Longnose

I just read the trading game by gary stevenson. He made his money for his career trading currencies. The bet that he kept making after the GFC was that countries cant raise rates and that rates must remain low or the global economy will collapse. So any time a country would raise rates he would take the opposite side saying that the rates will have to come down because the global economy cant sustain it. Its been about a year since ive done any hard listening or reading in the BTC space but a lot of the bitcoin podcasts I used to listen to used to talk about this that the global economy cant sustain raised rates. So for many the BTC bet is that our current money system (global reserve currency and all other centralized currencies) is broken.

Amazing! These are my kind of adventures. I want to do the kungsleden trail in sweden. How many miles/km did you go on this NZ trek?

I have a personal bet with a good friend of mine. He says BTC 1M per coin by 2030. I say BTC 1M per coin by 2040. Regardless of when, I do think it will reach 1M per coin in the future.

BABA

Id argue exception not the rule on this one. *edit* And to circle back on the actual initial topic of the thread for small cap companies. I have held/traded a small position in an OTC stock NROM. Noble romans pizza. for several years now. That embodies a myriad of the things discussed in this thread. Management is a family. Most the money of the business goes to them or is used within the company probably to benefit the family. They've had all sorts of ups and downs in the past 3 years with variable costs of cheese. They franchise lots of locations and they have tried sit down pub styles. Employee challenges are brought up regularly if/when they hold an investor conference call. On a separate note personally I have debated many times about buying a Little Caesars Pizza franchise. Right location with a solid brand name could be very lucrative. Again having a quality manager makes or breaks the investment though.

The book i mentioned "the shipping man" I read it several years ago after listening to Monish talk about an investment in some shipping company he claimed to have made a bunch of money on. I remember mohnish talking about how the shipping industry is pretty close to the commercial real estate business. Major boom and busts the product (ships and sky scraper sized commercial real estate) take year to deliver and projects only get entered into the pipe when the economics are booming. The people who are really good at the business are the ones who know how to buy and sell when the values are right. There are tons of people who get fleeced on thinking they are getting a deal and are really just the patsy in global game of poker. In the book the character makes a mentor friend who helps him navigate this and learn the rules of the shipping game early in his endeavor.

BTC and MU

Lots of work, lots of variable costs, crappy margins, high employee turnover. To name a few. It can work but to be hands off youll need an incredible manager. Or youre buying yourself a job.

No experience buying ships. https://www.amazon.com/Shipping-Man-Matthew-McCleery/dp/0983716307 This is a fictional story but was a good inside look into how the shipping industry works. and if you chose to embark on the journey I would love to know how much it parallels this story.

makes me think of this movie.

+1 for this ^^ +1 for this too ^^ A lot of work and effort and some big ass maybes. But if your a masochist like me then sure keep diggin.

In most of your mentioned market caps you are mostly looking at pinksheets. I personally like to troll these but you dont see lots of people talking about them on COBF because of a myraid of factors. (unclear financials, lack of liquidity, misaligned management incentives, risk/reward profile) There are some better boards/forums for people who actively invest in nanocap companies. (investorshub, /r/pennystocks, depending on the name you can find decent stuff on seekingalpha) To answer a few of your questions. My question is, what should be my cut-off on the lower end as to whether the company is too small to viably sustain itself? - IMO as low as you feel comfortable. A company can sustain itself at any size depending on who is running it and how they are running it. Here is the kicker if its on a regulated exchange such as the NASDAQ then it is subject to a much higher standard which incurs a bunch of costs. The benefit here is if they are on one of these exchanges you can feel much more confident in their numbers they are reporting. Whereas, the majority of public companies in the marketcaps your describing will be listed on the pinksheets / OTC and they wont be held the the same regulatory standards. Do I only look at stocks with a market cap of $25m USD and upwards? - Up to you. Is that silly, should I also be looking at $5m to $25m USD market caps? - Again up to you, There is money to be made in the lower buckets its just a slightly different game. Is a company with a market cap of $4.7m USD for example too small to reasonably make enough money to comfortably cover its ongoing admin and listing costs for the next 10 years? - Sure, lots of successful small businesses out there. Question is why are you investing in it? is there a viable path to 10M? 20M? 30M? is it a 4.7M marketcap with 25M of had assets on the balance sheet? is there a way to as an investor to unlock said assets? Will there be a sale of the company? -- The reality of most businesses public or not in these size ranges are not to be providing returns to the shareholders but to be a business that is providing for its direct employees. Many of these companies will have heavy family ownership and the people making money are the management not the shareholders. My advice if your going to continue down this rabbit hole. Really do your due diligence. if you're looking at pink sheet companies do some real scuttle butt. Remember that in these marketcaps its often small companies who don't have the investor in mind but are just trying to pay themselves and service their niche. So what is the value unlock your expecting? What is the timeline you expect that in? All that to say. its fun if you're into it. Probably more effort than its worth. I've made money on several nanocap. I'm holding bags/lost on some nano cap companies.

LOL, Kids college education sponsored by Hawk Tuah. This story would have been funny had it worked out too lol. On a funny note for myself i was auditing my old wallets the other night. Back in 2022 i was playing with DeX's and bought and staked/yield farmed a bunch of random alt coins mainly from an educational exercise. I eventually pulled the majority of that money out but if you've played with it you know that often you end up leaving small amounts of stuff in wallets for gas fees and such. So i had left like $3 dollars of this alt coin in a wallet. Now somewhere in the past 6 months that coin blew up and my like 3$ was like now several hundred dollars. Pulled it out and used it to buy a Christmas gift for my mother in law. LOL. Sometimes you never know with that altcoin shit.

surprised California didn't make the list.

IMO its up to you. I recommend everyone hold some. To RK's comments its still early. So if you're buying like me to hold & not trade. Then now is fine because the 4-40 year trajectory has a very high likely hood of going up and to the right. I was buying at the previous highs. I was buying at the previous lows. If you're a guy who cant stomach volatility, then maybe wait for the next sell off. which will happen. If you're like me and you dont care about next months values. Then now is fine.

I was a totally against it. Then decided to not just follow the hater crowd but buy a little and play with the technology for myself just so i could more confidently say yea this is useless and a scam. Tasted the koolaid and said this is pretty awesome. Outside of my retirement accounts also largely because of growth its now 30% of my portfolio. Other chains while very cool do not hold the same value as BTC to me. BTC is the only truly decentralized coin/token.

Eh fair point. guess i went on side tangent since original statement was about using LMM's to translate and essentially I'm referring to LMM's translating my shitty language learning and carrying on a conversation. I havent tried it but i know Samsung rolled out the live translate options with thier AI's in the most recent galaxy models. I think S23 and newer. maybe s22. I think if you have the galaxy earbuds you can do live translate as well. Learning is cooler to me than letting a robot do all the work.

I dunno about universal translators. But ive been playing with learning chinese for like 9 months. My learning style is that i want to dive in face first. I tried utilizing Hello talk to find language partners and had a few that lasted a while. But hellotalk has gotten more and more like a freaking dating app than a language partner app. The other day i wondered i wonder if theres any AI chatbots for language. There are and they are still pretty early stage, but man ive enjoyed looking for and playing with the 2-3 ive found so far. You can have a fake person to talk to in your chosen language. They are the most patient personality on the planet. They are available any time anywhere, No time zone gaps! You can tell them in your native language what you want to practice and how to correct you when you get it wrong. Then they will ask you repeated questions and coach you. Weaknesses that I'm sure are being addressed. For me in Chinese its struggling with some of the language recognition. Sometimes it gets what i say wrong in the voice recognition. I know my chinese is bad but i know that I know how to say some sentences and when I say them right and the app still gets them wrong i know its wrong not me. But still, this kind of stuff will only get better.

LOL thanks for the laugh!

Just finished season one of Goliath. Enjoyed it. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4687880/

This is how I view copying. For people on this forum, other forums, and 13F's, and personal friends. I have mental profiles of people who I respect. I profile their risk tolerances, specialties, valuation methods, style of investing, and holding periods. Then this allows me to short cut the vetting process on companies that these people own. One of the things I love about investing is it's a lot like poker. You can have the same winning hand and how you play the hand really dictates your returns. Even our shameless cloning friend Mohnish, that everyone on this board LOVES lol, acknowledges this. Listen to his things about him and Spier with the Fiat Chrysler investment and holding periods and such. Spier got a much better return because he didnt sell when Mohnish did. In one of the other threads. I dont remember who it was that was lamenting on another thread on COBF. But they talked about how they had been regularly trading in and out of apple over the past 10-15+ years and if they had just bought and held it they would have had substantially better returns.

Any other Alone fans on here? My wife and I are huge fans of Alone on the history channel. This season (11) has been awesome. Solid contestants and an area that isn't terrible for food procurement. I call it the real life "hunger" games.

To disliking GOT ending ******spoilers dont read if you intend to watch GOT and havent seen the ending **** my opinion. didnt hate it but was disappointed. I think the hate is in line with this. It was far to rushed. Dany's de-evolution from the savior queen breaker of chains etc... to mad queen takes place over like 2-3 episodes and felt like it came suddenly out of nowhere. You have a 7 season build up of the enemy behind the wall and then that enemy is defeated in 1 episode in a single battle by a single person. As a fan of the books this was huge disappointment to me I wanted to see the White walkers destroy 2/3s or more of westeros before humanity pulled its act together. Or in George RR martin style just screw westeros and the dead win lol. take your dragons back across the sea. euron killing a dragon 1 shot. They dont give enough character development to euron in the show. but in the books hes crazy.... so i dont question his ability but i felt like it was lacking in build up. I could go on. But the sentiment i think you would find accross most fans is that it was rushed. So yea i dont hate how it ended i just wish it took at least another season to develop it and get it there instead of saying Bam heres how it ends.

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