innerscorecard

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone. Keep 'em coming! I want to write and record songs about value investing myself. The only problem is my lack of musical (as well as investing) talent. Could probably write some demos and get professional musicians to do decent performances of the songs for a reasonable amount of money in our internet freelancing age, though.

Some rap (Jay-Z, who I do like a lot) is the closest I can think of. Why is there such a big lack here? Is it discordance between the type of person who likes to write songs and record music and the type of person who likes to create businesses, invest and make money?

I see that a bull market definition of risk is now in full force. ::)

Certainly not any one of the Liberty stocks. Nor BH. ;D Why not just have them buy low-cost index funds? If they don't have any special affinity for Markel the company or their philosophy, why should they own that over simply owning a representation of the larger economy?

I really hate The Intellligent Investor as a first investing book for someone with no investing or business experience. The same thing happened to me as with your girlfriend. A friend gave me his copy of The Intelligent Investor to read in the freshman year of college. I couldn't get through it at all. And yet now it's one of my favorite things to read. I think you really kind of have to know what Graham alludes to in his fairly dense writing style to get it, at least for us mere unexceptional mortals. That can be not only from investing in public markets but also running or participating in a business I think. I think a better choice is a good efficient market-based book that recommends indexing, like A Random Walk Down Wall Street or one of Bernstein's books. They're written in a much clearer way and more obviously meant for true laypeople. And I think it makes sense to start with EMH and indexing too. That's where most people should end up, so that's where they should begin, too. I really love The Little Book That Beats the Market as well, but despite what Greenblatt says about it being a book for kids, I think you get a lot more out of it if you have some basic knowledge or experience.

The final numbers are in. Dollar-weighted returns (XIRR) of 54.33% annualized for 2014 (38.55% annualized for partial 2013 for comparison - not managing an investment portfolio before then.) High concentration and leverage. Pretty much always fully invested. I was earlier above 60%, which is what I reported in the poll at the time the question was asked, but unfortunately, I can't un-vote. I don't expect to ever have as great as year, and I would be thrilled to simply not lose purchasing power next year, as that's my actual #1 goal.

There's an ignore feature?

My biggest regret is not thinking through the currency risk of unhedged investments in ADRs of Japanese companies.

Real investors walk 500 miles a day. 6. Kraven should limit his grievances to only 20 threads per year. As many people seem to be allergic to macro discussions, how about a Macro sub-forum? I would like a derivatives trading sub-forum. (I'm completely serious.)

Add to rather than detract from this board and others. ::)

As another poor person, I would also like to know.

I forgot, any website that doesn't look exactly like Berkshire Hathaway's is "slick." ::) It's just a nice-looking Squarespace template, really! It's something that any young person familiar with web design could throw together in a day. It's just modern design - which I don't think it's fair to immediately denigrate as "slick."

;D

It could be that some people are waiting for the year to actually end and don't want to first deliver a preliminary result which may be materially changed, as I foolishly did. There's also the talent factor. People without some threshold of investment skill (some of which may not be learnable) shouldn't be investing their own money. For them to swing for the fences and try to do what Eric or Packer do is suicide. They should be indexing, even if they like the idea of being a value investor. I'd love the idea of being a touring musician, but I have no musical talent, even though I've spent a lot of time in my life trying to improve musically. I'm now happy just listening to music and performing a few songs with my spouse at home. Many people should do the same for investing. That's why even though the Boglehead dogma is founded on an untruth (the markets are efficient), the lie is a good one to believe in for almost all people, including myself, probably.

I really don't think the data warrants that conclusion at all. The much simpler explanation would just be the returns of the broad market in 2013 as compared to this year. In aggregate, this board's return should reflect the broad market's return. The bigger this board gets in terms of membership, the more it should resemble the broad market.

Shalab, you may not have seen my question for you in the BH thread - just wondering if you would be comfortable sharing any of your personal experiences interacting with Sardar Biglari? Just curious, thanks!

Ah, the airing of grievances. The highlight of the celebration. Here's several. 1. If you're part of the seemingly every growing contingent of younger posters still living at home, please don't offer life advice. 2. For newer posters, please don't feel the need to weigh in with your views on every single thread. 3. If you post about how much angst you have with your investments and you don't know if you're investing properly, etc, please don't then 5 minutes later offer advice to someone else who asked an investing question. 4. If you're under, say, 30, please feel free to get rid of the world weary tone like you've seen and done it all. It's nice to have some contrarian indicators on this board too!

It's just a fact of life here.

(Checked and edited.) My XIRR (dollar-weighted returns) calculation for all my accounts combined this year as of before the market open today is 55.01%. This is my personal portfolio representing the majority of my spouse's and my financial assets. (This is significant lower than was the figure I posted earlier when I was away from my home computer, which I had calculated earlier this month. The difference is largely due to some of the idiosyncratic quirks described below): - Almost always fully invested. Cash is in checking accounts that aren't invested. - The total portfolio value is quite small, compared to the seven or eight figure portfolios of many others on here. So the monthly wage contributions or contributions of savings especially were a significant fraction of the total portfolio value. So a lot of the money was only invested later in the year. XIRR accounts for this, but it makes it so that my dollar-weighted-returns may be very different from my time-weighted returns. The problem is I can't calculate my time-weighted returns, as I didn't record my account value at the end of every day (or at least every day I made a contribution or withdrawal). - The AUM was even smaller at the beginning of the year, several times smaller, in fact. - The money is spread over several accounts, and I made a lot of transfers between them. So the returns may be very, very slightly understated due to all the transfer time. - I did not attribute investment gains from churning stocks for credit card rewards points on LOYAL3, or the small amount of investment "float" I got through churning credit cards for investment cash, as investment gains. I just treated them as any other types of cash input. In reality, this activity was somewhere in between work and investment, but to be conservative, I don't count it as part of my investment results for the year. You can also see from this being an issue how small my AUM is. - I did not attribute bonuses for moving money around (i.e. opening new credit card, bank or investment accounts) as part of my investment results, although I got a decent amount of money this way. - The above figures count all accounts together - whether active (individual stocks or options), completely passive (manual or robotized asset allocation) or semi-active (completely mechanical application of the Magic Formula). So this isn't really a measurement of my stock-picking abilities (well, I really have none) directly. - Takes a significant amount of time to formally transfer money from China to one US account and then to another. I count this deposit and withdrawal time from US bank account to bank account, to incentivize me to keep the process as efficient as possible, So what happened is I got quickly lucky with the timing of some of my big deposits to my accounts which were immediately invested in my best ideas at the time, and that had a material effect on my results. Also, my main concentrated investment, AAPL, did quite well, and my gains in the beginning of the year were benefited by leverage through options. My timing in my YHOO investment was also quite excellent and led to an extremely high IRR. All by accident, of course. P.S.: This also only includes US-domiciled-account investing, not investing that my spouse and I do in China. That's mostly fixed income, but also some A-shares. My spouse manages those, but that's a real part of our asset allocation, so for full disclosure's sake I should at least mention those. Also, my XIRR-calculated returns for 2013 were 38.55%. But I was only investing for part of the year, so that figure may not be extremely meaningful.

We were also very poor when we got married. Still are, as it wasn't that long ago. I'm really glad that was the case. I imagine it being stressful having that psychological inequality going into a marriage.

So you're going all in on VIX?

You say that, but what's the alternative? When you're young and working for someone else, it seems that the only differentiating factor that you can control is your availability and dedication.

A good friend lent me his copy of The Intelligent Investor in the freshman year of college. I skimmed it and it seemed reasonable but it just didn't stick or seem all that interesting (besides the concept of Mr. Market of course). I didn't really read it thoroughly. I'm now truly reading it (the same edition as before) and I find it amazing and so dense with carefully considered thought. It was years of life experience as well as a bit of time actually practicing investing and learning different things that totally changed my viewpoint of the book. I think that book-wise, the most important book in-between that allowed me to bridge the gap in readiness to read The Intelligent Investor was A Random Walk Down Wall Street (along with much other efficient-markets-hypothesis literature). A familiarity with the efficient markets hypothesis and index fund investing really ironically provided me with the grounding needed to appreciate how difficult and interesting it is to beat the market through value investing.

I'm amazed at how people will often spend weeks researching a $500 TV or planning their vacation, but they don't spend any time planning for their financial goals. I don't get it. Everything seems backwards to me. As any good Boglehead would tell you, it's more worthwhile to spend hundreds of hours on cashback and deal sites than to spend any time at all researching individual companies, since anyone who beats the market is simply "fooled by randomness" because the time period isn't long enough. ::)

I believe Pabrai once told a board member that he reads CoBF from time to time.