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Guys, if possible please let me know before you pull another 400%-Jim-Rogers move on the Austrian stock market, so I can place my orders accordingly. ;)

I would say people are just wired in different ways. I also don't buy every stock just because it's cheap, I need to feel comfortable with the investment and be able to sleep well. For example I usually have a problem with large caps, because there is just lots of news around them and I like it quiet, so probably I miss a lot of good opportunities because of that. In any case this is a long term game so going out of your comfort zone is almost always a bad idea.

Polytec is a boring small cap, the stock did nothing between 2012 and mid 2016 (except for paying approximately 5 percent dividend every year). In 2014 they made one of their bigger acquisitions and it started to show in their numbers towards the end of 2016, which is when the stock price started going up. Then in 2017 they released better than expected numbers and there were some reports that they will profit a lot from the switch to electric vehicles, which attracted many new investors, and the stock doubled within 2017. At least that’s my explanation, but you could also say Mr Market was in a good mood in 2017. In 2018 their numbers were weaker, mainly because of delayed projects (mostly WLTP related and due to issues with a non-automotive contract). Both issues should be temporary and their earnings should normalize again, also I hope they can do another cheap acquisition soon. So I think the 50% drop in their share price is overdone and the stock should recover to at least 15 Euros quite soon. Regarding the cycle: I don’t know, and I think nobody really knows.

The reason why I don’t own more Austrian companies is quite simple, Austria is a small country (8 million inhabitants) and there are not that many listed companies, so small universe. In terms of shareholder culture I would say it’s similar to Germany. Also in some listed companies the state still holds a stake. People in Austria are not very interested in the stock market, most people like real estate, cash and gold (probably also because of our history - with the two world wars we don’t have a long term stock market performance to look back on like the US). Regarding Polytec: they develop and supply plastic parts to the auto industry (for engines, interior, etc.), they should do well even with the shift to shift to EV as more lightweight parts will be required. So unless you think cars won’t be built in Germany any more they will do ok. They are good capital allocators imho, doing an acquisition every few years. Regarding Andritz: yeah good company, I have worked for them some years ago, CEO owns a third or so. But too complicated for me as they have five divisions, so difficult to analyze.

I‘m from Vienna, there is not much coverage of Austrian stocks and the few magazines and blogs that exist are in german. However most companies issue financial reports in english as well. The market is pretty cheap here at the moment, but keep in mind that it contains lots of cyclical stocks. The only Austrian stock in my portfolio is Polytec Holding AG, I have held it for many years and the stock got crushed last year so I added, trading at a very low PE and owner operated.

No further details in the book unfortunately (nor anywhere else on the internet).

Or just buy this one: https://www.amazon.com/Remington-MB-200-Titanium-Mustache-Trimmer/dp/B0009OMU0A It worked more than 5 years for me, then I had to buy a new one. Brings down your costs for shaving to around 5$ per year. :)

Highly recommended. I started reading it yesterday and am already half way through. The amount of hubris is mindblowing, they were thinking they could circumvent the FDA. I mean it‘s a blood testing device, of course the FDA has to approve it. A criminal gang of sociopaths who sold the dream of the next unicorn to investors who did know nothing about biotech. What worries me is that John Elkann (Exor / Fiat Chrysler) apparently also invested. Makes me wonder if he will really outperform the market long term or if he is just good at painting a nice halo effect by copying some Berkshire phrases into his annual reports. www.wsj.com/amp/articles/theranos-saw-huge-growth-in-revenue-and-profits-1480981872

He probably sees better opportunities in his Indian stocks, which unfortunately don't get reported in the 13F.

Current 13F is out, he sold some Alphabet and AerCap. http://www.dataroma.com/m/holdings.php?m=PI

I still listen to most of their episodes, they do pretty good book summaries. In terms of investment ideas I would recommend to look elsewhere although I think they give solid advice most of the time. Do they outperform the market? Maybe not.

+4

Very good point. I changed my opinion about the mid term prospects of the crypto market after going to a few blockchain meetups. Just lots of irrational behavior and reasoning out there. There are so many parallels to the dotcom bubble, watched this today and had a deja-vu.

Read from around page 12 onwards. The inference is only buy in a collapse, only buy Bitcoin, and it'll be your kids who collect https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/john-pfeffer/An+Investor%27s+Take+on+Cryptoassets+v6.pdf SD interesting paper, but here's a slight critique which i'd agree with https://medium.com/@elliotolds/thought-provoking-paper-but-it-seems-to-be-using-the-equation-of-exchange-incorrectly-25f3148b85ea " Suppose through a brilliant PR campaign I convince people to use this ledger and engage in $1,000,000,000 worth of transactions in a year, despite its low security. Suppose also that V=5. What is the token value for my ledger? My model says $2,000,000 per coin, yours says $2,000. Let’s assume your calculation is right. How could it be possible for a token with value $2,000 and velocity 5 to support a billion dollars worth of transactions in a year?" I think he misses the point.The paper doesn't say that the price must always be exactly what the formular says. But the VALUE of the network is what the formular calculates. Of course the market cap of a given crypto currency can fluctuate, but the intrinsic value will stay the same.

Would you pay with a currency that could move 10 or 20% a day? I think volatility will go down as market cap increases. Bitcoin is like a micro cap stock compared to the amount of capital that is flowing in and out today. Obviously we see a lot of price movement. The lightning network enables many things like off-chain transactions from a bitcoin wallet (lightning enabled) to wallets denominated in other cryptocurrencies (e.g. litecoin) without using an exchange. So you basically only need your bitcoin lightning wallet and can transact in all crypto currencies, which support this feature (it's called atomic swaps and has already been tested ) 99% of transactions will be done off-chain, maybe once or twice a year you will want to close the payment channels to update your current balance in the blockchain. Or maybe we will still use good old USD and EUR bills in 20 years and this was just a nice idea. Who knows, we all live and learn. :)

If you want to see how an implementation of the lightning network wallet could look like check out the videos in the following twitter thread. He shows how you can add a payment contact (i.e. open a payment channel) and how to send, request and receive payments. I guess it will still take a few months until the bitcoin network has fully rolled out lightning, but it's great to glimpse how it might look like for users.

Thanks for posting this Add another +1. Thank you. I'm heavily invested in Ethereum and yet I am having a hard time seeing where he is wrong. Sold my ETH and NEO for BTC today after reading it. First post. It seems to me he is using the equation of exchange incorrectly - P*Q should be total transaction volume on chain, not the value of computation behind it. It would be like valuing a fiat currency by the value of the government/police/gold/infrastructure/etc backing it, not the aggregate value of transactions. Welcome to the board. Still his main points are still valid even if the target valuation is some higher number. There is nothing stopping applications from moving from one turing complete app chain to another. If the value is located in the applications themselves, then what does it matter what chain any app is on as long as there is sufficient computing resources to run it. So there will be little stopping movement from one chain to another, or even from an app running on multiple chains at once and to switch between them (eventually even on the fly). And as long as there is more than one app-chain competing the prices will fall to some minimum level to provide the computing resources it needs to keep the chain operational (with maybe some small level of profit margin). And there will most likely be 10s or even hundreds of app-chains to choose from. There may be good investments in specific apps as they grow (just like stock in companies can be good investments), but the app chains themselves won't be the place the excess value will reside. I don't know, I'm still thinking through this myself. I think he basically means that utility blockchains (like ETH) are like a commodity business. There is no moat. The price for a token can only rise to the value of computing power you get for it (plus a small margin for the miners). If the price for tokens rises above that point people will start using a blockchain that offers cheaper tokens (and provide similar utility). Therefore the market cap (price of all tokens) equals computing power of the network (or slightly above, but never much higher). The only type of network where this does not apply is a store of value network (like bitcoin), because high token prices are a positive for users here.

Thanks for posting this Add another +1. Thank you. I'm heavily invested in Ethereum and yet I am having a hard time seeing where he is wrong. Sold my ETH and NEO for BTC today after reading it.

I came across the following article / paper. I think it's one of most thoughtful things written about Crypto. To sum it up: hold BTC and sell all other crypto assets. https://medium.com/john-pfeffer/an-institutional-investors-take-on-cryptoassets-690421158904 https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/john-pfeffer/An+Investor%27s+Take+on+Cryptoassets+v6.pdf

Yeah, I would bet quite some money that Lidl and Aldi will take a lot of market share in the US over the next few years. Both come from a much more competitive market for grocery stores (Germany) and offer great value for money compared to many other stores in the US. Also they did a lot in terms of branding recently, the stores are much nicer now (e.g. in-store bakeries). There is a great biography on the Aldi founders (unfortunately only in German as far as I know), it's amazing how frugal those guys were and how they ingrained it into the corporate culture. https://www.amazon.de/Die-Albrechts-Auf-Spuren-ALDI-Unternehmer

The main value in bitcoin is the network effect that is evolving around it. The more people own it and the more applications are built for it the stronger its moat will get (e.g. the bitcoin lightning network to lower transaction costs and enable the usage for micro transactions - hopefully going live in q2 2018). I think Charlie Munger is being a bit ignorant here. There are definitely arguments against bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies but dismissing it all as rat poison just reveals that he didn't read much about it.

Merry Christmas everyone! :)

Adam Wyden from ADW Capital seems to have a very good track record, so he could be worth following as well.

Writser, thanks a lot for the matched betting hint, will try this to get the bonus. Did some research today and already have enough of sports betting. stock investing is just so much more rewarding, both financially and intellectually. in addition the bookies can lock you out of the system basically whenever they want. will close my betting account again asap (and maybe reopen in a few years for another big event like this :) )

yesterday i opened an account with one of those betting firms just for this fight. today i am wiring my money (incl. 25% winnings) back to my bank account. :) this firm also gave me a bonus for opening the account. unfortunately this bonus cannot be paid out directly, but can only be used for bets where the odds are above 1.7 (or -142 if i understand the american odds system correctly) they obviously want me to take a lot of risk with that free money (which i don't want 8) ). does anyone know a blog or some other source where smart people are posting about sport events where the odds are massively in ones favor? btw: it is interesting to see that the odds for mayweather went up to 1.28 (28%) directly before the fight. it looks like the bookmakers had to take on some insurace to protect them in case of a mcgregor victory. http://www.oddsshark.com/boxing/floyd-mayweather-vs-conor-mcgregor-boxing-betting-odds-tracker