alwaysinvert

I'm looking at a very small regional bank and I'm not really a bank guy, despite making a few bets in the sector in the past (perhaps against better knowledge). Was wondering if someone had any good resources/primers on valuing small banks. Anyone?

I'll check my bookshelf for a refresher later but these come to mind immediately: When Genius Failed - Roger Lowenstein The Match King - Frank Partnoy And I'm guessing everyone has already read Michael Lewis' books but read them again if you can :)

There is a man in Sweden called The Stock Station Master ('aktiestinsen', a bit difficult to translate his nick name directly, but the gist of it is he was a station master all his working life and bought stocks). The guy is 95 years old and has managed to get a portfolio worth 100s om millions (Swedish kronor) in stocks from a pretty paltry wage. Bought his first stock in 1946 for 600 sek, about $90. At that time it was 4 monthly wages for him. But to be fair, he hardly is a Buffett or anything of the sorts and doesn't seem to have made any deep fundamental analysis. He bought low p/e, low p/b and low nominal price (!) stocks and held basically forever, or at least was always invested in stocks even if he changed around a bit, and that's pretty much it, as far as strategy goes. He also used some margin in the very beginning of his career. But investing for a whole (long) lifetime in a market which rose more than 10% per year will get you quite far, even more so if you get a bit lucky. Hardly an economist, he often quips "I like inflation, it gets me a couple of percent richer every year" and "The stock market goes up for two years and then down for one year". But he also uses the old "Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy", and it's unclear if he ever read Buffett or Graham. I don't think he knows English and none of that literature has been translated into Swedish. Now he is giving most of it away, so atleast there is something very Buffett-esque about him :)

I agree, I would rate this site in my top 5 clicks in the morning to get the day started....one of which is the Nespresso. I can't say the same for FB. Have in mind that the demographics of this board probably is the most ill-suited as Facebook customers/users. Mostly introverts, high IQs and on top of that most people here are above 30 (thus in general don't use computers as an integral part of IRL communication but as complement/substitute) and the board is exclusively male. The most ardent Facebook users are the antithesis to those attributes, so your experience doesn't really matter to Facebook. That's also the reason why Google+ is failing so miserably. It's aimed at a group of people who just plain sucks at gossiping and small talk, which makes for the cyber version of a ghost town.

First of all, Sweden never was invaded by the Nazis and Estonia was occupied by Soviet. Secondly, you don't think that the easy occupation of the other ones has more to to with their small size than anything else? Or are you going to say that the oh-so-atheist France kneeled over for the same reesons? Thirdly, all these countries (with the possible exception of Estonia) were just about as religious as mosts of the Western world back in the early 40s. Yes I know that did you not read me say "4 of the 5 countries"??? Geez... And supercatholic Poland put up a hell of a fight with their cavalry :D Btw, Estonia is probably the greatest growth story in Europe for the last 20 years, possibly with the exception of Ireland, a country which doesn't have Russia as a neighbour. So yeah, after more than half a century of communist rule and being occupied for most of their history, Estonia's economy is pretty damn impressive. But I take it you've never been there and seen the tons of skyscrapers that have been erected in the capital which has less than 0.5 million inhabitants. Tallinn also has free wifi covering pretty much all of the city core. To me they have done a marvellous job since their independence. Also, their politics, like Finland's, is based far more on consensus and cooperation since they still have an outer enemy to actually worry about. You should visit some time and learn about the country. It will get you further than sweeping statements, I promise. Oh, and as for the suicide rate. Hungary is above all those five countries in that respect. Are they atheist too?

First of all, Sweden never was invaded by the Nazis and Estonia was occupied by Soviet. Secondly, you don't think that the easy occupation of the other ones has more to to with their small size than anything else? Or are you going to say that the oh-so-atheist France kneeled over for the same reesons? Thirdly, all these countries (with the possible exception of Estonia) were just about as religious as mosts of the Western world back in the early 40s.

Try Spinoza instead. Since all the basic tenets of Langans 'theory' were stolen from there, why not go to the main source. I'll read more. Have you guys looked into Ian Stevenson's work at all? By the way, have you personally read his Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe? No, I couldn't really be bothered. Firstly, all of the warnings signs are blinking when it comes to Langan. He seems more of a self-promoter than a serious thinker. His wordings seem to be far too obfuscating to be a mere coincident - doesn't pass the smell test. Secondly, he presupposes the biblical God in his theory, which sets up the whole thing to be circular reasoning. The rest seems, like I said, to be pretty much lifted from the 17th century, albeit from brilliant sources. Couple this with the fact that no real philosophers or any oher kind of intellectuals have bothered with his ideas and I call bullshit. And no, that Malcolm "Igon value" Gladwell has another explanation for Langan's obscurity doesn't really bother me. Don't you think it'd be wise to read before you give such definitive opinions? I don't think I'm being definitive at all, but I just don't have time to waste reading up on every oddball who claims to have some extraordinary insight. Just like I don't have time to go to the moon to prove that it's not made of cheese or go check out the perpetuum mobile that Joey McLunatic stores in his garage. So I am waiting for some reputable people to say something nice about Langan's work before digging into it (not that I think that will happen in a million years since I as someone who only has intermediate knowledge of philosophy spotted glaring logical holes in CTMU in about 10 seconds), just like in most other instances when it comes to science or other subjects of which I am no expert. That said, I have given Langan a fair amount of my time (far more than he deserves tbf), read a dozen or so articles about him, read his wikipedia page, watched a documentary featuring him and read Outliers. The reason why I have done that though is not because of his theory but because I thought there was something fishy about him. And much seems to point to that he, while surely very smart, is more of an expert on IQ tests and a good self-promoter rather than the smartest man in the world who happens to have a groundbreaking theory of everything. And here are some incentives for you: On January 25, 2008, Langan was a contestant on NBC's 1 vs. 100, where he won $250,000.

Try Spinoza instead. Since all the basic tenets of Langans 'theory' were stolen from there, why not go to the main source. I'll read more. Have you guys looked into Ian Stevenson's work at all? By the way, have you personally read his Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe? No, I couldn't really be bothered. Firstly, all of the warnings signs are blinking when it comes to Langan. He seems more of a self-promoter than a serious thinker. His wordings seem to be far too obfuscating to be a mere coincident - doesn't pass the smell test. Secondly, he presupposes the biblical God in his theory, which sets up the whole thing to be circular reasoning. The rest seems, like I said, to be pretty much lifted from the 17th century, albeit from brilliant sources. Couple this with the fact that no real philosophers or any oher kind of intellectuals have bothered with his ideas and I call bullshit. And no, that Malcolm "Igon value" Gladwell has another explanation for Langan's obscurity doesn't really bother me.

Try Spinoza instead. Since all the basic tenets of Langans 'theory' were stolen from there, why not go to the main source.

I'm not offended or trying to jump on you, but this sentiment flies in the face of massive evidence to the contrary (although evidence isn't religion's strongsuit) Predominantly atheist countries have lowest crime rates: http://www.nairaland.com/121066/predominantly-atheist-countries-lowest-crime Despite being roughly 5-8% of the population, atheists make up only aboout .2% of prisoners http://www.holysmoke.org/icr-pri.htm Isn't the last statistic something to do with convicts being treated more leniently if they are converted when incarcerated? I do however think you should be careful in implying causality to what belief system does to crime rates. Active atheists tend to be higher IQs, higher IQs have lower testosterone levels and thus are less violent and less prone to crime by default.

Nah, marriage predates all of them and exists in pretty much all cultures, and there are many examples of cultures where marriages don't have anything in particular to do with religion, such as in ancient Greece.

Is there any evidence for this in a modern context? It would be difficult to have a natural experiment because the type of factors that change marital relations probably touch on a range of cultural issues. Wouldn't we expect to see something like an increase in violent crime by males increase among age groups given lower marriage rates? You are right, it's not fair to compare across cultures so natural experiments in that sense are out. I draw my conclusions from what I've read about male propensity for violence depending on marital status. Of course, there is room for doubt when I extrapolate that to be causation and to be true for whole societies but I don't think I'm going out on that much of a limb tbf. Also, there are lots of studies which show decrease in testosterone in fathers when they are around their children, which I think gives some support to my deduction.

I agree about marriage but not about religion. We really do not derive our morals from religious dogma - no one does - , but mens' actions are certainly more restrained and less aggressive (more 'moral' in the utilitarian sense) as a result of marriage and children. Tying down fathers, especially young ones, to their children is a good thing for society as a whole and no matter what we may feel towards marriage as an institution and concept it accomplishes just this.

Breaking news: democrats say republicans are to blame.

You get the post of the day award, sir. And of course, the same goes for Russia.

I'm by no means a math whiz and have no higher math skills, but I've always been good at logic and I can count fast in my head. And I have always had the ability to focus intently on things I find interesting, which probably was my most useful asset. Poker mathematics (if you are not programming a bot) is not necessarily very advanced, but you have to be able to think in steps and see how each step interacts with the other and keep an eye on what each individual play implies about your general game. If anyone is interested in this, you could read the book Mathematics of poker for an introduction. A warning though: it's not a light read even if you could skip most of the equations and not impair your general understanding of the subject.

That's a pretty long story in the full version but I will tell you a bit about it. I started from zero. Literally zero. I was underaged, and couldn't deposit in any way. Not that my parents would let me. I played in my brother's name. Started with one-table freerolls (that is tourneys with free buy-ins) which paid out something like 6 cents for the winner and 2 cents for 2nd place, or some similar ridiculously low sums. I found out I could pretty much just fold myself into the money because the others played so crazy. I guess that's the most odd tidbit about my poker playing. I remember when I had played for 6 months - I was 17 at this point - or something like that and made about $10k in total. My daily results were recorded in a notebook (in those days I didn't use fancy databases yet). After having a mare of a day where I dropped something like 3k (my money management wasn't top notch at that point) and recording it in my notebook, my dad - who had been reading it in secrecy - gave me a real hard time about it, telling me I should know when to quit and fallacious stuff like that. I didn't think his point was valid and decided to just stop recording my wins and lossses where he could see it and stop telling my parents any details about my progress. Of course, they knew that I made a lot of money during the following years - but not how much. I never discussed sums with them, because I knew it would stress them out. I lost and won annual wages on most days. A couple of months before I moved out to my own place and when the poker thing was slowly starting to wind down, both in sums and hours, I just jotted down the balance on all my accounts on a slip of paper and handed it to them. Those disbelieving stares were something for the history books ;D I played extremely high stakes at one point in late 2008 and early 2009 (as high as $250/500 with buy-ins of $50k). Admittedly, I very rarely took all the action at those stakes. That would be batshit crazy money management. Selling of percent in yourself is the norm at higher stakes. Very, very few poker pros can afford not to. It's been a while since I ran simulations on this but - without going into too much technical detail - even if you have a decent edge on the other players at those tables, you should still expect to lose 50 buyins from time to time. You could see where that would take my RoR having a 100% in myself at 250/500, given that you know the ballpark of my networth. There are more funny anecdotes but many would require real familiarity with the game and even so I can't come up with anymore right now :) Me and a couple of my friends were also very early adopters of a game theory approach to poker (I was certainly not the brain in that gang). In those days the great majority of the community thought we were mad to take that approach. These days, what we did then would seem primitive compared to what most midstakes pros do now in terms of game theory analysis. We weren't the very first ones, but we managed to get great success by stressing mathematical analysis, hand range weighting and other stuff like that instead of the psychological 'feel' aspects, which in our view mostly consisted of post hoc rationalizations of decisions, that most pros were focusing on at that point in time.

I'm from the southern parts where soccer is the be all and end all of sports, but when I come to Vancouver I will let you sell me on hockey if you'll let me probe your mind for value wisdoms ;) Someone made the suggestion earlier that I should make contacts by going to conferences and contacting people in the business, and I'll be sure to do that more than I have before. I have met a couple of very impressive CEOs of some smaller companies. They are usually very acommodating in explaining how things work if you show genuine interest and some pre-knowledge. Thanks for all the great answers. I will get back to you on how everything goes.

Sadly, the house prices in Vegas also reflects the way the action has gone away from there, from what I have heard. Macau is where it's at these days. But your idea is good in essence. I am planning some trips in the near future. Actually moving for half the year would be a big step, though. Gambling cities are quite depressing to me, there really isn't that much going on but depravity. Fun for a week or two maybe, but not really an environment you ideally would choose long-term. Many people have this romanticised view of poker pros as calculating masterminds, but most of them really are just action junkies scraping by on massive amounts of loans, and they have far less money in the bank than you would think. Especially on the live scene. Even pooling money from family and friends and managing it for a fee is not really legal here. Providing financial advice or assistance requires registering with our SEC and that is really costly. Sweden. Our rules are A LOT stricter than yours in this area. I have read them through and through and there really is no way to make this happen while still being cheap and legal at the same time. You could get around legal restrictions by forming a sort of a stock club (a legal entity which I don't think the US has any equivalent for), but it has significant downside when it comes to taxes and I would have to charge some insane fee (probably over 2% of assets, obviously a bit depending on AUM) to make it worthwhile for me. Maybe in the future there will be an opportunity to get control over some cheap micro cap company instead :) Haha, yes. I hope you guys don't get the impression that I'm whining, I count my blessings. But being fortunate doesn't eliminate the need to make some choices :)

Are you interested in investing or building wealth? If you are in it for the intellectual challenge of investing, you can enjoy the process with a small or large portfolio, and you can do it fulltime or part time. As long as you keep your expenses under control, you can continue on for years doing what you are doing now. But if you are interesting in building wealth over your lifetime (and you have many years to go!), then I believe you are best off finding a way to leverage your considerable talents through employment or the ownership of a business. In order to build wealth with $1.5mm you need to keep expenses under $30,000/year and that may be incompatible with your lifestyle especially if you plan on having a family. Game theory talents go a long way in the fields of money management, real estate, financial trading, and any number of other businesses. Combine these talents with good ethics and the ability to get along with others, with the considerable leverage and scale afforded from a larger organization, and you will build wealth at a much faster rate than growing your personal portfolio. When you build enough personal wealth that this is no longer the case (as I did when I was in my late 40's) you can walk away if you choose and live a life of complete freedom. Both! I love the process of investing and I want to get richer. But optimizing my total wealth creation is not necessary if from that follows doing things which are less interesting or stimulating to me than investing (i.e a career in a large company or something like that) When did u start playing it? If you feel that's sustainable, keep doing it, why change if things work? I started in 2005 (before I was of legal age) and have pretty much never looked back. I was well-off even before my 18th birthday. I realize that I am a lottery winner in pretty much every sense. Yes, it has taken a lot of hard work but not nearly as much as the regular self-made man who is a dollar millionaire. I also don't have even close to the skillsets that a business millionaire has. I'm pretty much just as unqualified as a lottery winner, maybe a bit luckier genetically than the average one but that won't help me all that much.

What you do seems to be exactly the route I am trying to take and I truly share your passion for reading. And as for going to 'university' I also share your contention that it's better doing it solo than in actuality, at least if learning is the primary objective. Although setting up things in a professional way with office and all that is a cost issue, too. I would either have to move to a bigger place where I could set up a home office or rent an office somewhere. While, I am 'rich' I really can't afford unnecessary costs so that would be something I would have to think about even if it would be ideal to do it that way.

There was a huge boom in 2003-2004 which lasted until about 2009-2010 and everyone with some brains who applied themselves could make good money. Not so much anymore, both because the boom is over and has been replaced mainly with sports betting and because many countries have taken legal action to restrict the market.

Online poker has gotten a lot less lucrative in the last 2 years or so. People I know who made loads of money when I also did are barely winners now (poker bots and the art of finding easy targets have been refined to an almost crazy extent), so going back to playing online is not really a live option. I do however still go and play live games from time to time. They can never yield the same hourly wage because they are imminently slower, but they will probably always be soft for someone like me. Going full-out live pro would however force me to move far away from here and it's not really appealing in terms of social life and working hours. Even pooling money from family and friends and managing it for a fee is not really legal here. Providing financial advice or assistance requires registering with our SEC and that is really costly. Thanks for all the answers! I will answer you back during the day.

Thanks, Cardboard. That's some great thoughts. On working hours and all that you said it better than I could. At the moment I am stretching to find interesting investments, but on the other hand, running out of things to read is not going to be an issue anytime soon. I've never had a regular paycheck so that won't suddenly strike me as stressing, although I do agree with you that the fact that I need to make capital gains to make ends meet is a problem. The way I figure is if a couple of years down the line I realize that I need a regular job to make ends meet in the cash flow department that won't be the worst thing in the world. Adding knowledge is better done now than later, and if doing this full-time for a while will earn me one or two percentage points extra per year in the long-run, it will have been a wise decision, at least financially. Doing some other non-stock market related business ventures would suit me fine, too, but I haven't really found anything that great to do yet. As for the opinion of relatives (except for immediate family), I have already been a bum to them for a couple of years so stating 'investor' as profession wouldn't really change anything. Although since they pretty much all are professed socialists, it could yield some hilarious results :D

I guess I would study econ and/or business, but since the prospect of later taking a job at a firm instead of striking out on my own in some manner doesn't strike me as particularly compelling, I'm not sure what that would give me, really. It's kind of my last shot at living the 'youth' life to go to university and it's quite cheap as long as I do it in this country and finally it might open some doors in the future. However, I feel a bit past the point where school work is rewarding to me (I have had one term at uni, so I speak from experience). The decision not to go to school is really already 90% made, but if someone thinks that's utterly stupid I'm all ears. Hehe, tell me about it. Somehow, poker doesn't cut it either :D