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innerscorecard

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Posts posted by innerscorecard

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. at some point there has to be some value added? Isnt that what corporations should do?'

     

    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.

  4. The truth is that school shootings really are no big deal

     

    I'm sorry that you had to go through that, but it is difficult to enumerate all the ways your comments are wrong. 

     

    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.

  5. Interesting. I believe one of the Freakonomics books gets into this kind of stuff as well. One of the examples they give is after a highly publicized suicide happens, suicides across the country will spike and then gradually return to normal levels. People who normally may be on the border of committing suicide suddenly are convinced to by a public figure doing so.

     

    Cialdini's Influence talks about this as well.

  6. 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.

  7. 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?

  8.  

    Yes, but almost all of it is due to options trading and macro nonsense which should be discounted for a certain future portfolio annihilation if I continue doing this... therefore the number is meaningless. Bravo to whomever managed to pass Cardboard's hurdle just by investing in plain vanilla.

     

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

  9. 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%).

     

     

     

     

  10. The wiki article he talks about.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

     

     

    To think that Marks takes the time to write a memo about "second level thinking" at 70 is astounding. Even he has to think about it now. Buffet, munger...they continue to think the same now too.

     

    How many times have you read these guys and they drill the same sayings over and over again....even at 70?!.....makes me feel kinda bittersweet

     

    I wonder what these guys were like in their 20s and 30s, 40.....

     

    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.

  11. Yup - the article gets quite personal:

     

    One source who left said morale is plummeting.

    Adding to the sense of unease, Biglari has been muscling in on cover shoots and seeking to meet the scantily clad models, the source said.

    “There is a level of creepiness to him that is off-putting,” said one former insider, who also said the staffers always know when he is in town because of the heavy scent of cologne that trails him."

  12. 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.

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