rkbabang

Unfortunately (for home alarm companies) crime has been on a downward spiral for almost 40 years. EDIT: It would be more accurate to say "over 30 years" than "almost 40". http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Property_Crime_Rates_in_the_United_States.svg

You can tell with a proper MRI study. Certainly how well a sociopath functions in society is determined by environment. There are definitely degrees to this dysfunction as well as vast differences on how it is expressed in different people. The sociopath or psychopath who becomes a senator or president is behaving differently than the serial killer who kills people and eats them. True the president may be killing far more people by proxy, but the serial killer is doing it himself personally. I wonder is this just different manifestations of the same dysfunction expressed differently because of environment or do these people have a different severity of the same dysfunction, or a different problem all-together?

What on earth is wrong with being motivated by monetary gain? I am motivated by monetary gain, WEB is as well. What makes something either moral or not moral has nothing to do with it being motivated by monetary gain or not. If someone robs me and gives the loot to charity it is still immoral even though it wasn't motivated by monetary gain. If someone invests my money for me and makes me rich while charging me a fee it is moral even though it was completely motivated by monetary gain. I know it is a small point, but I see this "money is evil" meme all over the place, it is discouraging to see it even on an investing discussion board.

I believe your conjecture is largely correct. Power doesn't just corrupt, it also attracts the corrupt and the corruptible like flies to manure. Fearless dominance and the U.S. presidency: Implications of psychopathic personality traits for successful and unsuccessful political leadership. Just do what I do, I assume that they are all psychopaths and/or sociopaths (I'm most likely correct much more often than not) and I don't encourage them by voting.

I scored 16 out of 33. It said that 16 is below average. It was probably higher than it otherwise would have been, because of my "strongly agree" answers to questions about driving fast cars and liking roller coasters. As well as thinking I'd be OK in a dangerous job because I can make quick decisions. I wonder if they weigh those questions the same as the one about not being concerned about an animal being injured or killed? Of course for the test to be valid at all you would need to tell the truth on the questions, so it doesn't control for lying psychopaths.

If you go here, this is all the info sent to the RSS reader: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/.xml/?type=rss I don't see the authors name there, so I don't think the board's software is sending the author to the RSS readers.

The Church of Technical Analysis. Telling the future by the readings of the Sacred Charts. :) Just poking a little fun. Welcome to the board Phaceliacapital.

Agreed. I'm sure they started working on iPhone6 (or more likely iPhone 5S) as soon as the iPhone5 was released. Both long before that. I'm not sure about software or other hardware, but I know semiconductors. The development time from concept to product release on something like the A6 chip in the iPhone5 is anywhere from 12-24 months depending on how much is carried over from the generation before. The A7 is probably nearing completion, but there are groups in Apple working on the A8 and even A9 right now. I'm sure the A10 is in the concept stage. I wouldn't be surprised if there are already people working on the iPhone7. If you count chip development then there are certainly people already working on the chips that will go into the next 3 iPhones maybe the next 4. These things aren't hobbled together in 6 months.

Exactly. And just because someone is internally testing something called iphone6 doesn't mean that there won't be an iPhone 5S released much earlier. This "iPhone6" they are testing could be nothing but a software emulator or it could be a hardware test board as big as a PC motherboard at this point loaded with multiple processors and FPGAs to emulate what will be on the next i-chip. This isn't the same as a sighting of someone with a market-ready prototype, this really doesn't mean much of anything.

so, I was thinking about this some more (it was bothering me as I expected general outperformance from the board)--the graph is deceiving. It looks like a normal distribution, but the y-axis (in this case) is not linear, it is <0, 0-10 (gap of 10), 10-25 (gap of 15), 25-50 (gap of 25), 50+ (gap of 25), so I bet the underlying data are not centered around the S&P TR, but a bit above it. Admittedly it is a poorly done poll indeed. I did this because I didn't realize that it was possible to add more than 5 choices, but I see by your compounding poll that it is possible. I thought I was limited to 5 categories and I wanted to capture negative returns as well as really high returns. This left only 3 categories to work with in the middle. I broke them up best I could. Had I known I could create more options I would have done a much finer granularity. These types of polls are not scientific anyway. They are self selected in at least two ways. One is that we choose to be members of this board, and two we need to choose to answer the poll. Also someone could lie or estimate mistakenly when answering. They are fun though. And I agree with your analysis. There are 60 people (right now) in the 10-25% category which contains the 16% S&P500 return, but there are more people in the categories above that (55 people) than there are in the categories below that (46 people), and as you pointed out the higher categories have larger ranges than the lower ones, so it stands to reason that the center is on the higher end of that middle category, not the lower. Also, I apologize for the offensive looking results using 5 categories produces. Like being flipped off every time you look at it.

Congrats, I will need couple of this. I could use a couple myself. I'd have to do 200% 7 years in a row to be a Billionaire. Difficult, but they say the first $Billion is the hardest.

I'm not answering in the poll because I don't know. I've been using Fidelity's "your rate of return" feature at years end since 2009 and keeping track: 70.9% in 2009 21.2% in 2010 12.7% in 2011 9.4% in 2012 The problem is that Fidelity will only go back 24 months and I've been managing my own portfolio since about 1997. I have a text file with every transaction I've ever made in it, I just need some software to enter it all into. Anyone have any suggestions? I've thought about a spreadsheet, but what about splits, dividends, and symbols which no longer exist.

I had a roller coaster year. I was down almost 20% at one point and I finished up 9.4%. I should have invested in BAC earlier. I spent months making the decision while my portfolio was plumiting the whole time. In retrospect I should have moved most of it to cash while doing my research.

I want to see Les Miserables but I'm going to wait until Netflix can send it to me. I did see The Hobbit in IMAX 3D with my son this week. Yes I'm a geek but I've been anticipating this movie ever since I first heard it was being filmed and I wasn't disappointed, it was excellent. Not completely true to the book, but movies never are. Now I can't wait for the second one.

You have a pretty warped view of the US I think. His mother may or may not have committed suicide (not knowing her I have no way of knowing the answer to that), but she most certainly wouldn't have been murdered. Vigilante justice is rare even when someone is to blame for an atrocity (OJ was never murdered), it is unheard of for someone to go after a murderer's mother. Also, many Americans value our freedom above almost all else, but don't walk around in fear. Don't let a rare event skew your perception of the world. Yes there are bad neighborhoods that have been completely destroyed by the welfare state combined with the war on drugs, but in general the US is a pretty safe place to be and getting safer every year. I sure hope people on this board don't let emotions drive their investment decisions the way they drive their politics. [img http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/cdn0.virgin.com/uploads/images/story/image001-16678.jpg /img] No appeal to emotion there. I was responding to the barbarous suggestion that it was a "good thing" that a woman was murdered.... err.. forget it. No one is listening.... Yep we're all just gun touting loons killin' each other, better just stay up north where your safe. Give me a break. I have probably travelled around the US as much as you have. Rkabang, Try envisioning it like this: One of your kids, that you trained to shoot, goes on a rampage with one of your weapons and kills twenty children. How would you handle it? Do you think you could live with yourself? Now tell me that you would not have an emotional reponse. The only logical solution is to ban All guns. Its not emotional at all. Barring that, banning all multiple shot (semi etc.) weapons, and requiring full registration is the only thing that makes sense. Statistics dont bear you out either. The US has by far the largest rate of non war homicides of all developed countries on earth. Were not just talking higher rates but multiples of anywhere else. Again ignoring what I said. I don't know if she would have killed herself. I took offence to you saying that it was a good thing she was slaughtered. That was a barbaric thing to say. Also that someone else would have hunted her down and murdered her. That was just projecting your own barbarism onto society.

And the 3rd qrtr results. Hopefully they'll be trading again soon. Chanticleer Holdings Announces Third Quarter 2012 Financial Results

I'm actually starting to doubt my recollection on that fact. I thought I found his blog originally because he was posting here, but I can't find any posts by searching, I may have found it because someone else was posting about it. Regardless it is an excellent blog to follow.

Anyone who was properly prepared won't be able to vote in this poll, because they are locked into their bunkers 3 stories underground sleeping by their 2 years worth of freeze dried food. I am less prepared than Parsad. I don't have a month of food in my house. I do have a stockpile of guns and ammo though. When society collapses not only will that help protect me, but I have a feeling both guns and ammo will be worth more than their weight in gold as far as trading goes. We also have chickens, rabbits, goats and a huge garden (with the land to make it much larger), so we won't starve. You have to hand it to the Mayans for their foresight though. They were correct in that there was no need for their calendar to go past this date.

I have a small position in Mongolia Growth Group, which owns commercial real estate and an insurance company in Mongolia. The CEO is a board member here and his letters to shareholders are a good read as well as his blog where he talks a lot about emerging markets. A good book you might want to pick up is World Right Side Up: Investing Across Six Continents by Christopher Mayer. He talks about investing all over the world, he's traveled just about everywhere and gives some good suggestions in each region. He interviews CEOs and fund managers, talks about trends he sees when he visits, talks about individual companies, industries, real estate, and mutual funds/hedge funds/ETFs. For instance he mentions Mongolian Growth Group on his section about Mongolia and has quotes from his interview with its CEO Harris Kupperman. I haven't yet invested in anything as a result from reading the book (I already had my small position MNGGF before reading it), but I found it a highly interesting read.

This has got to be the mushiest thread ever on this board, complete with virtual cartoon kitten hugs. :P Yeah, you guys are an excellent group of people and smart. And this board is the most valuable discussion board on the internet (for me anyway). Thanks everyone. Now shouldn't we be auguring about taxes :( , guns :) , or the existence of god :( , or something...

I am certainly impacted by my political views, but hopefully I am still able to act rationally most of the time while making investment decisions. And I'm not always consistent, returns trump politics for me most of the time. For instance I try not to invest directly in the military industrial complex, yet I might not sell BRK or FFH just because they hold a small position in a company which I wouldn't invest in directly (like say GE). Like I said inconsistent, but I tend to skew my inconsistency toward better investment returns rather than towards politics. I know this about myself even though I'm not proud of it.

Likewise Parsad. And here's hoping you are able to partake in many lunches and late breakfasts in the new year.

You have a pretty warped view of the US I think. His mother may or may not have committed suicide (not knowing her I have no way of knowing the answer to that), but she most certainly wouldn't have been murdered. Vigilante justice is rare even when someone is to blame for an atrocity (OJ was never murdered), it is unheard of for someone to go after a murderer's mother. Also, many Americans value our freedom above almost all else, but don't walk around in fear. Don't let a rare event skew your perception of the world. Yes there are bad neighborhoods that have been completely destroyed by the welfare state combined with the war on drugs, but in general the US is a pretty safe place to be and getting safer every year. I sure hope people on this board don't let emotions drive their investment decisions the way they drive their politics. [img http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/cdn0.virgin.com/uploads/images/story/image001-16678.jpg /img] No appeal to emotion there. I was responding to the barbarous suggestion that it was a "good thing" that a woman was murdered.... err.. forget it. No one is listening.... Yep we're all just gun touting loons killin' each other, better just stay up north where your safe.

You have a pretty warped view of the US I think. His mother may or may not have committed suicide (not knowing her I have no way of knowing the answer to that), but she most certainly wouldn't have been murdered. Vigilante justice is rare even when someone is to blame for an atrocity (OJ was never murdered), it is unheard of for someone to go after a murderer's mother. Also, many Americans value our freedom above almost all else, but don't walk around in fear. Don't let a rare event skew your perception of the world. Yes there are bad neighborhoods that have been completely destroyed by the welfare state combined with the war on drugs, but in general the US is a pretty safe place to be and getting safer every year. I sure hope people on this board don't let emotions drive their investment decisions the way they drive their politics.

What about: "I am not rational, yet I make my own investment decisions" We all like to think we are rational at least "most of the time". The second option from the top would get the most votes even in a random poll of people on the street. Would it be possible to answer this poll rationally if you were not thinking rationally?