compoundinglife

I read the kindle edition last year, great book. Lots of interesting stuff, some things that come to mind are the details of real estate development phase and the period in his early thirties were he hit a bottom that could have easily ruined someone with less perseverance.

FWIW I got a pretty good rate at the Bond Place Hotel, 93 a night: http://www.bondplace.ca/ No idea if its a dump or not though :) Looks ok on the web site.

1. Amazon 2. High Yield (Junk) 3. JGBs 4. HLF (Just Kidding!) 4. NFLX 5. Direxion 3X ETFs trending near 52 week highs I have alway been interested in buying long dated puts on ETFs that suffer from decay. Have read about this strategy WRT USO ( http://beta.fool.com/sumzeroresearch/2012/01/24/going-short-uso/1189/ ). If I remember correctly a lot of the good short candidates in this space have high borrowing fees. What are the gotchas to watch out for when shorting ETFs that suffer from decay?

I agree that Splunk's valuation seems very high and a lot of the points about potential competition and business model seem valid. However the bearish stuff I read about splunk is generally full of errors and other indications that the authors don't understand the space or the company. http://seekingalpha.com/article/900021-new-competition-challenges-splunk "Just today, Lending Club hired Oracle for its ERP software when it could've hired Splunk." What? http://www.marketfolly.com/2012/10/zack-buckley-shorts-splunk-value.html "The company monitor's web traffic". Not exactly. When they first IPO'ed I read another article that said they did mobile analytics. Like I said it seems way overvalued. But don't blindly follow someone into this short because it seems like the vocal bears don't really have this in their circle of competence from what I have seen. Zack Buckley also lists SAP and EMC as competitors to Splunk. It has been a little while since I have been involved in product selection for log aggregation/analysis. But I have never seen either of these companies come up in this space and even after looking through their website could not find an offering that competes with Splunk (anyone know what he is talking about). Companies like Oracle/SAP generally sell solutions that require lots of custom tweaking and setup, where as Splunk's product is intended to be setup and configured by your average IT guy. Also Splunk does have a hosted solution for cloud based applications. I have no idea how the product is doing. But that was another thing ZB highlighted was lack of a SAAS offering, which may not have been released when he presented the idea.

What is the hypothetical goal (i.e. double your stake?) and hypothetical time frame? If I had to pick only one leveraged play it would be BAC class A warrants. The dividend reduction and longish expiration offers more safety than LEAPs while still offering good upside. If things go well you could see a 3-5 X return. Some of the other warrants look interesting (HIG, FFBC for example). But I have not been following them enough to say that I would or would not take a serious position. I own a tiny amount of FFBCW. Leveraged positions in LUK and BRK are interesting but the features you get with the BAC warrants offer much more of a buffer in the event of any catastrophic market events IMO. My stated opinion is based on the requirement of picking only one leveraged postition.

The quote I remember reading or hearing from WEB regarding IQ and intelligence is something like "If you have a 160 IQ sell 30 points to someone else because the extra 30 wont help you and will probably hurt you". I don't think Buffett is implying that we should all wish for 100 IQ. I think his point is that someone with an IQ of 100 can get decent returns because you have sufficient intelligence, at that point you just need the ability to be rational and grasp the $1 for 50 cent concept. So a 100 IQ investor that "gets" value investing could outperform a 160 IQ investor who knows/thinks he is smarter than everyone else. The later might do really well for a while but might end up blowing up a la LTCM. Of course there is no research to back this up, but I tend to agree with him.

#1 Highly unlikely IMO. The closest I have gotten to WEB was watching him play bridge at the mall for a few minutes. They used to have an international meetup for people with international passports to meet them, but they have stopped doing that. #2 I went in 09 and 10, showed up around 6:30am to get in line and got decent seats. For those two years it seemed like there were plenty of seats available. But maybe someone who went last year can comment. #3 No idea. If there is I would like to know. #4 No idea.

Oh, it will continue as long as I'm alive! I love hanging out with you guys, and I have a blast being able to communicate with so many people. It will continue to evolve at a sloth-like pace, as it has for the last 11 years. I want to maintain a sense of community, so we'll get larger slowly. The boards will continue to be monitored as they have been. I'm still looking at the best ways to make the site mobile. The cheaper and free ways of setting up a site for mobile browsers doesn't work as well with the Simple Machines software and layout. I think it's going to be costly, so it may be a little longer before we do that. I'll let you guys know of any other updates as they happen, if any. Cheers! Out of curiosity have you looked at: http://tapatalk.com/activate_tapatalk.php They have SMF plugin which appears to be free, then users buy the client app from the app store.

Gotta love these article titles. Insuring a ~100M issue that will be used to finance land including a future Nebraska Furniture Mart location. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-05/buffett-s-berkshire-returns-to-once-shunned-muni-market.html

A couple of short articles I found: http://www.wib.org/publications__resources/article_library/2000-02/jun02_tr-pref2.html http://www.balch.com/files/Publication/d100fb9f-db69-4f7f-a2e6-03b0cb575f1b/Presentation/PublicationAttachment/fc4a927d-6ca6-4a3a-8b1d-096a952495c7/Neighbors1108.pdf http://www.davidevanson.com/pages/stories.php?ID(Stories)=144&RECORD_KEY(Stories)=ID If you register for a free JSTOR account you can access this article "Debt-Equity Hybrid Securities" from The Journal of Accounting Research, or potentially find it at your local public or academic library: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2491409?uid=3739552&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101594198931 When I am looking for stuff like this that may be in Journals I will usually use Google Scholar and then try to track down the articles from a Library. For example: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=trust+preferred+securities&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C48&as_sdtp=

That's pretty damn funny...you really have to wait for the punch line, because he sounds exactly like he did on CNBC for the first few minutes. Cheers! I probably should have mentioned that parts of the video including the punch line is NSFW, so use headphones!

BTW if you have never seen this video its entertaining as well. "Carl Icahn caught on video at Caroline's Comedy Club in Manhattan talking about the Texaco/Getty Oil Lawsuit."

Wow they held commercials for a while.

+1, there is a lot of dreaming here and minimal ideas. Ha, I was not being sarcastic, I was 400% serious. I think that for these web startup type firms, the idea is not really that important, many of the ideas already exist....all about putting something really good together IMO. One common factor I have noticed among alot of the successful web start ups (successful does not always mean profitable in this context ) is the founders and key players have unrivalled passion about what they are doing. So while the idea itself does not have to be revolutionary, sincere passion and belief in the idea is IMO.

1.1B w/450M available http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/14/starz-trading-idUSL2N0AJE2720130114

I will repost the response I gave in the SHLD thread:

Thanks for the clarification.

He does not own any in the fund but he does own it. Pretty sure its 200,000 shares at around 25 a share. ahh, makes sense then. Thanks man! :) Here are the filings, ballpark of 27 per share http://insidercow.com/forms/2011079/0000895126-11-000206.xml http://insidercow.com/forms/2011109/0000895126-11-000281.xml

He does not own any in the fund but he does own it. Pretty sure its 200,000 shares at around 25 a share.

If you do not have a completely clean computing/browsing environment and keep it that way then tor is of little help. It attempts to anonymize you at the network layer, but if your browser is still barfing up cookies its very easy for sites to identify and track you while using tor. It is also painfully slow or at least it was the first time I tried it out. I take that back, it looks like the tor project now provides some browser plugins to help reduce the exposure to cookies etc... in addition to providing the network layer anonymizing. https://www.torproject.org/torbutton/index.html.en

If you do not have a completely clean computing/browsing environment and keep it that way then tor is of little help. It attempts to anonymize you at the network layer, but if your browser is still barfing up cookies its very easy for sites to identify and track you while using tor. It is also painfully slow or at least it was the first time I tried it out.

The vast majority of people who have been involved with Herbalife have lost money. The company claims that anyone who loses money is really a customer (not a distributor), but the truth is there are millions of failed distributors. They lose money because they did not execute on the distribution...an actual effort has to be made on the system package material provided to new distributors. A similar argument could be made that some universities are ponzi schemes...students pay fees to attend the university and receive their degree. What if the student has paid fees for four years, fails some of their courses and does not receive a degree? Should the educational institution be categorized as a "ponzi scheme" because the student lost money? Ironically, what about failed hedge fund managers...should their businesses be deemed ponzi schemes? As they charge 2&20 fees on other people's money, run aground, and then close their funds after realizing they will be a long ways from receiving another incentive fee. But they are at the top of the pyramid and run away with all of the fees they've generated over the years. I like Ackman some of the time, but his hypocrisy stinks big time on this one...that Target fund was one of the stupidest things any hedge fund manager has done in some time and his investors lost a bundle. Cheers! I don't disagree with most of what you are saying but if there is any truth in Ackman's research then executing on distribution with HLF is near impossible because people who need to make their hurdle to get paid from people below them sell product on the market at a massive discount. So you are basically recruiting new people at the bottom to execute on a strategy that requires them to sell product for more then what the market is charging.

I have a friend whose wife has been successful with pampered chef, as Ackman mentioned in the preso there are other MLMs with compensation structures that allow hard workers at the bottom to make money and work their way up. At least the way its portrayed in Ackman's preso it is near impossible to accomplish this with HLF.

Interesting. Perhaps Canonical will actually make some money one of these days. Seems like a tough market for them get into considering all the major players already have some app store ecosystem. Although I could see app developers getting excited about a truly open platform.

FWIW, I manage an account for a close family member that is much larger than my pa and I manage it quite differently WRT to concentration. For example at the end of the year BAC was %30 of my port vs %9 of the other port. A couple of reasons for that, one I did not start managing it till BAC had risen to around $9 for the common , I never know when this person might need to pull out capital even though they say they wont, something unexpected could happen with BAC and I also feel in general its not responsible as a stewart of this persons money to go very large on the best idea. I know that WEB had at points %40 of his partners assets in one position, but I remind myself constantly that I am not him nor will I ever be therefor I need to be more conservative when it comes to OP money. Hell Munger almost blew up managing other peoples money. On the other hand I am 35 with decent earning power and time on my side and I generally feel I am unemotional in comparison to the herd so I am more aggressive with my own money. Question for the pros like Sanjeev. Does managing someone else's account fall into building a track record or do you feel it has to be in the form of a partnership or fund to really count for a track record?