cobafdek

My sister is at the NRC, and I advised her to put 1/3 each into the C, S, and I funds. Future allocations for the year go into the fund that lagged the previous year; alternatively, re-balance into the 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 proportions at the end of a year, whichever is easier. Either method for investing future funds would take advantage of major drawdowns in the previous year in a particular fund. Easier still would be one of the Lifecycle funds, but I agree with the others that one should be 100% in equities if younger than 50, and all the Lifecycle funds have some level of money market and bonds. Also, max out on your contributions. The TSP is one government plan that is superb. If only a portion of each non-federal-employee citizen could opt to have a portion of his Social Security contributions with a TSP-like plan . . .

Yahoo is losing another user. The finance message board has long been a joke. I almost left when they stopped supporting their screener, which was pretty decent. When I started investing in Japan, I discovered I couldn't log in my transactions, so I use MSN for that country. I don't care for MSN's format and features. And now this. I guess it's time to consolidate everything and switch over to Google Finance.

Ahah!!!!... An equivalent of Hamilton?... I would be glad (and very surprised!) if at least one of those eurocrats had read Hamilton… That would be enough! ;) Cheers, Gio Maybe we're being too hard on your Euro countrymen and neighbors? I haven't gotten to Chernow's biography yet, but from what I already know of Hamilton's solution to the post-war national debt, in real time it was a messy, wrangling process (Madison, among others, came out against it). Perhaps not too dissimilar to the inter-Euro-country feud currently going on? If things had turned out badly for the young USA, Hamilton might be seen as that day's equivalent of Varoufakis. (Aaron Burr, alternatively, might liken him to Berlusconi?) We Americans were real lucky to have all those geniuses (geniuses at least in retrospect) there at the founding. Best of wishes, and luck, to you Europeans!

Gio, how about adding: 5) Alexander Hamilton? Do you see any current Euro equivalent of our (for us here in the U.S.) genius first Secretary of the Treasury? Anybody even close? Could any Euro committee even come close? (I know: unfair to ask this with the benefit of hindsight, but what the hell . . .)

The best alternative universe was ancient Athens, where direct democracy was functional on the smaller scale of a city-state. Referenda on the scale of modern societies are problematic, maybe even a joke, since a good case could be made that the average citizen (in any country) might not grasp the complexities of the situation. Modern representative democracies need adults in the room, to quote SharperDingaan. Tsipras punted by calling the referendum, acts like he now has a mandate, and only now tries to act like an adult by palming off more bitter medicine on his voters who maybe said they don't want any more? A tragicomedy indeed. I'll look for some Rochefort, and thanks for your armchair comments from closer to the scene. Ditto. Also, Mythos does not taste very good. Do you have a favorite brand of kriek to recommend for me watching this show for the weekend? Hm yes Mythos isn't that special. Why are you asking me? Because I'm a Belgian drunk? ;D If by kriek you mean the "beer with cherries flavor", I can't really help you as I'm not a big fan. For other beers it depends on what you can buy in your country really. Where are you from? From some friendly Americans we met here in Ghent (aren't all American tourists overly friendly? ;D) and drank good beers with, we found out that they could barely buy anything better than a light beer locally, let alone a decent Belgian trappist like Rochefort, Chimay or one of the many others. American and second generation Korean living in Southern California, where we have a retail beverage chain called BevMo that carries a wide variety of international beers, including Belgian. We Koreans are called the Irish of Asia, so we can probably hold the Rocheforts and Chimays. I enjoyed a kriek as a tourist while listening to Beethoven's Ninth in Brussels's Grote Markt about 35 years ago.

Ditto. Also, Mythos does not taste very good. Do you have a favorite brand of kriek to recommend for me watching this show for the weekend?

I asked myself this question quite awhile ago and couldn't find satisfactory professional/institutional examples. Peter Lynch first came to mind, but he was too eclectic. Interestingly, there's not much on Philip Fisher's actual long-term returns. Maybe Claude Shannon? From the "Shannon's Portfolio" chapter of Fortune's Formula: "We've been involved for about 35 years. The first few years served as a kind of learning period--we did considerable trading and made moderate profits. In switching to long term holdings, our overall growth rate has been about 28% per year."

The late great Professor Randy Pausch, of "The Last Lecture" fame, had many practical ideas for time management. This link will get you to your choice of format, apropos of the subject of this thread, to save you time: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/Randy/Randy/timemanagement.html

Willi Schlamm, an Austrian ex-communist journalist, said, "The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists." So it may be useful to separate NormR's question into "Is value investing, as a discipline, mistaken?" from "How do value investors, as practitioners, make mistakes?" I certainly would be interested in any theoretical objections to value investing theory and principles. I don't think there are any, but maybe I (along with everyone on this board) am just biased. I would bet most answers in this thread touch on the cognitive and psychological mistakes that value investors make, they being human, after all. Which is far from saying value investing per se is a mistake. Does anyone know, for example, a technical chartist who would say, "The trouble with value investing is value investing. The trouble with technical analysis is technical analysts"?

"Success can’t keep its promises and failure can’t hold its ground. One shouldn’t be bamboozled by either state. The important thing is not to be in a certain state, but to be a certain kind of person in whichever state you find yourself." (Prof. Michael Ward; May 9, 2015; Hillsdale College commencement address: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/) A good quote for undergraduate humanities majors who can't find good paying jobs; for value investors; and for life in general.

fiction - Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry non-fiction - anything by James Grant

Obvious question: how do you plan to deploy it? Regarding a member of the administration? Fellow faculty? Alumni member? Members of the student body? None of the above? Do you need to reply by PM for your self-protection? Full disclosure: I can make good use of this myself. Thanks for bringing it up!

It could be you're just being too modest a value investor! Or, maybe even Graham was afflicted with hindsight bias as well: ". . . a rigid observance of old-time canons of common-stock investment would have dictated the sale of one's holdings at a substantial profit very early in the upswing and a heroic abstinence from further participation in the market until at some point after the 1929 collapse when prices were again attractive in relation to earnings and other analytical factors. No doubt this would have resulted in making repurchases too soon - as matters turned out - with consequent paper or actual losses. . . . The chief weakness of these investment principles was the difficulty of adhering firmly to them in the speculative contagion of 1928 and 1929." (from Security Analysis, 1934 edition, pages 8-9)

Looks like a tough sell for Jurgis. It may come down to your offering to try PowerPoint for your lectures. We may have reached an impasse. Until now, I never would have thought Powerpoint could be equated with a colonoscopy. The circle has been squared: hated products, both. Well, there you go.

LOL OT: I really hope they invent something else before I have to go for colonoscopy, since I am so f&(*ing not doing it. I'd rather die. ;) The actual scope is a breeze. You close your eyes and the next thing you know it is all over. It is the prep that is a bitch. boilermaker75's correct: after Versed/Fentanyl for the anesthesia, it's amnesia time. I have to trust the people who tell me that I had the colonoscopy.

You've anticipated my next question (you've got pretty good tarot cards!), which had to do with fleshing out your thought process, so thanks for that. And thanks for correcting me awhile back on another aspect of FCF accounting. Do you have any use for any quantitative metric on your checklist, such as sales growth rate/PE which Lynch talks about? How do you go about pricing your potential quality stocks to include in your portfolio?

Love: Anthem/Blue Cross (just had my first colonoscopy. Since it was a screening test, it was free.) Hate: Anthem/Blue Cross (all those premium payments for all those years, and all I get is a long one up the a$$.)

This statement may apply to me. Guilty as charged, if I understand you correctly! But do I understand you correctly? Would you be saying the same if you hadn't evolved into a more GARPish style? In terms of value investing gurus, would you say you're less Ben Graham (of whom I am more of) and now more Phil Fisher/Peter Lynch? Anyway, thanks, Scott, for this unique and most refreshing thread.

Donald Keough's house?, i.e., estate sale?

I'll plan to consolidate my Etrade Global Account into my Fidelity account. Fidelity has an easy to use online process to make such transfers. You'll also have more foreign markets available than Etrade, and a much smoother process for currency exchanges. IB is also another option I'll think about. This point is not true. It is the case only if there is a U.S. market maker for such overseas security, in which case it is assigned the 5-letter ticker symbol ending in -F, signifying a "Foreign Ordinary." I have several Korean stocks with Fidelity that have no U.S. market maker, so Fidelity lists it on my statements by a CUSIP number.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-south-korea-fortune-tellers-1430172769 "The nose indicates a person’s ability to earn money, which could explain how Warren Buffett made his fortune, he says. People like the so-called Wizard of Omaha, who have a fat nose with small nostrils, “usually make a lot of money,” Mr. Park says. But someone who has plastic surgery to have Mr. Buffett’s kind of nose “will not become a millionaire,” he adds. “Plastic surgery can’t change their fortune,” he says. Mr. Buffett declined to comment." Qui tacet consentit.

He falls in the sometimes efficient and sometimes irrational crowd. Thanks. I wish I could be in a small roundtable discussion with him. Judge Sweeney next? Or is she disqualified for being a non-Yalie?

Have you modified your views of Eugene Fama's work in any way, since the time of sharing the prize? Is market inefficiency and investor irrationality all-or-nothing? Or are markets sometimes efficient, and investors (as a crowd) sometimes rational (like in the short-term, or in the long-term)?

I think Munger's general point, made in his talk on worldly wisdom and elsewhere, is that it's all part of getting a good education. A worldly wise investor is a generalist who knows at least a little about a lot of disparate fields, and will find surprising connections to investing if he uses his imagination. You become a better investor by becoming a better thinker. Hagstrom made a pretty good attempt with: http://www.amazon.com/Latticework-Investing-Robert-G-Hagstrom/dp/1587990008/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1429474238&sr=1-1&keywords=latticework which was recently revised into a new edition: http://www.amazon.com/Investing-Liberal-Columbia-Business-Publishing/dp/0231160100/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1429474238&sr=1-3&keywords=latticework Ironically, none of Hagstrom's chapters is specifically on history, which I think is unfortunate. Here's Graham from his introduction to The Intelligent Investor (1st Edition): "One thing badly needed by investors---and a quality they rarely seem to have---is a sense of financial history."

Uccmal, this is nice, and congratulations also. Is the dividend yield on your portfolio comparable to what you could get with a passive approach, say with like VIG, VYM, VTV from Vanguard; or with a near-passive approach like a Dogs of the Dow strategy? Could you see yourself going this passive route? I've toyed with this idea myself (but decided not to until I get too bored or demented to pick stocks actively, like maybe when I'm over 90?)