clutch

You fail to mention their secondary asset, which is IGM (Investor Group + Mackenzie Financials). Do you really like those businesses? They basically make money off financially illiterate people with ridiculously high fees on their funds. Not the kind of business I'd want to be in going forward...

The chronic meme of "the economic (boom/recession) would have been much shallower if only the Fed had (raised/lowered) rates by x months by Monday morning quarterbacks (usually "macro" traders like Druck or CNBC commentators like Cramer) is amusing. Just sum it down to: "everything bad in the economic cycle is the Fed's fault". If you want "real data", look at the United States before the Fed existed on Wikipedia (they used to call them Panics for a reason): Panic of 1907 Panic of 1901 Panic of 1896 Panic of 1893 Panic of 1884 The list goes on (and on)... So if you want to argue that the Fed makes things worse, please provide data of similar caliber. Can't wait until historians write about the Fed induced great economic crash of 2018 where the S&P sold off (almost) 20% from all-time-highs and nearly everyone who wanted a job had one... I don't have a strong opinion about Fed one way or another... but if you want to disapprove the hypothesis that Fed makes things worse, you shouldn't provide evidence on how things were bad before Fed. It's like showing how many people starved to death before communism in Russia to disapprove the point that communism made Russia worse. ::)

In light of this topic (and a sell-off today), I bought more BRK.b.

You can do it in Excel: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-monte-carlo-simulation-in-excel-64c0ba99-752a-4fa8-bbd3-4450d8db16f1

Forgot to mention - another way to utilize the variance information is to apply different rates of margin of safety on your intrinsic value calculation. For example, you multiply a discount factor of 0.9 on the intrinsic value for companies with low variance, but 0.7 on those with high variance.

You can use MC to compute your intrinsic value +/- variance. For example, instead of using one number for WACC, margin rate, growth rate, etc., you use a range of values (maybe take them from the company's historical record) to model their probability distributions. Then, use MC to sample from those probability distributions to compute a range of intrinsic values. The variance information can then be used for your portfolio allocation (i.e., bet sizing). Basically applying the idea of Kelly's criterion - place bigger bets (more confidence) on companies with intrinsic values with lower variances. Interestingly, if you apply this approach, you will basically place bigger bets on non-cyclical and steady "moaty" companies vs. cyclical ones (because cyclical ones will have higher variances in their performance metrics). Also, I find it is a good way to distinguish steady tech companies vs. volatile ones.

Lol, acting like Trump on Twitter!

I think this idea is pretty cool. Although it should give me some (even minimal) incentive for me to leave my computer on to run the software. If not money, some gamification / reward of some sort would be nice. E.g., if you are in the top 10 contributors of all time, you will be acknowledged in some future publication. Also, I guess security could be an issue. Hopefully these developers spent enough time making sure the software can't be hacked to steal other data from your computer.

But people won't value those forked cryptos over time, much like not every lump of material on Earth warrants value.

I bet gold (or any other "store of value" assets) had the same traits as BTC at their early stages of being adopted as a store of value. See my perspective on this matter: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/what-are-cryptocurrencies-(ontological-perspective)/msg320343/#msg320343 Of course, because BTC is at a very early stage, the possible range of outcomes is extremely wide, hence the risk / speculative nature of investing in BTC. It may not turn out to be a good store of value, but fundamentally speaking, I don't think you can claim that it CAN'T be a store of value. The thesis is that if it DOES, it will be worth as much as gold, if not more.

Value investors are still humans.

+1 I've met a young value investor who refuses to consider any tech stocks. He would often proudly say "Well, technology is not my strongest strength...", e.g., when he couldn't get a projector to work for presentation. I wanted to vomit... I mean, there is no problem following the footsteps of Warren Buffett... but you don't have to blindly copy all his investing habits!

You are comparing FFH's stock price to your business's book value...

Finally, I can trace the origin of each morsel of the chicken meat in my kebob sandwiches! I hope they are based on Proof-of-Halal though.

What evidence do you have that these were the NORM, not a few instances?

Hands-free magnetic cell phone mount for my car

there is also one with Bloomberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwTeJvLAuxQ

Really?? This is what you guys want to talk about from the whole interview and over analyze it? We can't look at anything nowadays without the lense of identity politics...

No, $1

The main point is to include it in the search feed rather than have it hidden, and to have a better name that will resonate with more people. The fact that there's more than just science in there is a good thing, not a bad thing, and figuring out how to work that into the idea is what needs to be done, not throwing out the baby with the bathwater, IMO. Right now Scholar is kind of off to the side. I think pretty much 100% of power users (scientists, technical people, academics, etc) who should use it already know about it and use it. But there's a much larger group of people who might use it once in a while if it was presented to them in the right context, but they just don't know about it or don't think to go do a search in it when they're looking for something. This group is so much larger than the academics and power users that even if just a very small fraction of it was pushed to Google Scholar, it would probably increase the reads and reach on most papers (or at least the abstracts) by a lot, and some people might get hooked into these sources or develop into scientists or technical people later on (I know that if I hadn't had access to the internet growing up there's a lot of things I'd never have learned and my life would be a lot different). I'm the field where I contribute to academic journals and I use Google scholar regularly. But I rarely use it to look up information outsidee of my own research. If I'm curious about some scientific knowledge, Wikipedia is usually enough. If I want to learn more, I'd use Google search. Sometimes the Wikipedia page or websites might refer me to a paper and I'd read it. The problem is scientific papers are not really written in the languauge most people can understand. You also need to understand scientific research methods to properly draw right conclusions from those papers.

+1 Lately I've become really cognizant of this tendency and how detrimental it can be to people (often myself as well). At my work especially I realized how much time and meetings are wasted because people get attached to their ideas emotionally and end up arguing about points that are so insignificant. And you can see those people losing respect from peers over time. Nowadays I just try to step away from such occurrences. In some regard, I think this tendency also explains the erratic behaviors of Trump or even Musk on twitter... And of course many people on internet forums.

Scholarly articles are not always about science. Art, history, philosophy, math, engineering... It would be a tragedy if Derrida's work is recognized by people as a "science" article, lol. At one level, it would be demonstration of a bad UI design. The designer is naming things not based on what they are about in reality, but imposing their view. At another level, it shows how a certain motivation can distort your view.

He was also just saying that it's fake, isn't he?

Liberty, I don't think you are that naive or not smart enough to think that this kind of post will elicit political discussions regardless of your intent... especially given the track record of this forum ;D Of course, you are free to place your post in whichever section you prefer, but I think you already know the consequences.

Part of the reason why Buffett is holding onto these stocks is precisely this. He probably cannot find alternative mega cap stocks that fit his investing framework other than, e.g., Apple.