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.

Cialdini's Influence talks about this as well.

If only this post were made even a year ago, the answers would be so easy in retrospect!

But a big drawdown really does call into question the rest of someone's record. That's because it means those risks were being incurred all along, so the returns gained must be seen in light of that risk.

I liked the section on LEAPs in Joel Greenblatt's You Can Be A Stock Market Genius. There are also, of course, ERICOPOLY's discussions here on "cost of leverage."

The more I think about it, the more interesting this thread is. Berkshire Hathaway has a YTD total return of -10.7%. FFH is -3.6%. And yet I am one of the worst performing people YTD in this thread, because I haven't done double YTD returns so far! There are a larger number of non-USD-base-currency investors on here, so there's a big tailwind for many. Is that the big factor?

Why do you think it has been easier for you to make money trading than value investing?

This thread doesn't refer to me, but I thought I'd chime in so people know how the non-superinvestors are doing. My XIRR across all accounts YTD is 4.4%. Very underwhelming compared to everyone here. Yet still better than my benchmarks, which is exactly what I would be doing if I weren't actively investing (VTI Total Return YTD: -3.0%, VXUS: -4.0%, BND: +0.5%).

Marks talks a bit about his earlier years in his podcast with Ritholtz. Of course that's as he remembers it now, but I think there were some good lessons either way.

Yup - the article gets quite personal:

This goes towards the question I have been pondering on Twitter the last couple of weeks. It seems like some value investors often implicitly do things like commodities trading, forex trading, macro forecasting and technical analysis when they buy stocks. They just do it badly, by using rules of thumb instead of rigorous analysis. But I am still exploring what rigorous analysis would look like.