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Ok, I won't go into the PC platform cause it's mostly nonsense. You can go through it on digest it on your own time. But about the "animal spirits". In general you are correct that politicians can be full of it and unleash animal spirits - basically people doing dumb things with money. That has been happening for millennia. So it's not an unreasonable premise. However, in this particular case I don't think it will work. Here's why. The main ingredient you need in order to unleash animal spirits, beside bs, is credit. And what regulation B20 does effectively is cut off credit from the animal spirits. You are a someone who makes a lot of money and can afford an overpriced house? No problem, here's a mortgage. You are a Chinese housewife who has a 25% down payment for million dollar home? Sorry, no credit for you. You're just a regular middle class dude that wants to dive in and own x number or properties? No can do. B20 is the massive thing that didn't sink in yet. OSFI decided that the party's over and shut off the credit tap. Game over. I want to see the animal spirits that speculate with 100% down. Disclosure: I know real estate investors that buy properties with 100% cash. But they're about as far from the animal spirit type as you can get.

I went through it. The presentation i kinda shit. But the statistical aspect is actually correct. Basically in angel investing despite all the bs around of people who profess to see the future you don't know what each individual company will do. You will have a whole load of zeros and (hopefully) a few that will rocket up to the heavens. In the end you hope for a good result. Diversification is necessary because the level of confidence in each investment is low. I guess you could make a case about growth investing if you try but I'm not sure it'll be right. Basically when you talk about public growth investing your uncertainty is not about the company/business. Your uncertainty is about the valuation. I don't think that diversification will save you here because the companies that rocket to the havens will already have a very rich valuation to start with. Whereas in the angel model you get them for regular valuation.

The short answer is that they're full of it and can't do nothing about it. I can elaborate if you wish. As an aside if you rent in Toronto given the way things are now, you're actually getting a pretty good deal. (Deal goodness varies depending on what you rent). Prices would actually have to move quite a bit before you would get anything that seems "reasonable".

Yea, I'd go in to support as well. But it's pretty lightly traded. I'd need 10 days of average volume just to pick up 1% of this thing.

Yea, I'd underwrite mortgages in Detroit. Probably not as many as I'd like but i would do it.

Yea, I have a problem with that. Did we really get to a place where it's ok not to comply with laws as long as you make money?

Beating the market? You would think that the typical denizen of Detroit is prosperous from that video! You would also think that the typical Detroiter is walking around with bricks of cash and Detroit is the place to be! To be fair, carrying bricks of cash is only for the weekends and holidays....NOT everyday. ;) You guys don't have banks out there in D-town? 8)

Yea when I was typing that some car company came to mind as well. But just like you I could really place the name. Mainly because I didn't want to get 40 replies which can be summarized like "You just don't get it man!". I'd rather restrict myself to getting those replies on the thread for that name.... whichever that may be.

I agree with most of what you said. It seems harder today because of recency bias. But it was never easy. Also the more things change the more they stay the same. A lot of the opportunities to beat the market come from people doing stupid shit driven by emotions like ego, and fear and greed. In the late 90s up here in Canada we had Nortel. This thing was so big and was going up so fast that if you didn't hold it you didn't outperform. Period. During that time you could talk about responsible or conservative asset allocation, etc. But that wouldn't matter if you're sitting next to some smug asshole bragging about his giant returns driven by holdings in Nortel and talking about how the market is different. Of course your underperformance problem got solved when Nortel too a bungee jump off Olympus Mons. The thing is that you didn't need supercomputers or rocket scientists to figure out that Nortel was a turd. But people just wanted to believe. They wanted to believe so bad that when it had a not horrible quarter in 2004 they've piled back in so hard that they crashed the trade matching computers at the TSX. Not long after the company took another dive right into the sea. You wanna talk Wall Street insiders? Take Valeant. I the shareholders of Valeant were not the ultimate insiders I don't know who they are. These guys had every technology or resource at their disposal. They had board seats. But again they just wanted to believe.

Yea but you also don't beat the market :P ;D 8)

I may be wrong, but isn't Scott the guy that makes investment decisions based on 10-15 minutes of research? In that case diversification is a smart move.

Well if it was really easy then everyone would be really good at this stuff wouldn't they?

Show me anyone who can actually measure risk. Really measure it rather than waving hands about margin of safety, intrinsic value and value investing. I'm interested. I'm gonna go ScottHall here and say that FB might be less risky investment than 10 value stocks. 8) Yes, it's true. Risk is incredibly hard to quantify. But that is where the art part of investing kicks is and where the wheat separates from the chaff over time. If you think about it, being a good investor is all about managing risk. If you're actually good at no making mistakes you will do quite well over time even if you're not that good at picking the big winners. And it's a lot easier to be careful than to be brilliant.

It is also possible that the statements like this are just making people to continue investing badly in a nebulous hope of the "remarkable out-performance". Well some people are just bad investors.

This may be it. I don't have a google account. So there's that.

Incidentally I've found this: https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/california// It seems that at $88 for the average bill you guys don't actually pay that much overall. Average consumption per household at 573 kw also looks really low for a hot place like California. Maybe you go do in fact have a lot of private solar? :-\

MD, Yes you would have still have to run the AC. But you would run it less because you don't have to use the extra energy to overcome those extra 2-4 degrees or whatever it may be. So there are savings there. I didn't take it easy on the politicians. I actually tried to avoid talking about them. As I said I'm not from California, so your politicians, your problem sort of thing. I just said that from where I stand it'll be an interesting experiment to watch. I can empathize with what you are saying though. Bitching about energy costs is a favorite pastime up here in Ontario as well. Though our rates aren't that high - my peak rate if 13.2 cents (CAD) per kw. But I also pay about $40 a month for transmission so all in comes to probably around 20 cents per kw.

I agree with most of the above. I'd also like to add that I think we're seeing a bit of a crisis of the soul/confidence about beating the market. I think this is brought on by the environment over the past few years of low volatility and increased correlation of stock prices. In such an environment it is indeed harder to beat the market. If stock prices are highly correlated you mathematically can't beat it. So if you think that this time is different, that we've had a paradigm shift and this environment will continue into the future. Then yes, you should sell your stuff, buy some vanguard idexes and go to the beach. But, coming back to the idea of the process and what you actually do - I call it making money for the right reasons vs making money for the wrong reasons. There are still great companies and crappy companies out there. Over time the IV of the great companies will outperform the IV of the crappy companies. But if their stock prices move in tandem. Then the great companies will become very cheap compared to the crappy companies. Eventually this will be recognized and the cycle will be broken. Then good process/investing will be rewarded and bad process will be punished. Then the crisis of the soul will dissipate.

Ok, first the 48 cents peaking price is insane. But taking a look at the pricing structure it looks like your price per kw is not just energy but a blend of generation and transmission. So it's trickier to compare. Regarding the order. For someone who is not from California this is a really interesting experiment. In the summer esp in California most of the electricity usage would come from running the ACs to keep the house cool. The main source of heat bringing the temperature up in the house is actually not the ambient air temperature but solar radiation hitting your house. Solar cells would not only generate power but would also block/absorb that solar radiation and your house wouldn't heat up as much, in turn you won't have to run the AC as much and save on that 0.48/kw energy costs. If the order goes ahead I hope they can do some sort of measurement/statistic so that we can quantify the effects of this radiation absorption are. Regarding the effect on housing costs. You are correct that on the margin this will add to the cost of houses. Though if you have 0.48/kw peaking rates I think it should be a positive NPV project. But I don't think that whether the order goes ahead or not it will have any impact on housing affordability. The dominant driver of housing (un)affordability in California wasn't that your houses got more expensive to build. It was something else. Home ownership rates in California cities is shockingly low. Maybe it's real estate investors playing monopoly with your housing markets.

Nope, accessed from my computer in my home office north of Toronto. I've attached a clipping google_finance.pdf

For some unknown reason the old site is working again. At least the canadian one finance.google.ca

Yea rock pits are great businesses. They also happen to be very expensive!

There was a thread on this last year about self driving trucks doing convoys. The conclusion: it's not even close.

What you are saying is true. The more pools you can wade in the greater the probability of finding bargains. That's just math. But if you were to take Berkshire, most of their greatest hits Coke, Gillette, Wells Fargo, AmEx, BNSF, etc were large, well known companies. Nobody stopped anybody from from buying these firms. So these bargains were there for the taking. The takers just didn't show up. Similarly when I was buying stakes in Microsoft, Cisco, Berkshire at ridiculous prices I'm sure some of the people I was buying from were some of these really sophisticated investors with supposedly really advanced capabilities. So I don't actually have such a high opinion of them. One other I didn't mention in my original post. I don't think this obsession we have with beating the market is a good one. I know that as investors it is a way to measure how good we are. But it can become damaging. If you're really focused on beating the market, you'll start to try to do things to beat the market. That's not good. You should just try do your best to get good, safe returns. If they beat the market, that's great. If they don't, well... there are worse things in life.

Well why is Alibaba a great company? Because it's big? Because it grew a lot? So did Enron. Now I'm not saying that Alibaba is an Enron. I have no idea. But there is also no way I can tell. That's the point. What's one the first things you do when looking at a company? You pull up an annual report and look at the financials. But if you have no idea whether those financials are a work of fiction or non-fiction then what do you do next? By the way, I am not a xenophobic investor. There are a couple of companies in Croatia that I'd love to buy. I would love to invest in China. And for all of my talk about fraud and Enrons in China it is my belief that despite the fraud over there there are loads and loads of honest non-fraudulent companies over there. But without any way to tell the difference what good are they? As an aside, there is no room for balls in investment. If balls have to kick in then you're lacking in research or a thesis. I can just picture my conversation with a client about a loosing investment. I'm sorry but my investor balls were so big that I just had to put your money into that thing. They would love that!