rkbabang

I'm not sure simply being an Internet forum explains the over abundance of engineers. It might have 10 years ago, and certainly would have 21 years ago (when I first had Internet access). But Now? Hell everyone I know from age 8 to 80 has internet access, this is everyone from any background and any profession. Look at Facebook, most people are not engineers. If non-engineers wanted to be here, they would be. I think it could be that the type of person who is interested in investing would also be interested in a technical field (and vise versa). In other words if you gather a group of self selected people together who like numbers, a lot of them will be engineers of one type or another.

I also disagree with this assertion. While I’ve only smoked once since Sophomore Year if High School (more than 30 years ago), I know of a few folks who do. The profile of these folks is not focused…older, younger, professional, manual laborers, artsy or more concrete thinkers…it runs the gamut. As with alcohol, there are those who do it to excess and others who do not and any mind-altering chemical put into one’s body carries with it a unique set of problems/issues. While I do not partake in the smoking of pot, I’ve found it difficult to maintain my position that it should not be legalized. The parenting aspect of this is interesting. I candidly do not want my kids (15 and 13) smoking pot OR drinking and, to the best of my knowledge, neither do. It was always easy to say “Don’t smoke pot, it’s illegal” but that parenting tool is being lost. Now it’s a matter of trying to dissuade them based on thinks like random drug testing, the cost, etc. Parenting is hard. I would agree with everything you said here. I know of professionals who do it often (not on the job of course). As far as parenting goes, I obviously don't want my children doing pot or alcohol either, but of the two, I think alcohol is much worse. I think the largest danger of pot being illegal is that it increases drinking. Yes parenting is hard. Always has been, always will be, but I have no desire for "the village" to do it for me.

Oh good. I was afraid that Jesse Pinkman was really dead.

This carnage has to end! How many more have to die! Marijuana Overdoses Kill 37 in Colorado On First Day of Legalization "One of the those victims was 29-year-old Jesse Bruce Pinkman, a former methamphetamine dealer from Albuquerque who had recently moved to Boulder to establish a legal marijuana dispensary. Pinkman was partying with friends when he suffered several seizures and a massive heart attack which ultimately proved to be fatal. Toxicology reports revealed that marijuana was the only drug present in his system. "This is just a terrible tragedy," says his friend Peter. "Jesse was trying to go legit and now this happens? I guess drugs really are as dangerous as they say."

Digital ASIC designer (18 years).

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 . :)