innerscorecard

I liked Fund Manager by Beiley Software ok. But in the end I decided to just use Excel, since I only look at performance once a year on purpose.

It's not a bad offer at all. Few magazines are as reliable of a contrarian indicator.

Despite my awful performance this past year, I would still say myself, because I don't have to pay fees.

I know that in the investment industry, you are supposed to use time-weighted returns. This is to easily compare returns between different funds. I like using dollar-weighted returns, because I do think the timing of deploying capital is a measure of investment skill. But I benchmark my annualized dollar-weighted returns to a simple annual return for the relevant index ETFs, because if I were passively indexing, the cash deployed would be regular.

I wonder why others don't simply use the XIRR function, given how easy it is to do. I wonder how much internet stock performance is rather inaccurate because of this.

I just finished updating my spreadsheet and I returned -10.4% in 2015 on a dollar-weighted basis. I lost money, and this was a big failure. What would be a complete failure would be if in 2016 I actually started to lose more than the amount I made in 2013 and 2014.

My favorite book of 2015 that was published this year was Alex Gurevich's The Next Perfect Trade. He's a leveraged trader, but I think the principles apply for value investing, too. Actually, I think it's interesting that the book has gotten as little attention as it has.

Investing is a zero sum game. Its not a socially useful activity (with the exception of VC and IPOs). We are parasites. Its quite possible to make a lot of money investing without adding any value. I would say that if Buffet had never existed, the world would be more or less the same. Living in a world without pricing isn't very fun. You should try it sometime. Try to get something from a government bureau.

I cloned Ackman and all I got was this pair of ROE goggles!: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CS6PGF5WEAIYr91.jpg

VERY interesting in retrospect (2013 Wealthtrack interview with Whitman): https://whatheheckaboom.wordpress.com/2015/01/19/notes-from-martin-whitmans-interview-with-wealthtrack-com/

I wonder if Biglari really is willing to cut Maxim off if needed, like he said before.

I totally agree - I just stated it weirdly.

Even if value investing were as simple as buying the dips in large-cap stocks, value mutual fund managers as a group don't seem to be able to accomplish that simple task either. And I don't think it's just the environment - there have been dips to buy.

Mutual fund value investing seems like a sucker's bet.

Do you have children? Your lack of pathos suggests that you do not. You can use statistics to argue for a lot of things, but to suggest that school children being murdered in class is 'no big deal' because we need self driving cars is being almost laughably callous. I do, 2 teenagers. And I know that driving is far more dangerous for them than attending school. EDIT: If anyone here has children and are more worried about them being shot in school than you are about them sitting in the seat of a moving automobile you are insane, completely 100% insane. I'm sorry if that sounds callous, but it is true. Many think this way, but rather than being insane, I think they are simply "moist robots" responding to stimuli and memes in a predictable fashion, just as we all are.