Jurgis

That's true, but he could have lived nicely ever after with much smaller balls if he did not invoke the referendum in the first place. Ah, yes, another lesson: Never, ever, bank on referendum going your expected way. There's a reason most things are not decided by referendums and that referendums seldom give good results.

From the non-involved point of view (which is hard for me, but), couple lessons: It's so easy to screw up everything by pandering to opinions you don't like or support. Cameron was an idiot to let the referendum genie out of the bottle. Prediction markets sometimes have no clue. https://www.gjopen.com/questions/149-will-a-majority-of-voters-in-britain-s-upcoming-referendum-elect-to-remain-in-the-european-union (see graphs and stats).

Condolences to everyone who stood for united Europe. It is a sad day, a sad day indeed. We can only hope that the tide will turn again and Europe will come out of this strong at some point in the future. For now though, this future is in question. :'(

Talk to Warren about Coke... oh, wait, he did not sell. Maybe that's the lesson: it only works - well, it doesn't, but let's say it does - if you just hold it forever and you don't sell. Since otherwise you just sell them and they become even more overvalued and you kick yourself. And by the time they are cheap, they are 300B-500B company and the "cheap" means they ain't gonna grow anymore. Say hello to AAPL, GOOGL, FB, MSFT, ISRG, AMZN, NFLX, etc.

We'll keep you in mind when my wife decides to sell her startup.... ...or maybe not. :P Good luck. Keep us posted how it goes. :)

Sounds like a possibility in theory. In practice - well, the devil is in the details. Like with everything else, why would someone sell you a profitable business for cheap? And if they do, how certain are you about the niche, the sales, the contracts, whether it's not a melting ice cube, single customer risk, key personnel risk, etc. I guess you can develop the knack for it eventually, but the first couple are likely to be learning experiences ... unless you buy in the middle of a meltdown from forced sellers when nobody else has cash to buy. From the other side: you might as well ask about buying small premium chocolate companies, I hear they are great cash cows. ;) (not a novel idea, there are companies who already are buying small chocolate companies, see BFCF/BBX filings ...)

A person I know did this and was stopped for it. Apparently, this is not even a ticket - it's misdemeanor. Or maybe the cop was just trying to scare them. YMMV. Possibly considered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reckless_driving ( may depend on the state ).

Wait, this is not "The Bachelor" 2016 season? ??? I have to change the channel asap.

Right. It's not clear that people want democracy per se. Good economic conditions probably trump (eh, not a pun) the political system. So if you give people lots of money and games and generally good/great living conditions, they might be happy with a dictatorship or whatever. Of course that's in ideal case. In reality things are in shades of grey: the system's not perfect, not everyone gets good living conditions, etc. So China can go in a multitude of directions depending. We'll just have to see.

KCLarkin, Ah, but Bill67 and Charlie479 were right to exit TSCO in 2003. The stock went nowhere from 2003 to 2009. ;) OK, I am kidding. Or partly kidding, since that's one of the reasons why people don't get the compounder returns: it's wicked hard to hold for 6 years with zero return. I've had stocks in companies that were good FCF/ROE cash cows going nowhere for years. And sold them before they finally hit a rerating because of something. Looking backward they were "compounders". Looking forward it became hard for me to expect that at some point. (And in at least one case a somewhat known hedgie also sold out before the rerating). Regarding boring vs. Amazon/Microsoft. There are couple factors at play. Yes, there's glitz (vs. boredom). But another part is that it's rather easy to understand Amazon/Microsoft or let's say Tesla. Somewhat easy to understand restaurants (PNRA) or retail story (LULU). But with companies like MSM or NDSN, the issue is not boredom, the issue is that it is hard to understand and hold on to the company when you don't know its products and you don't have a story. Persuading yourself that NDSN adhesive thingamagingies are competitive, needed and will grow at high rate is hard. Unless you're really in the industry, you don't know what they are and how competitive they are. And so possibly harder to buy and hold through any adverse results. In other words, I get Coke, Geico and Burlington Northern. But I don't really get Lubrizol. (On the other hand, the story may lie: it's easy to get Salomon Brothers or NetJets or BusinessWire. And then results are not what you expected.) Anyway, just some thoughts based on your post and from going through the list of possible compounders above.

Looks like PE ratio graph does not account for stock splits: https://stockrow.com/NKE/snapshots

"Dangerous wildlife" reason is likely less than 1% of current gun ownership (~100M gun owners, <1M "dangerous wildlifers"). IMO sports hunting should be banned, but that's a somewhat separate issue.

But you guys realize that with other exchanges having no delay loop, there might be ways to exploit the time diff between IEX and non-IEX? I wonder if this is well tested for exploits. These might be real issues.

Maybe there's a research, but my hunch is that many homicidal crises are also short-lived. So (irrational) conflict situation escalates and the ready availability of means (guns) lead to more fatal results. This could happen with domestic conflict, workplace conflict, bar conflict, road rage, or even less-violent crime.

Went through my portfolio and some lists from CoBF and elsewhere. Below 10B companies that could possibly be high compounders : CNSWF, FRMO, KHTRF, CLKFF, JLL, SEDG, NOV, PSHZF, URBN, IPGP, CFX, OTCM, EPIQ, EAT, MSM, CSVI, DCI, LNN, CRWS, CLC, CHE, HEI, NDSN, HCSG, LANC, VAL. I'm skeptical that they will be, mostly because of too low growth, but just throwing out some names. :) Sorry if majority of names are already known and discussed in various places before. :) Omitted Liberties-related cos. DTEA is also possibility. I think CMG, PNRA examples show that retail-related concepts that catch up can be a huge compounders through years. The problem might be concepts that don't catch up... ;) Have fun.

I partially disagree with this. I think what you say is true for tech companies. But if you tried to start a new Walmart, Home Depot, Fastenal, I doubt that you'd get easy VC funding. Do you have any examples of non-tech space companies: retailers, restaurants, distributors, non-tech household items manufacturers, etc. who would easily get to unicorn without going public? I'm not talking about online-only retailers like Jet.

Merkhet, even with market cap inflation 25B is pushing it. You are still talking about AAPL equivalent - a company that pretty much takes over a huge huge area. So FIT - maybe if they dominate on-person-health-monitoring-and-care. IBKR - probably not. Of course, as I said, you can lower your expectations to perhaps 18% growth, perhaps 10-15 years, then more companies would qualify. Oddball, I think I am more optimistic. One possibility is spinoffs. CMG and PNRA were spinoffs. So something like that. That's why Liberties and their pieces could be attractive maybe. But, yeah, I agree that the private-forever could be issue for investors. We'll see.

Although it was noted couple times in original article, finding a long term high compounder at somewhat reasonable price is very very hard. First, you have to start at pretty small company, since even 20% compounding for 20 years is something like 38 bagger. So maybe max 10B market cap at investment time and probably lower (1B?), since you also need a huge runway for the 20% growth for 20 years. If you want 25% compounding it's even worse (86x). OTOH, if you want only 15% compounding then we are down from hypercompounders and you might get it with somewhat regular companies - but you also might not satisfy people who want to hugely outperform the index (especially if some of their other picks crash and burn). So max 10B market cap, 20%+ growth rate, probably less than 30x PE, huge runway? Even IBKR doesn't qualify. I tried to look at some potentials. ILMN - no. REGN - no. TDG - maybe barely, but does it really have 20 year runway? EXOSF - doubt it will grow 20%, especially long term. Maybe some Liberties? TRIP - barely under 10B, does it really have 20 year runway? CMPR - maybe, but will it grow 20%, does it have long runway? FIT - maybe if it survives and becomes category buster (it can just crash and burn though). Edit: if you can find a huge compounder at 10-100M market cap, that could work great. But usually that means untested companies that for some reason pivot or positively explode. Usually 10-100M market caps are not clear moat/clear huge runway companies, so it's hard to predict 20 years. But yeah something like next CMG or PNRA maybe. Next TJX. If you buy at 10-100M, you don't need a category buster, just something that is good business and can capture reasonable piece of market share. It's still hard IMO, but for some people maybe easier than picking 1B+ winners.

Have you looked into Michael Bloomberg's "Every Town For Gun Safety" organization? I'm sure it has all the funding it needs but I am considering getting involved. I saw it mentioned among others. I will look into it next time I do a donation. Thanks. Of course, even pro-gun-control groups in USA treat 2nd amendment as a third rail. (yeah pun intended). So none of them stand up for a gun ban. Pity.

Added 5 pro gun demagogues to ignore list. Donated to https://secure.efsgv.org/page/contribute/efsgv Good day's work. Pro-gun propaganda kills people. Stop NRA, stop guns, stop gun violence.

Here we go: http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/brits-can-now-insure-their-driverless-cars Found the link on SI

Lost-time is difficult to quantify without knowing what would be saved by going via air and relative speeds/etc. Regarding VTOL autonomous "they will never be driven on the land" - this would be future ideal case. However, most of the current flying car startups are car-plane hybrids that have to drive, have to have runways. A few are trying VTOL, but AFAIK they are farther away from working prototypes and commercialization. Still good luck to them. :) It would be great if we also had VTOL for long range travel. I think a lot of crappiness with air travel is due to airport congestion, which is mostly due to the runway planning (although I might be wrong - just heard it somewhere). But VTOL for long range is not really even in the works AFAIK. Huge lead times, huge regulations (though possibly justified) and not clear if there's demand, especially since past military VTOLs crashed a lot.

OK, thanks.

Isn't flying hugely energy-inefficient? Even after accounting for road-building-maintenance costs? Unless you expect the cost of energy to drop to marginal zero based on cheap fusion/whatever. At current technology, my friends who drive and fly pretty much say that flying-cars are bad cars and bad planes combined into a bad hybrid. But sure I'm all for spending money on flying car R&D. Better than spending it on 140 characters. ;)

Yes, I understand that casinos will still use Berkshire Energy as transmission provider. My question meant specifically the energy provider part. So to repeat: Is Berkshire Energy the high cost energy provider or are other companies loss-selling (or very-low-margin selling) it (in wholesale market)? I thought Buffett or Abel said that they are low cost energy provider. But perhaps they meant low-cost energy+transmission combined - although that makes little sense, since you can't compare transmission since usually there's only a single transmission provider.