WayWardCloud

Thanks for sharing, it sounds interesting! Have you heard of Recursion (RxRx)? They use robotics to systematically experiment with biology and they plan to sell this data library to big AI models to forage through. The goals is to accelerate pharma research by being able to predict more interactions in software. 2B market cap 500 employees.

Joint Sword-2024B is already over

China is starting a massive military exercise around Taiwan called Joint Sword-2024B. 2024"A" was last May and lasted for two days. Could this be the start of an actual invasion? It's too soon to tell but if I put on my conspiracy hat a lot of elements are lined up. - October and April are the best two months to attack because of the weather. - Current US president is mentally impaired from old age. - US weapons are spread thin around the world with Russia + Middle East fronts - Weeks before a tight election where Americans are already at each others throat and ready to claim election interference. What if China has a plan to sow enough mistrust about the results that neither side recognizes the other's right to govern? - They just propped up their stock market 25% on little more than announcements, it could have been to bait western money in while telling party friends at the top to unload their shares. - Demography shows time is not anymore on the Chinese side. - AI difference between the two is actually supposed to widen in the next few years according to Ex Google CEO Eric Schmidt giving the US an advantage, so better attack quickly now? Hopefully I'm just scaring myself

50% All world stocks ETF 30% family real estate 14% US corporate bonds ETF 3.6% Alphabet 2.4% AirBnB no cash no debt about 1/3rd of the way to financial independence Wish there was more to do but nothing feels obvious at the moment and I sleep well with my indexing in the meantime

Meanwhile their GDP was multiplied by 24. I'm still unsure how such a discrepancy is even possible. But yeah if you take a long term view it's pretty clear foreigner's money has only ever been welcomed in and never out. Must be nice to have people invest in you so much with nothing in return. Maybe we got our money back in cheaper goods? But then de-industrializing wrecks social cohesion at home and makes us dependent on their stuff. Re:wallets experiment I wish they had tested Japan I bet it would have made number one in the list. Safest and most honest country I've ever visited.

I bought Airbnb on Friday for 2.2% of the portfolio. I've been wanting to own this for over a decade but it stayed private forever and then the IPO was way too expensive. Now seems like a good opportunity to own a wonderful business at a reasonable price.

I've started a reverse "what are you buying today" thread a year ago and got some great initial answers but the momentum didn't sustain. I'm not shorting anything at the moment. Now that we can get yields from bonds I find that if I'm nervous I can just reduce my stocks exposure and increase my fixed income and lower the portfolio volatility that way instead of attempting to be long/short. Are you short anything?

China does everything they can to be hated by every single one of their many neighbors. This is the most puzzling part of their global strategy to me. Do they really need a tiny bit more land here and there and what is the diplomatic cost of being such a dick to everyone else in the region? This isn't medieval times anymore. I was equally scratching my head when they decided it was a good idea to send "wolf" diplomats to Europe to straight up insult and threaten us. They gained nothing and only deeply damaged their own image. I imagine they might have internal reasons that justify all this external non sense. Appeasing the hard liners nationalists in the party by giving them a bone to chew or something? Maybe some general needs to justify increasing the army budget? Those settlements cancel the soft power and good will Belt and Road was supposed to bring and push away countries that should be natural allies such as Vietnam.

Thanks for sharing! I'm curious are you the author of this blog? https://oraclefromomaha.wordpress.com/

Gotcha! Makes sense Here is my boring portfolio by the way (whole net worth) 3.9% Alphabet (because AI) 47.2% VT (World Stocks ETF) 16.5% VTC (US Bonds ETF) 32.4% Condo in Paris (in the process of being sold)

Thanks for sharing your process! Doesn't reallocating to equal weight go against ever getting a 100 bagger?

Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Nvidia, Tesla

I watched this interview of Murati and it felt so odd so I looked her up. She's CTO yet has an education in mechanical engineering and has never coded. Meanwhile Ilya Sutkever who built the damn thing is apparently being sidelined and silenced since the failed putsch.

So... they make doors and windows?

Would love to hear more about this!

I just don't see how LLMs overlap much with Search. Maybe we are thinking that way only because Microsoft made the claim a year ago and tried to bundle ChatGPT with Bing, but that alliance has gone nowhere. Now that we've seen the new tool in action and people have had time to look for use cases it seems to me like a different animal altogether, creating its own new market. LLMs, as long as you teach your employees how to properly prompt supervise and double check, are useful to enhance the productivity of many office jobs and can answer/summarize complex questions into neat little essays. Applied to imagery instead of text, they can generate pictures (Dall-E) and now even early videos (OpenAI Sora), which I could see mounting a challenge to someone like Adobe. All the above is absolutely amazing (and probably just the beginning) but it has nothing to do with what I use Google Search for. Or am I the one missing something?

I did just that last year and got my ass handed to me

VC and PE take their pick and they are both extremely well funded so all that's left in small public stocks are left-overs none of the pros wanted. I believe this is why the long overdue mean revert hasn't happened and might never.

What changed your mind?

Thanks for starting this discussion Luca! I have used leverage successfully during covid (the highest I reached was 1.28 margin) and during the slump of late 2022 (mostly through LEAPS this time, maybe 1.15 or so). I find it easy to identify moments when markets are already down quite a bit and people are in fear mode and I'm good at staying calm and adding during those moments without trying to time the bottom or overthinking the crisis du jour. For those who do use leverage, how have the new interest rates changed that? I believe USD at Interactive Brokers went from around 2.5% to around 6%. Given the long term returns of stocks around 7%, I find the 6% hurdle too high and I'm currently at zero margin (but fully invested). Maybe it's just anchoring from the past. looking back we've been spoiled, what an opportunity for leverage the past 15 years have been!

Uh Oh

Wait what ?! Maybe they ran away together.

All great points above. Let me add one. Due to one child policy and the cost of living in big cities + education, a lot of households only have one male heir for four grand parents and they have invested absolutely all they have on him. Losing your only son/grandson means the end of the lineage and that's considered the ultimate failure in a Confucian society. The government can't afford to lose lives on the front, unlike with Russians who also have horrendous demographics but are culturally used to sending their sons to the meat grinder every few decades Chinese families wouldn't accept it for long. All our arguments above assume rationality though, it all goes out of the window if the top dog in a corrupt regime is too far gone inside his yes men bubble. I'm guessing that's not the case here so I voted no.

+18% for me Biggest winners have been Amazon calls Live Nation commons Global-E commons Biggest losers have been Nvidia puts based on nosebleed valuation and a desire to hedge my gains on other stuff Accumulating looooots of GM calls because I was excited by their Cruise autonomous division The Nvidia loss was just stupid, no excuses. The GM one on the other hand I'm actually proud of myself for managing the position well. If I had been right I stood to make a life changing amount of money and by trading around the position and having strong safeguards I managed to only get wounded a lil bit when the whole thing imploded. Very asymmetrical bet and a good training in allocation although it would be an understatement to say it didn't go my way. As far as 2024 is concerned, I'm entering it passively invested with 75% in a whole world ETF and 25% in a US Bonds ETF. Maybe I've finally learned that I have no edge, maybe something will show up to get me out of the index but right now nothing too obvious jumps at me and I'm not a cash person so I'm going to lay down like a sleepy alligator in the vanguard swamp and just let you guys value and price things efficiently for me please and thank you.

It's been a while since this board has felt so optimistic, me included. Curious to see what cataclysm is right around the corner