Gardener

Don't forget you are incurring some non-recoupable costs by buying a starter home and selling a few years later. In Belgium this is around 10% + redecorating costs etc. so look at your own situation and odds of finding someone / wanting a bigger place. I'm going to have to disagree with you to be honest since I am also Belgian and thus can relate to what a quirky system the government has put in place in Belgium. You definitely don't always lose 10% (ignoring the redecorating costs): For example, say half a year ago I bought a "modest house" (this is really a term that the Belgian government uses but the law is changing as we speak), this means that I pay 5% tax when I buy the house. So let's say I decide to pay EUR 200.000 for a "modest house" => totals EUR 10.000 in tax that I have to pay the government to buy the property. For these kind of house you pay nearly 0% recurring, yearly taxes (let's say EUR 500 per year). If I take out a loan to finance this building, I and a partner (for a maximum of 2 persons) get a tax advantage that equals a little over 900 per year for the first 10 years (so EUR 1800 in total per year or EUR 18000 for ten years). After these 10 years, the advantage drops to about EUR 650 per year for some time longer (decided by a rule which is a bit too long to explain here). Let's say you can get this discount for another 10 years. That's EUR 13000 in tax advantage. So a total of EUR 21000 in less taxes paid over 20 years for a loan taken out by 2 people living in a house. Renters don't get none of these tax advantages in Belgium. Fastforward 20 years later. You sell the house to buy another bigger house. The amount of tax you don't have to pay again on the new house is capped at EUR 12.500 since you already bought a house in the past and paid taxes on that old house. So for the next house, you don't have to pay the EUR 10.000 again which you already paid (under old rules I think they didn't correct this for inflation but I believe from now on they will). The added value that you get when selling the house is exempt from taxes since you lived in it yourself. I constantly see small houses being flipped when they are in effect paying zero taxes, on the contrary they are being subsidized by the government for doing so... So in effect, you bought a house, lived in it and paid 0 taxes (apart from a small, recurring, yearly tax). On the contrary, you received EUR 21000 in less taxes paid. Here in Belgium the tax advantage the government gives you actually reconciles with the cost you incur on your mortgage so in effect they are just handing out free money to leverage and buy a house. * number are a bit of because didn't feel like looking them up in detail but really not by much The house vs. appartment phenomenon you talk about is in large effect because of a very strange taxation system in Belgium called "kadastraal inkomen". It in effect states how much taxes you pay on a piece of real estate, regardless of how much rent you actually receive. It is completely outdated. It makes a lot more sense (not in all cases but in a lot) to rent out an appartment than it is to rent out a house (especially a new house like you are renting), hence elevated prices for appartments, "modest houses", ...

StubbleJumper, thank you for your information. Could you perhaps tell me why a Chinese person seeking to 'lock-in' his wealth in Canada can buy RE valued at > 1 mio, but needs to lease a car? Is there a difference in legislation, or is this just personal preference? Another reason? Just trying to understand the phenomenon.

Do you have some more information on why the Chinese are favouring Canada? In particular why Canada (as opposed to other countries) and what happened before the 10-20 years you mention in your post. (Not really familiar with this phenomenon) Thanks

I love technological progress, but also think these estimates are way off... You often see forecasts being interpolated from previous smartphone adoption, but the smartphone was totally different in my opinion. First time I say an iPhone I was like "damn, can you do all of this with this thing". You have a camera, an ipod, a notebook, a internet device, ...., and o-yeah a phone all in once. If you compared the price of all these things combined, a smartphone is one heck of a deal. THAT imo is the reason why smartphones were so quickly dispersed across society. Even if tomorrow they sell a autonomous driving vehicle, I won't buy it since I already drive a vehicle and the added value of autonomous driving doesn't convince me to buy a new car...

At the risk of asking something dumb, why would anyone give $400 mio dollars to a university? There must be a reason besides vanity, no? ???

Different engineering philosophies German: precision, handling, styling heritage. they don't see upkeep as some tremendous failure -its part the course for the handling and precision they trumpet. Japanese: reliability, efficiency above all else. I would also describe it as a difference in engineering philosophy. Here in Europe, we don't see distance the same way an American would see it. The distances we do are generally way, way shorter. I would assume that an American sees 200 miles as a distance that can be easily covered, while a Belgian is travelling across his entire country doing that. In general, we tend to drive a lot less, therefore putting less miles on our cars. If you sell a car in Belgium, anything above 125.000 miles is already considered to be 'hard to sell' and most people assume that by the time it reaches that distance, it is to be written off completely. I would be surprised that the average Belgian puts more than 7000 miles per year on his car. In general cars that reach that mileage are 15 years old or something (just a guess). German manufacturers put less weight on durability over a large amount of distance, because the main market for selling the cars doesn't put as high of a premium on that aspect. G.

Not sure if I am following you on this one. Being born with an IQ of 2 std deviations above the mean for instance is for the most part based on pure 'genepool'-luck. So you have luck (the good genes), and you have an observable cause of your above average investment performance for instance (the IQ). To take a stupid example, I would be very, very, very (did I say very?) surpised to see even one of the great investors among us with an IQ below the mean. They were all for the most part born with that IQ. I see no flaw in that reasoning, and so there is no reason for me that luck could not be observed scientifically (being IQ an obvious one). Maybe just misunderstanding your point though... G.

Anybody have an opinion on the consequences for the global financial system if this bubble deflates? From what I seem to read following a quick search on google, the impact does not seem to be that large from a global viewpoint... Is this true or are they just downplaying the consequences of a correction? Apologies in advance if I missed something in the thread, or if the question has already been answered before... G

Thanks!

If you go all the way to the bottom of the page in the interwebs browers on your iPhone, you should be able to click "Mobile version" on the right of the screen. That should normally do the trick...

Listened to it this morning on my way to work... Not that it's really important but from what I understand his technique of 'mastering' blackjack was based on the game where they only use one stack of cards as opposed to multiple now?

Laughed so hard at this ;D This actually doesn't seem such a bad idea to me, but there already must be something out there like this, no?

Might be a book that I will put on the list. Thanks. Anyone perhaps knows where the money for their first takeover came from?

It's also a question of having enough cash on hand to make a meaningful purchase right after the dip.

Do you have a source for this? I was trying to find accurate numbers on average VC returns over the last 15 years but couldn't find anything for the average returns. I could only find returns for the outliers like Sequoia and AA, with numbers all over the place depending on how you mark their returns (http://a16z.com/2016/09/01/marks-offmark/). From The Economist, 22th of October: "This July, in an update of a previous study*, business-school professors at the Universities of Chicago, Oxford and Virginia found that, although in recent years buy-out funds had not done much better than stockmarket averages, those raised between 1984 and 2005 had outperformed the S&P 500, or its equivalent benchmarks in Europe, by three to four percentage points annually after fees. That is a lot. Ludovic Phalippou, also of Oxford, is more sceptical; he argues that when you control for the size and type of asset the funds invest in, their long-term results have never looked better than market-tracking indices. That said, getting the same size and type of assets by other means is not easy. The average return, disputed as it may be, does not tell the whole story. Studies find some evidence that private-equity managers who do well with one fund have been able to replicate their success (though again the effect seems to have decreased in the past decade). The biggest inducement to invest may simply be a lack of alternatives. Private equity’s current appeal rests not on whether it can repeat the absolute returns achieved in the past (which for the big firms were often said to be in excess of 20% annually) but on whether it has a plausible chance of doing better than today’s lacklustre alternatives. This is a particular issue for pension funds, which often need to earn 7% or 8% to meet their obligations." And the study to which they refer in case anybody is interested: http://www.investmentcouncil.org/app/uploads/ssrn-id2597259.pdf