nsx5200

I don't buy that narrative, as described by the typical left, in whole. If a janitor with sub average wage can save and invest to have a net worth of 8 mil at the end of the run way, I think the the majority of the population can find ways to save, even a couple dollars a paycheck to slowly bootstrap themselves out of a situation. (yes, extreme frugality is, IMHO, like saving sex for when you're old, as Buffet would describe it. In the case of the janitor, it may be like saving sex for after death). https://www.ramseysolutions.com/retirement/the-national-study-of-millionaires-research Outside of the high wage types (CEO/lawyer) typical millionaire is your everyday CPA/engineer/teacher. What do they really have in common: financial knowledge and willingness to grind, which essentially is deliberate delayed gratification. IMHO, the ability to fight all the forces to get you to spend and actually save is a skill that must be learned, and honed over time. If I met my younger self today, I would admonish my younger self for a lot of the unnecessary spendings that was done (but would give my younger self a thumbs up for willingness to grind). The power of compounding outweighs minor financial mistakes. I read somewhere that language provides the framework in which the mind thinks. A language like Chinese has less focus on time, so Chinese speakers are forced to consider the past, present and future, whereas a language like English with clear delineation for the past, present, and future only considers one of those three states. So a English speaker will typically think in the now, and not consider their future self, and thus affecting their default savings, which I think shows up in the difference in savings rate.

It might be a reflection on the negative impact social media on people's wallet. Going to have to quote Charlie on this one again, since he's figured out a big chunk of the world already: Charlie Munger: ‘The world is not driven by greed, it’s driven by envy’ Dug up these studies: https://www.bankrate.com/banking/is-social-media-to-blame-for-unrealistic-money-expectations/#social-media-s-impact-on-your-budget https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewarnold/2018/12/27/heres-how-social-media-is-affecting-your-savings-goals/?sh=7b0a1e036436 https://www.bankrate.com/personal-finance/social-media-influences-consumer-spending/ So it seems like the group you hang out with online affects how you save, and COBF probably has a positive effect on savings rate.

The system's rigged against the common naivete. IMHO, these are the major input that leads to such poor outcome: - Bell curve, half of the people are below average intelligence - Built in cognitive bias thinking they are smarter than others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority), AND thinking they can outsmart most people, even when they're below average intelligence. - Herd mentality/keeping-up-with-the-jones/envy pushes those making less money to keep up with the spending of those making more money in the same group. - Marketing promotes unnecessary spending due to a side-effect of free market capitalism. Worse, marketing is one of those things that scales, so the best marketing will take over the lesser marketing, causing greater overall effects that leads to money to separate from people. - Coupling all the above elements leads to such Lollapalooza Effect. So somebody who, by default, is not trained to see these forces and act against them will lead to the separation of their money unnecessarily. You can see it everywhere... people wanting a bigger/second house, luxury car, mechanical watches, the latest smart phone, Birkin bags, and even Stanley water bottles too. I remember getting sucked into collecting Garbage Pail cards back in the day. Get them while they're young. Looking at Charlie and Buffet, they've pretty much avoided all those (except for the Indefensible). IMHO, this is really the ultimate truth to building wealth: "you become rich, literally, the moment you don't desire, or have the need for more money". Reminds of this clip from The Devil's Advocate. But thinking about the alternative if everybody lived like Buffet and Munger... I can see the destruction of many many industries. I guess we've seen a mini-version of that through cancel culture, but rise of new ones in social media, so it probably have gotten worse.

Barron's speculation list: https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/berkshire-hathaway-mystery-stock-bfd8ec86

I thought about DFS as well, but the hidden disclosure (Nov. '23) was before COF announced DFS acquisition intention(Feb. '24). That in itself is not an issue, but was there wasn't an obvious catalyst back in late '23. In fact, it seems like their net income (quarter) dropped. Maybe he thought the drop was only temporary so that's why he bought into it. FI is an interesting possibility. Anybody know what might be cause of the run up from late '23 to now (~$120 to $150)?

https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/warren-buffett-berkshire-hathaway-stock-purchase-431172f6 "When Berkshire Hathaway disclosed its U.S. equity holdings as of Sept. 30 via its quarterly 13-F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in mid November, it had asked the regulator for confidential treatment for one or more stocks." "Barron’s has written about the Berkshire mystery purchase and speculated that it was a financial company based on disclosure in Berkshire’s third-quarter 10-Q report showing an increase of over $1 billion in the cost basis of its equity holdings in financial stocks. The ultimate position in the company could total $5 billion or more." Any idea? Trying to see what companies might be in this space, and see if the idea can be reverse engineered.

Do you have links/insight into what kind of process and gases are used in the semi manufacturing? It may be something I will need to ramp up on. TIA

IMHO, the answer is in the question. There simply not enough margin in the business to support yet another competitor and the economy of scale to achieve a decent profit is not very well known. It took Uber 37 billion in annual revenue and roughly 15 years to achieve profit... I don't know about you, even if a new company is 4x more efficient, it would take nearly 10 billion in revenue to achieve profit, and I'm not sure if 4x more efficiency can be achieved without a real breakthrough in operating style. I say there are easier fish to catch, and looking at a 37 billion 10+ year problem, unless there's a real compelling new angle to this, I would, IMHO, rather just chunk money at S&P500.

I didn't dig too deeply, but it seems like they had to borrow to buy back shares, and yet their EPS is still not going up, if Macrotrends' data is accurate. Their operating performance is also not too consistent, even though their target market is the high volume, low margin business. Doesn't smell like a no-brainer to me yet. Is there something else besides the cannibal side that I missed, @Vish_ram?

So many to choose from. Any particular government do you recommend?

While contacting them, here are some hints on optimizing your chance of getting what you want: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/16/1086915600/get-what-you-want-customer-service IMHO, with business-class seats, I'm pretty sure United CS will try to accommodate you as much as they can. Enjoy, and if you can, report back on how things have changed(or not changed) post-pandemic. TIA.

Don't about untold, but I ran across these relatively unknown interviews from the Kunhardt Film Foundation with the people that interacted with WEB: Warren Buffet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieXLNVwshRU&t=31s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd-w9H0G6nQ Charlie Munger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6s2HAzMeL0 Sandy Gottesman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WGC69B3tWE Peter Buffet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1bOnkLh_9E Doris Buffett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C5IuD6rZjc Howard Buffet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SY1OCV0vko Carol Lomis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F7SN3ID420 Bill and Melinda Gates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBAiRcDzZ7U The one from Howard is probably really relevant to shareholders of BRK Possibly more that I might've missed. Most of them are on my backlog. Please share if you find any interesting nuggets in the videos, and if anybody have any interesting speech from Peter Lynch, I would appreciate some links to that. The ones I've come across seems like they have the same standard speech material and jokes that Lynch uses.

I didn't know Biden was crowned the king of OPEC+ in secret. If you have credible news, please share. He did, however, pump in trillions of dollar that ended up inflating everything, and not just oil, so Joe's not completely blameless. @Gregmal, I whole heartedly agree with you. If you know of a viable way to buy Gazprom at near zero pennies, I'd be happy to put in a dinner-valued lottery ticket. If the ticket is redeemable, it won't matter if we choose to blame Joe, Trump or heck, you can even blame me. Here's an interesting article I ran across regarding dictorship and Putin: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/putin-dictator-trap-russia-ukraine/627064/ Something to think about if Trump decides to run again.

They are the leader in their very small ponds. IMHO, their biggest competitor is Apple. Every time Apple makes their phone/watch a little better, Garmin’s moat gets smaller. Great pivots from Garmin over the years, but can they really keep fighting the Apple beast? Unlike Home Depot vs Amazon, where there are natural moats, I don’t see that in Garmin. Doesn’t mean it’s not there. I just don’t see it, but I haven’t been looking. Let me know if there new insights.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine You poke the bear, expect the bear to bite. It seems like the facts haven’t really changed. A minority trying to rule an area due to Karen syndrome.

I remember having a mock debate on this back in high school decades ago. Back then both sides more or less came to the conclusion that Israel invaded and took over West Bank territories without any real good reason. All the safety and other reasonings were pretty much not really significant. At the end of the day, Israel just wanted more land. Why? Couldn’t explain it then, still can’t explain it today. The closest thing I can think of is some ‘divine’ prophecy about some promised land leading to entitlement complex, which I think is what Putin is suffering from right now. Over the decades of accumulating casual readings, my impression is that they are treating the Palestinians as second class citizens, if at that, and continuing to take over land while asking why the Palestinians are so angry. In a way, it reminds me of the Angry Bird game…. In a very sad way. I guess the short summary is that we see countries suffering from the Karen syndrome as well. On a country-wide scale. It makes me wonder. Does having more land really mean a country is great? We see countries with relatively small land area and natural resources accomplish great stuff like UK, Japan, Singapore, etc. Doesn’t it show that to make a country great, it does not take land, but the quality of the people/government? I find it amusing that great country have problems trying to keep people out where bad countries have issues keeping people in. Use that yard stick to measure Russian in regards to what it is trying to do with the Ukrainian refugees. The US immigration problem is a good problem to have compared to the alternative.

We’ve only seen Munger go all in on ideas that he knows he’s got an edge on. Some idea that more or less nobody else have figured out yet. Looking at the process they went through for Coke, I suspect it’s something along those lines. Something micro, with multiple factors at play to create a Lolla effect. My current thinking is that he sees BABA will one day challenging Amazon itself but on a global scale. I remember seeing a lot of reviews/feedback from different countries when shopping on Ali, so it’s just a matter of continuing the execution and let the network/scaling effect take care of it since they seem to have the only practical(although not great) global logistic chain that delivers from supplier to consumer. Does anybody have seen other competitors that can challenge that? I welcome ideas that refute those thoughts. Full disclosure, I’m long in BABA and a bunch of other Chinese companies during this time of tech crackdown. Probably prematurely…

@Spekulatius, why you said reminds me of this great article provided by turtle bay from Jared.Diamond regarding optimal government fragment and control structure. https://web.archive.org/web/20160908035153/https://www.edge.org/conversation/jared_diamond-how-to-get-rich Probably a bit too macro to be acted upon, investment-wise, but something to ponder when looking at dictatorish government vs fragmented (US, Euro). After reading that article, I can see some of the view points of the politics on the right in regards to supporting some of the more unpopular tech like guns. Thanks for all the interesting ideas to keep the mind going. Leads to less trading, which is a good thing.

If you actually follow what is actually practiced, Hong Kong citizen have essentially lost their Democratic rights since. The Hong Kong citizens no longer can elect officials that have real power(lost of the second system, for all intent and purposes). Yes, on paper, it’s still two systems, in reality, it’s not. Similar to the Texas abortion non-ban. On paper, it’s not a ban, in practice, it’s more or less a ban. To argue otherwise is to deny reality. Here’s a sample of that type of analysis. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hong-kong-freedoms-democracy-protests-china-crackdown If you have other credible sources that shows otherwise, you’re welcome to share. I concede that there’s a high probability that I may have missed another angle to it and welcome challenges to that.

A minor, but significant detail: that article was written in 2019, pre Hong-Kong take-over.

Taiwan is actually more Chinese than China, not having gone through the cultural revolution. So you actually experience more of the thousand years of legacy there. Some of the traditional spots may look older, but if you look closely, there is actually a lot more high-tech compared to a typical U.S. city. High speed rail connect the whole (small) country. Smart pass/card that's actually unibiqutious and usable. Government services can actually be accessed via non-descript terminals in 7-11's. Universal healthcare that covers both western and traditional medicine. Open digital government platforms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G0v) that hackers can contribute to. Merit based society, starting from high school admission. Having a smaller area means program experiements are cheaper to run, and so the government have a willingness to try new things. For example, the smart pass/card has already evolved several generations already. It was this attitude that got the government investing in the semiconductor industry back in the 80's. Taiwan uses a lot of tech where it really matters. IMHO, it's one of the most high tech Democratic country you'll find.

Did I hear somebody say Coke, Berkshire, or Costco? (maybe not (too) undervalued... )

Speaking for myself. Parsad, I thank you for sponsoring this board to share valuable ideas and information. Whatever you need to do to keep the site operation is probably okay with me, as my tolerance for noise is fairly high and the signal level is sufficiently high enough to keep me coming back. Maybe there are other high roller out there that where every second lost can mean the difference of a few million lost. I find that long term investing is fairly tolerant in regards to timing and think that if we can weed out short term thinkers by adding more ads, I’d welcome that. Again, thanks for keeping this site operational. From rolling my own sites, I know this stuff is not cheap, time and resource wise and I hope others can appreciate that.

I think he got burned by DFC (as did I... teach you to follow blindly) and realized that his ideas are not 100% flawless (or anywhere near, even with the best of the best) to concentrate like he used to. Couple this with the Kelly discussion above, and he's diversifying a bit more to play it safer. The question that I pose is, is Buffet diversifying w/ his deals regarding gs, dow, etc, or asked another way if there were a opportunity that is big enough, would he be comfortable sinking all his current cash into it.

In this article http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/23/graham-dodd-buffett-personal-finance_fund_managers.html?feed=rss_news, it lists a few stocks that he owns. Any body have any input on these zinc, cresy.