Travis Wiedower

Just thought of another one (while I'm up at 2:00am waiting for reports to print, maybe I should take Nate's advice): I found a dry cleaner that picks up my stuff on Tuesday and redelivers it Friday. Saves me two trips to the dry cleaner every two weeks. Once I started putting effort into saving time ~2 years ago I was blown away by how many little things I did that wasted time.

I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to save time (hmm...). I work from home most days so some weeks I only drive my car 1-2 days. I make sure to run errands when I already have to be out and about anyway--I pretty much never leave the house to run an errand on a day when I don't have to be gone for something else. Speaking of errands/chores, I've gotten out of as many of them as possible. I hired a maid last year that cleans and does laundry/dishes so that saves me 1-2 hours per week. I do almost all my shopping online so physical errands are kept to a minimum. It takes a while to get your measurements down but I buy almost all my clothes through Luxire which saves a ton of time. It's as close to bespoke as online clothing can be and it now takes me minutes to buy perfectly fitting new clothes. Can't tell you the last time I shopped for clothes in person. When Cincinnati gets Amazon Fresh I will be their first customer which will save me ~45 minutes per week of grocery shopping. These are some of the "bigger" things but as investors we probably spend a lot of time in Excel. I've spent many hours in the past year getting better with Excel which probably saves me 1-2 hours per week. I've gotten MUCH stricter on what emails I receive. I unsubscribe/report spammers on a regular basis to keep my email as clean as possible. I'll try and pay attention the next few days to think of other things I've changed to save time.

I taught myself to code years ago so I enjoyed the read. It is really long, but probably a solid overview for people who know very little, or nothing, about programming.

Completely agree. Doesn't take much effort to write a paragraph or two summary of the investment thesis. Starting a thread about a company and basically asking other people to do the work for you rubs me the wrong way.

Glad I'm not the only person who is highly suspicious of many SA (and a couple VIC) articles out there.

In my case, management fee is quarterly and performance fee is yearly. Both in arrears.

To the first question, definitely not. I was recently talking to an engineer who has a sizable investment in a <$50M market cap company because he saw something about the company on the news, listened to a conference call or two and liked the story enough to invest. There are all kinds of ways that investors find out about companies. A small percentage of these do serious due diligence before buying. To the second question, turning over as many rocks as possible. Investing blogs, VIC, this forum, other investors, screens, lists of insider purchases, etc. Lately I've been going through a list A-Z of every public company in Australia (obviously not all these are small caps but it gets the point across) in search of cheap companies I've never heard of.

As Tim said, startup costs for SMAs can be super low--mine were definitely under $1,000 (I'd guess $750ish). Easier to do it super lean when you're only opening up with friends and family. Raising outside capital will probably require audit costs and stuff like that. I only opened shop in February but I can already see the benefit of managing one fund over separate accounts. If I ever grow to the tens of millions I'd definitely be converting to a hedge fund. I also don't understand the hate for IB's interface. Took me a couple days to get used to it but I love it now--buying/selling for multiple accounts (or one) is so easy, reporting/billing is great too.

I have often wondered why the government is so anti-performance fees. Still don't like it but this does make sense. I learn something new every day :)

Well at least they live up to their firm's name :D

Enlightening, thanks for posting. I just started my investment firm and am definitely guilty of the "if I build a track record, investors will come" mentality.

Great video, thanks for posting. I'm in New Orleans right now and visited the World War 2 museum yesterday. Great learning experience but so incredibly sad. Highly recommended to anyone that hasn't been before.

jinni.com is fantastic for recommending movies and TV shows.

While many people going to the Berkshire meeting are value investors (and cheap I guess? Not convinced these things are correlated), I'm sure the average income of attendees is significantly above the national average so $100-200 is relatively meaningless. Many people (like myself) think the cost of a personal hotel room is well worth the privacy/alone time/etc.

The new Elon Musk book (appropriately titled Elon Musk) would be perfect beach reading. A light page turner that's still fascinating.

I have the opposite reaction. When a stock I'm interested in doesn't have a thread already created here (or has one with few replies) I like it even more. If you want to invest in the Apples and General Motors of the world you'll never have a shortage of people to discuss your ideas with.

Whoa thanks for posting! Never seen this before, seems like the best way to browse.

Every forum I've ever been a part of has an off-topic (general discussion) forum. Just ignore it if you don't like it, it's really that simple. And Seeking Alpha and VIC have PLENTY of awful content (I don't use Twitter or MicroCapClub).

I was sure this thread was about "fishing" for stocks in British Columbia...

I'm only 4-5 chapters into the new book and my man-crush has already grown. As much as I love following Buffett, Munger, etc there is no one as fascinating as Elon.

Damn. RIP.

Purchased. Looks great.

I assume you don't own a car? Because if you own one you must think the value it provides outweighs the lifetime cost (including depreciation). Even if you don't own one, I'm sure you can imagine other people with different life circumstances who get enough value from their car to justify ownership. Hating specific cars or car companies is fine but hating all cars because they depreciate seems... weird.

Ya'll forgot the definition of "one" and have very loose definitions of "product/service" ;D

Love: Luxire is probably my all-around favorite company. They're a clothing company that describes themselves as ebespoke which is accurate--definitely a league above MTM and as close to true bespoke as you can get. Their quality and prices are unbelievable and their motto is they don't say no to anything. If you dream it they will produce it. I buy damn near all my clothes from them now. Hate: Similar to jschembs I'm saying Time Warner Cable. Almost all my friends and family use them and every single one hates them. Really hope Google can disrupt this industry with Google Fiber.