alwaysinvert

Fletcher was one of the best players in the team seasons 08/09 and 09/10. He has certainly had a major impact, even though his career stopped in its tracks due to his disease, a very serious one. He played his second match of the season yesterday and did well. Evans has played loads of matches this season and has certainly not been surpassed by Jones for the CB slot. Maybe by Smalling but he is injured at the moment. Ferguson did NOT have a huge budget in his early years and he also had great success with limited funds at Aberdeen. The funds later available was mostly due to his success as a manager for Man Utd and reviving the Man Utd brand. Even then he never splashed around like other teams, especially not in the latest 10 years. Have you even looked at Benitez transfer record when he was at Liverpool? It was atrocious. Admittedly he found gems like Mascherano and Alonso but there were a huge amount of mishits and even while outspending everyone but Mourinho's Chelsea he only managed one PL title challenging season - where they ultimately weren't really close to Man Utd. Benitez did very well at Valencia and had some success at Liverpool (CL title), but comparing him to Ferguson is a joke. Pep came to a club with at least 3 of the 5 best players in the world and the rest of the squad also worldclass from the get-go. He did well but a few years of managing in a club with an already set philosophy and the best players in the world doesn't put you in the higher echelons just yet. Let's see how he does when/if he comes back for another stint at coaching. Mourinho is one impressive guy and probably the best in the world as of now, but since he managed Porto he has always come to clubs with basically unlimited funds (yes, even Inter at that time). Btw, did you watch the CL yesterday? Hernandez did pretty well, eh. Rafael not too shabby either - he has arguably been the best player in United thus far this season. Büttner wasn't bought for a high fee either, even though he still has lots to prove. Kagawa did not play very well, but he has had some great games this season already, and he wasn't at all expensive even though he came from a very successful Dortmund and arguably was their best player last season. One of the cornerstones of Utd these last few years has been Antonio Valencia. Was he expensive? London clubs (and Spanish ones) have had an upper hand in the youth development area because of the 10 mile radius rule, but it has been changed recently, so we will see what comes out of the Utd academy in the coming years. None of the managers you mention have had the accumulated success and longevity of SAF. Now, that may be due to dumb luck or career choices and not tactical and managerial prowess. But those are the hard facts.

People say this often, but are you sure it's not some form of selection bias perhaps from loss aversion? I have half a dozen of quite small positions in my portfolio that never grew bigger because they ran up a lot before I had the time to buy more (or sucked my thumb). Even so, the ones I recall most vividly and beat myself up about are the ones that fell a lot after I bought much of them (why did I not buy more at lower prices alternatively why did I not stress margin of safety more).

I understand now and it makes sense. Thanks for the clarifications!

You should allocate more towards lower potential return? I don't get it.

[amazonsearch]Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking[/amazonsearch] Great book that I recommend to everybody on this board. Among other things it elaborates on how schools and workplaces are very ill-suited to introverts these days (not only are open-space offices bad for us freaks, it actually decreases productivity in total!), why introspective leadership styles can be superior and how introversion translate into an edge in the markets or as dealmakers. The book certainly helped my glean some personal insights and, as I've said before, this forum should be highly skewed towards introverted personalities and maybe it can make you look at some of your 'deficiencies' as assets or at least mere traits. If you aren't up for reading the book yet, have a look at the author's TED talk:

But you can still read the threads to inspect the quality before you register for an account. If you can't figure out from the reading the board that its worth $10 for a lifetime membership to be able to participate in the discussions then you probably won't do well as a value focused investor IMO. You could always have a free registration window at random time intervals. That way you would only have to deal with spam in those select periods.

Dell is way, way different from what I usually buy, but I started nibbling at it yesterday too. Now I just need to raise some more cash from more illiquid investments. Seems like they are in the perfect storm on the consumer side and if that weakness only is lessened in the midterm you can make out like a bandit. No credit is being given to their transformation and stickiness on the corporate and public business is probably greater than recognized. In the somewhat probable worst case scenario the consumer side keeps getting revenues slashed quickly for the forseeable future, but from what I can see that is already priced in like it's a fact. It won't be a homerun if that happens, but the fiasco risk seems very limited at these levels. My dad used to work with IT purchases in the public sector and he says their technicians refuse to work with different brands of computers to avoid hassle. They buy only Dell. Anecdotal as hell, but I think it speaks to a stickiness which maybe is not clearly understood. If they want to change they are going to redirect ALL future purchases and it will raise problems for the organization. Not worth doing if the savings aren't substantial. Remains to be seen if I am dumb money competing in this space, but if that is the case, at least I'm in good company with Dell, Watsa, Simpson and some outstanding investors from this board.

I just read it and actually quite agree with you. When he explained that skepticism is not only being negative in a positive environment but also positive in a too negative environment my eyes rolled to the back of my head. There were some gems and he is obviously a talented writer but he dragged it out way, way too long and repeated himself many times. And that's not a very flattering review for a book that short.

As a funny side anecdote I can tell you that the only reason H&M was publically listed in 1974 was because of the political climate in Sweden. The founder thought that if worse came to worst, it would make it harder for the government to seize the company (!). They never ever needed outside capital to keep growing. The IPO was shunned by analysts because of it's high price (p/e 6).

Data can be used for anything when mixed with ideology :) Correlation does not equal causation. The truth is Sweden's wealth was built to a huge extent in an environment of low taxes and free markets. I see this constant glorification of Swedish/Scandinavian system by American Liberals. As a Swede myself, I have always been envious of the American way, so this is a bit puzzling to me. For an alternative theory, which harks back all the way to Weber, see this report http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/Sweden%20Paper-%20revised.pdf Yes, it's from a biased source, obviously. Like almost anything else, but check it out anyway. I think there is a lot to be said for cultural factors when looking at that list of countries. Norway is a bit of an outlier because of their oil - all the other top countries have considerably lower tax rates, which is interesting. And it should be said that HDI as a measurement is considerably biased towards more equal socities. All ways of measuring are flawed and nothing can capture everything (like p/e, p/b, ev/ebitda etc) so we should be aware of that.

~30% BRK ~65% different Swedish and Danish small and micro caps ~5% cash Never quite got the conviction to buy Nintendo a couple of months ago and of course it has rallied like hell. My mistakes of omission are piling up in an unplesant way these last two years and on top of that I have made a few of comission too. Time to buckle down and start thinking harder.

Funny how you could lose an election expressing what pretty much everyone already knows (granted, not everyone would put it in exactly those dumb words). Obama at 68% on intrade as of now. The video seems to have added 10 percentage points to his chances already.

Isn't selling also a skill? Just because a company goes bankrupt later doesn't necessarily mean the initial buy was a mistake. We're not trading on insider information so there could be real surprises that change the story in a way that would make selling be a value skill and not a trader skill.

Frankly, I'm surprised to hear there is one.

I've had the exact same thoughts though not so well formulated. Sadly, I'm in the B) category but trying to ignore the scare of losing money. I'm not smart enough to take calculated risks with options like you, however, so that's out of the window anyway. 'Starting over' when you are decently young because you lost some money doesn't seem like such a huge burden when you have a chance (with good odds) of hitting the stratosphere if you aren't unlucky. But being in the same situation at 50 feels like something you should probably avoid.

I'm modestly down this year, trailing the indicies by about 10%. My consolation is that my CAGR since 2008 is at about 15%. First year of underperformance, if nothing drastic happens. I still feel like I'm only just starting to learn this.

What I find ridiculous is that he owned more than 1,000 stocks in his portfolio and still made 29.2% annual return... there must have been tons of 100, 1000, 10,000 baggers He did have massive amounts of token investments for screening purposes, right? While certainly more diversified than Buffett, I don't think he was as diversified as those figures would indicate at a glance.

Where did the outrage come from? If you postulate something, and even more so if you draw conclusions from that on how other people should lead their lives in order to be moral, it's on you to prove that. I hope you do also realize that pretty much all classical philosophers and scientists lived in times when it was dangerous to question religious doctrine. Spinoza suffered greatly from it even though he never suggested anything as radical as atheism. Rosseau had to hide out with Hume in Scotland for a while. And as you sure know, Socrates was executed. Opinions weren't non-consequential in those days. Do you remember what happened to Galilei? Darwin was a non-believer and a genius in repressive times even though he never spoke up on the subject of God, for fear of repercussions and/or of respect for his devout wife. I really don't see your point, seems like angry ramblings, to be honest. If you are going to appeal to authority, don't be satisfied with Pascal; use God, for heaven's sake!

He is definitely smarter than me, but not for that wager! First note that the wager relies on the unproven statement that there are two possibilities: A specific God concept exists or it does not. What about other God concepts? Or what about concepts not even considered by the wagerers? So you end up with an even bigger problem: How does Pascal assign probabilities to his scenarios? If he can't assign, even with huge errors, a probability to that specific God-scenario, then what distinguishes it from any other scenario? You could just as easily say that God is seeking arch-positivists, and has seeded the world with tests to weed out the faithful. It's simply too unspecified a wager to lead to fruitful insights. If it's Jahve it won't matter what you do since you aren't a true believer anyway and will burn in hell no matter what (at least if you're Protestant). And wouldn't it be a pretty lousy God (never mind his other properties) if he couldn't see through your charade of 'believing' and treat you just like the other non-believers?

For Dell proponents in the thread: What is it that makes your conviction high that the PC business will keep chugging along decently for at least a couple more years? Is it only the historical operational efficiency and Michael Dell or am I missing something?

I liked this one:

He most certainly does not think that. Being edited by a dishonest foe can yield weird results. http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/2394-lying-for-jesus

On the original subject of this thread: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20120821.gif

http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/145162445X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347121742&sr=8-1&keywords=lawrence+krauss Haven't read the book, though, but I'm told it's great, I'm also wondering what makes you reject a deistic or pantheistic worldview in favour of theism. Could it be your biases playing up? Not to be brusque, but if you cannot fathom how complexity can arise from simplicity with the help of darwinian natural selection you just don't understand the implications of it. The irreducible complexity argument (like the human eye) is just argument from ignorance. There are loads and loads of intermittent eyes in nature and they are all useful even though they lack elements/uses of what we would usually consider an eye. Check out this fascinating animal for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuatara

I figured you had spam problems because I remember trying to register several times under random nicks but wasn't approved until I deliberately chose a nick that would be unlikely for a bot :)