DooDiligence

ESRX (because I'm a dumbass...)

the horror...

Chinese love of old, wise and rich men! WEB is sort of the 21st century Buddha. Ayup...

If they say synergy more than 5 times when touting an acquisition, run the other way...

I thought it was very good. I'm not a trained financial analyst (holdings in signature will bear witness...) Reading through the history of the Dempster Mill deal was cool (I loved the painted inventory level line in the warehouse - simple but effective.) The book also gives a nice intro to Generals, Workouts & Controls. Worth reading & anybody who say's otherwise is just itchin' for a fight...

Thanks... Did you take notes? (sounds interesting but my book pile is friggin stratospheric...) I posted excerpts I found interesting on my Twitter, if you feel like digging those up.

The perfect match for WEB since he doesn't like being "O cara empunhando o machado"

Did you take notes? (sounds interesting but my book pile is friggin stratospheric...)

Why build a shovel when you just wanna dig a hole?

His returns were better in the partnership days. That's not to say he was a "better" investor as he probably couldn't have deployed tens of billions of dollars in that strategy, but none of us have that problem. His early days are probably the best one for aspiring managers to emulate and leave the Berkshire model as the road map to corporate investments. His strategy had to fundamentally change. If memory serves during the partnership days he categorized holdings into three categories: generals, control situations and arbitrage. My guess is he changed the % of each based on the environment he was in. However at this point, the overwhelming majority of holdings are subsidiaries with some generals. At this point arbitrage is probably no longer a relevant part of Berkshire's strategy. I don't think that was necessarily true. I think he saw the writing on the wall for high turnover necessary to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in cigar butt strategies and that there were likely to few opportunities to do it consistently with an capital growing at an exponential rate. He recognized that his strategy was better suited for smaller sums of money and to scale he'd need to change - not because the strategy was bad, but because he was going to outgrow it. When he wound down the partnership he specifically stated that the new "strategy" was to buy quality companies and hold them. He also said that he expected returns from this strategy to be lower without an actual reduction in risk. He recognized that the strategy would underperform what he had been doing (and it has), BUT you can't manage hundreds of millions, or billions, of dollars the way he was investing. Takes too much work, too much turnover, too much lost to taxes and brokerages, and too few opportunities for you to find to put $10-15 billion to work in any given quarter. It was easier and deleveraging to move to a strategy better suited for investing large sums of money with reasonable returns (i.e. strategically buying quality companies and holding forever). The only thing that forced him to change strategy was the scale he envisioned achieving through Berkshire. Not because anything was fundamentally flawed with the original approach. Yep

You don't know how much you rely on a thing, until it's gone...

I'm tempted... I bought ESRX & am perfectly happy owning it. Am I right in thinking that CVS & ESRX offer inverse corollaries to biotech/pharma? I figure if drug prices go down, NVO & BBH suffer but ESRX & CVS do well...

I use Fidelity & am pretty happy (not a frequent trader...) I like all the reports they offer (EVA, GMI, S & P, etc.) I keep the minimum cash in a Schwab account for the reports they offer but haven't ever traded there.

Who relies on a frozen yogurt company for investment advice?

Sorry, was busy earlier. To answer your previous question (not this one), yes I think cigar butts can beat the market too. This is all about response optimization. :) Where do you tool response optimization? Ad copy, landing pages, ease of conversion (a lousy checkout process can kill returns...) Screw impressions, I want click through's & an inescapable funnel...

When you're spending $15M/mo on a branding campaign across 10 online platforms it absolutely matters. Do you say that what numbers a company reports doesn't matter, when you are allocating investment dollars between competing investments? Of course not. Companies must report using a common standard - GAAP. They have auditors who provide assurance over numbers like revenue, margins, etc. You have no insight into what Facebook's self-reported metrics mean, and have no confidence when comparing them vs. competitors. Of course that matters when determining where to allocate ad dollars. I'm not talking about some dude with a small business spending 10K on an adwords campaign who can easily measure results. I'm talking about huge clients and their agencies trying to manage very complicated campaigns, where digital spend may only be 5-20%. Even within just digital, with all the attributions that go into trying to measure the success of a campaign, it becomes extremely complicated to gain insight. When facebook essentially FVCKS you on the data, making your job much more difficult, it is easy to see why savvy marketers do not like working with them. i understand & agree again says the small dude...

What Facebook says & what their ad rep says don't matter. Your own ROI for a project is all that matters. Nobody relies on just one platform (gotta have search & social) If you craft your offerings well, you'll sell...

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LOL and I never LOL

I'd wear a pink leotard... ----- I was searching for stories about how Trump has gone about reducing property taxes & found this: http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/25/news/companies/donald-trump-property-tax-fights/ The headline of the ad isn't the message here. The message is "you gotta fight on property taxes" I also like the herd of goats idea (it's at the end of the article...)

Great post odd! I see web dev as accessible for someone who only understands markup (I know it's not code) & believe that learning javascript & then PHP MySql would be easier than jumping straight into C++ and all that (true or false?) I figure if it turns out I can't code for squat, I can fall back on front end web dev (which I enjoy...) If I can learn to code then yes, it would make sense to go where the big dollars are... (we kind of got off topic - this is supposed to be about Sanjeev's drive)

Is that the French language blog?

Thanks odd, writ & Richard. The latency issues you guys brought up hadn't occurred to me. I'm on a path to becoming a full stack web dev & have been discussing web vs enterprise with AugustaBound (his preference is for enterprise.) ----- Interesting discussion on interpreted vs compiled http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3265357/compiled-vs-interpreted-languages ----- Hey, speaking of latency, I just got Sling TV & noticed that if I'm watching CNBC on the big screen & iPad at the same time, the iPad broadcast lags the TV by 3 to 6 seconds (is there an arbitrage here?!?) ::)

Thank you Parsad. You are a man who can truly appreciate the finer things in life. We anticipate receiving your $1 billion check by the end of the week. All Become One When Growth Exceeds WACC, so we expect the value of your investments to compound at a rate approaching ∞ for the foreseeable future. Any given year it might be a little more or a little less, but over the long run, we expect our investors to have claims equivalent to the world's annual economic output which we expect to experience hyperbolic growth as the Singularity arrives. My quarterly letter is in the mail. I request that you DO NOT distribute it publicly, as it contains proprietary information regarding our allocation to each of our four holdings and it would cause great financial harm to us if others were to copy our allocations in Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google instead of investing in our fund directly. Thank you for your confidence in us. We won't let you down. Scotty Hall Founder & CEO Horsefeather Capital Management I think I'm experiencing hysteresis...

Did you use Java, C++ or Python?