Jurgis

The issue is that you have to have pretty gigantic changes in the rate for the price to differ substantially with payment staying the same. E.g. it took about 20 years to go from 15% to 5%. So I think your scenarios are too abstract and also too unlikely to discuss. Sorry. Have fun. :) You can see from your example that rate change would have to be huge for relatively small change in prices. So if we are talking about genuinely overpriced RE, the prices can drop a lot without much change in rates. You are more likely to end up with 500K/5% going to to 400K/6% than your scenario 1->2. If you are talking about genuinely undervalued RE, it's the opposite: you'll likely get 200K/10% -> 300K/9% or something like that. In yet other words, RE prices do not depend just on rates. They depend on a lot of other factors and rate dependency is not direct and linear as in your scenarios.

14% difference (500K/437K) suddenly makes RE from expensive to cheap? Sorry, no. The answer really is buying cheap RE with cheap debt. Or at least with refinansable debt in dropping rate environment. Like Florida in 2010 or so. You can make or lose money in both scenarios you mentioned, but it will depend on context. Just don't delude yourself that 14% difference makes RE cheap.

The topic showed up on my browser shortened as "Choosing the right univers" and I thought "wow, I did not know I could choose the universe to live in". :o ;D I'm sure someone will post more useful reply. Peace. :) Edit: IMO better university is almost always the way to go. But ratings may not be accurate, so it would be good to get opinion from someone who really knows universities involved. E.g. I did my degree in the university that was rated #2 by some criteria and otoh was not considered great by other criteria. I don't think it was #2 but it was way better than "common" view.

Here you go, I've got a market cap fever and the only prescription is... 8) ::)

Jurgis - how were you able to get a mortgage with no fees? Appraisal, underwriting, title insurance, legal fees - all mandatory as far as I know. Would love to know your secret. In reality they eat the fees so it’s effectively lowering the interest rate slightly. Exactly. Mortgage guy just pays these fees from his pocket. Which means that he likely gave me a bit higher rate which made his commission higher and then he paid fees from his commission. If you don't plan to refi and plan to hold mortgage very long, you are likely better with fees (and maybe with points too) to get a lower rate now. If you expect to refi, you are better off with no fees/no points, since the fees you paid are pure loss and the bit higher rate you get now will be refi'd anyway. In the past 10 years or so it was better to go no-fees/no-points since you refi'd frequently. Now it's harder to say - we might be at the bottom - or not. ;)

We need more cowbell.

https://lorenshapiro.villagemtg.com/ - this is the guy I got my mortgages from. No clue if he does non-MA.

I got my last N mortgages through a single mortgage broker guy. I pretty much always took 30y no points no fees, which gives a bit higher rate, but then you refi again at no points no fees when rate drops .5 or more. So ended up at 3.5% and sitting there. Not sure if rates ever got to 3.0% 30y no points no fees. Perhaps I should ping the guy to check. ;) Edit: I don't see rates at 3.0% right now. Should keep it in mind - maybe we'll drop there.

You have little control of who your lender ultimately is. Your mortgage can be sold at any moment to anyone. Sure, some lenders are more likely to retain mortgage, but overall there's no guarantee. My mortgage got transferred (sold?) two or three times in the last five years.

What oddball said. +1. Also, it might be harder to judge branch numbers in big suburbia, but I think in our area it's stable to going down a bit. Consistent with oddball's national numbers. Edit: I don't know why there would be huge branch growth in your small city. Some kind of local bank competitive war?

Happy Birthday!

See my post at http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/books/billion-dollar-lessons-paul-b-carroll-chunka-mui/ In short IMO often there are no clear differences between the companies that succeeded and the ones that failed. Or the difference is the management if you can evaluate it. So yeah perhaps it's safer not to invest in levered rollups at all. Or be careful and watch closely. But then you're likely to sell out at any sign of trouble. And even successful rollups usually go through trouble spots. So, we pretty much come back to trusting management or not investing. Just IMO though. :) Disclosure: I have positions in various Liberty companies.

TDG? :)

Great book IMO, just finished reading it. One thing I realized from reading it is that all the supersuccessful "outsider" companies have done pretty much the same things that were billion dollar mistakes for other companies. I.e. buyouts, expanding into close-by fields, expanding into unrelated fields, leverage, etc. All of these are also things that supersuccessful companies did as well. (Yeah, BRK is a conglomerate, strike one, bought out overpriced broken companies - GenRe/NetJets, strike two, three and so on ;) ). So you pretty much can't look at company A and say "well, it's doing things that led to billion dollar mistakes, so it's gonna fail, don't invest". I guess you pretty much have to look at the management (and culture??? - I still don't know if anyone can evaluate the culture effectively en moment and not just past with perfect 20/20 vision). And hope that management results stay as good as they were in the past. There might be a few category killers that never strayed from straight and narrow even as they made killing while growing. WMT (didn't they fail somewhere abroad though?)? HD? MA/V? This would be a very very small list of investable companies. Maybe enough for very concentrated investors if they start at the right point in time. Not sure.

Guns in the hands of people is never a solution. If police doesn't work, fix the police. Don't give up and arm the people. And BTW the pro-gun clowns are in lala land if they think that their 80 year old parents will shoot the armed robbers stealing their cars and everything will work out just fine. Places where police enforcement breaks down and crime is rampant are unsafe whether you have a gun or not. In some situations having the gun will scare the criminals, in others it will just escalate and you'll end up dead. Presumably that's the outcome that doesn't cross the gun toters mind. The solution is to solve the economy problems, solve the crime problems, solve the enforcement problems. Yeah, it's hard. So people always go for easy "solutions" that don't solve anything. Cause NYC crime was radically reduced by giving NYCers guns. Not. http://www.nber.org/digest/jan03/w9061.html

What Eric said might be true when you roll over from 401(k) into IRAs, but it doesn't apply when you convert IRAs to Roth. IRA conversion to Roth is proportional like you said. For it not to be proportional, you'd have to put the pre-tax portion into 401(k) and then it's not counted in the proportion.

I believe there was already a long thread about this on CoBF. Search? From client side the advantages/disadvantages are: - Non qualified clients can be in SMA, not sure if you can have hedge fund for non-qualified. - In SMA client does the taxes, in HF client gets K-1 - both of these have pros/cons from client side - In SMA client sees all the moves in real-time, in HF they don't and might not know what you hold at all - both of these have pros/cons - In SMA client can pull money/close account at any time, in HF you can restrict - both of these have pros/cons.

Some years ago we come back to our house after work and find big screen TV missing. Well, my wife did not even notice it, I noticed it when I got home. Call police. They tell us to get out of the house in case robber is still inside and show up in force (this being Boston and not Detroit suburbs ::) ), look through the house, find no burglar. Then one guy remains to write the report, finds the window that was open where the burglars cut the screen and got in. Well, he says, this is where they got in, but I'm not a detective, so we won't do anything more like taking fingerprints or whatever. Good bye. If you need to file insurance report, refer to case XXXXXX. That's it. I thought it was par for course. In another case, where someone stole my car (joyride) police phoned me to get it back when the car got towed with tons of parking tickets. At least I did not have to pay for the parking tickets. In yet another case, a guy stole my purse/wallet/etc. got apprehended by mall police while trying to use blocked CC. I got back the contents that were dumped by the culprit and turned to police by good Samaritans. That's my USA police experience. At least they don't ask for bribes and are not crooked - in my experience - as the police back in Lithuania... Edit: all the times I've been stopped by traffic cops in USA, they have been extremely professional and nice. All the stops were warranted and I got fewer tickets than I should have.

Soros does not do any good by scaremongering the EU disintegration. It's one thing to acknowledge that the situation is difficult and changes are needed. It's another thing to openly say that disintegration is inevitable. Calling for "we must not give up" after that sounds rather meaningless: if you believe the fallout is inevitable, what's the point of action? Now, on the other hand, most pro-EU commentators are saying that changes are needed. What changes? Soros says "a genuine banking union, a limited fiscal union, and much stronger mechanisms of democratic accountability". First two of these are probably good ones. But common people probably don't give a crap about "a genuine banking union, a limited fiscal union". Common people might care about "democratic accountability" of EU institutions, but that's a tough one to reform for people to like. Euro parliament is already elected. Transferring more power to Euro parliament is not going to be attractive right now. It's not clear to me what else can be done for "democratic accountability" of EU institutions. Other areas of contention: 1. Euro. Yes, euro was possibly a mistake. But disbanding euro into separate currencies right now would be a tough thing to do and possibly not satisfying to anyone. Clearly it would lead to some de-EUization. Might be an interesting thing to consider: to sacrifice euro and yet maintain EU. Probably unlikely. 2. Inter EU free movement of labor. I agree that this is one of the major features of EU and without it EU is so much less. Another one that common people care about (clearly on both sides: some are pro, some are against), but very difficult to envision EU without it. So probably no change, which means continued unhappiness of some (significant) percentage of common people. 3. Immigration from outside EU. This is recent issue. On one hand, this is somewhat easy to deal with: EU just closes its doors to outside immigration or at least severely reduces it. This would be popular among most common people. As much as I am pro-immigration, this might be (and might have been already) a way to go to stop intra EU breakdown. In a way, step back to lose a fight, but keep the EU. Not sure if this is possible at this stage. Maybe it's too late to change public opinion even if steps to curtail outside immigration are taken. 4. EU "laws" and "regulations". This is another place where single EU framework is a significant part of EU structure. I think this is overblown as concern to common people. I.e. it is something against-EU camp is drumming up, but in reality it's not a big issue. Reducing bureaucracy and lightening the regulatory frameworks might be possible and positive. I am not sure it would change much in people's perception. It might change things in CoBF and business owner's perception, but they are not the ones that campaign and vote against EU mostly. In general, anti-EU sentiment is mostly due to bad economy. This is usually the case. When economy is good, people are friends. When economy is bad, immigrants, politicians, gays, muslims and Euro bureaucrats are to blame. So the answer is to fix the economy stupid. The tough part is that EU has limited powers to fix economy and some of these powers are not even used well. But still perhaps it's the way to go if EU is to survive.

We can only hope that Felix Salmon is too negative. No, there are a lot of people who want Europe to be one federalist nation. It's clear from the voting too. Whether nationalists will win in the short term and long term still remains the question. We can only hope that they won't or that any of their victories will be reversed in the future. But sure, knowing Europe and Europeans, the EU progress until 2008 crisis was completely remarkable to me. I never expected EU to go so far as it did. How far it will now step backward is ongoing question.

I would say Liberties have that opportunity too. Anyway, merkhet is right that there is also risk with LBTYA, so do your own DD. Edit: obviously the forum namesakes BRK and FFH may buy more Euro businesses too. Edit 2: I wonder if BRK wrote any specialty Brexit (re)insurance.

LBTYA is below February low according to Yahoo, but I am not sure if they adjusted the chart for LILA distribution.

Economist says it better than I ever could: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21701265-how-minimise-damage-britains-senseless-self-inflicted-blow-tragic-split I should invest more into EXOSF just because they bought the bloody paper.

Right, investment-wise, I guess my GDWN.GB position and some minor UK holdings will take it in chin. I may add to GDWN or not - though I doubt it goes below Feb/March 1600 prices. EXOSF might drop a bunch - might add. The rest is US mostly, so it will depend on whether market goes nuclear down or takes it in a stride. Like Buffett says about these things, longer term it will work out. Assuming we are not going into full blown isolationism & depression across the globe (which I don't predict yet).

I position myself strongly politically. I did not position myself strongly investment-wise. Although I guess I could have gone market neutral today - might have been smart thing to do with 20/20 past vision. (No smilies, not in a smiling mood).