Gregmal

That’s what they said last year…that the 6-7% margin hurdle was just too much….heck we had people hooting and hollering about how attractive cash and t bills were at 5%….and the market did 30% or whatever. Just gotta make a decision based on the opportunity set. This year I’m slightly less margined, but still confident my aggregate easily exceeds the carry cost.

Knowing what you own is important. I have zero issue borrowing heavily against stuff like MSGS, FRP Holdings, the Berkshire or Fairfax stuff too would fit the bill. Stuff that has clear value and won’t get zero’d. For lots of last decade I then bought stuff like Google, Waste Management, Costco, Visa, etc…fully on margin. Essentially, Wall Street likes to scare people with tales of “well there was this one time”…and “if you bought xyz on (insert all time high before crash) you’ve never recovered” stories. I’m basically short the shit out of that fear mongering bullshit. Use your head and you should be fine, if not just stick to indexing. Like yea, I have access to the “max” button on the Yahoo finance chart for Berkshire Hathaway. I’m capable of seeing it has had a drawdown before. If I own it, I’m either not expecting that to happen, or perfectly ok if it does. Next….

Rolling average over the past 15 years is probably around 1.3x but it totally depends on the opportunity set. Have gone well over 2x a few times; lowest I think I’ve ever been is 1.1x. Really just depends. Wall Street spends a lot of money advertising things that prevent investors from maximizing their returns. The overall misrepresentation of levered investing is one of them. If for example, I am 60% long Berkshire, 60% long the SPY, and have a 15% position in index put options, I wouldn’t consider that risky at all. But my account statement would show 1.35x or whatever.

Yea a lot of the stuff we see people do makes no sense. Sitting on a bond yielding 5% is like paying 20x for a business with no growth and no inflation protection. It’s probably even worse. But people do it and then think Apple is expensive even though it’s got modest growth and inflation protection. Not saying I’m a buyer of Apple here, and I still wouldn’t even get out of bed for 5%, but the logic is head scratching. On Berkshire, it’s an index substitute with a few caveats. You don’t buy it to sit around spending all this time thinking about it. You buy it so you don’t have to check your stock quotes every month.

Nothing screams “I do not value my time, at all” quite like someone indicating they’ve spent time trying to find a reason to short Berkshire Hathaway.

eBay is the furthest thing from a melting ice cube. The VIC write up posted yesterday sums it up as well as any of us could have in the thread. eBay will exist a decade from now, and it doesn’t need to do anything for us to make a satisfactory return.

I’m not even sure what a cigar butt is in relation to todays investing world. Maybe merger arb? Generally I don’t have an interest in terminally declining businesses, which was always what my understanding of cigar butts was.

Yea amazing how people forget that it was the US government that stole everyone’s Russian assets.

Yea when you manage OPM you learn at some point that your gift is also your curse. Most people are shitty investors because they can’t handle volatility but still insist on being in the market. This is why they hold cash, sell early, waste money gambling on crashes. So being able to deal with volatility is certainly necessary for investing success, but having to manage OPM and deal with their emotions is another story and one that eventually you either learn to ignore, or come to resent.

Maybe we do, maybe we just aren’t looking at it the right way. Who knows? All I know is there’s a million instances over my investing career where something didn’t make sense to me in the moment and then in hindsite it became clear what I was missing. For instance there were some pretty aggressive Tesla short pitches in 2012-2015, most got really, really hung up on “valuation”, and today they look downright stupid and that valuation would be a bargain. My comment was more so directed at the folks who spend all this time micro analyzing all these reasons they can’t invest, rather than just finding things to invest in. There’s always stuff to invest in.

Reminder for the millionth time, stop worrying about things that don’t make sense to you. Stop spending so much time fretting whether or not something is “expensive”….and just focus that energy on things that do make sense to you and that are solid value. #foreverSPY3000

Focus on understanding the material non public part. Inside information by itself doesn’t really mean much.

I do find it amusing how bent out of shape people get about him; he’s literally just doing what any finance guy would do if they had the ability. You can’t honestly tell me these money and career obsessed egomaniacs wouldnt or don’t do the same type of stuff in the context of how it applies to their opportunity set. Ultimately it’s up to the Tesla BoD to determine if this makes sense for shareholders. But finance dudes whining about a scheme to enrich oneself is really…..rich.

Wow I had not seen this. But again, it just shows what kind of scumbags the run of the mill, non professional investor has to deal with.

Yea totally depends on the assets. It helps being familiar with the individual assets too. A vintage Porsche, a private market warrant, BC era coin, and a mitigate bank are all solid assets but Im not sure I know anyone who's an expert on all 4. Gotta get your hands dirty and sometimes seek out expert opinions.

I laughed at this but it’s true. I don’t even bother to read the Russia/China/Middle East stuff anymore because I can easily guess what the stupid Western narrative slant will be. It’s a waste of time. I’m not sure they taught the Cuban Missile Crisis in history either. Must have been replaced with gender studies.

In a very basic way, the difference is that Trump and family ran a business for decades. Before all the libs lost their mind, he was even regarded as fairly good at many aspects of it. The Biden family has done nothing but get rich off “serving” as an elected official. Nothing symbolizes what’s wrong with politics better than the Biden family.

Exactly. The entire thesis for my life was that if I could develop a core portfolio of investments that the compounding would take care of the rest. By 26 I had my primary residence secured, a decent car, a boat and an investment property…everything material I wanted, and with the business rolling I came to the conclusion I didnt need more than a half mil or so of investable assets to get me there. If you leave it alone and double it every 10 years then by 50 you’re still worlds ahead of the 9-5 W2 lifestyle. A few of the more important aspects that I’d mention because they might help folks is that it’s so important that if you spend, to try to spend on things that retain value. If you go about it the right way, you can blow $30k on a watch for a meeting….that’s still on the asset side of things. The custom suit? Worthless. If you can incorporate business into travel, there’s an embedded ROI there. And as I’ve said with real estate a million times, you just need to get on the title and let other people do the work and in 30 years you have it free and clear. My fallback was always the idea that if I could find my way into a few million bucks face value of real estate, worst case I could eat dirt for 20 years as a w2 while I waited for either the next real estate bubble, or the mortgage to be paid down. Really you just have to bet on yourself and to me it was always clear that there’s no real path to early freedom for folks as a w2. It’s just kinda of impossible unless you’re a statistical outlier. You have to eat what you kill to get ahead.

I had some hardships and adversity earlier in my life and my parents had a very unhealthy relationship with money so I just never wanted to be a slave to it. I didn’t have a pot to piss in and working for somebody else for 20 years, let alone 40-50 like many do just wasn’t an option for me. I probably couldn’t even have done that for 10. Just wanted to live a normal life and do what I wanted with my time and future family and the path seemed clear to me so I just needed to put in the work.

Thanks Mike!

Ive been busy lately and this probably warrants a longer response but Ill give the short one. 1) do whatever it takes. Worked 100 hour 5 day work weeks in the beginning. 1.5 of those non work hours per day were spent commuting. Be relentless, thats the difference between winners and losers. Just get the results. Need to crank adderall for a bit to get there...down the hatch those little fuckers go. Pitch an Asian client over the phone at 1am NY time? lets do it. Hop on a flight to Bermuda to have lunch with an existing relationship short notice...so what, done. You gotta want it and be willing to do whatever it takes to get the results. 2) invest wisely, be willing to challenge traditional perception of what investing and risk are. My first big purchase at 23 was an Audi because I dealt with clients and you cant drive a schmuck car. Investing in appearance mattered to a degree. Second investment was buying a house I could live in for 30 years and raise a family in. By 26 my critical infrastructure was in place. From there just invest the fuck out of the majority of my incoming cashflow and then make sure lifestyle scales up to reward myself, but with a massive lag so that its never outpacing my means. Now my goal is to just make sure my kids have the wealth to do whatever they want in life and with compounding and time on my side, its fairly easy.

Sure, but what they were talking about was that you couldn’t live well on $500k or whatever in nyc and my comment was just kinda like why TF would you want to when you can have a significantly higher quality of life moving out of the city while still being just a short drive away.

I think there is a HUGE in between ground with poverty on one end, and wealthy on the other. I’ve brought it up before, but eliminate the privileged Ivy League type, who get handed high paying jobs because dads friend knew a guy, and eliminate the really poor people who have no chance. Take your slightly above average husband and wife with 1 kid and another planned. What’s a reasonable salary? $200k combined? Now eliminate taxes, housing, food, and transportation. What’s left? How many friggin years now do they have to save EVERYTHING in order to retire? How about if they decide to enjoy life a little? The system is just so stacked that I understand why people lose hope. If they’re not financial wizards and just put the money in a savings account even at a 15% savings/income rate, they each need to work for what? 30-40 years while living like cheapskates? Fuck that.

I’ve had big and small houses and honestly my favorite place is a 1600 sq/Ft lakehouse because it’s small enough that everyone spends good time together and interacts. Our bigger house the girls are in the movie theatre, my sons doing legos in the living room, wife’s using the home office, I’m doing yard work…it’s cool but just kinda different. And we still only probably use 40% of the home.

I’ve just never got the “NYC is expensive” cries from people with families. Looked for 2 minutes, you can put down 30% and your monthly payment is lower than what you’d get in a mediocre nyc “luxury” building. Safe as can be. Great public school. Yard for the kids and dog. Tons of stuff for the wives- ranging from bs part time jobs to social clubs for the stay at homes. 20 minute train/bus to the city. My friends dad has drove in every day for 40 years and if you leave before “everyone else” decides to go to work, it’s a 15 minute commute. Yea parking and tolls are a bitch but it still beats living in the city. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/502-Prospect-St-Glen-Rock-NJ-07452/37919664_zpid/