jasonw1

Thank you so much for all your replies. @Yosemite, what you shared is super helpful. Yes Washington estate tax is the main concern. I will look into credit shelter trust. I wasn't sure what you mean by "just use (hopefully cheap) term life insurance to pay the taxes above $4.3mm", are you saying to buy term insurance payout which can help pay estate tax? Our kids are still young, I don't feel we are ready to gift them the annual limit yet, as I don't want to rob them the joy of making money themselves. One of my kids is very interested in finance and just got into stock investing last year, he's getting much better returns than me, and he may not need any of the gifts. When asked how he does it, his response? "I just buy stocks which are on the rise" @rkbabang looks like I should move to NH, or one of the no/low estate tax state to die rich I'm planning to get the revokable trust set up first. In the meantime, if anyone has experience with irrevocable trust, IDGT, SLAT etc, I'd really appreciate if you can share your experience.

It's not so much about the $20,000 cost to set it up, I'm willing to pay that to get things done right, and willing to pay a few thousands for annual maintenance cost. However I'm not sure whether it's the right thing to do, what's the downside of setting up irrevocable trust and putting assets there, and I'm definitely not willing to pay 1% of AUM every year for that. Attorneys are telling me it's something good to consider, I assume they want the business and could be biased, I'm just not sure whether it's something a regular family should worry about.

Correct, I'm a US citizen and I live in Washington state. "The State of Washington estate tax threshold amount for year 2023 is $2,193,000. Thus, at your death you are allowed to pass on $2,193,000 estate tax free at the State of Washington level. The tax rate is a graduated rate beginning at 10% and increasing to a maximum of 20%." For US estate tax it will sunset to $5M in 2026 which I expect a lot of folks will hit that "However, on January 1, 2026, the exclusion amount will “sunset” and revert back to the 2017 amount of $5 million, adjusted for inflation. That's a significant difference – especially considering estate taxes of 40% will be applied to anything over the threshold"

Thanks all for the feedback, has anyone done this? how much net wealth would it make sense to consider this? do people think this is even necessary? I've talked to a couple of attorneys specialized in estate planning, they've quoted me $20,000 to set things up, then it's a few thousand dollars per year to maintain it. I'm just not clear how I can access/control money once it's in trust, it seems complicated. @SharperDingaan how did you get the ongoing maintenance cost you mentioned? I'd agree it's not worth the trouble if I have to pay 1.25% AUM for ongoing maintenance every year.

Given there are a lot of high net worth folks in the forum, can you share your experience of estate planning? We have a simple will from 10 years, and we're thinking about update it and have a living trust. We have both real estates (primary home, a couple of rental properties), and stock investments in tax account and retirement accounts. If things continue, we expect we will bump to state estate tax and US federal estate tax. People have recommended starting a irrevocable trust and start passing assets to my kids. Today a wealth advisor suggested a list of ideas: Intentionally Defective Grantor Trust (IDGT) w/ Lifetime gift exemption, Spousal Lifetime Access Trust (SLAT), putting rental properties into a LLC and give some shares to my kids now etc. It seems complicated to me. Has anyone done this? How helpful will this be? what's the pros and cons? How much would it cost?

I have a couple of real estate investments I want to sell, both of them have sizable capital gains. My tax account suggest Opportunity Zone investments to defer the tax, even to eliminate the tax. I looked it up it seems very appealing, but not sure what would be the best way to go: should I set up something myself? that will require significant operation and time commitment; or should I just buy one of the opportunity zone fund, then which one? they all carry pretty high fees and relatively new. Anyone with experience to share? Here are some background of opportunity zone investing: https://www.wellsfargo.com/the-private-bank/insights/planning/wpu-qualified-opportunity-zones/ https://www.ncsha.org/resource/opportunity-zone-fund-directory/

This strategy hasn't worked well for the past 5 years. I keep hearing great returns with these kinds of screens but I haven't seen anyone claim big success these days. Several years ago I played with a couple of deep value screens and backtested for 20 years with good performance (25-30%, excluding any ADRs/foreign listed), but they haven't come close to SP500 index for the past several years. If you look at Gotham funds, where Joel Greenblatt runs them with Magic formula, they haven't been doing so hot either. As matter of fact I would say the past 5 years have been a humbling experience for a lot of the value investors. FUND NAME TICKER MONTH TRAILING 3 MONTHS YTD 1 YEAR 3 YEAR SINCE INCEPTION ANNUALIZED SINCE INCEPTION CUMULATIVE INCEPTION DATE Gotham Absolute Return GARIX 0.22% 1.72% 2.56% 9.92% 1.48% 8.72% 47.66% August 31, 2012 Gotham Enhanced Return GENIX 0.45% 3.59% 5.40% 17.11% 5.45% 11.23% 51.71% May 31, 2013 Gotham Neutral GONIX 0.29% 0.29% -0.29% 3.28% -1.58% 1.93% 7.26% August 30, 2013 Gotham Index Plus GINDX -0.16% 4.56% 5.46% 20.73% N/A 11.03% 24.35% March 31, 2015 Gotham Absolute 500 Fund GFIVX -0.27% 2.98% 3.37% 9.51% N/A 5.85% 16.92% July 31, 2014

JD is interesting. E-commerce in China is the war between Alibaba and JD, two very different models, the more affluent buyers are moving to JD platform in the past several years. Top tier companies in China are pretty trustworthy, they are at the scale that they get enough scrutiny from VC firms, regulators, investors, and it's not worthwhile for the founders and CEOs to cheat. I consider JD to be one of them.

I don't seem to be able find anything interesting at this time, nothing I can be fairly convinced of, offers enough upside for investment returns. In the past couple of years my stock portfolio has largely been flat, I have a bunch of value names and they haven't done well at all, while I'm holding to them and think they should do better in the future, I don't find anything I'm convinced to buy either, it's been a drought for last couple of years. All of my gains for the last several years have come from real estate. I bought several properties from 2011-2014 and they have done really well. The price has went up a lot but I don't think there is bubble, however the deals are all gone and every interesting properties I looked at there have been bidding wars to drive up price. I have positive cash flow for all the properties I have, I don't think we're at the end of the real estate cycles, and I don't want to sell to trigger huge tax bill, so I'm just sitting on them and riding the wave out. Keeping money in the bank or in bond is clearly losing, however I just can't find anywhere which is interesting and rewarding to put fund to use. The only places I found in stock market which may be interesting are China/South Korea/Australia, they seem to be better value, I might just buy some ETFs while figuring things out. Any interesting areas you may have? And why?

Tim, can you share a link to the first CEO interview you're referring to? The only English one I'm aware is the one he did with NASDAQ last year. This stock is clearly being manupulated, with 10M shares float, it traded average 6M shares daily in the past 10 days, it also had consistent high short interest, with 6M shares shorted as shown. After reading through reports from Citron research and Muddy Water, I don't see convincing evidence of fraud as they apprear to be subjective, there are also errors and false claims in the reports which make them even less credible, I was able to find quite a few and verify the errors, for example the bus counts evidence provided in Muddy Water, which is misleading and completely wrong for several bus operators, I just followed the links they give and checked the sites. They are clearly incentived to bring down the share price and profit from it. I'm not sure why it's been picked out as such short target for pretty much the past year. But it does create the lingering questions and fear for everyone: are the shorts onto something? do they know something I'm missing? A lot of the company's past behavior don't suggest fraud, why would they hire a big 4 auditor? why would the insider buy $1.5M, why would Starr invest $50M+ through a couple of occasions, they are also starting dividend, from past converage in Chinese they're also a credible advertiser with substantial revenue. The biggest mistake the company made is taking the reverse merge route instead of doing an IPO, I'm also disappointed that the company hasn't really bought any shares back by the last earning announcement, although they have announced a $30M buyback program. If they haven't bought any in recen times, I would be very disappointed.

I wanted to confirm whether the roth coversion can be done in 2011, regardless of AGI limit, looks like it can done. http://www.irs.gov/publications/p590/ch02.html#en_US_publink1000230961 "Conversions to Roth IRAs. Beginning in 2010, the modified AGI and filing status requirements for converting a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA are eliminated.Also, for any 2010 rollover from an IRA other than a Roth IRA to a Roth IRA, any amounts that would be included as income will be included in income in equal amounts in 2011 and 2012. You can choose to include the entire amount in income in 2010. "

Is this only available in 2010? I couldn't find anything which states the Roth conversion can't be done in 2011 or later, so I assume this is still doable? I understand the tax defer is only for 2010.

Not sure your logic in deriving this. I like the $15 quote on YHOO, so much so that I bought the stock this year, thinking it's worth more than what I paid. I estimate YHOO could worth up to $25, if someone comes in to buy the company and offer a premium, $30 is not impossible.

I thought the offer price for YHOO was insane and was certainly happy to see the YHOO deal fell off. Now I think even if YHOO deal went through it's not waste of money, YHOO is worth more than current quote. Jerry knows it, he may be stubbon and attached to the company, he's no idiot though. He's got some really nice assets for YHOO. Most of the managers at tech compaines don't think like value investors, if they do there won't be much innovations and disruptions, and when they do, that means it's not much a growth technology company anymore, but rather an established business living off its past glory.

Cash under Ballmer would be my least worry. There are plenty things MS could have done better and need to do better, but they have wasted no cash and pretty much returned them to shareholders, except for the $6 billion aQuantative aquasition which is a total waste IMO. I don't know what the catalyst would be, maybe value itself, maybe one day people wake up and just feel different.

If any of you still using Vista, you should definitely upgrade to Win7, it's such a pleasure to use, everything just works. I have had my share of frustration with IPad software upgrade, it's a really cool device and I pretty much ditched my Kindle and laptop most of the time and use it for surfing and reading (don't try to write anything though, it's pretty frustrating). But right after upgrade the old button, a physical button, to lock orientation doesn't work anymore, instead it becomes switch to turn on/off sound. This is really annoying as I read on bed and it'll shift orientation automatically to make it unreadable. I couldn't find anywhere I can set this and finally found out Apple just repurposed the switch to be the volume switch in iOS 4.2, although there is a way to work around this but you got to do quite a bit leg work to find it. I don't understand why they make the switch as there is already volume control which makes the additional button to switch on/off sound redundant. If this were Microsoft it would have made headline news, but this is Apple and they could do no wrong. Apple has been on an amazing run in the last several years, but as investment its best days are behind it. Now they'll have to face upgrade and compatibility, and put some real test on their software. Things are going pretty well for Microsoft at the moment. Old cash cows are doing well, Bing is climbing back up, XBox/Kinect is such a hit I couldn't get one anywhere in States, Windows Phone 7 is decent which gets it back to the mobile game. Stock is cheap... ;D

Yahoo made many mistakes, the article missed mentioning Yahoo's best assets today, stakes in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba Group. The investment in Alibaba Group, $1 billion plus Yahoo China's asset, is probably worth $15-20 billion today. That's been Yahoo and Yang's best move.

For BAC, there are ~150 million A warrant and ~120 million B warrant, yes they will be dilutative but fairly small considering current 10 billion shares of common stock Not sure the exact time when Chou bought it A warrant but BAC common has been trading at $15-19 range for the first half of this year, the price now is $11. I also wonder how Chou bought A warrant at <$6, as its starting bid was $7 and never traded below $6 until in the last couple of weeks.

With the current share vs warrant price, I think common is a better deal than warrant, with less risk. I used the spreadsheet and adjusted price to mid point of PE=10 and PB=1, and got the share price of 32, which I feel it's comfortable and not too aggressive, then return of common and warrant A are about the same, both at 3X of the initial price without counting dividends, while warrant B is negative.

This is really good discussion. Even without a systematic approach, we're all making implicit decisions for selling/buying in our portofolio, based on our research and the factors mentioned. I would be really interested to know if a statistically proven allocation approach can help improve results. To have an optimized allocation for the ideas you have, I think you need to factor in the criteria for the overall portofolio: 1) What's an acceptable % of loss and its confidence level, for the portofolio as a whole? 2) What's the targetted % of gain and its confidence level, for the portofolio as a whole? This is not arbitrary but based on the initial input and research ideas And one more input factor: Cost of tax and trading Intuitively the problem looks like a tradeoff between criteria 1) & 2), with all the factors mentioned earlier as input. Is there any math wizard to be able to come up with a fomula?

I think the land is granted to BYD before the hard brake on land & real estate. Also I guess they can and will have backdoor negotiations and good things may come out later, but for now, they have to show that they've got balls for these kind of violations and to deter future violations, even it's BYD and Buffett, and actually they serve as perfect case :)

It's also interesting to note that the investigation has been going on since July and decision has been made by 9/30, but the goverment didn't go out and announce it until Buffett/Gates/Munger have left China and news on their trip have settled down. The goverment has been supportative and is courting BYD, Buffett & co extreamly well, so well that they're holding back announcement to show their respect and support. At the same time they have to show something that they've got balls for these kind of violations and to deter future violations.

The issue, as I understand it, if not government coming after BYD. It's really central government slapping on local government. It seems that Shanxi province and Xi'an city government went aggressive and "extra mile" in granting BYD the license and land to build its factory, which violates some farmland usage policy set by central government. Unfortunately it's bad timing as China is clam down hard on land usage and real estate, they had to do something to show they're serious. But the penality to both BYD and local government officials are minimal. I won't be surprised BYD will get back something, maybe even the confiscated factory after some time, when the news is over.

Not necessarily, it always comes down to what price paid to get this :) This is no surprise though, Google considers Facebook to be its biggest competitor, and MSFT has an ownership stake in Facebook and it's already partern with them on search.

Starr investment bought another 1.5 million shares at 9$, which increases their investment from $30million to $43.5million. They certainly don't think it's a fraud. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Greenbergs-Starr-ups-stake-in-apf-1132677641.html?x=0&.v=1 Stock has gone up from $8 to $13, since we first discussed this.