).

+1. Not to restart my soapbox, but I pretty much stay with opinion that in US you need 500K-1M just to be on the safe side of medical/long-term care. Also assuming 3% withdrawal 500K gives you only 15K per year income...

One answer that is promoted by a lot of people is that you only evaluate process rather than outcome. So a decision is "correct" if you followed the process (e.g. if you're a Buffetty investor: ensured that business had moat, was not in decline, trading at reasonable FCF, whatever else) irrespective of what the investment result was. Of course, the problem with above is that you could have (almost?) perfect process and still crappy results. E.g. you could have bought AXP 5 years ago (arguably good Buffetty process?) instead of MA/V or even SPY and your results would be crap. Maybe not perfect example, but IMO somewhat reasonable one. So at some point you have to evaluate your results too. Or somehow evaluate the process results in comparison with what else you could have done. Not sure how this would work though.

Might be interesting place to work for. :)

Looks like saved by Trump this year. Maybe next year too if Fannie/Freddie work out.

Right. And I see how people from poor countries might dismiss American poverty as non-issue. Yeah, I have friends and relatives who immigrated to America and are doing "fine" while working mostly menial jobs (for some definition of "fine": some still have no health insurance and just hope not to get sick; they may have to retire back home where it's much cheaper to live; etc.). So it's easy to say: "Hey everyone in America could do as well as an immigrant who cleans floors and wipes asses of rich seniors". Except that's a huge simplification and does not really cover the issues of American poverty.

Great though painful article. Thanks.

The fact that poverty in India is much worse than poverty in USA does not subtract from issues of poverty in USA. Yeah, I would rather alleviate poverty in India and other super poor countries. Yeah, I mostly donate for charities outside USA. But rich rightwingers like people in previous messages who casually dismiss US poor likely haven't seen their living conditions either. It's very easy to dismiss US homeless who die in the streets as mentally unstable or addicts. A lot of them are, but there are numerous examples of normal people who lose their mobile houses (haha, let's perhaps read about BRK's Clayton again), have no employment, are buried in debt, and have no money for medicine or other necessities. Should we read about Flint again? Should we read about native American reservations? It's always possible to blame them as clearly they've had much better opportunities than people in India, but that's the common practice of blaming the victim.

Right. Part of attraction to FFH was the deflation hedges/optionality and market hedges. They removed half of market hedges and deflation hedges are less attractive with inflation possibly picking up. So then you look at FFH naked and have to decide if that is attractive. If FFH was at price comparable to BRK, it might not be very attractive naked vs BRK. Now that it's at a (way?) "cheaper" price than BRK, maybe it is. Disclosure: I have large positions in both FFH and BRK. Haven't added recently.

Not bad.

I've watched this before. I don't particularly agree about AAPL or FB buying content (DIS, DISCA, etc.). IMO AAPL and FB are very different from content companies and this would probably be bad idea (although maybe OK for shareholders of the company bought). Probably same with MSFT and GOOGL. AMZN or NFLX could buy content companies. NFLX is too small to buy DIS. Edit: see AAPL thread about their weird attempts at the content... I stand with my original opinion though.

Exactly. So to clarify my comment above: there are businesses that will do mostly fine when not actively run (i.e. run by passive persons); there are no businesses that can withstand active idiots. And yeah, we shouldn't use word "idiots" since they would really be good meaning, but would break the business by trying to grow (diworsify, lever, etc.) or change the products. See "Billion-Dollar Lessons" for more exhaustive list.

Hey, not fair, I almost had a bet for a free beer... :P

Bet that you are misunderstanding the form. I claim that positions with code 4 are Berkshire Hathaway stock positions and not private Warren Buffett stock positions.

You wanna bet? :)

I believe you're misinterpreting the filing. I believe code 4 is Berkshire proper (as opposed to one of the subs) and not Buffett's PA. I don't have much data to substantiate this, just the fact that majority of positions are in 4 and the fact that there's no code for Berkshire proper. I believe code 4 says "Buffett Warren E", because he's specified as the manager for Berkshire proper.

OK, just for fun: what you guys gonna say if Buffett bags an airline with his elephant gun? 8) I mean there are synergies: BRK is already a transportation company ;D ; they could sell tickets for AAL, BNSF and NetJets depending on your travel plans... ;D

But this is likely not Warren Buffett. Will we have to rewrite the above as: ? ::)

I'm gonna misuse a quote (since apparently it was intended the opposite way), but I'm concerned that "The only things in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos." (Jim Hightower. I haven't read the book). I'm the same way unhappy about leftization of the left as I'm unhappy about the rightization of the right. Both lead to policies that are populist and mostly broken. (Yeah, I'm mostly there with dead armadillos.)

Start from http://s1.q4cdn.com/579586326/files/doc_financials/2016/2016-Q3-Interim-Report-Final.pdf and make adjustments if you like... ::) @cwericb: If OP wanted adjustments to Q3 BV, ycharts won't help...