mccole72

It sounds like the OP has rich tech friends in the Bay Area, not friends in $10k of credit card debt. Though of course anyone still in credit card or student debt should be focused on paying those off before investing. Also one of the best pieces of financial advice for young people is simply to buy a used reliable car, not a $35k car when you have a $70k salary or worse. For said tech friends, wouldn't the most critical investment advice be in the form of optimizing their 401ks, stock based compensation, startup equity, etc., rather than trying to beat the market by a couple % in their IRAs? Or maybe I'm incorrectly assuming that they're young and haven't accumulated much wealth yet Gregmal is right, Series 7 is to trade securities for commission, you would want a Series 65. But it's important to consider whether you're ready to manage money, as rb pointed out. Everyone always says that managing OPM is very very different from managing your own money, and I certainly believe it

Why are the alternatives horrible? The most straightforward alternative is to open an account with a reputable low cost asset manager like Fidelity or Schwab and cost average into low cost index funds like (SP500, QQQ or total stock market index). That’s easy to do for everyone. If handholding is required, I think Fidelity and Schwab actually do a pretty good job with their advisors for a relatively low fee. those are alternatives that I have and would advise my friends. I completely agree that low fee index funds at Fidelity or Schwab are perfectly reasonable and straightforward alternatives. I'm saying that it's frustrating that, even with those very reasonable alternatives out there, somehow people still get pulled into overpriced Advisors. I am constantly surprised to hear from smart and rational people who have their money managed by someone at MS or similar

Jobyts, I have been contemplating the same thing. I am in CA as well, and from what I can gather passing the Series 65 and forming an RIA seems to be the best route to manage OPM officially. The bigger issue is deciding whether it's a good idea to manage friends/family money. I'm currently torn on this. I've had friends offer to pay me to help them with investing but have been hesitant so far. As people here have mentioned, it can be mutually beneficial so long as you work hard and add value, plus are honest and communicate effectively (Buffett pulled this off early in his career). But it can also be disastrous if you are wrong, especially with close friends and family. What is frustrating about this is that for most people the alternatives are horrible. Without proper guidance they might just sit in cash forever, or open a Robinhood account and buy Zoom and Tesla, or get roped in by some Financial Advisor at Northwestern Mutual or Morgan Stanley or something who will charge them 1-2% to put them in high fee mutual funds. If those are the alternatives, then surely it is my moral duty to step in and at the very least guide them away from these paths, no?? And if I don't want to take them on as clients, my default advice would be to just invest in index funds. But there are many people who lack the confidence/knowledge/emotional stability to DIY index and would have sold half their investments on March 20, 2020. I think that as readers of this board, we forget what "average" financial prowess really looks like. There's no perfect answer here. Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

There s a good saying, "if it drives, flies, floats, or fucks, rent it"... That said, I totally agree with rkbabang as a boat owner. Expensive, but totally worth it. Buddy of mine says that BOAT stands for Bust Out Another Thousand! Get a used sailboat from the 70s or 80s. Someone else owned it through the steep part of the depreciation curve. They're the cigar butts of the boating world. If you really want to be frugal you can buy one for not much more than the scrap value of the lead keel.

Have you done any digging into whether this is really Burry? The pics on this twitter page scream fake to me. I know Bloomberg "confirmed" it was really him, but all they said was that they had an email exchange with him. Idk how foolproof that is.

https://stockrow.com/ is a decent free option. They have 10 years of basic stats and financials, but being a free site you need to take it with a grain of salt and double check their numbers with the company's financial statements.

Warren and Charlie weigh in at the 2007 annual meeting

From a geological perspective, climate has always changed - there have been periods of "snowball earth" and periods when the planet would have resembled a greenhouse. 50 million years ago the global avg temp was some 15C warmer than today. At this scale, warming the planet a few degrees is hardly noticeable. As a planet, earth will no doubt be just fine. Of course, these timescales are irrelevant to humans. Homo sapiens have only been around a few hundred thousand years and all of recorded history has occurred in the last few thousand. Everything we have done and built has been during a very stable period in terms of climate, sometimes called the Holocene climatic optimum. Since industrialization, we have increased the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere from ~280 to 410 ppm, and temperature has subsequently increased ~1 deg C. The original question was: Is this really a big net negative? That is hard to say and depends a lot on your perspective. Like everything these days, the polarization on this issue is insane and the real answer will probably be somewhere between the extremes. Sea levels are certain to rise a foot or two by 2100 (maybe 3, 6, or 10 ft) - so if you are Miami this is a big net negative. If you are concerned about environmental conservation it is a big net negative (It will be much harder to show my grandkids a glacier or a coral reef). For Canadians it might be a net positive - more pleasant temperatures and longer growing seasons. The biggest concerns I have are the indirect effects on humans (e.g. droughts in the mid east or lower crop yields in Africa), and potential unforeseen consequences related to obscure biological interactions that I don't understand. I think the simplest and most effective solution to all of this is a basic carbon tax. From Economics 101, CO2 is an externality, it's just invisible and doesn't smell bad so we've allowed ourselves to believe that it's not. Now we know that CO2 has a cost, even if it's impossible to quantify. When I burn a gallon of gas that cost me $3, the overall cost to society is certainly not $3 - it might be $3.01 or $13 - I have no idea. Why not start with a $.01 tax and scale up as the impacts become more clear over time, and cut taxes by an equal amount somewhere else - say payroll taxes. Otherwise we might end up getting a Green New Deal funded by MMT :/

For an engineering firm in southern CA

I currently work as a geologist (mostly dealing with groundwater). I haven't read the Deep Hot Biosphere but I will say this: I have always been near the top of my age cohort in understanding the power of microbes, and my entire career I've underestimated it. Not a year goes by that I don't get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther ;) And SD is right, it's certainly not all rocks (I actually don't care much for rocks). There are a lot of interesting applications for an understanding of earth sciences

Appreciate all the input! Lot’s to add to my reading list :) Most advice corroborates the direction I was starting to go - use indexing for now (a large chunk was already invested in indexes) and start dipping my toe in the water with companies I understand. Start small so mistakes are limited. I like the idea to buy some BRK.B at 200. @sarganaga Regarding data science/python, do you mean analyzing the business/industry data relating to a co. you are researching? I haven’t seen this topic come up much in value investing circles. What other education is worth pursuing? Accounting, economics, industry specific research? I’m taking a free Wharton intro accounting class on Coursera.com now. I have a science background, so I needed some understanding of accounting language.

Hi everyone, I am new to this site and have been very impressed with the threads I’ve read so far. I am new to both investing and value investing - I’m 28 and have only been working full time less than 2 years. In my first 26 years I didn’t even really know what a stock was. Having actual savings, I began playing with compound interest calculators, and I quickly realized the value of increasing both time and alpha. This led me to explore investing, which led to reading people like Peter Lynch, Mohnish Pabrai, Guy Spier, which led me to where I am now: reading Buffett’s annual letters, 10Ks and this forum for fun. “Value investing” really resonates with me, and I see myself doing this stuff for the rest of my life, but at the moment I am having trouble getting the ball rolling. Part of that may just be because most companies appear to be full/overpriced right now. Is right now just a hard time to buy good companies with a wide margin of safety, or is my inexperience making me hesitant? I am naturally a cautious and patient person. I would appreciate any words of advice on how one should get started, or your personal example of how you got started. From what I can gather, this forum seems to be full of DIY investors and perhaps some fund managers, all of whom follow a value-type approach, and I am curious to hear your thoughts. I should mention that I recently inherited a nice little chunk of money as an inherited IRA. While it may have been a bit easier to get the ball rolling by investing as I saved my own earnings in bite sized pieces, the magnitude of inheriting money is more daunting, but also exciting. There is a post on this thread “how to invest 100k” with some helpful advice. One suggestion that came up repeatedly was to start in real estate, but I am in coastal CA where prices are high, and if I bought with lots of leverage and rented out it would be hard be break even on the mortgage. Another suggestion was indexing or a “target retirement fund”, which I think of as kind of a fall-back option if I find I don’t have the skill or time to pick companies to invest in. I think of a basic hierarchy of investing as 1. Bury cash in the backyard 2. Pay an FA 1-2% to deliver market avg return 3. Invest in low fee index funds for market avg returns 4. Pick companies using Buffett approach for above market returns (if you know what you’re doing). I’m currently at 3 trying to get to 4. Thanks! MC