clutch

IMO, the only plausible approach at this point is to somehow convince Kim that his well being will be guaranteed if he decides to let go of his regime. Have him step down and let him live in some secret location where US/Chinese military will protect him. In place of the current regime, US/Russia/China/S.Korea/Japan will have to negotiate instituting some sort of a temporary state with the goal of de-militarizing everything there. De-militarization (especially of the nuclear weapons / facilities) would be a must for other countries in the region before the North Korean peninsula could be unified with South Korea. (i.e., China, or even Japan, would never accept South Korea with nuclear weapon capabilities) Of course, I don't know how well US could convince Kim, when Kim saw what happened to Gaddafi and Hussein...

Disclosure: I'm Korean Canadian who was born in South Korea. The approach you describe is a good one, but North Korea knows it too. So they will do whatever they can (including military force) to counter this strategy. For instance, read this: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/22/world/asia/north-korea-attack-on-south-triggered-by-propaganda-loudspeakers.html In other words, they won't just sit on their ass knowing that the western materials / information are getting into their country. "Allow their citizens to have a welcome in other countries" - Well, N. Korea will kill anyone and their families who are caught defecting to other countries. You have to realize that they know how to play this game well... Otherwise sustaining their regime for decades over three generations would not have been possible.

Aside: Do you want to clone the AlphaBay creator's cryptocurrency allocations? ;D http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/alexandre-cazes-millionaire-cars-property-alphabay-1.4215894

No offense but you are totally missing the point. At least the point that I was trying to make... Demanding absolute consistency??? Who is demanding that? If you are making speeches here and there all the time, shouldn't we expect some type of consistency between your speeches and what you are actually doing in real life? No one is forcing him to make those speeches at the end of the day. After you tell your audience something you would have a moral obligation to either follow that in real life or let people know about any changes. Of course anyone has a right to change his mind but the problem is making public statements and the responsibility of letting people know about any changes that might follow afterward in my view. I totally agree with the previous comment regarding cloning too. He is always talking about how he is cloning easily etc etc. Is it that easy? come on man, you are supposed to give either full picture or shut up in my view. Actually, he has no responsibility nor obligation to align his action with his words (whether private or public). It is only up to his clients to decide whether to keep their money with him or not based on such a behavior. You said no one is forcing him to make those speeches... so you also can't force him to be consistent... It's his business and life. But the consequences will naturally follow.

At least you can bet that these problems are in the mind of Bezos.

It's very hard to argue against his logic. Especially if you assume that BRK now won't be outperforming the index by much. For those who wants to programmatically invest, and hence remove any negative consequences of biases / emotion, I think indexing makes a perfect sense. On the other hand, if you believe you can act rationally and properly value BRK, it could make sense to buy BRK at opportune times. But the second method is obviously harder than the first, and requires both the skills and temperament. And I'm not sure how many investors can actually do the second method well, even if the decision was simply about buying BRK when it's relatively cheap.

Sorry that it's not as exciting! ;D

But do you think there are enough people who would be forced to sell? We definitely see the signs of cooling already (both the data and the sentiment), but not sure if we would see a significant "burst" of this bubble in a short period of time.

A documentary on the Nordic gender equality paradox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70 A book on the same topic: http://nordicparadox.se/

Regarding the hurdle rate becoming meaningless - you could resolve this issue by treating the hurdle rate both as a hard constraint (something you must satisfy) and considering it also as an objective (greater from the hurdle rate the better). And say, you also put a constraint on the maximum number of securities you'd hold at a time. During the opportune market, if you find a number of favorable investments above the hurdle rate, you would also need to rank them and select n best securities. (I guess at this point the strategy becomes more like yours). Anyways, thanks for sharing your interesting idea.

I didn't get this part - could you please clarify? In general, I see a couple of limitations in this approach. The first big limitation is that it seems like this approach is less goal-oriented than the hurdle rate-based approach. In the hurdle rate-based approach, you set a specific and absolute target rate, which motivates you to find a very few best investment opportunities. I feel like this mind set makes you work really hard to find the best opportunities. The concept of "marginal" security seems like you could easily settle for sub-par opportunities, because you don't have a specific goal in mind and rather you have a relative criterion. There is no concrete goal. (I work on optimization problems and this seems to be analogous to settling for local optima instead of looking for global optimum.) My second criticism would be how this strategy works during an insane market bubble, or even an absurd market condition. Imagine a theoretical scenario when every opportunity is insanely overpriced or for some reason has zero or even negative yields! In those situations, it does not make sense to invest even on the "marginal" investments, because they would likely generate negative returns. I don't like the fact that you HAVE to be invested based on the pre-determined allocation percentages.

Investing might be just another form of competition for men. https://web.stanford.edu/~niederle/NV.AnnualReview.Print.pdf BTW, this tendency might also explain why fewer women reach the C-level roles. At some level when you make enough money, women tend to find and prioritize values / meanings in other things such as families. Men still pursue higher pay / positions, as a way to keep scores from their corporate competitions, and more frequently end up at executive management positions. If you want to resolve the issue of gender discrepancies in certain occupations (I'm not advocating this should be done, BTW), I think we need to understand these tendencies - and of course, accept the fact that there are gender differences. For instance, if an organization really wanted equal gender compositions, the best strategy might be to focus on making jobs more meaningful / flexible and killing competitions within the organization (so that women finds more meaning in their work and men would look for competitions elsewhere). The problem of course is then the productivity / efficiency will likely deteriorate.

Then what about when your prophet and his closest disciple say they regret not believing in the Search God? And they continuously praise the prophet Bezos? You keep your ears closed? :-D

You lesser mortals don't see the transcendant value common across these companies. Hence you are stuck in your tribal tendencies and group think. Wake up! ;-)

Agreed. Same situation - mortgage, car payment, refi'd student loans, and any other loan i can get below 4%. We have the entire world to invest in, and the hurdle is 4%. Well, you won't go broke doing this, but when we actually hit a serious downturn, I can say from experience that it really feels shitty to be in the situation with your equity decimated and all these loans hanging over your head. It does work out in the long term (assuming you haven't done something really catastrophic on your investments) but it doesn't feel good at all. +1 Plus you won't have any room to invest when things get cheap.

It'd be interesting to re-visit this post 1, 3, and 5 years later and compare the returns.

Agreed, seems like a free option play.

Thanks again for another interesting idea, wrister. It seems that the market has not really responded to the third party offering news yet?? I had to search for a while to dig it up: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/to-fight-against-the-behavior-between-sinovacs-special-committee-and-weidong-yins-consortium-and-their-low-price-sinobioway-consortium-raises-its-purchase-price-to-8-per-share-300481381.html

I don't think owning techs and BRK should be exclusive. I've owned BRK, AMZN, and GOOG for the past twp years and they all have been among my best performing stocks.

FFH is currently my best idea and I have allocated 17% of my portfolio in FFH over the last couple of weeks. Hope it works out.

Thanks for sharing.

I'd pay cash, get HELOC, and use that during the next market down turn. I like flexibility...

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