Jurgis

Thanks oddball. Mostly agree. :) audio/video is much worse for me than reading. Seems to take much more time and most of the time I try to multitask, so I don't get much. Audio also seems like much lower bandwidth - i.e. you can get through the interview/presentation/Q&A in less than half time by reading transcript than it takes to listen. Also for non-native English speaker like me, listening is much more effort and I still may miss some things. Also I don't listen while driving - well, I don't drive too much and I prefer silence when I do :). The issue is that I do want to read them. Like oddball says, it's like junk food. Maybe not addiction, but something similar. Can't throw away old Economists, can't go away from Bloomberg - lots of interesting stuff. I'll have to figure out some way to ration. ;)

OK, so we've had a number of threads on how to read more (500 pages per day! 1000 pages per day!). And we have a number of great suggestions every day on what to read - both online and offline (books). So I have a question: how do I read less? Ideas, thoughts, suggestions on how to read less and how to balance on things that are attractive-but-possibly-not-useful (infoporn) vs. possibly-boring-but-maybe-more-useful? Some random thoughts: Like mentioned in Soros thread, I can go on Bloomberg news and spend 2+ hours a day just reading articles there. There's a lot of stuff and it's interesting. Possibly infoporn though. Articles/newsletters/blogs linked in CoBF tend to just accumulate. I probably have over 50 if not 100 articles that look interesting, but haven't had time to read. This includes things like Columbia Business School Graham & Doddsville newsletter, blog posts, etc. Compilations are bad shizz. I'm thankful for whoever collects everything-Munger or everything-Buffett or whatever, but these are books and ... no time to get through them. Videos are really bad - or at least it seems so. You get something like 5 hour Liberty meeting or even 1 hour talks/interviews/lectures and it eats the time like heck. And we haven't gotten to the 10Ks/10Qs yet. :'( These are possibly less of an issue, since they mostly are less reading-candy and you can focus on the companies you invest into and skip others mostly. And we haven't gotten to the books yet. :'( Stuck on Jobs' biography for 6+ months because of lack of time. Read through most of Howard Marks' book only because of the trip to Fairfax Toronto - 4+ hours in airports/planes - and the rest of the book is going to be finished who-knows-when. I guess the answer is to schedule, prioritize and aggressively cut. But how? Sometimes you read something that you think is not going to be useful - and it is - and vice versa. Pushing things into a semi-priority-based queue might work somewhat, but then it doesn't when your queue is hundreds of items long. I was elected to lead not to read.

I want to know what they are smoking when they say $86 is a break-even oil price for Saudi Arabia. Perhaps this includes one-palace-per-prince overhead. Edit: ah, they say: I don't think the "break-even price" means what they say it means.

Oh well. Let's sue WSJ for ... http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/super-villain/images/9/91/3998596-dr-evil.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140805055410 $9 billion dollars baby!

I would add: please don't encourage this foolishness by reposting said stories on this forum. Thanks so much. I clicked your link... and then clicked another 10 links in the Bloomberg link list. :-\ Another hour wasted... :'( Why did you do it? :'( ;)

Like what? He does eat like it's described in Snowball all the time. He may work out and use personal trainer, but that's separate from diet.

OK, so you now qualified with "in investing your own money". That's the first part. In investing other people's money 90% if not more is sales. And Burry, sure, it sounds good in the movie when Christian Bale says that phrase with the puppy eyes of his. But I knew Mike in real life and yeah that man actually could sell like shiz. No, he got the capital not just because people were agog about his numbers. It was in large part because he wrote the columns and participated in the new-at-the-time Internet investing forums and people knew of him. So sales. But let's get back to "in investing your own money". So if I do some programming, I create something useful. Maybe not a lot of people use it, but it's still useful. And 99%+ of engineers create something useful every day. Something that makes this world a better place, that advances the civilization. Investors? OK, you are right "In investing your own money: you get paid if your bet is right ". But in general this creates pretty much zero value. Actually, it's likely that some crappy investors create more value than good investors. I.e. people who put money into biotech stocks and lose most of it, but doing so advances drug research. Good investors mostly just make money. So, OK, if money is your yardstick, maybe that's more fulfilling than engineering. And sure, it also promotes your ego and individualistic tendencies. I get it. Investing is the perfect occupation where you don't have to deal with others (if you don't want it), nobody can tell you what to do, you don't have to compromise or reach consensus with a team - and it rains money (if you're good). But I still object to it being called "truthful". Even successful, numbers-based investing is way less truthful than most of engineering. For your result you're depending on companies to do the right things, you are dependent on markets to do the right things, you are dependent on the politics and economy and country and so on. It's actually really much more society dependent than any engineering and much less dependent on you. And to call the results based on what thousands of people involved in companies you invest are going to do "truthful" - well I don't see that at all. And I also disagree with "in engineering you make money convincing others you are right". I actually make money by creating something. What you say only applies once you go up the management ladder. And then it's no longer engineering. It's management, leadership, sales, advertising, entrepreneurship. Not engineering. All of this IMO and whatever. Have fun being an investor. Peace.

ROFL. ;D ::) :D ;D OK, sorry man. You want the truth? Investing is way way way way way more away from truth than engineering is, was or will ever be. Engineering is at least measurable and actually measured in good organizations. Investing? Well, 99% if not more investors don't add any value. Even on this forum, I'd guess more than 50% of already 1%'ers don't add any value. Discussions here? The truth? LOL. It's all agendas and biases and p3n15 size and all that. Even the best investors just push their agenda and run their book.

Exor should switch listing asap.

I think that's one of the best and least biased descriptions of what happened. :) So I'll +1 on it even if nobody else does. :)

OT. I don't know if I should be concerned or proud or both that my portfolio has large overlap with the above. I don't have PFE/JNJ and have only token amount of AMZN and GOOG. I don't think PFE/JNJ has great management, but they might have better longevity than some of the others.

So bad news is that Buffett was wrong in both points 1 and 2. Why bad news? Because that might have juiced the returns of last 17 years a bit, but looking forward we have to look at points 1 and 2 again and likely to come to Buffett's conclusion again: rates won't fall further from here and corporate profitability won't rise. Assuming we stay with Buffett's prediction on GDP growth, we are pretty much back to his 1999 prediction: pretty subpar general market growth. Yeah, I know, valuations are lower and we still can try to outperform the market. But general returns are unlikely to be great. (Some people will argue that this means we need to short, whatever, but unlike 1999 market may not have a predictable crash. It may just meander like it did for 2015 and so far this year).

OT Apart from Chinese reverse mergers, which pretty much all had no debt.

In this particular case, it seems only someone with medical experience could have done DD and pushed for answers. Likely medical skeptics either did not make it into the board or were silenced. I doubt someone outside the field like Richard Kovacevich (WFC) can do much unless they are already informed by whistle blower or skeptical expert and decide to push with that evidence. Theranos was not cooking financials, Theranos was cooking test results. And their defense to any questions was that the system was proprietary so they would not disclose any results/methods/comparative studies. This may have sounded OK to non medical people on the board, especially if inside medical people perpetuated the illusion too.

I'm gonna regret this, but... - anybody who compares USA under Obama to Soviet Union or "socialist" block, has no clue about Soviet Union or socialist block. - applying a label of "socialism" to the countries as different as Denmark, Venezuela and Soviet Union makes no sense. It might be worthwhile to define the system in more detail than just throw labels. - the standard of living of most of the former "socialist" block did rise significantly after the regimes fell. Which is no way an indiction of Denmark's socialprograms. - some of the former "socialist" block countries are more or less screwed up by corruption, oligarchy and other screw-the-masses policies that are more related to the mindset of people living there than they are to free-market or social programs. In other words, arguing that Poland/Ukraine/Lithuania are doing great or doing badly based on just their "capitalism" quotient makes very little sense. - Edit: some of these Eastern European countries have some social programs that are in some ways better than the ones in US. (So does that make them "socialist" now? I wouldn't say). OTOH, these programs are often also broken in various ways, so, no it's not a paradise. Lucky for me, this site has an ignore list.

I wonder what the story is with these filings. It's possible that there's a large (?) part of the fund that is in investments that don't need to be in the filing. So possibly we only see the rather irrelevant piece of the iceberg. Anyone on the inside who knows more about the fund and whether we are seeing a reasonably big part of it? Is there a large part in cash, non US securities, private assets, etc?

+1 on what glorysk87 said. I know too many programmers who are intelligent and can read code, but can't make good investment decisions for the life of them. And that's also assuming that you don't get majority that votes to funnel money into related party corps - which is very likely.

Be careful what you wish for. Of course his rants were marketing strategy. But his "principles" in general election will also be a marketing strategy. Republicans fell for the populist demagoguery marketing. Will Democrats fall for it too? News at 11. 8) Trump has no principles except for "I am Trump and I do and say whatever I want" principle. But then I'd rather Reps nominate Trump than Christian right ideologue like Cruz. So ... mission accomplished! 8) Let them eat cake!

If you pay 27-42% on gains and you pay nothing on unrealized gains, then hold forever is pretty much the only way to go. There is no way you can generate enough alpha to outweigh losing 27-42% of your gains every time you sell if you sell more often that once in 3 years or so. -------------- Below is my personal US only situation. Fortunately or unfortunately, most of my money is in IRAs/401(k)s, so I get no tax hits from selling. In taxable account, I haven't sold anything for ages except for stock donations to charities which allow me to get higher bang on the buck for appreciated stock.

You might be totally right in what you wrote and I guess I never listened to the details of his secretary's example. But I always thought that the example was that he was not paying taxes because his income was cap gains (or untaxed unrealized cap gains) while the secretary's income was salary. That makes sense as an example and does raise the issue of cap gains taxes (which is another can of worms). You might be right though and maybe the example people have in mind is distorted from what he said. Peace.

Possibly OT. In the past, there have been places and times, countries and cultures that had some mix of progressive egalitarian, religious, democratic, trade/economy libertarian parts. And then usually counter-reforms came that squashed the good things into the ground. I wonder if we are living in one of these temporary times or if we have passed a point of no return and the counter-reforms have no chance. Let's hope it's the latter.

Seen that in the past. The guy is a cookoo.

Pretty good paper. Surprising there was no comments on it.

;D ;D ;D

Donald Bren is in some sense like that Italian guy: I admit he executed great, but he also chose the right place at the right time to start and build. Building on both of these stories, a bunch of Lithuanians made quite OK money in RE because they moved to US/Canada after WW2 and RE was the thing they knew how to do. Not big stuff, but couple houses or apartment buildings. And sure CA was one of the places to do it: huge LA expansion. I even know some post-Soviet immigrants who did it great in CA: if you came in 1990s, the appreciation was still pretty good there, plus buy-renovate-rent/sell. Still I wonder if some of these people would have made better money in stock market (e.g. buying BRK or Wesco ;) ). Oh yeah, Munger also did well in RE because he was in CA.