rkbabang

I've got a Samsung 32" tube TV in one of my living rooms which is about 12 year old and still 4:3 aspect ratio. And in my other living room I just replaced my other tube TV last year (which was about 25 years old, I used to have it in my bedroom when I was in high school living with my parents) with a Vizio 32" 3D HDTV. This model I think, it doesn't look like its available anymore. I got a cheap 3D Bluray player for it and the 3D is pretty good. I still don't watch much TV though.

Great. I haven't flown in years, I don't spend much on clothes, and my family eats a fairly low-carb paleo diet, so we don't buy potatoes, but we do buy a ton of fresh vegetables every week. I guess I can enjoy my low electric rates, even though I haven't noticed any difference in my bills.

That’s a very good way to put “original ideas” into the right perspective! ;) I simply believe in frugality and in the importance of shrewd capital allocation. My whole business experience tells me that those two things can take you far, very far. Therefore, I try to save as much as I can, and I try to keep company with shrewd capital allocators. I don’t think this is enough to qualify even as a good investor, let alone an “excellent investor”… Anyway, thank you very much! :) You are welcome Gio, in fact one obvious thing that I forgot to point out is that by my definition the only way to claim to have had an original idea is to start your own company, making you the first investor of both time and capital. This is something you have done that I and many others have not.

"ethical government" You are talking about an organization that claims the right to make pronouncements that everybody in a certain geographical area must obey on penalty of being caged or killed and funds itself through theft. There is no such thing as an ethical government. If you mean to say that some are better than others to a certain degree, yeah some criminal gangs are worse than others, but none are ethical. He's accepted the shelter of one criminal gang, because another one wants him caged or killed. I don't see that he had much of a choice. If you tell the world what the violent gang calling themselves the federal government of the united states of america is doing, you are risking your life, and you better run for it.

If someone from China leaked a bunch of documents on Chinese government spying programs and took refuge in another country to protect himself from certain life in prison (or worse) we'd be calling him a hero. Snowden is no less a hero and his life is in every bit as much danger from the US government as that hypothetical Chinese spy would be in my scenario above. Look at Bradley Manning, (s)he is likely going to die in jail.

Indeed, I find it odd that a group of people who are interested enough in investing to go online and discuss it everyday are using the set it and forget it approach to an almost religious degree. There was one post on that thread where you could just read the guilt dripping off his words as he admitted to the board that he let his stock funds run this year without doing any asset allocation, but promised that he's got it on his to-do list for January. Sacrilege!

Wow 25% this year! I'm only up about 5.5% this year.

Yes! Of course! Never pretended to be such a good investor, and I think that probably I will never be! ;) Gio Well, that makes two of us. I continually assert that I'm just an average retail investor who copies better investors. Don't sell yourselves short. I think you are both excellent investors, way above average, and way better than I. I've seen people say that they copy other investors and don't have original ideas. What is an original idea anyway? An idea where you are the first one to invest in the company? Any public company has had investors prior to you, so an original idea is impossible. It doesn't matter where you found the idea, only that you understood it and put your money into it and earned the return.

Why shooting so low? You should aim impossibly high so that even if you miss by a mile you still do great. So I'm setting a goal to make billions by compounding at 200% yearly for only 7 years. See, that way, even if I only make 1/8th of my goal every year that is still 25% CAGR, if you make 1/8th of your goal you'll barely beat inflation, thus you have to come much closer. I think aiming to compound at a certain rate could be problematic and lead to entering into investments that backfire. It's akin to Munger's "Man with a hammer" approach. If you know what you're good at and what you're psychologically suit for, then you concentrate on your best ideas and the returns kind of takes care of itself. I'd agree with that, I probably should have put a smiley on my post, but I think that might be against Kraven's rules for 2014. lol. I don't really have a goal except to earn as much of a return as I can.

That's pretty much what I do as well. I also use Yahoo Portfolios to track my portfolio value and see current news feed so that I don't have to log into my brokerage account unless I want to make a trade, view statements/history, etc. The reason I use Yahoo for this is that, for one, I've been using it for a long time and all of my trades since about 2005 or so have been entered into it. And two, it allows me to track stocks (large & small caps, OTC, BB), options, and warrants, some other online portfolio sites I've looked at only do stocks. I also have a Yahoo "portfolio" of watchlist stocks that I don't own. This contains hundreds of companies that I find interesting for one reason or another, but that I don't yet own. For an example of how I use this, a glance at my watchlist this morning what stood out to me right away is that Fiat is up 13% today, then a look at the bottom of the page I saw the headlines that they acquired the rest of Chrysler. I like Gurufocus for browsing around who's holding what and finding possible ideas, but the only two sites I look at daily without exception are Yahoo Finance and this board.

Why shooting so low? You should aim impossibly high so that even if you miss by a mile you still do great. So I'm setting a goal to make billions by compounding at 200% yearly for only 7 years. See, that way, even if I only make 1/8th of my goal every year that is still 25% CAGR, if you make 1/8th of your goal you'll barely beat inflation, thus you have to come much closer.

Consumer sentiment is fairly low, there is still a lot of negativity out there. http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Michigan-Consumer-Sentiment-Index.php

BBRY BBY BH CBRL FB GME HLF MJNA NFLX TWTR EDIT: I thought it was up to ten, not at least ten positions. I added 3 more.

Things aren't going well for those involved with Silk Road 2 :( Alleged Top Moderators Of Silk Road 2 Forums Arrested In Ireland, U.S. In International Sweep

I just went back to read it. Yes it is fascinating and it makes sense. When the value of the money goes down, things of value cost more. That includes labor. So people get paid more. Services, real goods, and real estate cost more, what gets wiped out is cash savings and anyone on a fixed income. This is why I think of cash as a very short term storage. To put it in computer terms, cash is the equivalent of data being stored in the SRAM cache by the processor just long enough to use it, while stocks are the equivalent of data being stored on the hard drive long term for when its needed.

It doesn't matter. It is open source. If there was a backdoor or a weakness in the code it would most likely have been seen by someone by now. When the source code is open for all to see, it doesn't matter who originally wrote it. What if Shakespeare didn't write Hamlet? We have it, does it really matter who wrote it at this point?

I think of money as a means of short term value storage to facilitate transactions. I don't consider any form of money a good long term savings vehicle. I am worried about future inflation of the US dollar, which is why I remain fully invested in securities. I think that stocks are the best protection against inflation as long as the entire system doesn't collapse. And if I thought that was going to happen I wouldn't be buying gold or bitcoins either. I'd be buying guns, ammo, non-perishable food, toilet paper, razor blades, non-electric handtools, building greenhouses, raising more animals, etc.

I love it. Actually, a Flooz sounds better than some of this stuff. I could actually at least get a book from B&N with some Flooz. There was also eGold around the same time, right? I don't know what this sudden interest in bitcoins and similar cyptocurrencies mean in terms of where we are on the bubble cycle. I have long felt that social media companies have been bought and traded at insane valuations. But can it be a bubble when the public at large can't partake? Bitcoin seems to be an extension of whatever's been happening in social media to me at least. I used to have a little online business selling bumper stickers back then (rkbabang.com). I accepted e-gold, GoldMoney, and of course paypal. I actually lost some money when the feds shutdown e-gold. One of the allures of bitcoin is that the feds can't shut it down.

I actually tend to disagree with this approach. e.g., if I were to invest in the S&P, I would not do it in the same manner I would invest in stocks. For example, some of the skill is identifying when is a good time to buy a security, and which may correspond to a market downturn (e.g., 2009/2011). An indexer will not do this; instead, they would dollar cost average and never pay any attention. Thus, I think putting the same amount of money in the S&P at the same time either gives too much benefit to the S&P benchmark if you are right, or doesn't give credit to the S&P benchmark if you are wrong. It depends on your investment style. I've been 95-100% invested for the last 10-12 years or so. When I have new money to invest I immediately put it into my best idea. This aversion to holding cash has cost me at times (like in 2008 I was down around 35% and at one point in 2012 I was down 20% for just two examples out of many), but the benefits of this strategy has far outweighed the negatives (>40%/yr since 2005, unfortunately I haven't calculated my gains pre-2005 when I moved to Fidelity, but they were pretty good as well). If I was an index fund type investor, I would put money into the index fund at about exactly the same times as I invested money in my top pics, so the approach of keeping track of when new money would have gone into the index would be a fair comparison for me. I don't keep track of that though.

I've never paid anyone to fix something that I've done first. (ok - I've only been in this house a few months so nothing has gone wrong that I've touched..... but it will :D ) Houses will cost you.you can mitigate some of the expenses - or at least postpone them... You must be a better plumber than I . :)

This is all very true. I'd never go back to renting for the reasons I said here (mhdousa, you should read this thread as it is evolves to this topic), but it cracks me up when I hear people say that their house is an investment. If I was analyzing my home as a possible investment I would absolutely never buy it. I've spent so much time and money on my homes over the years it isn't even funny, and I'm someone that tries to do almost all maintenance/upgrades/repairs myself. When I hire someone it is because something I tried to do went horribly wrong.

Yes, but the only way to discover which 1 or 2 make sense is to let the market create a thousand of them and see which 2 survive. Does the Diners Club card still exist? Maybe in 20 years everyone uses one of 2 or 3 virtual crypto-currencies, but bitcoin isn't one of them, or maybe it is. Who knows?

All good advice so far. The best advice I can give to any home owner is don't borrow against your house for anything other than money you need to spent on your house (like say a new roof). So many people got into trouble borrowing for vacations, RVs, Christmas gifts, cars, you name it. There are people who have lived in their house for 35 years and despite the fact that they originally paid a ridiculously small amount for their home (by today's prices) they still owe more than its worth and can't retire because they have a mortgage to pay. 30 years from now if you still live in that home you want it paid for. Congratulations, btw.

I love that quote. Some of my other favorites are: "Never trust quotes you see on the internet." --Abraham Lincoln "YOLO" --Thomas Jefferson

I manage my wife's RothIRA as well, this was started by a roll over of her old 401K into an IRA when she quit her job to be a stay at home mom 13 years ago, so anything that has been added to it has been money I've made. I also manage UTMA accounts in my kids' names, that they invest portions of their allowance as well as Christmas/birthday money from relatives. Even their accounts have significant amounts in them now due to the growth (5 figures each). But I still answered "No" to the poll, because neither my wife nor my kids pay me to manage their money for them. Maybe I should start charging a fee. :)