s8019

My 2 humble cents. Culture is an output. The input is something like long-term customer-driven focus + proper incentives on various levels + focus on decent process (vs. the outcome). As easy as it seems it is very rare in practice (even though basically every company pays a lot of lip service to it). Let's say Amazon was doing something like this. Measure inputs, tweak the process and see what is going to happen with the output, rinse and repeat. However, it also helped that it was a platform with a leading market share in the turbo-growth market almost from day 1. If it was a brick-and-mortar bookstore, I suppose no amount of "culture" would save them.

I'm not a big fan of macro trades or royalty companies for a number of reasons. However, if somebody put a gun to my head... I would probably stop with Anglo Pacific.

Unfortunately, I'm not so smart, so I just stopped checking the quotes for my portfolio for a while (except for the stocks that I wanted to sell anyway). I knew that I was down, probably by a lot, but only a couple of months later I found out that my portfolio was down by a whopping 40%+ YTD by mid-March. However, there was no point to look at it back then. It was kind of obvious (I've checked my notes from the time) that barring a nuclear war scenario the value was still there, either in terms of long term cash flows or balance sheet or whatever you do to value stocks. So assuming that stocks are not just pieces of toilet paper circulating in an outlandish global casino but represent a stake in some business there was no point to self-torture by way of constantly refreshing panicky mark-to-market prints of my portfolio holdings. As for the kids, we hired a nanny for a few months. It cost us a small fortune, but eventually, it was worth every single euro cent. Neurons are not compounding, unlike investments.

This was a factor for sure. I also think that overall (ex tech sector) profit margins for the same type of businesses in the US and Europe should be quite different. Take healthcare, for example. The difference in what US and EU hospitals charge for the same type of procedures may be as high as 10:1. And healthcare is a sizeable chunk of the index. Telecoms? I guess it is about 2:1 for broadband and mobile plans. And so on.

Jumped to the conclusion and did not get it. If all investors combined own the market how exactly they improve aggregate returns if they exchange paper with each other? I would say aggregate return will be less due to the trading commission.

Or they can decide that they are not independently wealthy enough and... oops. For example look at what happened to Emperor Watch and Jewellery last week. I would move Hong Kong companies much closer to the Chinese ones.

You forgot to mention a basket of high yield bonds. Of course the yield of HY bonds is not so high these days, akin 3-4%, but not to worry, you may lever it up via derivatives (aka total return swaps) and get respectable 6-7%. What possibly could go wrong?

Thanks, have not seen the article.

17 years ago, in November 1999, Buffett made a following foreast: "Let me summarize what I've been saying about the stock market: I think it's very hard to come up with a persuasive case that equities will over the next 17 years perform anything like--anything like--they've performed in the past 17. If I had to pick the most probable return, from appreciation and dividends combined, that investors in aggregate--repeat, aggregate--would earn in a world of constant interest rates, 2% inflation, and those ever hurtful frictional costs, it would be 6%. If you strip out the inflation component from this nominal return (which you would need to do however inflation fluctuates), that's 4% in real terms. And if 4% is wrong, I believe that the percentage is just as likely to be less as more." http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1999/11/22/269071/index.htm Who can calculate actual return for the last 17 years (he is referring to DJIA)? I'm not sure I can correctly estimate dividends.