DooDiligence

This guy prob has an answer but I got bored after the 1st few paragraphs & never found out. https://aeon.co/essays/why-have-we-stopped-seeing-ufos-in-the-skies I'm thinking people are spending more time on social media & simply don't have time to look for them. That & the aliens may have found a more attractive species to molest.

I’m totally thankful for all here & on FinTwit who’ve taught me a ton of cool stuff pertaining to finance & personal philosophy.

Apologies. I haven't even bothered looking at anything in the politics section. Just thought this was funny (oh, well...)

Courtesy of Lord Single Malt on Twitter: If you’re a republican having thanksgiving dinner with your democrat family, as you go around the table saying what you’re thankful for, I highly encourage you to say “the electoral college.” --- Probably belongs on the Tell Me a Joke thread but it just felt right to add it here (I've been wrong before.)

A teacher, a doctor and an investment banker die and arrive at the pearly gates. God asks the teacher why he should be let into heaven and the teacher explains to God that he taught small children how to read and write. God says, "Welcome to heaven, my son." God then asks the doctor what he had done in life that should allow him into heaven. "I saved people's lives by curing their illnesses," the doctor replies. "Welcome to heaven, my son," God says. God then turns to the investment banker & asked him what he was, and the man replied that he was an investment banker and he helped banks package their subprime mortgages into highly marketable CDOs. edit - NEW & IMPROVED PUNCHLINE - edit "Welcome to heaven, my son," says God, "your room's being cleaned but you're in luck, I've got a friend who's having a BBQ & he says he can put you up for a while."

http://uglymule.com/images/Barking-Dogs.jpg recycled cardboard

Hurricane Ophelia

I'd love to see FFXDF <=$12 (purely arbitrary anchor based number) PVW's last shareholder letter is intoxicating (awesome storyteller / DRM & copy hooked me.)

BRK.B also, last week I pushed CVS up to a 3.6% pos (includes the 30.3% in cash that I'm holding) and I feel much better about enduring the upcoming ugliness at CVS than I did with ESRX (expect to add when it gets REAL ugly.) (unless CVS gets hit with a big termination fee & expenses on the proposed AET thing, in which case I'll be PO'd at myself.)

Know thyself (and a bunch of other wise assed FinTwits) the AI's will only clear out dead wood. https://seekingalpha.com/article/4113351-pro-weekly-digest-upslope-capital-management-short-selling-quality-longs *edit - BTW I didn't post this because of the OI short thesis or the Ferragamo & Crown long ideas, but bc of all the other stuff.

This was a fun read re: OID

Fixed that. aaand this is where wiggle watching winds up! Cheers ;)

http://www.minyanville.com/special-features/articles/oldest-public-companies-america2527s-oldest-companies/9/23/2011/id/37022 and FKRAF

and the courage to carve 'em in stone... https://wexboy.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/why-i-write/

Does anyone know if they have any repurchase agreements with OMERS from the last offering?

Sold out of ESRX & put funds in CVS. Tired of losing sleep over something I don’t understand as well as I thought. Still long Jan 2019 $50 Calls & will prob ride them to 0. I fully expect that Amazon will announce they’re buying ESRX & it’ll shoot through the roof now that I’ve taken the loss (in a tax advantaged acct to add insult to injury.)

What ever happened to OID?

Along this vein, sell side looks at hearing loss. Would you bet on manufacturers or a retail consolidator or just go with Costco? --- edit --- Forgot to add "or none of the above." --- another edit --- (instead of bumping it to the top) Really good piece on big box retailers & hearing aids (Costco loves 'em for their stealthy pricing power.) http://www.hearingreview.com/2015/09/top-10-reasons-big-box-retailers-love-affair-hearing-aids/ Excerpt from article: "Hearing aids are still considered medical devices and as such are sold at a premium. When retailers began to treat hearing aids as consumer products, these devices were (and still are) priced much higher than any other electronic devices. By lowering the selling price to the consumer that thinks of hearing aids as being outrageously expensive, retailers are able to attract a large market that still sees them as high-priced medical devices." --- Holy crap! I smell a business idea... --- Oops - https://www.amazon.com/Hearing-aids/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3AHearing%20aids

I thought the SA link was going to tell us to all buy Wells Fargo. I'm a shade over 30% now. Good find, thanks.

Bumped DVA to 5% & trying to buy some Jan 2020 $60 Calls (my bid will probably not be met.) I want to hear Cramer yell, SELL, SELL, SELL so I can bid on some lower strikes. --- Scared to do anything more with my 4.8% ESRX (kinda wish it was <3%) (crap, the market may make it so.)

"Buy & hold an ETF & you're taking a slice of ignorance." (paraphrased) (Holy crap, what a concept.) "Tried to stick to philosophy but wound up creating index funds because..." (paraphrased) (Looked like he wanted to cry & rightfully so. Seems like a great guy.) --- "Fidelity needs to produce research at a lower cost" (again, paraphrased) "Strategy on this is above my pay grade" (Distribution costs should be negligible so where do you cut after you cut your revs with $4.95 trades?) (Lower pay for non-2nd level thinkers?)

"There is a famous picture of Paul Tudor Jones with a piece of paper on his bulletin board that says ‘Losers average losers’. As value investors, we always want to believe that the stock is overreacting to bad news. A typical analyst report goes: This is a disappointing quarter but my value estimate fell only 5% while the stock fell 15%, so it’s a lot cheaper than what it was yesterday. This led us to do a lot of research into our own ideas. When the fundamentals start deviating from what our analysts had projected, averaging down on those names tend to not work. It made us alter how we thought a little bit more, which for us is certainly more valuable than learning what Warren Buffett eats for breakfast. What Warren does — buying great businesses that are run by good people, buying and holding, thinking about long term — is still the core of our investment approach. Nothing pleases me more than when somebody says that what we do at Oakmark is very similar to Buffett. At the same time, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from people who do things very differently from what we do." - Good point...

"Foremost is the current valuation of a company, and the second most important is a management team that is focused solely on maximising per share value. Some of the best opportunities today are in very large financial companies selling at low book value, selling below P/Es with managements that have learnt that growth through shrinking shares outstanding can be just as valuable as topline growth. The last thing I want to invest in today is a financial services company, where the management is trying to grow by growing their loan book 10% a year. Companies that maximise per share value, no matter if that means they don’t grow or even if they shrink, will be great bets." Bolded statement, True or False? (hint, the answer is true.) --- Attachment from CSInvesting.com Teledyne-and-Henry-Singleton-a-CS-of-a-Great-Capital-Allocator.pdf

"It is hard to come up with companies that have pricing power today because so much of the opportunity, and venture capital money, is in finding a way to get a product directly from the producer to the consumer. This is much more efficient than the value chains of today, where you have a producer selling to a distributor, then to a retailer and then to the consumer. It is hard to see anyone in that chain having pricing power when the competition lies in the producer trying to get directly to the consumer. Look at the example of Gillette. Five years ago, you could say that it was as entrenched as a consumer brand could get. Media marketing to the consumer directly has turned that industry upside down." "The pricing power is probably with those companies that are earning almost no money because they are massively growing scale to become the dominant player and only then worry about monetising. YouTube is monetising numbers by charging like 4 cents per hour watched, whereas typical cable is charging 20 cents. It has pricing power, but it’s not a separate company selling at a low P/E and having pricing power. It is a company that is reinvesting heavily to dominate its business. Amazon is probably one company that has pricing power. Today, pricing power is in a different place than it was 20 years ago. Back then, you would have said that the cable networks or consumer brands had pricing power." - Excerpt from https://www.outlookbusiness.com/specials/masterspeak_2017/companies-that-maximise-per-share-value-even-if-they-dont-grow-will-be-great-bets-3783 previously posted on another thread by Liberty.

Brilliant illustration! "When you have an industrial company that is growing, that growth tends to be represented by building new factories, which is capital expenditure. It goes on the balance sheet and is expensed over the 30-year life of the company. On the other hand, when a company like Alphabet invests for growth, it is done through their income statement, which depresses its current earnings. When someone new looks at Alphabet and they see it trading at 35x earnings, they would say that it’s almost twice the market multiple and does not obviously look like value. If you look deeper, you may find they are losing $5 a share per year on some bets they are making. But when you consider what the Google search engine is worth, it’s not generating just the amount of reported earnings; it’s generating $5 a share more. These are VC-like investments made in the company that, if made through a VC firm, would be showing up on the balance sheet as an investment and not going through their income statement." I think @ScottMoneyHall said something like this before but in fewer words...