rkbabang

I'm not sure how you evaluate this risk unless you have some reason to trust the management and/or any large shareholders. This falls under: don't allocate a significant portion of your portfolio to any one small/microcap stock.

I would love to know how to do this -- earn a total of $1 million over 10 years and then have a net worth of $10 million. Does this involve playing Powerball? :) No this is easy, they earned all of the $1M in cash and paid no taxes. They lived in their parents' basement and thus had no bills or expenses not even food as Mommy cooked dinner every night, so they were able to invest 100% of that money. And they earned excellent returns. Let's see $1M over 10 years is $8333.33/month to invest. In order to have $10M at the end they only have to earn an average of 37% per year for the 10 year period. No problem anyone can do all of those things.

Why is that disappointing? It suggests a belief that war will be avoided and that all of this will blow over and turn out okay.

I don't think it is a matter of defining terms. The word "equality" has a well established meaning. If there was "income equality" everyone on Earth would be forced to make the exact same income right down to the penny. No one seems to want that, so no one is really for "income equality" what they want is to take from the people who have more than them. Whenever I hear "income equality" or "fairness" I know that I'm either dealing with someone consumed by envy over what others have, or guilt over what they have obtained. The envy I understand, we all have this to one degree or another, but the guilt part I do not. If you are really guilty you can simply give what you have away. Not only is this moral, but commendable. But you do not need to use the violence of the state to take money from others as well, this is neither moral nor commendable.

Yes, whenever I hear the war hawks rattling their sabers, I think to myself that someone was smacked upside the head too many times as a child.

Putin is not Hitler. He doesn't want to exterminate whole races of people or take over the world (as far as I know). BTW WWI was the real cause of WWII and posturing, saving face, and refusing to break treaties was the cause of WWI, which aside from setting off the chain of events which caused WWII, WWI itself pretty much wiped out all the wealth created by the industrial revolution up to that point in Europe.. Not fun. While you can argue that the US had to intervene in Europe to stop Hitler, I'd argue that had the US not intervened in Europe in WWI, there would have been a stalemate with no clear winners, and thus no crazy German reparations, no Nazi Party, and no Adolf Hitler (he'd just be a bad painter). We had to go in and clean up a mess we created.

Speaking of powerful computers the worlds most powerful super computer might be built in Oregon in order to game the foreign exchange market. John Fitzpatrick is forming a company to make an Exaflop computer this year using 1000 megawatts of power, costing $50 billion and using Intel processors "He will use foreign currency trading as the main application. This is the Bitcoin mining of the Foreign Exchange market The machine will cost $50 billion. Financed with short term notes."

No it doesn't cost more in the long run than risking a war with Russia, which of course will pull in most of the world. The US has to start minding its own damn business and stop thinking of itself as a "superpower", because there is no such thing. Will other countries think developing nukes is a good idea? Yes, but why haven't they realized that already? North Korea and Iran realized that right after Bush put them on a three country kill list, which he called the "axis of evil" then proceeded to attack the first country on the list. Should the US (with its enormous stockpile of nukes and still the only country to have used them aggressively) have anything to say about other countries developing nukes as it has? No. It should shut up and mind its own business unless directly attacked or threatened.

Exactly. Nobody thinks that you should be able to buy one share in a company and be able to force it to do your bidding. But when a shareholder asks a question of management, regardless of how small the shareholder or how stupid the question, answering anything like "Because that's how I run the company. If you don't like it sell your shares" is never appropriate.

What exactly does management telling shareholder to sell the stock (for any reason) actually mean? My translation: "You are no longer welcome to own the company which you've hired me to run for you."

The Meyer fuel cell? The 200mpg carburetor? Really? I know a a guy who used to be a sewing machine repair man in Boston in the 1960-70's. He told me that he repaired a machine at this guy's house who had a working perpetual motion machine in the basement (why couldn't he fix his own sewing machine? I don't know). But he was threatened by the government and couldn't produce it or market it or they would kill him. 100% true!

I don't think you get it. Don't you see the potential "revenue" that the parasitic class can suck out of the productive people of the world with a carbon tax? "If you drive a car, I'll tax the street If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet"

We should only discuss that in a thread about Religion. I am glad my mom didn't have an abortion 49 years ago...... Undoubtedly you think that, but is she glad? (It's the woman's choice after all, not the baby's). Also, while you think that you are happy that she did not have an abortion, I guarantee you that if she had you would not care either way today. Nor would you care either way today if someone had murdered you yesterday. :) Absolutely true. We don't punish murder because it matters to the person who was murdered, we punish it because of the victims loved ones who are still living and do care. They are the ones who deserve restitution*, the murder victim himself doesn't care either way any more and can't be compensated. *Of course in our current system we don't require the murderer to pay restitution of any kind to the people left behind, (nor do we require thieves to pay restitution or any other criminal for that matter) so there is not even an attempt at justice, just retribution.

We should only discuss that in a thread about Religion. I am glad my mom didn't have an abortion 49 years ago...... Undoubtedly you think that, but is she glad? (It's the woman's choice after all, not the baby's). Also, while you think that you are happy that she did not have an abortion, I guarantee you that if she had you would not care either way today.

Kill'em all and feed them to the poor. Solve overpopulation (read The Population Bomb, pretty scary stuff) and world hunger in one fell swoop. Interesting stuff. I like these topics. So what religion do people think is the best? Listen, as a true conservative I never fully agreed with us deciding as a people to move on from Zeus. Seriously. What was up with that? Zeus was pretty cool, always throwing around those lightning bolts and whatnot, but I've always liked Eris. If I really was to go religious maybe Morlock and his obsession with throwing children into pits of fire is a little extreme (I'll leave burning people to death to the Christians), my next choice would be Discordianism.

Kill'em all and feed them to the poor. Solve overpopulation (read The Population Bomb, pretty scary stuff) and world hunger in one fell swoop. Interesting stuff. I like these topics. So what religion do people think is the best? I'm an atheist myself, but if I were to pick a god to worship it would probably be Moloch. I don't think he cares all that much about what I do, or what I think or what I eat, and he certainly supports abortion.

Kill'em all and feed them to the poor. Solve overpopulation (read The Population Bomb, pretty scary stuff) and world hunger in one fell swoop.

If you raise your prices and not see a decrease in sales, that only means that you were irresponsibly charging too little for your product or service. You have a fiduciary duty (to either your shareholders, family, employees, your employees' families, and/or yourself) to charge what the market will bear. My question to the CEO that "jacks up"* his prices and sees no loss of business is "How long ago could you have done this? And why didn't you?". *(you seem to suggest a negative connotation to raising prices just by your language "jack up prices", rather than "increases prices to market levels").

Love it! This just became a much more dangerous intersection. You'll see me on Berkshire and Fairfax, but as far as Sears Holdings, I intend to stay far away from that part of town.

Exactly. This is why WD-40 is an excellent example. Why would I ever bother doing any research or trying something new when it is in-expensive enough and it works? When my can goes empty I just buy another one the next time I'm at a home improvement store. I've had WDFC on my watch list for a while but haven't bought it. They also own 3-in-One Oil, which doesn't have the moat that WD-40 has, but is another well known brand and something cheap enough that you wouldn't bother buying the competitor.

Outstanding! No need to throw away money on a flashy website. At least their website looks better than this one for a multinational corporation: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ I agree, Mays has that spiffy background image.

Yes, I put this in the same category as having an "original" idea. There are a certain number of publicly traded companies who all have a certain number of outstanding shares, all of which are already owned by somebody. No idea to invest in a public company is original nor contrarian. You can't even say whether an idea is good or bad without knowing a person's cost basis and how much they eventually sold it for. When a stock drops from $120 to $80 it wasn't necessarily a bad idea for the person who bought at $12 and plans to hold for another 10 years.

Hi seclive, Just wondering, is it part of your business plan to get thousands of investors to use the site regularly and then data-mine the info for investment ideas? It seems you could tell which stocks people are interested in, what they are highlighting as positive and negative, how they rate the stocks. After a number of years for each regular user you could correlate that users stocks and ratings with how the stock performed in the next 3 month, 6 months, 1 year, etc, and generate an automated best stocks to buy now recommendation for yourself with a confidence value based on which users have recently recommend it and which users have recently started watching it and the accuracy value for those users. Or maybe generate the recommendations and sell them. I'm just wondering how you are going to make money without ads and thinking out loud.

Also even though they ask for your real name they don't make any effort to enforce it. I put in 'rkbabang' as my name and it accepted it even though I assume most real names are at least two words separated by a space. It is a nice site, hope it sticks around.

Let's say you made that statement two years ago. Since then, mortgage rates on the 30 yr have climbed significantly (30%?) as did housing prices (20%?). So from this point, for the statement to continue to hold true... housing needs to drop 30% from here if mortgage rate climbs another 54%. A 30% drop is almost as big as what happened in the Great Depression. Like anything in economics you can make a statement like: "all else being equal if mortgage rates rise, housing prices will fall". But of course in the real world all else is never equal.