innerscorecard

I really wish Earnings Cast let you download the calls. I think that alone could be the basis for a competitor.

Definitely. Perhaps this bit could be copied onto the time-saving thread?: "several times a day she drinks a pulverized concoction of cucumber, parsley, kale, spinach, romaine lettuce, and celery."

Wow! Had no idea Earningscast existed. Fantastic idea. I have long commutes every day, and literally have no sitting room (or even standing room) on public transportation. But I can listen to audiobooks and podcasts. Conference calls are even better. I am downloading it immediately. Edit: It appears it is streaming only. Really, really wish it allowed you to simply download the earnings calls, as is the case with podcast apps.

Every day it's obvious to me that not having to commute a long distance both ways to a full-time job would be the biggest win I could achieve, but it won't be for a while yet.

I quite liked the most recent episode with John Huber of Base Hit Investing. Base Hit Investing and Oddball Stocks were the most clear and articulate expounders of compounders and cigar-butts respectively, and it was interesting to have both John and Nate on together.

I wonder how good the book is. Tren Griffin is obviously a very intelligent, successful and talented blogger, investor and person (and I am not), but I find the writing on his site almost completely unreadable. He makes Joel Greenblatt, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, as well as literally everyone else, all sound exactly the same! Perhaps I am too dumb to "get" his great synthesis of every public and private investor.

I currently check once a day (when waking up in the morning), but am in the process of transitioning to a system where I never check, BUT I receive automated alerts if something warrants my attention (>5% move up or down perhaps). I already know when important fundamental changes happen via SEC RSS alerts (although honestly, prices usually are faster signifiers for this than my RSS feed, but I don't need that kind of speed anyways), so only significant moves in price are important for me to know about, not day-to-day fluctuations.

There's this (which may mean peak activism?): http://getonboardalbum.com/

I think that for almost everyone, the product is not what's inside the cup. I also think people really do not think about price and value the way people on this board or engineers (who make up most of this board) think. I - who can't even drink coffee without not being able to sleep at night - personally don't "get it" on an intuitive level, for example. I only go to Starbucks when it is late at work and there is literally nothing else in my building to eat except the disgusting sandwiches at Starbucks, or when I invite a professional contact to coffee. It's simple to just look at the maps app and find the closest Starbucks to their building. I then get a decaf and don't enjoy it. I'll try to make time to listen to the audiobook.

What many Chinese investors would say is that value investing only works in certain contexts, but not in markets such as China, where politics is too important. That's the line they say all the time, anyways. They read Buffett and Lynch and then buy stocks not based on business fundamentals but based on this week's government pronouncements.

Fear of missing out is real. The closest I ever personally felt was Bitcoin, 2012-2013, although I didn't buy at all in the end. I can see it again with Chinese-listed equities. The fear of missing out is spreading as we speak.

http://www.thebulldoginvestor.com/2015/06/14/mi-11-interview-with-tim-melvin-on-community-banks/ Will be interesting to see where this goes, especially with future guests.

By definition as the asset base increases the opportunity size decreases. The manager will also by definition have less time available for communicating with any one individual client. Although maybe that is a good thing, given how clients are. The list of posters (including me) in this thread is interesting. All that has to happen is yadayada to join in, and then it will be the perfect list of young, idiot posters, including myself, that the old, best posters perhaps rightfully claim have completely ruined this board.

Have many others expressed an interest in giving you their money to manage?

I think an informational product summarizing relevant regulation and compliance issues (PFIC, can't buy GDRs in London, etc) for Americans buying international stocks could be good. Hmm, maybe I'll do it myself.

Thanks for posting this. I would be the crudest potential user of this, but I absolutely would want to implement my mechanical Magic Formula investments algorithmically.

You may be right about Miller's analytical acumen, but I think risk control and avoiding blowups is an integral part of being a great or even good investor. If someone literally blew up, it rightfully should cause a re-evaluation of someone's entire record, as it means their returns were built on hidden risk in the first place.

Buffett neglected his children when they were young, then tried to buy their affection later. His relationship with Susie also deteriorated due to his lack of attention to her, which he only seemed to really notice when she was on her deathbed in the hospital. He was always focused on accumulating wealth rather than on his family life. After all, he could have retired in the 1950's if he had wanted, and he actually planned on doing that early on, at first.

How do you know when you're at the top? Miller was at the top for 15 years. Should've he retired 3 years into the streak? 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? ;) Of course you could even say that Peter Lynch retired too late. One of the biggest lessons of The Snowball to me, after all, was that Buffett's success and endurance came at great personal cost.

What happened to Bill Miller to me really makes Peter Lynch's decision to quit while he was ahead more brilliant. It's easy to say money isn't that important after you've lost it, as Miller said. Much harder to forego more money when you are the top of your game.

Alwaysinvert, I actually agree with you, in that my actual methodology is a lot closer to what you describe than what vinod1 does. I only read when I'm having fun. I certainly don't spend months making sure I understand texts as if I were doing academic work! (That's probably one of the reasons I was so bad at graduate school....) I just wanted to say that having some more elevated level of engagement can be beneficial too, as I've noticed in my own experience. And you're definitely right that advocating that people do what vinod1 does would likely make them go insane! Really admire that level of discipline and focus - something I don't have, for sure.

I used to read that way when I was in college and in graduate school. But I wasn't a very good student, and I think my lack of engagement due to this laziness hurt me. Obviously smarter people can do it. That's why I don't like to think about literally copying Buffett or Munger, although I love to learn from them. They're a lot smarter than me. They might say to avoid spreadsheets, but I might need a spreadsheet just to calculate what they can figure out in 15 seconds in their head.

Right, the thing to do when you don't see a lot would be to keep on digging and keep on monitoring, but if you don't find things, you don't find things. I don't see that as a problem. If anything, it's a tribute to people's discipline.

Innerscorecard, what markets are you referring to where valuation is higher? There are 60,000 stocks that a North American investor can invest. There are always pockets of cheap stocks: eg., HongKong, Russia, Greece, many stocks in these areas are not trash as I think of the word. I definitely agree that there are cheap stocks out there, or sure. But the crucial variable isn't whether there are cheap stocks on an absolute basis, or even enough cheap stocks for individual investors to be completely fully invested. It's whether valuation levels are higher or lower than they were when this board was more active. All those international opportunities existed then, too, but there were also more US and large-cap opportunities then as well. So the aggregate amount of actionable ideas is lower now than then, even if it is still enough for people to be fully invested. Some people will be entrepreneurial and risk-seeking enough to find the ideas that exist currently. That's why we still do have posts on this board. And others won't, which is why there are less posts than before. For example, copying 13Fs will be less frutiful than before, because this only draws from the universe investable for 13F filers.

When valuations are higher, this is actually the logical course of action, especially for individual investors, rather than lowering standards further and further and spinning trash as gold. When people don't have investment ideas, they don't have investment ideas.