pricingpower

This was a fun book thanks for that, it comes through that this is thousands of hours of thought and lived experience distilled down to a short book. If he was a US based investor this would be a much more popular book. In the audiobook they pronounced the acronym ROCE as "roas" in roast which isn't how I had pronounced it in my head.

Do the Canadian rails trade above a theoretical replacement construction cost? I thought the costs math on short stretches that have been built in more recent times in the US have been prohibitively expensive even setting the political process issues aside. It seems unlikely meaningful new routes will be created in the US before autonomous vehicles challenge the industry much more. I think part of why Berkshire chose to pursue BNSF instead of their other US rail investments (like NSC) was the western rails have a stronger moat vs trucking in the very long term. One of the neater niche renewable energy storage techs is using old rail tracks to move heavy things up a hill to store intermittent power as rail is so efficient.

The Rebuttal to the Foreward is very Munger, it's great. Love how Stripe made the free web release of the third edition have an integrated audiobook defaulting to 1.5x speed too. https://www.stripe.press/poor-charlies-almanack/forewords#charles-t-munger

For listed shares I find it's helpful to use a combination of displayed and non-displayed orders (called "iceberg" at Interactive Brokers and "Reserve" when using directed orders in Fidelity's Active Trader Pro app) so size doesn't move the market as much. Interactive Brokers has nicely flexible tools for doing things like % of volume or a hidden order floating at the middle of the bid/ask "midprice" but their commissions can get expensive. I find myself mostly using the "TV05" or "TV10" directed trade routing on Fidelity for medium liquidity names where an algo tries to execute x% of trading volume.

I particularly liked the super-rational section about calibrating fitness goals by selecting tasks you want to still be able to do at age 90s (hold a baby, put carry-on luggage in overhead bin etc) and then applying typical muscle loss from aging (8% a decade?) to back-solve for minimum you should be capable of at your current age. I also wasn't aware he spent a brief period of his early professional life as a bank regulations consultant, always interesting to see the variety of paths people take after finance careers.

Also the new podcast referenced with GEICO history: https://www.audacy.com/podcast/the-10-k-podcast-2facf/episodes

Came here to recommend Body by Science as well

Looking at a similar question this was a nicely done recent article breaking out today's costs for some specific aspirational lifestyles: https://www.curbed.com/article/cost-of-living-nyc-calculator.html

Progressive’s year over year premiums written were +31% for February with personal policies in force +8%, almost concerningly high growth.

If you have bloomberg you can use the excel plugin to pull in a wide variety of info from a list of tickers to basically create your own one-pagers, finviz is a solid free screener where one of the views gives you corp descriptions

I enjoyed this book, pretty inspiring to see someone push science forward like this for the rest of humanity and to be reminded that bubble valuation times can create some nice positive externalities for society.

Bloomberg terminals have a built in change/blackline function for comparing filings, draftable is a great free tool though.

Allstate had a recent investor presentation on reserve development that was good, logically medical costs are much slower to become clear than the property portion. I keep getting surprised by how hard the state regulators push back on pricing changes in some states when the costs are already apparent. It will be helpful to progressive and geico that others are recognizing they are underpricing, hopefully the days of not growing policy count will come to an end.

I thought it was a nice recap of recent geopolitics but it was a little disappointing when he discussed "peak oil" theory as if he had no history believing/discussing it, I thought that lowered his credibility.

A more generalist book that's good/timeless is The Real Estate Game: The Intelligent Guide To Decisionmaking And Investment by Poorvu who taught it at HBS / was a Baupost founder if I recall

Hopefully a nice aspect of telematics is that it should create a clear incentive for people to drive more safely... if drivers know that sharp turns/not using a turn signal/braking will increase their rate they'll hopefully behave better which benefits everyone

Constitution of Knowledge was a great book, bit surprised it hasn't been a more common recommendation from some of the more wide reading notable investors, it's very Soros/Munger too

He deferred to Charlie on evaluating Diageo’s products

This was entertaining and had all sorts of interesting nuggets on how Trader Joe's came to be and the day to day business of retailing, it was much more shaped by regulation than I had known. Interesting that a major factor for him selling it too early was a fear of a tax law change getting rid of the lower rate for long term capital gains at a time when income tax rates were particularly punitive.

This was an enjoyable read for what can be a pretty dry subject, detailed overview of a contested bankruptcy process mostly from the perspective of distressed creditors to a PE backed LBO. It's been the rare recent business book where the authors both understood the situation well and were presenting it without a particular agenda which was refreshing.

I think my years-later recall is best doing printed documents with notes on paper but in practice have migrated to doing a split screen of Google Sheets (mostly plaintext notes with occasional screenshots) and a pdf (sumatraPDF on computer or foxitpdf on ipad) as it's really nice to be device agnostic and searchable. I found doing all notes in Sheets better than a word doc as in practice I do more back of envelope jotting down of random ratios and adjustments to financials as they come to mind. I set up a template with small formatting tweaks I like like using =isformula(a1:ac1044) conditional formatting to make anything that's a formula automatically colored differently. Google Sheet is also nice for maintaining a watch list as the =googlefinance() function can pull some decent data and sheets can do basic web scraping. Being searchable across all google drive files is nice and seeing the build up over time of a folder per ticker researched is pleasant in the same way as a a full bookshelf. For equipment the 12.9 inch ipad pro with a bluetooth keyboard and the safari browser version of Google Sheets (app version is terrible!) works reasonably in split view, a 17 inch laptop with a 16:10 aspect ratio and a bluetooth numpad is more comfortable for long sessions but docking with a large 4k display is best. BenQ's monitor light is nice for a dark desk. When looking at SEC filings I'll pretty much always first run them through Draftable's free tool to highlight year-on-year additions to the text, makes it much faster to skim boilerplate language in annual reports and pick up on subtle wording tweaks. You can download Draftable's output as a pdf with green highlights of everything that was added or do a neat side-by-side view of the deletions. For general life organizing and synchronization I like Simplenote although I'll periodically download to backup

It’s an enjoyable quick read. Iger’s recent book and Cable Cowboy were other good books touching on some tangental spaces I feel like I retained more from though.

Seems reasonable shorter term assuming they can do a better job segmenting drivers with good behavior than competitors their marginal advantage increases as the new source of danger is people using smartphones while driving (a not random population) and severities trending ever higher (value of a human life increases and cars are steadily more difficult to repair). Makes sense to me that good underwriting is more valuable than historically and given how fast growth is already a rational operator would choose the extra combined ratio benefit over pedal to the metal growth. I don’t have strong confidence current combined ratios will be sticky but I also have a view investment returns will eventually improve with higher rates. Would recommend their investor presentations, watching them feels more like a master class on operating their business with an unusually high level of transparency... that probably comes from not being super threatened by the competition.

PGR has been my largest holding for years, auto insurance is a great industry for now with sleepy competitors, by being at the forefront of using telemetrics data I love how pgr has been long term greedy and taken reduced near term revenue for a stickier harder to assault customer relationship (30pct discount to a great driver makes it really hard for anyone to poach them but gives up a lot of near term easy profits). The home insurance seems like a somewhat forced response to the 15+ years out autonomous vehicles business model threat but I like how they reinsure most of that risk while learning the underwriting and trying to make economics via sticker customers. In the long term I think of each dollar of premiums if they can make 4pts of underwriting, 4 pts of investment returns and 1-2 dollars of return on additional equity funded investments that more than justifies trading at 1x premiums written which themselves have been growing low double digits as pgr and geico take all the industry net growth. They can then reinvest 5% of salrs into equity to grow premiums 15pts and return the rest to shareholders even while growing that fast (used to be returned via a variable dividend formula they recently changed given the speed of growth). Its a fearsome flywheel. I also like it directly benefits from higher interest rates. Recently they have overearned vs this on underwriting but ought to earn less in investments.

my watchlist monitoring workflow- For prices Google Sheets, it's not 100% reliable but you can pull in prices (some realtime and others delayed using googlefinance functions), it's easy to look at where a stock is trading relative to 52w high and lows, a bit harder to pull in historic info (have to use index for google data or importhtml functions to scrape from elsewhere). For corporate news/events I'll subscribe to SEC filings using an RSS feed (Feedly app is great), Fidelity watchlist and Google Alerts for media coverage, and also sign up with the company's investor relations if available.