LightWhale

Interesting observing the age differences there. The young feel invincible, the old not so much? Either that, or Ackman has already made his year by hedging the original downdraft and riding the ride up. He probably isn't as worried about additional downside in markets because he's already locked in massive outperformance for the year, earned his fees, and will probably have dramatic alpha for 2020 regardless of if markets are up or down over the next 8 months . Another difference is that Ackman is more of a finance trader who looks at each part in isolation. Buffett, Zell, and possibly Larry Fink are all looking at the intricacies of the economy, as a collection of complex systems, from a bird's eye view. Think of it as the difference between object oriented vs system design coding.

That's a great source, thanks.

Anyone has a transcript of the entire meeting?

CTL does not buy back stock because of its dividends, but insiders have been buying in the last week, including the CFO

"Extinction" of what? Common sense. Thanks. made my day.

Pittsburgh does sound awesome. Jurgis, save me a room. Thank you guys for the comments.

If you know mind numbing smart guys who do AI, are worth $0.5M in annual salary, and would truly work for free, why don't you send them over? I'm serious. But until that materialises, forgive me for remaining doubtful.

It's a matter of opportunity cost. How much do you think such engineers make at Google/Facebook/Amazon?

startups are in a bubble only if you think public markets, and FAANG stocks in particular, are in a bubble. The need for greater funding comes from inflated labour costs. We compete with rising salaries in those public companies. Hiring a proper engineer for less than $200k (and % equity) is a real struggle. Re And with illiquid stocks the risk of overfitting is alarming. re revenues, we haven't even started building the product. But we've gone through the PoC process with some potential S&P 500 customers. That's no reason to celebrate though, and chances are still skewed towards failure. Thanks for the community tip. Real-life connections are indispensable. I'm in touch with various entrepreneurs, but it's uncomfortable to always be on the asking side. It's probably obvious to say, but shallow learning might work better for trading than deep learning, because of the low signal-to-noise and the moving goalpost inherent in asset pricing problems. Plus, if the main factor is momentum, maybe it's because these models try to forecast changes in the risk premium? But I know far less than you as it sounds, so i'll try to stick to what I know :)

you mean ML apps in investing? I don't see a reason that correlations would zoom in only on momentum, but it's not my field. Ultimately it would depend on the specific methods employed. ML is a fuzzy term, a suite of dissimilar methods of search ranging from generalised linear models to KNN, regression trees and deep neural networks, which are nonlinear. Plus the results will be heavily reliant on the input quality, where it is very hard to beat the big funds. Does it answer your Q? if you could be more specific, I'll try to help more.

That's a great tip, thanks. I'll have a look at their youtube channel. We got enough funding to have breathing room in case the world falls apart in the next 18 months, but we took it from investors with less infrastructure than traditional VC's.

Thanks guys. There's already a very solid idea of what the product should be. And funding is secured ;) But seriously, we've already received seed funding guarantee for $5-6m. It's more about how to perform the everyday, non-technical practicalities that I anticipate to struggle with. Jurgis, thanks for the offer, and I'll check out the subreddit forums you suggested.

Hi guys, I'm considering joining a ML startup as a founding member. This field of building young tech companies is new to me (my background is in theoretical science). During the last years when I was doing value investing on the side, CoBF and its members taught me much more about the practicalities of investing than any business school could have. So I'm wondering of any of you knows a similar discussion board for startups? Dealing with VC investors, finding HR & accounting vendors, buying insurance, issuing visas for foreign employees, and running cap tables are common themes that I'm about to bang my head into, and 10-15 pages of discussion about of each topic would probably save me endless days and mistakes. Thanks!

CM was interviewed (for 6 hours) by the WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/charlie-munger-unplugged-11556935195 If anyone knows how to get around the paywall i'd be happy to read the transcript.

Thanks for the link. Also interesting to read that both Buffett and his deputies have lagged the s&p over the last 7 years. And if I had to guess, I would say Buffett was referring to some chunk of GE, where the price started running away from him towards the end of December.

You might want to have a look at Westaim, which possesses the opposite traits to the names you've mentioned, in terms of business/management quality. Has been trading around ~0.8 book (or 0.85 after adjusting the multiple on HIIG back down to x1), of which >50% is managed house money. So you pay 0.85 cent for a dollar of mid-duration credit portfolio, and 0.85 p/b of an insurance company. on the cashflow side, Both HIIG and Arena might reaching an inflection point. HIIG has finally improved underwriting and disposed of its legacy (money-losing) lines. Arena's AUM has probably crossed 1B at yearend, and its operating leverage should soon shift from negative to positive. The credit cycle is also turning in its favour. I don't think the stock will skyrocket in 2019, but it should at least take off, and with little downside risk. my biggest concern is that most created value will go to the employees. Holdco overhead has an annual run rate of 10m CAD, and at Arena average salary is around 350K USD BG, would you share the cheap names you like?

Which issuers/CUSIPs fit your description? CTL (Centurylink) might be one of them. My parents' account needs to remain liquid and short duration, so I bought the APR2020 bond, 1.1Y duration, for 6% YTM. The company currently pays out 2.3B dividend annually, vs 2.1B interest payments, so plenty of fat to cut before defaulting.

There are other ways to look at it, but the AAPL position (~56B) equates to about 10% of BRK's market cap. So for every 10% in Apple's stock, BRK should move 1%. Meaningful? yes. Spooky? doesn't sound like that to me. Then again, many on wall street have moved completely to cash in their personal accounts in December, so they are generally alarmed. I'm a buyer this month, but they do make a strong case.

Eurobank's stock price plummeting https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-03/greek-banks-said-to-promise-deep-cuts-to-pile-of-soured-debt

Re CK assets, rising rates should certainly cool down the property market. But downside is protected in two ways. First, 1113:HK trades at 0.65 book, and book itself is ~0.7 of latest market deals. That might be what Packer calls compound mispricing. So owning the assets via stock ownership, rather than buying the physical properties, allows us to purchase them at 45% their current price. That's a generous safety margin. And second, with zero debt, they will be provider of liquidity in a financial meltdown. A crash is an opportunity rather than a risk. Re CK Hutch, how did you calculate ROE? And Even with 6.7% return on equity, if you buy the equity at the current discount, doesn't it give you a return above 11%? For a company of such qualities, at current rates and expected ERP, I think that's a bargain.

Timely thread for me. last year I bought shares of FutureBright, which runs restaurants and food courts in Macau, HK, and the mainland. And I've recently (i.e., the last days) also purchased shares in Vipshop, and invested more in Li Ka-Shing's companies - CK Hutchison and CK Asset. The stock prices of the latter two are puzzling. Both are valued by the market at ~0.6 BV. CK Hutch trades at 4.7 EBITDA and ~9 annual P/E, and CK Assets at 8 P/E on 1H 2018 earning alone! Plus it has no debt (net debt to total capital of 1.8%). Is that because they trade on HKSE? Is that part of recent aversion to conglomerates? fear of world trade tensions? China bubble? BTW, bennycx, both companies are certainly shareholder friendly, with value orientation, owner operator, and long track record. Currently position sizing is conservative, because it's hard to ignore that the HK market knows something I don't. I'd love to hear if anyone knows what that is. TheAsiaReport, it would be great to learn from your viewpoint in general.

Thanks, great link. The quality of questions and answers in the old tapes is clearly higher than current ones. This year's was mostly a waste of time.

CK Hutchison (0001:HK) owns ports, in China and worldwide. Ports are 8% of their revenues but 12% of EBIT, so margins are good. Their accounting can be relied upon, they are owner-operators, shareholder friendly, and the entire company sells below book, for X10 p/e, X5 EBITDA and grows well above inflation (~8% this year). Plus the old man is stepping down and his son Victor will be taking over. He was educated in the west, well-versed in value investing, and the first thing he did when taking over Cheung Kong in 2015-16 was selling overpriced assets and buybacks, big time. It should probably be priced 50% above today's close, even with a Chinese company discount & conglomerate discount both still intact. If you did decide to have a look, I'd be happy to hear your opinion.

I would not want to second guess Munger, but generally H shares of Chinese companies with credible accounting and reliable managements do sell for 50-70% of American prices. Some that come to mind are CK asset (1113:HK) which is a wonderful real estate company trading at 8-9 P/E; CRRC (1766:HK), the largest rolling stock manufacturer in the world, which sells for P/E of 15, and various shipping and port companies (144:HK, 1199HK) which trade at 9-11 P/E. If I'm not mistaken, Southeastern Asset Management is invested in CK Asset, and Li Lu is invested in CRRC.

I can confirm that you have performed some kind of magic ;D Myriad of thanks. Yahoo Finance has now become much better than Google Finance. From this point it's easy, all I'm left to do is follow and buy the right stocks...