mrholty

Along the opposite lines the government needs to look at licensing to becoming a doctor. The cost of our healthcare is driven by not only drug costs and insurance profits but also salaries.

I agree with SlowAppreciation. If you are Oreo and you have a large sales quantity, brand awareness, etc and you are running general ads than you can spend a ton of money very quick on Facebook. If you are a new brand and have limited dollars to spend FB targeting while not perfect can take unprofitable campaigns and by further segmenting the groups lead to very healthy ROI's that can be actually measured especially vs old school mediums of radio, print and TV. My friend who built his business burned through a bunch of money to start. He took no salary for 2-3 years and did this as a part-time gig. It took a lot of fine tuning to figure out what worked and what didn't and even then its changing. Last night I reached out to him again to see how its going. He's finally started to get to breakeven on some instrgram ads though his target market only slighly overlaps with the average user there. His viewpoint on the different platforms: GOOG Adwords - he spends less and less on. Still a positive ROI but barely. Instragram - Finally breaking even on ROI - has a few positive campaigns. He'e excited for some new features that Instragram is launching here where you can buy what is in the ad without leaving Instragram. (his words is that this will be a gamechanger for instragram if it works as well as he's read about it) Pinterest - If you have a product for women (any age) it will work. Pinterest is 90% women and the way ads work along with promoted pins and others they have a long tail. Snapchat - their targeting is absolute crap. He was shocked at how bad it is vs Facebook. Bing-He has a few products that skew older and they work very well on Bing. A much better ROI than Goog due to their costs being less than half primarily but also a higher conversion %.

Your old lead acid battery is mostly recycleable. Some stats I saw were that they were 90+% recyclable and something like 95% of the batteries themselves are recycled. Its economically positive as you can call up your local dealership and they will pay you or give you a credit for a returned battery. For Lithium batteries its the opposite. The chemicals are mixed together so its hard to seperate for recycling. Simple way to check is when you return one of them you have to pay = uneconomic. When companies say they recycle lithium batteries what they are mostly doing are seperating the packs from the rest and sending the packs to China where Chinese companies are then signing off and recyling them. What that means in China is that they are then usually disposed off in landfills in China or sent to Africa and then disposed of. Its not a green process by any means. (My data is 3+ years old but when I spent a lot of time on this they said it would be very hard to recycle)

I've spent some time with some battery engineers and to a fault they all told me (and this was 3 years ago). Lithium is easy to mine and get and therefore it won't bubble as new demand will come on-line. The problem will be the cobalt. RB's post above confirms what these guys were saying in 2014. If only I would have listened.

Not going to say but personal goods that are accessory items to a leisure activity. Like batting gloves or say life preservers for boating enthusiasts.

Along these lines, I have been watching SharkTank (on ABC) since Season 1. It is pretty amazing how many small business can jump start to millions in sales simply through FB advertising. The targeting capabilities are amazing. Here is an example. Starting 2 weeks before fathers day he will start an ad campaign that hits women whose parents like any sort of baseball (from a little league team fan page to any MLB team). He then starts the ads 4 days before for men with the same. The entire time he is tweaking additional keywords. The campaign I mention above is the master group but he runs probably 30 slightly different ad sets and pictures and kills them after 2 days if they do not have an ROI+. Then he throws money at the successful ones and its purely a numbers game.

I agree with you completely on FB ad targeting capabilities. I doubt very few of you on here have ever used either AdSense or FB ads. I was a bear on FB when it IPOed and yet I ignored it when my friend who had a small website making him a little side hustle money told me that he was dabbling in Facebook ads and his ROI was tremendous. I watched him kill it and was envious for him and yet still couldn't make the leap to buy FB stock. His cost of ads double annually and yet still have a positive ROI due to the segmenting that he does. His business almost did $10M in sales this last year up from $5M the year before and he grows the majority of his sales via FB and less so Intragram. He still advertises on Goog and its ok but he is interested in a new Youtube sales channel that is supposed to be coming. GOOG has been slow on this.

Longest Held - I bought one share of IBM on July 17, 1991 as I was 13 years old and I still hold it to this day mostly because its been a pain in the ass to sell. My Dad was a local insurance broker who in the early 80s saw the value of computers and paid something like $30 or $50k to put a mainframe in his office to automate the billing and applications of payments/policies. He was an independent agent and saw that this would save his office something like reduce the need of the 5/6 people who all they did was handle paperwork/filing to 2 or 3. I was 4 years old and thought this thing was awesome. This was a big deal and the large insurers like Hartford and Travellers were sending agents to his office to "see the future". Sadly my Dad did some real stupid/illegal stuff when the farming industry crashed in 1985/86 and he lost the business. That little spark kept me interested in computers and we got our first computer in our house in 1987 when I was 9 and I remember how messed up it was to use the prompts. I could but my parents could not. In 1990 I saw my first version of Windows 3.0 where you could point and click and I was like "aha-this is the future. My mom can use a computer!" I asked my Dad how I could make money off of this - he said to buy stock and showed me the 2 pages of stock prices in the newspaper each day. That winter my local university extension catalog came home and I saw a class for "investing in the stock market" and I convinced my mom to sign me up and I paid the $25 fee. I went to the class on Saturday mornings for 6 weeks and was dejected. It ended up being run by a local broker who didn't teach about how to value stocks or anything like that but was just saying that you never know and should hire somebody but its a way to make huge money. I ended up going to my local library to learn more. After spending time in the investments section and I went there all the time as it was on the way home from school and old man came up to me and asked what I was doing. He explained all the things in the newspaper and showed me a value line book. I was shocked. He helped me over the next month and for that I am forever grateful. By that time my parents were seperated and times were tough. I worked that summer mowing a few lawns to make money and I wanted to buy stock in IBM and Microsoft as I knew that Microsoft made Windows and IBM made the computers that the schools and companies would be buying and using. My father came home from Las Vegas that week and on that Wednesday we went to the local bank to buy stock with my $100 in my pocket. I walked in with my Dad and the teller directed us to take a seat. Eventually we met a guy and he asked what we wanted and my Dad made me tell him. At that point he told me I was dumb and that I should put it in a mutual fund with a low upfront fee of 8% or something. I held firm and eventually we filled out the paperwork for me to buy 1 share @ $100. My Dad paid the $60 transaction fee and I walked out on cloud 9. My Dad told me that the next time I wanted to buy stock I would have to pay the transaction fee as well. At the end of August I bought 10 shares of Microsoft. I remember that just before I bought the IBM share that Microsoft had a 3 for 2 split at $30 and went from $30 to $20. I thought it just went down and freaked out. I was going to buy Microsoft first but IBM was safer. I ended up selling the Microsoft shares a few years later to pay for a chunk of college tuition. The 1 IBM share turned into 8 and we lost the certificate and I was a minor so it was in my Dad's name and I lost contact with him. Only in the last 6 months have I filled out the paperwork that the share certificate is lost and it should be in my name. I'm going to sell it and collect all the unclaimed dividends at some point and put that money into my kids college fund. thanks for reading if you have gotten this far. My second longest investment was a disaster in Axion Power that I held for too long expecting it to turn ignoring all the signs and waiting and hanging on.

A guess would be TSLA as its just a fraction of the entire automotive market.

Just wanted to add some antecdotal information to this thread. I watched this for a few years and felt there was a bubble atleast in BC. Earlier this summer spent a week in BC on vacation and spent a few nights with locals. Much of the stereotypes or comments I've read in this thread were there. Buying a second home in AZ - check. Sister is a house flipper - sold her business as a Chiro but not ready to retire. now a yoga instructor and house flipper - check etc, etc, etc. Well work took me for the last two weeks to SE Asia + China. These two weeks were with customers who run manufacturing and distribution companies to a part of the energy economy. In general these guys are all in their 50s and looking to sell out their business in the near future. I'd say that 50% of these guys already had a home in the US/Canada and the majority of those were in Vancouver. These guys want the Vancouver weather, they schools and they want some safety of their assets. They all paid 100% cash. That said these guys are just a couple hundred in the entire country of China that serves a several billion dollar industry. Their employees aren't doing what these guys are doing. In a lull between drinking Baiju one older guy smiled and asked me why I was so interested in what these guys did with their wealth. Clearly he was wary of my questions. (In reality I had simply brought up that I had just been vacationing in Vancouver and the rest of them told stories about them buying property there) and setting up their kids in college there and their kids were becoming landlords, starting businesses, etc. He told me that he's got his money in Canadian Banks and he's waiting for the bubble to burst to buy the others guys houses. There is no investment advice in this but much of the stories and anecdotes were confirmed for me in a few weeks of my travels this summer.

Here is a consise summary from Wikipedia.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_States As you can see even the summary is long and tedious. Basically a TL;DR is when someone dies their heirs will get their goods free and clear without having to pay an inheritance tax if the value is less than $5.3M. I don't have a comment about the amount and what that limit should be. My thought has been about corporations. I've watched too many small family businesses get crushed as they have to sell out to pay the tax man for the family business but yet corporations can exist infinitium. Add in the fact that citizens united gives a corporation the same rights as a person and maybe then we should state that all corporations have only an 80 year charter similar to a human life. At the end of 80 years the business and all its patents, processes, etc are sold to the highest bidder and the proceeds are distributed to debt and ultimately shareholders. Rather elegant I say.

Danaher is a classic aquirer. Dover as well. FD: own both. Work for a competitor of both. Don't own my company stock. The problem with what you are asking from us is that by asking us there is a bias there as we are giving the best of the best. There are tons of companies that went on hiring sprees and failed. The company I work for did a great job of buying assets for 10 years and then all of a sudden they have sucked for the last few. Nothing has changed - we didn't overpay comparatively/similar transaction sizes/from similar groups. Either we lost our way or we lucked into some better companies in the past and we are reverting to the mean. My assumption is to discount mgmt. guidance on cost cutting by 30% and discount sales consolidation by 20%. Back in the late 1980s - United Airlines was humming along and to roll up the travel sector bought Hertz and a hotel chain (I thought Hilton but I can't remember). Analysts loved the deals at the time. United sold them for Hundreds of millions in losses a few years later. Microsoft bought DOS from another Seattle company for $50k after selling an OS to IBM. Microsoft is a serial acquirer, same with GOOG, ORCL and others. I'd argue that ORCL was a serial aquirer that doesn't get the credit it deserves and should be on your list.

My list is quite different from most here: 1. I close my email after using and only open it 3 or 4 times a day. Otherwise I find myself responding to emails in a futile attempt to keep my inbox tidy. During the day I use email for about 30 minutes at a time. The closed email therefore doesn't distract me from my normal work. 2. I use email less and less and much more phone/Skype/in person contact. I've found that a substantial amount of email exchanges are going back and forth trying to clarify one point or that you do something and then realize that the person on the other end really wanted something else. I do use email to confirm items after the fact to cover my ass. 3. I should quit looking at this site and others. In general these types of websites while interesting can often be a huge time sink. I generally have not found investment ideas (that I ) invested in from others that have greatly outperformed the rest of my portfolio. However from other sites I have formed relationships with others that have lead to some great ideas and outperformance from discussions with those people. I tell myself that is why I don't quit these. 4. I found a new hobby. I have just started getting into woodworking. After spending 50 hours a week at a keyboard and moving things around that are not tangible I enjoy the feeling of woodworking. This spring I just built a new outdoor dining table. Is it perfect, no but I spent a few hundred dollars on tools, a few hundred in lumber and saved some money. More importantly its something that I am proud of. My wife had been eyeing a new dining set and new bedroom furniture. Instead I am building those and it will probably take a year but I will save money and my kids think its pretty cool to help. Not a time savings but a monetary savings and a time that I spend with my children that I will never forget.

I'm going to bump this to get others thoughts. I've been looking at some US industrials who have a good chunk of their sales oversees and in Q4 '14 and in Q1 I felt that the analysts nor the company had really kept up with the interest rate changes. Many of them guided to #s that still seemed optimistic if the currency flatlined from its current rate. Well, over the past Q I've noticed the estimates coming down gradually and the share price with it slowly and feel like they are at a FV to slightly overvalued +10% assuming a flat currency from here. How do others look at this. I'm starting to look at Canadian companies that high % of USD sales.

My coworker is one of those guys. The wall of his cube buts up to mine but we are in different divisions. He's in a technical training capacity. About 2 years ago he took a week seminar about trading FX. For the last 6 months he sets up daily trades at this desk and says he does day trading but hold each position 1-3x. He has been telling his staff for the past few months that he was picking up pennies as the Swiss defend their currency and he trades it as they will bring it back in line once it starts to move away. He has been out sick the past few days.

As I posted in the 2014 results thread the past three years have been humbling to me to say the least. Since that post I started to close out positions of my weird investments: I closed out my position in REPR before their earnings were released last night for a nice gain. Sales growth was very healthy but the prior 2 quarters expenses had grown as fast/faster and therefore there was no leverage showing up in the business. In December their prereleased strong sales growth for the current Q but nothing on the expense side which has caused a run up before earnings. The stock is down 16% today on high volume for it as people are coming to the same conclusion as I did back in December when I was not confident that it would translate. Its now trading at 18x earning and probably will be over 20x after the 4th quarter. Mgmt doesn't seem like they want to sell out which is what the end game should be as the sales growth should be enticing to somebody in the space as they should be able to cut SG&A drastically. Since my first post here I've also closed out my positions in ABTL, KIQ and GLDD and 50% of my Lands End (LE). To be honest I interviewed with Lands End corporate right before their spinoff from Sears and while I declined the job I saw from the employees the optimism in charting their own way and could hear the problems of being under Sears meant to them. Increasing my cash positions will hopefully make me think clearer and eliminate the bias I have in anchoring. Other positions I have in OESX and GLGI and a few others I continue to hold through the next earnings call. Those results will help me. To be honest - I'm pretty much done in the microcap space.

I haven't done this in depth in a few years but I should. Married with 3 young kids (ages 5, 3, 1) Wife works part time. Kids go to daycare part time. Mortgage - $15k Property Taxes - Just under $6k Daycare - $22k Utilities - $3k Food - $10k Auto - $3k (2 car family - buy used, keep for $10 years and only have payments on one car at a time) Dining Out/Season tickets/regional travel - $8k Other $12k I know we have a large leakage in dining out and other. Its a new years resolution for both of us. Other -

To be honest with you it was a number I had chose with my wife when we were engaged. What I didn't mention was that all my investing was done in an IRA. At some point if I was going to live off it I would have to pay a large tax bill. My plan was take $1M in safe corporate bonds/government bonds to hopefully provide $50k (after tax) of income. Another $1M I would invest in some distressed hedge funds with guys I know are smarter than I. $1M was for me to start a couple of businesses that I want to start and for me to sleep well at night I'd rather not have the bank debt (even if I could find a bank willing to do so). This investement would be in an economically depressed area has had large population losses and it would be more of me trying to create an industry to help an area I love very much. The last $1M was to bet set aside for taxes (mentioned above), pay off the house, and use to invest myself. In reality what really wiped me out was I knew that I didn't need $4M but $2M would have been perfect so the DIMEQ investment could have gotten me to a number that I really wanted. Now, I've switched jobs, am happier and work harder and longer hours than ever before. This allows me less time to think about investments which in reality makes me a better investor. The reason for my post was that I heard myself in some of those previous people who were doing great. I still think the DIMEQ decision was wrong and know several others who feel the same and know others who lost more than me. What still bothers me about that one is that in two different cases JPM has stated two distinct and different things about how it was acquired. To be honest other than the position sizing I would have still invested in DIMEQ if brought forward today. Once I have a new idea I'll be glad to post it to the boards. Just started to work on something interesting last week but I don't know when I'll be done.

Long time lurker (2+ years) without an account. Decided to make my first post here. I ended this year down 13%. This is my third straight year of underperformance to the S&P even though my picks are more in the Russell universe. I've been investing on my own for the past 14 years. In the early years (early 20s) I had no money and almost everything went to my 401k. A small slug of $2k and due to transaction costs I invested in the industry that I worked in and felt I understood better than most. Due to concentration that quickly became $10k and then $25k with some of the additions being additional capital added. I often had years of over 50%. After switching jobs I'd take my 401k and add that an increase the amount of money I was investing for myself. I went short with leverage via options and when Lehman blew up those were good days. That day I touched $800k and due to me rolling options and thinking the end was near I didn't close them out and ultimately went 100% flat with $250k. I felt like a genius. I spent 6 months flat and looking for deals. I saw a lot of cheap but I was greedy and wanted free. I started to wade into the distressed space and hit a few doubles with small amounts. Then I did very well on Chemtura and HearUSA (HEARQ). Accounts were nearing $750k and I was getting a big head. My next few investments I went bigger with size as I wasn't enjoying my day job and I've had a goal that if I get to $4M I walk away from my job. My next investment was in DIMEQ and I took at 30% stake or $200k with an average purchase price in the low $.30s (600k shares) after spending several grand on PACER. As the stock rose in 2010 to $.80 I was over a million and each day I felt like FV was $2-$3/share and the rulings were in our favor. I felt like when we won and got $2.50/share I would be over $2M and I could get conservative and churn out 10% year for 7 years and retire by age 40 with $4M. Granted at the time if asked I would have told you that I estimated the odds were 70/30 or 80/20 in our favor and realistically I was really thought it was more like 90/10 and thought the other side really had no case. That Christmas my first son was just a few months old and I was supposed to be enjoying family, friends, my 2 month newborn and yet I had 60% of our investments in a judges hands. My work output was crap for all of November and December and I was having ulcers from stress (but didn't know it). I went up to my family hometown for New Years for a few days to clear my mind and made up my mind to sell half immediately upon return. I started to liquidate half my position but the bid/ask was a few pennies and I didn't want to lose 10% on the spread so I was slowly selling the 300k shares I wanted to. I only sold 80 shares when the ruling hit around 11 IIRC and the bottom fell out in minutes to $.40 and then down to $.13 within the hour. After all that I was crushed emotionally. My goal of retirement which I could see was gone. I dabbled and lost on my next two special distressed plays due to trying to be cute. I had the story right and the prices but one doubled and one was up 4x and I broke even on both. I then put money in two ideas that I liked (Ram Power - initially from a writeup on Seeking Alpha) and Axion Power (also seeking alpha). Both are down 90% from when I bought and I double down on both as I thought I knew more. On Axion Power I listened to the calls, I visited the plant, etc. Q1 2013 call hit me. A caller asked about breakeven and the CEO said they saw 300% revenue growth in the backhalf of the year. I bought more as I thought he had visibility into upcoming orders as they were doing tests with BMW, other Autos and Norfolk Southern and had been for 2-3 years. If they simply published an order from one of those the stock would double. The next call he backtracked from the number and timing but still felt confident in the revenue growth. An order(s) felt imminent. Turns out the emporer has no clothes. NS has had problems outside the battery that has slowed development by 18-24 months and shows that its really not a high priority for them as was led to believe in 2012. I found shipping logs that Axion sent to a battery testing company in 2013 in Germany. Surely that was a sign that BMW was going forward still as they were checking quality. All wrong. Q3 2013 a disasterous financing went off. So bad that I felt that the only way mgmt. could have signed it was that they knew an order was imminent otherwise it was irresponsible. I bought more. Then CFO resigned. New CFO hired and resigns to go back to old company with promotion after 3-4 months in early 2014. CEO resigns due to health in summer 2014. Prior CFO comes back from board to fill in and finishes up Reverse split and uplisting to Nasdaq to get off the OTC. Stock is now one of the worst performers of the NASDAQ. I usually have no problem selling when the story isn't playing out. This one I couldn't as I love the idea and the tech seems pretty good. I got too close to former board members to ignore the warning signals. From 2011-2013 the CEO always spoke about new work being done in the caribbean with solar for storage and that business case would make sense due to high electricity prices but I could never find any test sites or anything but I trusted the CEO that stuff was going on and you would be hearing more soon. I knew how long things take in these countries so I always accepted the delays. Looking back the delays were too long in aggregate. (I justified it as I myself was working on getting some documentation in Europe that took over 15 months to get a piece of paper approval so I felt I understood. In early 2014 I finally found a guy who was working with the company and he told me all about the Caribbean work he was doing. That 30 minute phone call told me that if they were counting on him that was a mistake. I sold out half finally over the next month but I still owned a bunch as the RS/uplisting was a positive to me. Something good was on the horizon. At this point I would need a 20x to break even. My investments are now down to $250k in value. Its been an amazing 14 years in which the first 10 I could do no wrong. Now I can do no right. I've learned a ton about all sorts of randon stuff that has made be a better investor the last few years. I'm happy this thread wasn't here 10 years ago as I would have been the guy talking about 60-100% annual returns and concentrated positions. I still run concentrated positions (10-20) but I have a checklist that I follow religiously. I will also work until I'm 65.