innerscorecard

If you're reading "500 pages a day" anyways, I can't see how it's not worth your time to read these seminal books of this profession/hobby. I like both.

I absolutely agree with the post's core insight. I think the principle can be applied in a lot of small ways, too. If you work for others, you could try to do projects that have a wider impact on the business and that are more visible, so that the recognition benefits of your work scale better. Or if you spend a lot of time writing a tutorial or instruction for a few people for a private class you teach, you could put that up on YouTube.

I really like the new websites. We should all take advantage of new forms of media in expressing ideas. I'm not very good at that myself, so I just write for now, but photos, videos, and the like convey things a lot better than just words.

It's almost as if the author is repeating the Groveland talking points.

Appreciate everyone's thoughts. I suppose my posts may be too self-referential and vague, because I don't define terms I use which can have multiple meanings. By financial independence I precisely mean what you say about not needing to work to survive. Not wealth or being rich as it is commonly known, especially because my expenses are extremely low due to living an efficient life where I currently save a very high proportion of income. The goal is simply to have non-working-for-others income exceed these already low living costs. The simplest way to do this is to have a big pile (well, for me, it doesn't need to be so high given my very low expenses) of money enough to generate a "safe withdrawal rate," but that's just one way to do it. And getting part of the way there has made me a lot happier and freer than I was a few years ago. It'a nice knowing I could quit work today or get fired and still be able to cover all expenses for a few years. It makes me better and more confident at work to have this liberty, in fact. But of course it is only a fraction of my life goals, albeit one of the most important right now.

I think the problem is naive investors who use quotes like this to justify what is basically single-variable analysis of companies, saying a fool could run X company and it's cheap enough, so it's a Buffett wide moat company that you should hold forever.

As I just wrote about on my blog, I think the book is also extremely applicable for financial independence (getting comfotably poor) as well as getting actually rich. I wonder what you think, as someone who as actually followed that path, more or less, for much longer than I have?

I've said on here before that I really do quite admire how he was able to switch sides completely on Netflix, and not just close out his position but in fact go long. Not many people would do that, when he had been so public with his short position previously.

Yup, pretty much just investing gossip. As is the case with the Berkshire and Fairfax boards on here. As I said, I think Tilson is very talented and I've learned from him. It's just interesting to speculate on his motivations for returning to the spotlight.

I've enjoyed all the various podcasts you've done so far, but this was the best appearance so far.

It wasn't that long ago that he swore off all media appearances. Yet I wasn't surprised to see the lead to this article (among many others)...: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/in-praise-of-short-sellers?currentPage=all Obviously, even though people like to make fun of him, Tilson is in fact a very talented investor. It is just funny to watch his antics! I wonder who his investor base is composed of? Pretty much just friends and family?

Haha, nice Tilson find. He really can't stay off the media, despite saying he would. He's an addict! For everyone's benefit, here's the passage in question (from Bloomberg, actually): Hedge-fund manager Whitney Tilson used his American Express card for three decades to buy groceries, trips to Europe and just about everything else. A few months ago, he switched. “I charge a lot of money on my credit card,” said Tilson, 48, who manages more than $83 million at Kase Capital Management in New York. He said the Barclaycard Arrival Plus World MasterCard gives him more cash perks while rewarding him for the money he spends on travel. “The difference between getting 1 percent and 2 percent cash back is thousands of dollars and for that amount of money, Barclaycard has a better offer,” he said. American Express Co., long the envy of the industry for its wealthy clientele, is fighting to retain its grip on affluent cardholders like Tilson. Rivals including Barclays Plc and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are courting them with enhanced perks, lower fees and more incentives. And as AmEx seeks to diversify by pursuing tech-savvy millennials and underbanked Americans, the risk of eroding its brand—and its biggest source of revenue—is rising. ... Tilson said he prefers his Barclaycard because it gives him as much as 2.2 percent cash back on travel purchases and no fees on foreign transactions, unlike some AmEx cards. JPMorgan’s Palladium card, available only to clients of its private bank, offers complimentary airline tickets for travel companions and free time on a private jet.

Motorola ... Nokia ... RIMM ... Apple ... ;) Apple is nothing like those other companies in any way.

And then, here is Buffett on the future of BRK: The bad news is that Berkshire’s long-term gains – measured by percentages, not by dollars – cannot be dramatic and will not come close to those achieved in the past 50 years. The numbers have become too big. I think Berkshire will outperform the average American company, but our advantage, if any, won’t be great. Eventually – probably between ten and twenty years from now – Berkshire’s earnings and capital resources will reach a level that will not allow management to intelligently reinvest all of the company’s earnings. At that time our directors will need to determine whether the best method to distribute the excess earnings is through dividends, share repurchases or both. If Berkshire shares are selling below intrinsic business value, massive repurchases will almost certainly be the best choice. You can be comfortable that your directors will make the right decision. .. by percentages, not by dollars....??? Buffet has been saying that for years, and I think it is true. Even though it might still be better than most companies, but for us small investors, it might be better to invest your money elsewhere. One thing that I thought for a minutes back in 2009 was to sell BRK and buy others, but didn't pull the trigger ... I wanted to sleep easy :( I think for enterprising small individual investors, it doesn't make a lot of sense to buy any hold Berkshire if you have decent alternatives (that doesn't mean the corollary one should put your cash allocation in it naively if you don't have alternatives), but can make a lot of sense to treat Berkshire as a piece of merchandise, loading up when it is cheap and flipping it when it's expensive.

Agreed. Things are either public or not these days. Things aren't half-public, and if they are, then you should expect people to get things wrong.

At its core, regular index investing (depositing the same amount in a fixed asset allocation of index funds every month) requires you to buy completely blindly of valuation. Historically, when people have bought completely without minding valuation, bad things have happened. But maybe this time will be different? Looking back at the past, asset allocation and rebalancing of market-cap weighted indexes has been the optimal strategy for people living their lives, or at least the people who have been able to stick with it.

Haha, thanks. I'll always remember what Peter Lynch said about people spending way more time researching the purchase of a kitchen appliance than stock purchases of many times that amount. The illogical way people manage their money in general is just mindboggling. People spend years at stressful and disliked jobs, and then fritter away or mismanage the fruits of this hard labor on a whim.

If you stea If you steal books by torrenting them, make sure not to use uTorrent. Apparently (http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/6/8161251/utorrents-secret-bitcoin-miner-adware-malware) they install a hidden bitcoin miner on your computer that runs even when you don't have uTorrent open. No honor among thieves.

I enjoyed reading the parts of The Snowball that talked about Buffett's careful counting of calories and his incentives to his children to lose weight. And we know he regularly consults doctors and works out a lot too. But no one wants to hear that. It's much more entertaining and comforting to hear about some old guy drinking six cokes during a single interview. It's like how everyone loves hearing about some old retired guys who smoke cigarettes and drink whiskey every day and still die at an old age.

On the other hand, the authors are also hardly starving artists. I prefer to buy books, as the cost is so minimal, with Amazon discounting (and even better sometimes, buying iTunes gift certificates for deep discounts on eBay, then using them to buy books on the Apple iBooks store). I like having books in epub form, perfect for highlighting in iBooks, and cloud-synced as well. I wonder how John Chew has gotten away with it. As Lu Xun wrote, "to steal a book isn't really stealing" (窃书不算偷), but you'd think in a world where Klarman gets super-pissed and threatens to sue if you post his annual letters on a site, CS Investing would have been shut down.

The highest praise I have (and I'm not being facetious) for the US education system is that it allows you to opt out, through taking the GED and/or home-schooling. Many countries don't let you do that.

I hope that I could be rich enough to read this one day, or alternately that someone could upload some passages online.

Whenever I think about this issue I always go back to ERICOPOLY's discussion on this board of how much a rational person would pay for a "magic hat," in relation to valuing Fairfax.

If you don't care to buy books, you could always steal them. John Chew at CS Investing uploads finance and investing books to his website as if there's no tomorrow.

For me, the most important attribute of patience is to think of things on my time scale, not the time scale of others, which inevitably happens when you compare yourself to others. When I don't compare myself to others, I find that my time scale naturally slows down.