ratiman

Interesting. That sounds like they have cash flow problems, which might be the case if their spouse just lost a job. How many people will miss their April rent payment? We don't know yet.

I don't want to bias the voting (please vote) but I see a lot of people talking about buying. I just visited the BiggerPockets real estate investment forums and people are still looking to buy new, negative cash flow properties at the current prices, which haven't moved at all. All I see on here and on Twitter is BUY BUY BUY. Remember when TPG invested in WaMu right before it went under? That's what it feels like right now.

Please participate in the poll.

Tysons Corner Quality Inn is usually below $80 and it's a block from spring hill station which is straight shot to Trump at Fed triangle. I've stayed there dozens of times, no problem.

We are in the middle of a massive bull market. We may do a shakeout here before Trump is inaugurated, but once the new housing market takes off with millennial demand plus all the forces of deflation we are all familiar with, we'll have a combination of demand and deflation that will send the S&P to 3500 in the next few years.

My old relatives used to love talking stocks. They would watch Louis Rukeyser and brag about how great their Coca Cola and McDonalds was doing. This was in the days of the Beardstown Ladies. Internet investing and the wide swings have cleared most of those investors out, plus the indexing mantra. The same thing happened in poker, huge rush of people entered and lost money and never came back.

There was an article recently by a guy named Jason Voss saying basically that most investors don't do research. https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2016/06/07/alpha-wounds-lack-of-independent-judgment/ If that's true, and a lot of banks that used to provide small cap research are no longer in business, then is there reason to believe that small caps are better researched now? I've never visited small cap club, but I have trouble believing it's filling the gap.

My father had his car stolen from his driveway. Somebody came in the middle of the night with a tow truck. This was the response of the police.

randomep called this early and UNF2007 was also skeptical and as a doctor had some knowledge about it.

Most of those stocks are associated with a famous investor, so maybe the lesson is "don't follow a famous investor into a stock."

:o :o :o Craig Effron: Let me correct a misperception. Most funds don't author many of their own ideas, and we’re one of them. We have an idea or two that we generate ourselves, especially in credit, but most are in The Wall Street Journal, or they come up in discussions at dinner with friends of mine. The idea that we’re sitting in a room, and then are suddenly all like “I got it! Let's buy XYZ.” That's not how it works. Bill Ackman is a different guy. Bill does do that and he's unique. John Griffin does that as well, especially in Japan. Generally, though, we all talk to each other and share ideas. Ideas are not generated out of thin air. They come to me from Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, idea dinners, brokers, etc. That's how they come.

some reasons: a) Medallion cherry picks strategies. If a strategy does well, it gets in Medallion. If it doesn't do well, it doesn't. So Medallion results don't factor in losses from failed strategies. Those losses may be borne by other investors/funds. So Medallion is the "Admirals account" b) as was well-documented in a Senate report, Rentech was essentially running a market making operation, using Deutsche Bank and Barclays as the fronts. Rentech would use 20x leverage when legal limit was 7.6x. Rentech had none of the costs of running a broker dealer, however. It was a form of regulatory arbitrage. c) there are no examples I'm aware of in which Rentech employees started successful new funds. That suggests that the strategies were less important than the business model. d) where are the Rentech billionaires outside of Simons? Is he the only one? Again, that suggests the strategies were secondary to the fraudulent business model. e) if Simons and his geniuses were so brilliant, why did they need 20x leverage? f) why does Simons always get such good press? Does noone wonder how a man got a $15B fortune? Did no reporter actually read the Senate report, which laid out all of his tax fraud? Read Matt Levine of Bloomberg for a sad example of a reporter rolling over and licking Simons ass

Thanks for the link to the podcasts. Here is a sentence that I think nicely frames the problem with the focus on brand: "Whether you're talking about CPG companies like McDonalds or Nike, computer companies like Dell, or service companies like FedEx, brand is often the powerful differentiator that enables companies to attract, habituate, profit, and protect." That seems wrong. Dell had no brand. For a brief moment it had monopoly profits due to a new distribution model. FedEx might at one point have relied on a brand, but now it has a duopoly with UPS. The only powerful brand of the four is Nike. The Gardners argument is circular. Companies succeed because they have strong brands. And we know they have strong brands because they succeed. But in many cases the brand is secondary to other factors.

This is a book from 1998/9 that lays out the Fool strategy for Rule makers (AOL, Amazon, Starbucks, Whole Foods) (companies that disrupt/create new consumer industries), Rule Makers (Coke, Microsoft, Disney) (indispensable consumer products) and Tweeners (Iomega, Yahoo). It's well done. The Gardner brothers are related to the Gardner in the Gardner, Russo, Gardner firm, so they grew up talking stocks. They also know a great deal about branding and marketing, as they turned their little website into a big brand in the 90s and now into a mutual fund company. It's interesting to look back now and see what the Fools got right and wrong. Here is a list of the Rule Makers, the established firms with dominant monopolies: Coke Disney GAP Intel Microsoft Nike Dell The book was written in 1998/1999, so many of these stocks and companies were at a peak. Coke is still below the April 98 high. GAP and Intel and Microsoft haven't returned to former glory. Only Disney and Nike are at new highs. I don't know the lesson to draw from that. The success of ESPN and Pixar and Marvel and Star Wars was not foreordained. The Fools (Gardners) come up with a good rule for a stock that's between a Rule breaker and a Rule maker: if you can imagine life without the product, then it is a Tweener. If there is an acceptable substitute and competitor, then the transition from Rule Breaker to Maker is in doubt. Yahoo is convenient but Google is indispensable. At the time, Dell was considered a Rule Maker, having graduated to a stable, dominant business, but we now know that Dell was not indispensable. Amazon turned out to be indispensable. Is Starbucks indispensable? Are there no acceptable substitutes? The Gardners explain the success of Starbucks in terms of brand, but I'm not sure that's the best explanation. If the Fools have any bias, it's that they overvalue consumer brand. Brand is certainly important in consumer packaged goods. Coke, Cheerios, Gillette, etc. But brand wasn't able to save AOL, Yahoo, or GAP. Steve Case learned all about branding at P&G but ultimately AOL didn't have the magic sauce, Facebook did. Brand alone isn't going to create a dominant monopoly. Cheerios is not the only cereal. If this book were to be written today, it would probably focus on networks and not brands. Facebook, Google, Amazon, eBay, Netflix, Uber, Microsoft, etc can all be thought of as networks/marketplaces that aggregate two sides and take a fee in the middle. It's interesting that the Fools were largely silent about eBay even as that was in many ways the business model of the future.

I'm waiting for Thiel to write the book about his hedge fund, One to Zero. BAM! Recently finished The eboys, about the Benchmark VC firm. Great stories from the last bubble about firms like Webvan, Priceline, and eBay. If you skip most of the book and just read the stories about Webvan / Priceline / eBay , it's a pretty great book. I'd like to read the book about Priceline, that sounds like a great story.

Look at the investment in Handy by Ashton Kutcher's firm and then look at the miserable Alexa ranking for Handy. Homejoy was already in the process of shutting down and Ashton Kutcher thought, yeah, I'll put $15M in the exact same disproven business model.

So I pretty much nailed this one. You guys are lucky to have me here.

So you seem to be agreeing with me. As the regime of low interest rates comes to an end, gold speculators shift into assets that actually generate a yield. Gold is not an industrial commodity but countries that sell industrial commodities recycle their dollars in gold. So two sources of demand are drying up: commodity dollars and the speculators shifting into higher yielding assets. Once that shift accelerates, gold will not be seen as a stable currency by buyers looking to hedge their own currencies.

According to google trends data, interest in gold in the US reaches a peak in months when gold is advancing (August 2011 and August 2012 and February 2014) and/or has a wide range (February 2015). https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=gold&geo=US However that trend was broken this month, which has high search interest (88% of the old peak) but a narrow range and a price decline. This high level of interest combined with soggy price action is an inauspicious combination. It suggests a lot of inexperienced investors are looking at the headlines from Greece and China and the low price of gold and looking for some "cheap" protection. Gold has benefited from a multi-year run in commodities, including the industrial metals and oil. But that has come to an end. Copper, iron ore and oil are down big in the last twelve months, and the dollar is much stronger. Gold is the last man standing; even silver has recently put in a new bottom. Right now gold is a very poor value investment. The cash cost is in the vicinity of $800 and nobody is really talking much about the premium in gold even as other commodities are in deep bear markets. As mentioned, gold is benefiting from negative headlines. As soon as the headlines disappear, gold could disappoint the speculators betting on calamity. They could be the ones who find themselves in a violent rout.