Dalal.Holdings

None of the faang stocks were born as of 2001 besides Amazon? Apple has been around for decades (publicly traded). Google was founded in 1998 and Netflix in 1997. So the only one that wasn't "born" was Facebook. Let's assume that interest rates didn't drop in 2000-2002 (from a high of 6.79% to 3.61% in 2002.). It's probably safe to assume the market wouldn't have hit a new high so quickly (the market recovered from a 50% drop in roughly 6 years). If the market didn't recover (and people were still licking their wounds) it's plausible, if not likely that the most of the faangs wouldn't have received the venture capital that they did and wouldn't be around today. How's that not a bailout? This line of thinking is completely wrong! The correct way is clearly stated by Spekulatius: “Bailing out an economy us very different than bailing out specific companies. Investors in overvalued tech companies were never bailed outend neither were employees who lost their job.” FAANG stocks are creating a lot of jobs and innovating in many fronts. If what FAANG offer is not of use or if there’s is something better out there, users will vote stop using their services without the need of governments telling/helping them to do so, but if users like the service then no matter what they will keep using it, and that’s exactly what defines a free market and what makes the US such a strong economy. I don't think my thinking is wrong on this but could be. If interest rates didn't drop (primarly due to the waste of tech companies) would they have survived (especially since the hurdle rate of venture capital firms would have been higher)? If the Fed didn't reduce rates, would houses in SF be worth so much more than most of the country? I'm not saying that tech companies don't add value. In fact, they are add a ton of value for investors (few employees, monopoly power and asset light!) If they work it out, autonomous cars is huge benefit to society. Being addicted (engineered that way, mind you) to be addicted to your phone, instead of spending time with your kids? Not a net benefit to society. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/phones-children-silicon-valley.html Lol... I agree with Mondegreen. As I said “none of the FAANG stocks were big names (or even born) as of 2001”. I didn’t claim all except amazon did not exist. Google and Apple were small potatoes in 2001 (Apple almost went broke in 97-98, Google wasn’t even public and nothing compared to Yahoo). Netflix and FB did not exist. To argue that the gov’t made these successes and “bailed out” tech is ridiculous. Finally, low interest rates would not benefit asset light tech companies as much as capital intensive industries. Anyway, the usefulness here is outlived. Your arguments keep changing and it’s like a pointless game of whack-a-mole...

Dropping interest rates is a far cry from “not letting the innovators fail”. Please try to find the tech equivalents of AIG and GM to back up your argument because so far, you have no argument. Aside from Amazon, none of the FAANG stocks were big names (or even born) as of 2001. Your bailout of 2001 argument just doesn’t work—last I checked, Pets.com and AOL were total failures and the government did not get “involved” to prevent their failure (among many many other tech names in the graveyard from that era).

They bailed out silicon valley in 2001?? Your premise is wrong...

This mentality is pretty much a great example of why Europe has fallen behind the U.S. in tech innovation. Who's going to oversee and implement these great policies? Let's have some bureaucrat in Brussels tax memes and other "dangerous" activities for our users that cherry-picked studies from our prestigious institutions have shown is "bad for your health". Was broadcast TV also bad for your health? Shouldn't we also ban tabloids as well? Then we can take that tax revenue, cripple our tech companies, and form an elaborate pension scheme. We can all become chain smoking (do studies show cigarettes are bad too?) Parisians who have to fight in the streets against the Fifth Republic to get a pay raise or keep our precious pensions. Meanwhile, we can cry foul at the tech companies from across the Atlantic that seem to, for some reason, be all the rage in our "competitive", "mentally healthy" country as deemed by Brussels. :o Tech companies, like those in FAANG, are now the U.S.'s greatest export across the planet. Its equity holders (with stakes valued in the trillions of dollars or above 15% of GDP) include ordinary state pension funds, index investors (they make the largest portion of the S&P due to market cap), and ordinary, largely U.S. citizens. The U.S. benefits tremendously from having these companies. There are hordes of companies that benefit from the "free" advertising they get on social media platforms, a number of empires started on AAPL's app store. Crippling this would be like killing the goose that lays golden eggs.

One major difference is that it seems that unlike in 2000, Warren Buffett has jumped into tech this time (he largely sat out of it back in 2000). I think that's a significant difference and indicates a real change afoot. The network effects of FB, the moat of Alphabet, and the ecosystem/halo of Apple products is unlikely to disappear overnight like the popularity of tech companies circa 2000. These companies are producing real profits this time--and at high margins and asset light rates. Sure, competition will enter and disrupt, but tech in general is here to stay (and is embraced by mass market consumers now).

Sounds absolutely ridiculous.

Believing the next recession will be "as bad as 2008" is classic recency bias. True financial crises are rare beasts (that's why the Great Recession and Great Depression are so far apart). A true financial crisis involves the failure of banks which leads to systemic fallout throughout the economy (bank runs, credit drying up as no one is willing to lend, foreclosures, etc) which is exacerbated by vicious cycles (negative feedback loops). It takes a long time to emerge from such an event (hence why latest recovery has been slow despite monetary easing), but it also takes a long time for risks to build up in a lead-up to such a crisis (ie. poor risk management at banks). And so, they are rare and occur with long intervals in between. Banks are well capitalized now and such a crisis is extremely unlikely. What's much more likely is a smaller recession of shorter duration (it's easy to forget all the "small" recessions that occurred between the 1930s and 2008, but there were plenty in different shapes and sizes). Corporate debt problems would resemble such a small recession, not a full blown financial crisis.

Gold has been in the public eye for 3? 4? thousand years now and has relatively no breakthrough public product to justify all the time and energy spent. Where is the value? Bitcoin (and gold) itself is the product. Why bitcoin? Why not Dogecoin? Why not many of the other shitcoins?

Oh it is a feature, to those in power of influencing the monetary supply. It's detrimental to everyone else. Due to that asymmetry it undermines the free market (and is therefore by definition bad in my opinion as I consider the free market to be the optimal system). For those mentioning power waste, perhaps this recent study is an interesting read. It's on the price and sources of Bitcoin mining (both geographically and how the power is produced). The main conclusions are that at least 77.6% of the power consumption is from renewables and that a large part of this comes from stranded assets: power that is otherwise wasted. https://coinshares.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Mining-Whitepaper-Final.pdf (Note the source of the study is unlikely to be impartial based on the name alone) Lol...is this a joke? Crypto "mining" is an extremely wasteful, carbon positive (coal in China) activity. Love how anyone in the crypto world can write a seemingly technical, extremely long "white paper" pdf and be considered legit. What a joke. Crypto is worthless.

That’s because crypto is the antithesis of true value investing.

"Abacus: Small Enough to Jail"

Ray is a decision maker who focuses on macro issues unlike so many economists who focus on macro but bear no accountability for being wrong. That's what makes Ray's opinions and insights matter -- he's actually in the arena. A recent example of Ray shining amongst his lesser economist peers is the full Davos discussion on macro issues earlier this year: Summers, as usual, projects arrogance without humility. He's a prime example of someone whose career/reputation has largely been immune to his many bad ideas and projections in the past (many would say the largest being the run up in financial deregulation prior to the Great Recession). I guess one way that Summers has been held accountable is the rejection of his candidacy for Chairman of the Federal Reserve...well deserved in my opinion.

+1. When was the last true 'panic moment'? August 2015 right? I still remember that I wanted to buy some stuff around the opening but apart from IB all my brokerage accounts were inaccessible and/or unable to process orders. Complete disaster. Only IB was reliable (I use TWS fwiw). IB doesn't sell your market flow to others. Trading is usually crazy cheap and they allow access to a wide range of venues and order types. On the technical side they are just unbeatable. I personally think their reporting tools are excellent. I also love their corporate actions tool. With all other brokers I have to call / e-mail to get something done. Also, customer service might not hold your hand if you don't understand something but the ticket system works fine and they are far more knowledgeable about, for example, corporate actions, collateral, international withholding taxes and other 'advanced' subjects than all other brokers I have ever used. But yeah, sometimes it is not really user-friendly unless you are an expert. We would never trust a broker that sells our market flow orders. IB is worth it for that alone--and it shows in their rapid executions at favorable prices. Not giving TurboTax API access is also a good sign to us -- it shows that account security is held at the highest standards at IB, as allowing outside API access is a setup for massive potential vulnerabilities. We'll gladly download and import tax data manually to reduce the likelihood of malicious hackers from gaining account access.

So this is what happens to investors when patriotism wins over rationality. Being fully honest to your business partners while avoiding to take unnecessary consequences for those opinions is a smart thing to do. But if your opinion is that it is unamerican to be smart, well no objections here ;D By this logic, Trump should have been deemed a traitor for questioning the birth certificate of the last commander in chief... Oh ya, karma burns but this pres is very sensitive to criticism and will go after media, judicial branch, etc for hurting his feelings. Baupost has always kept their letters secret, long before Trump. Klarman has not exactly been secretive about opposition to Trump though, as he went public last year as written in the NYT article. Based on Klarman's investing strategy (small special situations), being secretive makes sense and is hardly cowardly (or to paraphrase Trump, "makes him very very smart"). It's interesting to see so much enthusiasm for trump in this forum when so many value gods (Buffett, Munger, Klarman, etc) have spoken against him.

Trump: "Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!" Wow.

The 1st amendment mentions who is "fit to speak" does it? Point me to where the right is burning things, assaulting people, and destroying property to stop people from speaking? I see but hurt fascists, but not on the right. The first amendment does not regulate who gets to speak at a university. It starts with the phrase "Congress shall make no law..." Using your logic, Harvard not allowing you to give a speech on constitutional law in one of their lecture halls is a violation of free speech. Love it when alt rightists go on about free speech. It is a public university. Do some research on the 14th amendment and the incorporation doctrine. But even without the first amendment if a group at Harvard law invited me to speak and another group lit fires and beat people up to stop me, whether that is a first amendment violation or not it isn't the way civilized human beings behave. If you do not want to hear someone speak don't attend. "I don't agree with what you say, but I will fight to the death to protect your right to say it shut you up" Lol. Way to deflect from your easily debunked original 1st amendment claim. I never agreed with the violent protests and destruction of property. That guy is scum. I am against giving an editor of Breitbart news, neo nazi, KKK, ISIS member, Al Qaeda, etc a platform at a legitimate university. Their speech would add no value to discussion and would be destructive. Anyway, it's not for me to decide, it's the university. If you want to know his opinion, go read at Breitbart news. I can't wait until Breitbart opens an investing section. I hope you will go ahead and invest based on their news since you have no regard for facts or decency. What ever happened to plain old decency and a commitment to truth? Isn't this forum in the spirit of a guy like Warren Buffett?

The 1st amendment mentions who is "fit to speak" does it? Point me to where the right is burning things, assaulting people, and destroying property to stop people from speaking? I see but hurt fascists, but not on the right. The first amendment does not regulate who gets to speak at a university. It starts with the phrase "Congress shall make no law..." Using your logic, Harvard not allowing you to give a speech on constitutional law in one of their lecture halls is a violation of free speech. Love it when alt rightists go on about free speech.

And if there is anything recent events such as at Berkeley show, the left will simply not tolerate Trump supporters to exist. No, the moderator should have kept the original thread going that was at least an attempt at a serious discussion and shut this troll thread down. The alt right butthurt is strong. That speaker had engaged in doxxing, threatening people online (among many other scum tactics). He was fit to speak at a place like Trump University. At a legitimate university not so much.

On another note, how nice of our forum creator to close down the other presidential discussion thread and allow this one clearly a trolling attempt by Trump supporter to exist.

The tech bubble crash in early Bush's term did not compare to Great Depression. The 2008 crash did because it was a full blown financial (debt) crisis. This was after 8 years of trickle down Republican economics. The 2008 recession >>> tech bubble.

Exactly. Thus far, we have not seen any brilliant results from the imposed 11-D chess moves. Refugee ban on these 7 nations (where Trump Hotels also happens to do no business) is unlikely to make America safer. America has been attacked by terrorists from other nations (mostly Saudi Arabia) where Trump does business. All Trump fans can lay claim to is his election victory: an election where both candidates had historically high disapproval ratings. If Trump is a genius for winning the election by such a slim margin and losing the popular vote, Obama must be super-genius level as he won two terms with even greater (electoral and popular vote) margins. Oh wait, but Trump's 304 electoral votes and losing the popular vote was a "landslide" and his inauguration "had the most number of people ever. period". You really can fool some of the people all of the time. If Trump is a master at anything, it's fooling his followers. What else would you expect from a casino operator???

please don't slander my country, the majority of americans do not approve of trump's initial days in office. http://fortune.com/2017/01/29/donald-trump-approval-rating-gallup/ Ya, they think they have a majority because they won the election. They forget 1) they lost the popular vote, 2) many dems did not vote bc of repulsion to Clinton/favoring Bernie, 3) Trump's approval is in the shitter. Fact is that both candidates in the 2016 election started out with the highest disapproval ratings in modern history. Americans hated both and they now hate trump more than they did. Trump's EO clearly violates the 1965 Immiration act that prevents immigration from being restricted based on nationality/origin. The fact that many support such a power grab is concerning.

Trump's EO clearly violates the 1965 Immiration act that prevents immigration from being restricted based on nationality. The fact that many support such a power grab is concerning. Attorney generals do not need to obey the president, the president is not their boss (though he does appoint them) in the sense that we have bosses. The DOJ is supposed to traditionally remain independent from POTUS in operations (how would the DOJ investigate a president like Nixon if it weren't?). Trump is treating the DOJ like he's treating a subsidiary business which hurts the institution (he's causing a lot of institutional harm that may harm the country for much longer than his presidency). He is greatly expanding power of the President as if he a CEO (or dictator). http://www.forbes.com/sites/charlestiefer/2017/01/30/the-wrongly-fired-attorney-general-lawfully-refused-to-defend-the-muslim-exclusion-order/#1175674c7b8c The ban was not legal according to many experts (including the federal judge who ruled on it), especially the application to legal green card holders. It's up to the courts to decide. Of course to many on here, it's "I like trump so she was in the wrong, should have obeyed her boss, and should be fired". It's not so simple.

The left's hysterical overreaction has set the bar so low that all Trump needs to win over another term is not be Hitler. He isn't bothered by the the Hitler/facist comparisons, and probably hopes they continue. #MasterStroke

Gee whiz, I dunno why these permanent residents and citizens like that 5 yo baby are fighting to be "let in" to where they've been living. Remember tho, it's obama who was "taking away our freedoms". But I guess taking away freedoms from brown people is ok doe.