rb

Well if you have 2 positions that make up 75% of the portfolio you're definitely running a concentrated portfolio. There's no hard rule of what constitutes a concentrated portfolio. But generally of there if your top 7 positions make up more than 50% of the portfolio they'd say you're running a concentrated portfolio.

That's been true for a while. The really important question is how exactly is it going to die. rb, thank you for quoting my post even before my own editing. I just suppose a lot of staff is working overtime right now - and during the weekend. "No sweat" comes to mind as when you arrive at home monday morning, after tripple all-nigtherts, and your spouse is happy to see you, despite your "odor". This is bad - really bad. You are very correct good sir. Reminds me of when I was a banker in London in 08. Horrible time at work that took its toll. But it was always very nice when I got home :)

That's been true for a while. The really important question is how exactly is it going to die.

I own TONS of financials and would take Lizzie over Mnuchin any day. I guess that answers that.

A good thing for what. Not believing science or the scientific method, definitely Pruitt, as in putting the fox in the hen house!! Well basically yes. In an evil genius/tough love kind of way. You have tons of people crapping on the EPA but they've been enjoying the benefits of the EPA like clean air and water. So if Pruitt dismantles the EPA and you get a whole bunch of crap in the water, then people will actually get a very good view what the EPA is good for and we can move past that debate. Yes, people will get hurt. But this is what they wanted right? Now they can have it. On a side-note they're all ideologues. If you didn't get Pruitt you'd get some other guy with the same beliefs who would do the same thing but quietly. Pruitt is loud and in your face so now people can connect the dots. They may they may try to defang the EPA for awhile. But the moment we get another Flint that will be the end of that. And then the dumb prick will have to resign and Trump will blame him for everything. I dont see corporations in the US suddenly rolling back their pollution control plans just because they can. A few might, and they will face the huge cost of playing catchup in four years when you have a democrat president, democrat senate, and democrat house, for the next twelve years because the republicans at all levels created such a fckup. . Or, My sense is that Republicans in Congress want to get reelected. They are going to block the scumbag PE everytime he does something that hampers their chances. Remember, this fckhead got elected by a minority. The republicans have a real mess on their hands. Be careful what you wish for. The dems can sit tight and vote any way they like, that suits their constituents, and and then blame the reps, for all the screwups. For the Dems, this is a sweet spot to be sitting in. Take the time and renew the party without the Clinton baggage. Maybe but I think you're wrong. Firstly yes there seem to be new rules of the road. The US population is actually becoming more liberal. Especially the ones with money to spend. Some companies seem to be attuned to that and don't want to piss off their customers needlessly. See the bathroom clusterfuck in NC. Some companies pushed back on that. Trump won NC but the Republican governor lost. On the other hand there's a different game in DC. I don't think the many GOP members are concerned about being reelected. Most of their seats are very safe. Democrats keep winning the popular votes and loose the house by large margins. Plus, most of the people voting for them are A-OK with things like blowing up the EPA. I know it's still early innings or maybe the game hasn't even begun but even the anti-trump Republicans seem to be in lockstep now behind their guy. We'll see what actually happens but i don't expect a lot of opposition to Trump. Coming back to companies. Yes, they will pollute if rules are relaxes because it's cheaper. They pollute even under current threat of severe punishment (see VW). Maybe they'll behave better now than in the past because of the afore mentioned new rules of the road. But it doesn't take a lot of bad actors to have an environmental disaster.

Ok here are a few tips. Use IB and leave the other brokers alone. IB doesn't sell your flow and most other brokers do which will kill you on the thinly traded stuff. On the liquid names you don't need to worry to much. Maybe you'll pay a penny more per share so unless you're dealing with millions and millions it won't be a big deal. You'll generally get good fills. On the thinly traded stuff. Never put in a market order. Use only limit orders. Break your order into small pieces. Try to do one lot at a time. Try to do full lots. If you put in an order of 1,000 shares you can kiss your execution goodbye. If you're looking to get a lot of shares sometimes it's worth it to pay up and hit the ask with a limit order. Especially if the ask size is high like 5-7 lots. But if the ask size is high like 7 lots don't go with an 7 lot order at midpoint or something like that. The ask won't come down it'll move away. If you want to go midpoint it's a 1 lot limit order. You've gotta be cagey with the thinly traded stuff. Use level 2 quotes. Try to understand the market and who's in it. There probably won't be more than 4 real players there. The rest are bullshit algos. Try to deal with the real players who actually need to move stock. If you have a lot of time on your hands and start to know what you're doing you can fuck around with the algos. They're not that smart and you can fool them. It won't make you that much money but it can be a little fun and gratifying to flip the bird to AI. Flesh, blood, and brains baby!

A good thing for what. Not believing science or the scientific method, definitely Pruitt, as in putting the fox in the hen house!! Well basically yes. In an evil genius/tough love kind of way. You have tons of people crapping on the EPA but they've been enjoying the benefits of the EPA like clean air and water. So if Pruitt dismantles the EPA and you get a whole bunch of crap in the water, then people will actually get a very good view what the EPA is good for and we can move past that debate. Yes, people will get hurt. But this is what they wanted right? Now they can have it. On a side-note they're all ideologues. If you didn't get Pruitt you'd get some other guy with the same beliefs who would do the same thing but quietly. Pruitt is loud and in your face so now people can connect the dots.

I agree; I've been trying every search term I can think of & don't get too many leads out of Google. Any tips for finding these type of companies? There are very few of those companies. If you don't hold calls and presentations and do the dance you piss off the investment banks. So you can have that type of attitude if you don't need or care for access to capital markets. Also if you piss off investment banks they won't give you analysts to pump your stock. Most companies pay executives with stock/options so they want the pump even if they don't need to tap capital markets. For example BRK doesn't have do the calls but they don't need cap markets access because they self finance. They also don't want the pump and don't need it because they don't issue stock options. As a result Berkshire which is like what, the 5th largest company in the world or something like that has about 5 analysts covering it. Blackberry which is a $4 B company has about 30 analysts covering it. A couple of years ago it was more like 70 analysts. But i agree. Quarterly calls are getting worse and worse. Lately it's just management teams telling analysts what numbers to pug into each cell in their models. What a waste of time!

Not that surprising. Fox already owned 30% of it. They were ready to take it over a few years ago but they backed off because of a phone hacking scandal they were involved in.

Have you considered something like long the pref/short the common?

Maybe both these guys are a good thing.

There's always been bloat in defense contracts going back to Eisenhower and his warnings about the military-industrial complex and probably way before that as well. I'd love for that problem to be fixed but aside from empty rhetoric over the years I have yet to see anyone come up with concrete and practical plans to do something about that. Regarding you tax payable I feel your pain. They're not really tax deferred accounts if you have to pay mark to market tax are they? Though in fairness if you have to pay 15.3% I guess that's just a partial tax. I have a different but similar problem. Our accounts are truly deferred tax. But over the past few years I've done quite well and my clients' tax deferred accounts have swelled a lot and are way beyond plan. They're now facing large tax bills on withdrawals. I'll have to figure out something about that. But hey those are first world problems. My view is that it's always better to make a lot of money and have to pay more tax as opposed to having to pay little tax because you didn't make money.

I'd appreciate that. Esp since I'm running a bit low on ideas as of late aster this rally. Try to make it something brilliant!

Sounds like you are ready to move to Canada if you are not already here. LOL Already there :)

See that sounds really good when you say it but it turns out that it's empirically wrong for a host of reasons. So I'll stick with what's been proven to work instead of going with what's supposed to work but doesn't.

LOL, basically me and Doo are just boring nice guys

20% is a hell of a high threshold. But VMWare will probably hang around the neighborhood.

I think there are a lot of us. We are lacking a party to represent us. Libertarian. Then I am not adequately describing myself with the terms socially liberal & fiscally conservative. I fall in the same bucket of socially liberal and fiscally conservative. And yea fiscally conservative and Libertarian are definitely not the same thing. Libertarians seem to have an allergy to paying taxes no matter what the outcome. As a fiscal conservative I'm in favor of efficiency. In favour of the government doing what it does best and no more. For example I'm in favor of single payer health care because it's delivered cheaper not because of a great love of government. I don't care if I pay my money to the gov't or to an insurance company. But I'm not in favor of gov't run airlines. The private sector has done that very efficiently and it should stay that way. I'm also not ok with massive surveillance programs where you have armies of employees/contractors that get fat paychecks to read my email. Also as a fiscal conservative I am also looking for the gov't to keep its fiscal position roughly in balance over a cycle. By no means does that mean a balanced budget mandate. I recognize that during bad times the gov't needs to run deficits but those should be balanced by surpluses during good times. It definitely doesn't mean it ok to hand out tax cuts like Halloween candy to top earners early and often. Definitely not when you're running deficits. I believe that those views have a whiff of libertarianism in them, but with views like that I'm pretty far from actual libertarians.

I think we'll have lots of these types of press releases in the future. It'll go like this: The president tweets some crazy thing, a company issues a press release to explain what is actually going on.

I suspect that those nifty features like air refueling, ability to withstand the EMP from a nuclear blast, ability to defend against missiles and ability to conduct a global war from 30,000 ft add a little to the price tag. In addition I suspect that a good chunk of the budget goes to the Air Force for planning, design of features, etc. That would be brown dollars not real cost since they'd still probably pay those people anyway even if they weren't working on this project.

Yea that rate is false. But it's not unreasonable for USD/CNY to go to 8 if the Chinese stop supporting/propping up the currency. Of course they could stop doing that, especially if they're pissed off. But then who really knows what the Chinese will do?

So do you think 24.5% CAGR in earnings from 1999-2007 at BHE is not impressive? With or without dividends, 24.5% CAGR is stunning in my mind especially given that return on invested capital is decent. No I didn't say that at all. They've done well. I'm just saying that those numbers are juiced up. So you can't really do a side by side comparison. I also think that the reporter was trying to get some sort of reaction but didn't do the homework to understand how the utility is being run as a part of the Berkshire black hole.

Whoops! :-[ Removed.

Additional shares were issued by BHE to Berkshire due to the additional capital invested along the way, so per share comparisons are quite valid. Still BHE doesn't pay a dividend to BRK and plows all earnings back. That's basically still a lot of capital being dropped in but gets you better PR. This seems like a huge advantage for them over other utlilities. What do you think the effect will be on the competitive landscape & will capital allocation change for other utilities? Well being part of Berkshire is a huge advantage for them. But I don't think that other utilities will change their capital allocation to match. The point i was trying to make though is that if I retain all earnings and reinvest I'm gonna grow my EPS a lot faster than my dividend paying competitors even if I have no idea what I'm doing. Obviously the people at BHE know what their doing. But still a larger EPS CAGR should not be that surprising since they employ larger and larger amounts of capital.

Additional shares were issued by BHE to Berkshire due to the additional capital invested along the way, so per share comparisons are quite valid. Still BHE doesn't pay a dividend to BRK and plows all earnings back. That's basically still a lot of capital being dropped in but gets you better PR.