Travis Wiedower

Do you mind digging up the link? Apparently I suck at Googling because I'm not seeing it. Thanks!

Same here ($800 for a king). Zero regrets. I tried a Casper mattress in a store and didn't love it. I know Casper (and their competitors) offer free returns, but that entire process is still a big annoyance. I'd rather go to a store, try a bunch out, pick one, and be done with it.

Nine Ten Capital Management is their small-cap fund, which is closer to what this thread is looking for. Here's their latest 13F: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1635236/000163523617000003/xslForm13F_X01/NTCM13F.xml

Do I read ALL of the filings? No, I don't care to read a 10-Q from seven years ago. The most recent 10-K, 10-Q, and proxy are all read in entirety though. Then, I generally click through every SEC filing from the past year or two to see if anything is worth reading. Many are pointless announcements that I click back on after 5 seconds, but sometimes there's stuff worth reading. Beyond that, I'd say it's dependent on the specific investment thesis. Sometimes looking at older filings is helpful, sometimes it's not.

Good interview. Agree with Jurgis on the recency bias being valuable thoughts. Also, he likes expensive compounders run by the founder... odds he owns IBKR?

This entire paragraph proves the point of this thread: this is exactly why your kids are so lucky. A lot of kids grow up with parents that a) have never had any success in life b) are dirt poor c) don't love them as much as you love your kids d) are dead, addicted to drugs, gambling addicts, in prison, etc etc. All of the above leads to those kids going to worse schools and a host of other things that result in a negative flywheel effect. Traveling the world isn't even an option for a large amount of people. They come from poor households led by unsuccessful parents who aren't able to teach them how to improve their life. So those kids maybe graduate high school and start the grind just to get by. Telling those people to just get good grades and travel the world would come off as incredibly insensitive. The fact that your kids were born into a successful household with two parents who love them and give them tons of advice is a MASSIVE advantage over all those other kids who correctly think of them as lucky.

Retail investors have always bought high and sold low, that's nothing new. And can't investors sell Facebook and Tesla just as quick as they can sell the SPY ETF? Maybe ETFs amplify it some, but is the effect really that large?

High multiple stocks underperform, that's already been proven many times. That's not what I was testing though (and in reality I wasn't scientifically testing anything, just followed my curiosity and discovered some interesting results, I'm sure my method had errors). I wanted to see how accurately the market values long-term compounders and it was pretty overwhelming evidence that the market doesn't value them as well as I expected before I went through the exercise. Ask me in ten or twenty years if I was correct on the quality of IBKR's business ;D

I don't have what you're looking for, but I did something similar myself years ago (can't find the spreadsheet right now unfortunately). I picked 20 or 30 high quality companies (P&G, Coke, J&J, etc) and tracked their multiples and earnings/dividends back several decades. The results were quite fascinating and lined up with what you found. The companies I looked at were almost always undervalued and there were only a few exceptions. It's one reason I don't mind investing in more expensive businesses like IBKR that I think are very high quality. Mr. Market is focused on the short-term quarterly results and probably isn't as good at valuing companies that are going to compound value for decades. Disclaimer: lots of hindsight bias

I use Seeking Alpha for a lot of the stuff JayGatsby mentioned. For more general financial news I like Financial Times (not free though).

Between this and Betting on Zero, we have a solid year of Wall Street movies to look forward to 8)

For several years there was a way to view all messages as a non-member. They fixed it last year though :'(

Same here.

I joined SumZero late last year and can echo some of onyx's thoughts. I understand requiring users to remain engaged, but it does seem like renewal write-ups are of lower quality than initial write-ups. I've noticed the same with VIC even though I'm not a member (been denied once :(). With that being said, both SumZero and VIC have higher quality write-ups than other public (or semi-public) sources on the web so I'm not complaining (Seeking Alpha, even Pro, is mostly a joke). I feel like there's not much incentive to join VIC when ideas can be viewed on a 45-day delay. I'm not going to act on the vast majority of ideas very quickly anyway.

rkbabang, Honestly, being a perma-bear probably isn't a terrible strategy for attracting assets. I'm amazed how many Americans think we are days away from the apocalypse. All those people eat up what Hussman is selling. Although most of these people that I've met also believe the stock market is rigged so who knows.

I didn't read the article (did a few CTRL+Fs though), but it appears he didn't talk about returns on capital at all? I see lots of articles writing about the market highs, but very few of them consider the fact that returns on capital are higher now than ever before. This of course justifies (at least somewhat) higher earnings ratios. Did he factor that in?

Pretty clearly a joke.

I'm old school. Only read physical books and all 10-Ks (unless they're super short) get printed out. Shorter stuff (10-Q, investment write-ups, forums) are mostly read on my laptop.

Cognitive dissonance is the answer (and to Parsad, the leash is long). Everyone is guilty of it in different aspects of their lives, but people tend to forget that and get nasty when the other political party is doing it. Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) is a really interesting book about cognitive dissonance.

Creative Cash Flow Reporting is another book that helped me to look out for this type of stuff. It's long and dense, but I learned a ton. I still use it as a reference on a pretty regular basis.

Someone on here recommended Financial Times last year and I've had a subscription ever since. I could never find a good free news source, but FT is worth the $25/month IMO.

Not that I've looked at specific opportunities, but I've always thought taking small public companies private sounds like a better gig than taking small private companies public (for reasons Schwab explained). Nothing about running a public company sounds enjoyable to me.

Maybe it's my lack of financial/Wall Street background, but I'm amazed at how common the use of EBIT and EBITDA are. There are a lot of very real expenses below those lines! Also, all those ratios mentioned can be fine ways to quickly gauge what a company is selling for, but don't forget that a company is worth its future cash flows, not past cash flows. A company selling for 30x trailing EBITDA/EBIT/earnings can be cheap and another selling for 8x can be expensive.

Have you guys tried the live chat? That's my default when I need customer service and I believe I've only had to wait more than a few minutes once. I've never once called them and the only time I've spoken to customer service on the phone they called me.

Of the stocks I own, I think PDEX has the highest expected value in 2017. They're currently doing ~$5.4M per quarter and that's going to ramp to over $7M in 3Q17. It won't be as big this time, but last time the company went through a major step up in revenue (2Q16) the stock went on a tear. They also have several potential projects they're working on that will be announced in 2017. Any project win will add a few million revenue per year. In the "special situations with no downside" category, I like the NYRT liquidation a lot. Sadly, CTO has essentially become a special situation at this point. I think Winters is favored to win the ensuing proxy battle so that would be another sale/liquidation. And finally, in the "high quality companies with no catalysts that I'm happy to own for years" category, IBKR and WFCF.