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berkshire101

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Posts posted by berkshire101

  1. My guess is that there's a disconnect between product and customer.  The customer being the driver.  The average drive doesn't have a good grasp for the price of say a timing belt.  If it breaks, they take it to a mechanic and get it fix.  The mechanic runs down to AutoZone or O'Rielly, buys the part, and fix the car.  The customer pays for both the part and labor.  As long as the car is fix then the extra premium paid is worth the convenience.

  2. Anyone received their annual letter in the mail yet?

     

    Yup, yesterday. Can confirm it is gold.

     

    Good to know.  I'm in California so hopefully it'll arrive soon.  My brokerage sent me the digital version so hopefully that'll work too if the physical doesn't arrive.

     

     

  3. I don't know why so many people hate the book rich dad poor dad.  It's my early inspiration to investing in early stage. Maybe his attitude is bad but I believe we can learn something useful from everybody.

    Maybe because the guy is a hack who doesn't care how many peoples lives he ruins as long as he sells a couple of extra books?

    Always upselling. How many books, board games, and seminars do you need to convey a set of ideas? I don't think than anyone who stood the time as a great mind ever uttered the words and if you want more detail buy my other book, and my board game, and drop by one of my seminars.

    Shilling for real estate during the bubble.

    Promoting irresponsible and reckless financial behavior that is sure to leave the practitioners worse off....

    The list goes on and on!

     

    And no, you can't learn something from everybody. Some people are just wrong and even worse, some are crooks.

     

    This documentary is relevant.  I don't like the fact that most of these guys incomes come from selling get rich products rather than practicing what they're preaching.  But I guess there's always someone out there who wants to make a quick buck and someone is ready to sell them that "magic formula".  And wasn't the rich dad poor dad story all made up? 

  4. How would you begin to analyze this company?  I looked at the investor presentation and annual report.  Management said their goal is to grow on a per share basis.  But the share count is being diluted year-over-year.  However, revenue and operating cash flow are growing too.  It looks like the business is selling for 0.4 book value.  But are their assets worth book value though?

     

    Klarman ideas tend to be too complex and high-level for my small brain.  From what I've seen, it does look interesting.

  5. The spread between 15% to 20% is the difference between millionaire and billionaires haha.  So that's why it's difficult to sit quietly and do nothing.  Pretty sure Buffett and Munger weren't sitting quietly in their early days.

     

    Yes. But very few people generate 5% annual alpha spread by acting vs sitting. Are you one of them? ;)

     

    No  :-[ :'(

  6. It's much more exciting to analyze managements or find compounders

     

    This might be off topic in this thread, but compounders are also boring to tears. Especially for active investors such as people frequenting this forum. There is no action - you just buy and hold. And hold. And hold.

     

    That's why very few people ever held BRK or FFH (or for that matter MSFT, GOOGL, WMT, JNJ, IBM ) for 20+ years. And most of the people who did that are not "investors", but rather employees or in case of BRK old ladies from Omaha. ;)

     

    Even most self admitted Berkheads or Fairheads on this forum have traded in/out of BRK/FFH more times than they casually admit. Or at least kept a non-trivial amount of their portfolio in companies that were sold much more often than compounding would call for. ;)

     

    Unfortunately action is a drug. A very difficult drug to kick for active investor.

     

    Indeed, to quote Munger, quoting Pascal:" All of humanity's (or, in this case, an investor's!) problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

     

    The spread between 15% to 20% is the difference between millionaire and billionaires haha.  So that's why it's difficult to sit quietly and do nothing.  Pretty sure Buffett and Munger weren't sitting quietly in their early days.

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