WayWardCloud

Very interesting feedback, thank you for the idea. I'm not sure I understood your math very well but I'll study the industry more tomorrow. Any publicly traded names you're thinking of? Off the top of my head. Death is a terrible business, it is mostly small operators. And worst of all, it is NOT a high growth business. I remember looking up Japan, death numbers is increasing only about 1% / yr, and I don't think they can offer much more expensive services over time. Since you can’t really meet, there is no reason to do elaborate funerals. It’s turn and burn time ( cremation). More business potentially, but far less profitable. Yes, definitely one of the last highly fragmented mom and pop industries. To my knowledge, there are only two aggregators: Service Corp International SCI at around 16% of TAM and Carriage Services CSV at around 5%. A slow growth business using adequate leverage on a very predictable (the famous "death and taxes") and regionally moaty service doesn't have to necessarily be a bad thing in my mind. By the way, Japan's population was 127M in 2000 and is 126M today, meanwhile the US population went from 282M to 331M. There is definitely an argument to be made for secular decline in price per death care event because younger people tend to favor cremations over burials and those are cheaper.

Have you guys considered investing in the death industry? (sorry in advance if that brushes off someone's ethics the wrong way. There's other industries that I couldn't see myself investing in with a clear conscience but this is one I personally have no problem with.) Way early on, back when I was still wondering whether this virus was overblown or the real deal, I decided that not knowing was OK and to open a long position in Service Corp International which is the biggest US+Canada owner of cemeteries and funeral homes. My reasoning was that either the fear was overblown - in which case I'd ride that little virus-caused dip with a fine company that I'm totally OK with having in my portfolio anyway and which would most probably go trading right back up with the rest of the market - or COVID turned out to be a serious threat (now we know it is) and this investment would act as an antifragile hedge (=the worst things get, the better it does). I must admit I was all proud of my reasoning but so far I've been wrong and Amazon/Walmart/Costco would have been the better asymmetrical risk choices (as in: something that will most likely behave like the market if the economy chugs along but much better than it if things do turn into Mad Max). For proportions, there's about 3M deaths each year in the US and Canada and SCI takes care of about 16% of them. Meanwhile, even our ostrich in chief is now talking about a 100-240k death toll. Thoughts?

Could we please stay clear of name calling and stick to factual information? We're not 5 years olds at recess... Not particularly a fan of senator Warren myself by the way.

That or helicopter money / universal income if the next president is one of the further left people running. I like the idea better actually. If the government really HAS to print money and throw it around, then it might as well be bottom up rather than hoping for it to somehow trickle down. I think it's superior because that way the money is mostly being reinvested in the "real" economy immediately rather than hoarded at the top. Give $1000 to working class people they'll go to the store and buy stuff. Give $1000 to upper class people they'll add it to their stash of financial assets and real estate. Rich dad, poor dad, all that. But good luck to whoever tries to implement those policies in the US ;D Oh, and I agree that a government borrowing at super low cost to invest in anything that can easily return more than the cost of debt, such as real estate, makes sense on paper. Austerity politics make no sense in our extremely low rate environment (I'm looking at you, Angela). That said I really don't want my government to be ubiquitous owning real estate, shares of companies and whatnot. It's too much power under the same hands and it's just asking for conflicts of interest and corruption. Just look at China.

One thing that surprises me is that we have basically all the textbook signs of a bubble: very high PE, PS, CAPE, debt load, Value under-performing growth, extreme enthusiasm for a particular group of companies (tech), old-fashioned value investors either throwing in the towel or converting (BRK bought Amazon), nonsensical public manias (Bitcoin), a plethora of unprofitable IPOs doing great, all time low unemployement........ But even though I do see some hubris here and there, I do not see euphoria or even as much as a healthy good old fashioned dose of optimism (except from Buffett but he's completely waterproof to herd psychology). Neither among investors, CEOs, journalists, on TV or among friends and family. Instead, I hear utter FEAR and a certain type of cynical resignation to the idea the whole world is soon going to hell (political polarization, climate change, fake news, education quality, pollution, nationalism, children being less well-off than parents, the end of our shared belief in truth, in science, in common decency, upcoming "unavoidable" wars...). ??? ??? ??? So who are all those optimistic people pushing the sp500 higher and investing in Beyond Meat and stuff??? Where are they hiding?

Sold out all of my Apple (AAPL) shares and about a third of my Liberty Latin America (LILAK) shares.

"Here’s the perfect business idea for this environment: Open a Hundred Dollar Bill Store™. You sell hundred dollar bills for ninety dollars each. You’ll lose ten dollars per transaction but you’ll do a trillion in revenues in year one. Maybe you show an ad to everyone who walks into the store and you break even. User growth with be on the order of 1000% per month. A billion users. You’ll be the biggest IPO of all time when Goldman’s underwriters get wind of that growth rate. Go public and let someone else worry about a competitor selling hundred dollar bills for eighty-five." That was called MoviePass ;D

So interesting to see how different interviewers can make or brake the quality of a talk with the same guest! The first video is so deeply interesting I watched it twice and took notes. Meanwhile, CNBC just obsesses over kindergarten level politics and wastes the time of a great mind and of its listeners ::)

TIGO :)

Bought more GOOG... on Friday before close. ::)

Super interesting and well balanced as always! Thanks for sharing. I agree with his view on both tariffs and anti-capitalist sentiments (basically: good initial intention + over-simplistic understanding of actual world complexity = get destroyed by all the side effects you haven't considered). I disagree however with his last remarks on taxation of the ultra-wealthy and the beer story is just plain ridiculous when you know that the mega-rich pay a MUCH smaller effective percentage rate on their income than the very rich, the rich and the upper middle class. Here is my take on it for what it's worth, I call it: "human body finity meets math infinity" (to take back the name of the article). There's only so much one person can do. Simply because we're restricted by having only one body, 24 hours in a day and so many years left to live. So even if you get immensely rich, let's say 1000 times richer than you were before, you're not going to start to eat 1000 times more food, live in a 1000 houses at once, etc. Sure, you'll have finer more expensive food and a bigger more expensive house and maybe one or two more for vacations, whatever: there's still limits to what's physically possible to consume. We live in a system, capitalism, where ownership of capital allows us to enjoy pieces of businesses that produce profits for us. Thanks to compounding, mathematically you can keep doubling your capital every 10 years or so on average. At some point you're going to reach a level where, no matter how extravagant your lifestyle, you'll still keep getting richer and richer and you will do so by a magnitude that eclipses everyone else's fortune who doesn't own capital (most people). Given that so many people in our country are still suffering from poverty this just feels wrong. But how do we share the pie better without creating disincentives for people to work hard, innovate, etc - because they are the ones who make the overall pie GROW? Good news! We last for only a glimpse of time on Earth. Then we disintegrate and new people come over to live their own lives. So let people become billionaires by their own doing and cheer for them along the way AND make the Buffet/Gates giving pledge into a LAW (and hunt down any loop-hole ferociously) with a hard cap on max inheritance ($10 million per kid? whether it's in stocks, real estate, fine art, anything counts). I bet that's enough to finance healthcare and education for all, paying down the debt, or whatever you fancy. I just think the idea that any kid should be born with a huge fortune thanks to no quality of their own is old-Europe nobility and very anti-American (plus it's detrimental to the actual person's character building). That might be me being hopeful, but I get a different read from (most) anti-capitalist declared young people than Marks. I think they see the difference between self-made men (Ask them if they look up to people such as Elon Musk or Steve Jobs) and trust-fund kids and that mostly the latter are the ones crystallizing their resentment. We could make this giving pledge not just an IRS thing but a very patriotic, very "proud to be an American" moment, too. With the right marketing I can see both liberal value people (sharing with those less fortunate) and conservative value people (hard work of your own) back it together and shame those who decide to change nationality at the end of their lives (which I don't think we can do much about except banning the heirs from setting foot in the US again). Opinions? :)

No that's not what I'm talking about. That's just trend following versus being contrarian. I'm talking about specific times in a company's history when deep changes happen which make the numbers look terrible on paper for specific one-time reasons that a computer model might wrongly interpret as a sign of long term underlining weakness. "As a result of the Cedar Creek acquisition, which has the potential to be wonderful in the long term, current debt has increased dramatically and large one-time expenses are being incurred to close redundant facilities and merge operations. Many of the machines may not factor in the qualitative attributes that attract me."

Thanks! The Bluelinx thesis is enticing. Recently I've read several young managers talking about playing against the algos and focusing on what screens poorly. It seems to be becoming a common criteria in a value thesis and I think that makes a lot of sense. Andrew Walker from Rangeley Capital is someone who talks about this too for example. Now, do they actually have an edge or are the true algo guys laughing because their models are already much more sophisticated than we naively think and can handle those special situations as well?

I hear you guys on the vehicle energy efficiency comparison but I'm also thinking if you use trains you still need a truck to carry merchandise from the factory to the train and then another one at arrival from the train-yard to the destination. I imagine there are additional costs involved in moving cargo on and off trains and trucks. If those are big enough could it make sense to skip the whole "train" step even at higher cost per mile driven just to save the hassle of loading and unloading? it's a question I've been asking myself in regards to Berkshire's investments in railroads.

I'm intrigued too and I wish Munger would reveal what companies he's invested in. Actually, it sounds more like it's a fund ("I respected the man who was going to do the investing"). JD.com trades 4 times lower than Amazon.com on a price/sales basis. Not that the two companies are exactly the same but it gives you a point of comparison. I believe Buffet owns some BYD, which is a car manufacturer, and that stock has been lumpy for a while you might want to look into it. Baidu/Google might be another pair, although I hear Baidu's search engine is not nearly as good as Google's.

Added big to GCI Liberty (GLIBA) today 12.8% > 20.3% and to Liberty SiriusXM (LSXMA) 5.6% > 8.7% Go Malone, Go!

The closest thing to a market place I remember caring about as a kid was the used video game exchange program at a store equivalent to Gamestop. I remember realizing how rigged it was because I had to bring in 3 or 4 used games to get just one in exchange... So maybe some kind of trade like that but using Craigslist, Facebook or Ebay to trade with other kids? For example, they could buy a big bundle (someone getting rid of everything at once : their gaming system + all their games + the controllers, whatever) then resell each element separately. It takes work and patience to collapse the "holding discount" (deferred gratification) and if let's says they manage to recover their initial investment and still have a couple games left afterwards, essentially getting them for "free", I bet that would feel pretty good to an 8 years old.

Reduced Liberty Global by a third Increased JD.com, General Motors and Liberty SiriusXM a bit each Really wanted to add to Liberty GCI and Tessenderlo as well but already had big positions 21.9 JD 20.5 *secret* 14.1 GLIBA 11.3 LBTYK 9.0 TESB 7.1 GM 6.1 LILA 5.2 LSXMA 4.4 PEY