alwaysinvert

I wrote a blog post speculating about this. I'll paste it here but if you want to read it in a better format here's the link: http://vardeinvesteraren.nu/vardeinvestering/buffett-buybacks-could-berkshire-tender-stock/

You have a presupposition that there is even a woman to "believe in" behind this account. We have no idea if there is even that. But I'm glad the countdown to Trump and Weinstein being mentioned didn't get very far. My objection wasn't to a poster not giving doxxing info, quite obivously. It was to point out that this story is conveniently completely uncheckable - by design - even in theory. Someone made a police report (not her) and she never gave her name at all to any officials. Why didn't the bouncer ask for her name as he was calling when she was still present? Why didn't police come to down to the club? They come for all kinds of minor happenings at night clubs and they usually come very quickly. Why would the bouncer allow them to leave before police arrived? Also, nobody out of her gang of five people thought this odd at any point in the following minutes, days, weeks? Yeah, this is unbelievable, sorry. Also, if the club in question was named somebody could easily check this by calling the owner and asking for such an incident, without anyone risking a dox at all (since the owner doesn't know her identity). Very simple.

I was answering your question - the story doesn't sound credible. That doesn't mean rapes or trafficking or kidnapping never happen. Duh. It means the story sounded off to me and I listed some of the reasons why. Telling the statistically likely story of trafficking and stranger rape is mundane - its' a story about drug addiction and social misery at the bottom of society. But that doesn't give many upvotes from middle-class internet strangers because there's way less emotional pull there for them. Not really, since I know nothing beyond the tweet. There's nothing there to elicit skepticism from me. I have no trouble believing that a victim of kidnapping finds a story of an attempted kidnapping compelling. See how that works? I update based on my evaluation of the information at hand.

That it does not sound credible, obviously. If there were multiple women randomly nabbed outside of night clubs in order to be trafficked, there would be a media frenzy. But there's no such thing. There's a story posted to a subreddit heavily dedicated towards outrage content. No.

No outside confirmation of story beyond forum post: Also no date and time to cross-check with any police database or media trail. Call to action with a very potent emotional appeal and anchored in people's everyday life situations: Also posted on a subreddit where this kind of story is like catnip. The implication of the story seems to be that this is an organized, premeditated thing that this "gang of eastern europeans" does repeatedly. Are there any other reports of similar events in the media or to the police? I'd stay very skeptical of this story until further evidence comes out in support of it.

Doesn't seem like it should be that hard or exclusive when immigration levels approach 1% of the current population every year, of whom "the economic class" (followed by "the family class") is the biggest group according to this article: https://globalnews.ca/news/3836805/340k-immigrants-per-year-by-2020-government-unveils-new-immigration-targets/ The figure I could find for the US was 1.49m immigrants (2016) which would equal 0.4% of the US population. So overall it seems markedly easier to move to Canada than to the US, but I guess that depends on who you are and where you come from.

An other way to express my own experience with Shareville, alwaysinvert. [ ; - ) ] - - - o 0 o - - - PS : I'm still in love with your idea: Rederi AB Gotlands [mentioned by you in 2014 here on CoBF], but I'm just too lazy to go through the hazzle to get some shares. It's a very cheap stock (perhaps cheaper than ever) with a rock-solid earnings stream from a monopoly business. They have done large buybacks in the pas, but the latest one was in 2011. I still think that at some point value will be unlocked, but many people are uneasy with being minority shareholders in a company with a very strong majority, especially when they don't dividend out the earnings regularly. I wrote up the stock on my blog way back (Swedish): http://vardeinvesteraren.nu/vardeinvestering/gotlandsbolaget-del-1-presentation/ http://vardeinvesteraren.nu/vardeinvestering/gotlandsbolaget-del-2-analys/

You have to sift through lots and lots of bs in all of them. I skim through forums looking for nuggets of information, links to articles and so on when I'm doing research on specific stocks. For analysis or insight they are generally useless. I used to read Börssnack more frequently, but Twitter has overtaken most of its function. I also give the forums on euroinvestor.dk and hegnar.no the occasional look.

http://borssnack.di.se/#/ https://www.flashback.org/f260 https://www.avanza.se/placera/forum.html https://shareville.se/aktier

Had she looked, dressed, and spoke exactly the same, yet her product worked exactly as she said it did with no lies and/or fraud would you still have said this? I don’t see how any of that matters. I did find her ridiculous from the very beginning, but that's not actually the point; I may very well be equally as biased in the opposite direction. The point is why did people not stay *agnostic*? Because they badly wanted to believe.

I'll be the first one to admit that I'm no sage short-seller or anything of the sort. And I obviously didn't know anything about outright fraud when this turned up first. However, her whole persona was the most ridiculously blatant thing ever and could only work in an era when the feminist narrative in some quarters is strong to the point of cultishness. She was a female carbon copy of Steve Jobs with a list of platitudes. How that was ever able to get as big as it did is a fantastic testament to herd behavior.

You are correct, the direct problems with no-go zones (clan culture, Islamism, mob-like crime gangs, etc) primarily impact the inhabitants of the no-go zones. Middle-class people, journalists and cosmopolitans do not know any inhabitants of these areas and never ever go there. If they know any "ethnically diverse" people, those are among the few ones who are just as middle-class as themselves. These are the perils of a heavily socially stratified society, like all Western countries have become. That's why university-educated professionals of the politician and bureaucrat class tend to think the problem is smaller than it really is. It's a real catch-22 when most of the people noticing the true extent of a problem do not have the verbal ability to convince anyone and much less the social network to do it. Of course, now these areas have grown to the extent where they start to put big strains on the resources of all citizens. The health care systems are built for much smaller populations, the police force is too small and trained for other purposes, social services have no idea how to handle big cultural differences. And not least, we are starting to learn about the high trust that we have taken for granted and what it means for a society when that is slipping. Or worse: getting ethnically coded. So now we are finally noticing.

You misunderstood that exchange quite a lot. 1. It was not included because it is foreign, size is irrelevant 2. He was probably reluctant to say exact size, rather than not remembering 3. She asked about him owning OTHER Korean stocks when they traveled together (Buffett traveled to South Korea in '06, I'm guessing this was the same occasion). The stocks Buffett bought at that time include the "famous" Daehan Flour. I don't know what retail company Becky Quick was referring to. 4. This couldn't have that far back since the stock traded far lower then. At 1m level would have been 2-3 years ago (maybe preferred since that traded at that level for a far longer time) You can refer back to this clip in case you don't believe me: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/02/26/buffett-we-bought-samsung-in-the-past.html An interesting follow-up question would have been if they have owned or own Hyundai pref, since Munger owns it in DJCO. Or why they sold a not obviously overvalued stock with unrealized gains when they have $100b in cash to throw around.

What no-go zones usually means here (if we are talking about Europe as one thing, as North Americans are wont to do) is not that it is extremely dangerous for civilians to go there; it is that it is hazardous for police and ambulance to enter without extra protection because they risk being attacked.

Grit is self-help stuff with great marketing appeal but dubious to non-existent scientific value. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/05/25/479172868/angela-duckworth-responds-to-a-new-critique-of-grit

Played professionally for 5 years or so. Munger remarked something about him being good, but not smart enough to not let on that he thought he was the best player in the room. That's something I was certainly very guilty of in my youthful arrogance. All the points writser made are good.

In every single society that has ever existed historically for which we have good records or been observed directly by anthropologists its always been the case that men dominate all roles with high formal social status and power, regardless of what those roles are. My view is that the simplest explanation is that men are biologically wired to strongly desire to ascend status hierarchies. Thus they are much more willing to sacrifice to do it than women are. Consider a guy like Warren Buffett. He spent most of his life, holed up in rooms, reading financial statements. I think Susan Buffett, his first wife, commented on how this was a poor way to live life. I completely agree with her. This isn't uncommon. I remember reading about Julius Caesar as a young man seeing a bust of Alexander the Great and feeling like a failure because he realized that when Alexander was his age, he had already conquered the known world. Julius Caesar wanted to be a great Conquerer, Buffett and Rockefeller wanted to be enormously rich....same underlying motivation (ascend a status hierarchy) but filtered through a different society with very different values (military conquest vs money). In India, men dominate the "spiritual guru" role. Does anyone really think men are more capable at being spiritual than women. Or better at cooking than woman. Women also tend to prefer to date men who are likely to or end up ascending a hierarchy. So men's mating strategy is "ascend the hierarchy". Women's is to get noticed by and marry the guy who ascended or will ascend it. This actually provides an extremely good explanation of one thing I have always but puzzled by...why women put so much effort into their appearance when in other animals the male usually is more colorful and tends to do more visual displays to attract the female. I don't really think women are any less capable or intelligent than men. I just think the priorities are way different and dictated by different mating strategies. This is all correct. In addition, men also have a flatter bell curve for psychological traits, including IQ. The societal implications of that are pretty clear for those inclined to ruminate over it.

These lines are perfect in more ways than I can properly express. It represents both bull markets and survivorship bias flawlessly.

Nobody actively reads 12 or 14 hours a day. It is an impossibility. You have to realize this is a marketing piece. What is communicated is that their focus is on absorbing information and making a few critical decisions. People take things way too literally. But now this quote will be making the rounds as gospel for years to come... Oh well.

Buffett had sizable holdings that were not marked-to-market. A bit of a cheat if you are going to put any weight on standard deviation.

I mean to be fair you could have said the same thing about Amazon 3 years and 200% ago. I am not a big fan of "the market knows" arguments b/c you don't know what the market is really forecasting; all you know is the aggregate superficial valuation. These stocks have traded at high multiples consistently, and they've done well regardless thanks to the underlying business performance. The biggest edge on any company is having the ability to wait; most investors are way too short term oriented, and don't have time to let the world's best companies work their wonders for them. As good as the market thinks these companies are, they may actually be perpetually undervalued because a lot of people are scared away by high multiples. It's arguable the multiples aren't as high as they should be and that's why they consistently outperform. There might be such an effect in "value circles" . God knows I'm guilty of having rejected stocks outright because they traded at 25x. But most of the market is not like that. Most of the market loves companies where they can extrapolate a good CAGR from the historical stock price action. Preferably without going against recent trends in the price and the news. Your argument is somewhat contrarian on this board and that is a decent start for any thesis. Now it just has to be right too. And the momentum traders which you find yourself in company with are sometimes right for incidental fundamental reasons, so it's not like it's impossible. Your case is well-argued. It is also the same case which has been made in any financial mania in history, they are never illogical at their core. The problem is that you can't reason very well against them with only logic, you have to use analogies. Analogies are poor persuading techniques because they are never perfect, they always have ill-fitting aspects to them, which a well-read bull can point out quickly. And obviously they could be the wrong lens, it really might be different this time. I think most people by now have realized that America in 2016 was not Germany in 1933, but many people believed that sincerely recently. Some might still do. Consensus is very alluring to humans, we find consensus so appealing that we actively distort reality to fit our logic into the consensus. Have you noticed that mean-reversion of profit margins is almost laughed at these days? It's so blatantly obvious that the composition of the economy is different. Making steel versus social media. But are historical competitive pressures on margins forever a thing of the past? Will crowded areas of tech never see competitive margin pressure? Is modern network effects the end of free capitalism? Some people are in the middle of very high jumps, but I still believe in gravity. Historically, the highest valued quartile of stocks has performed abysmally. In light of that I find it not a tantalising prospect to bet on megacap high-flyers despite seemingly convincing arguments in favor of it. I'll take my middling returns if that's the price I have to pay.

First, from an outcome-oriented analysis: I think only Baupost has been able to actually post "great" return while holding a sizeable chunk of cash relative to the portfolio size. And what Klarman invests in, I have no idea what his thinking is so I can't comment on that. Maybe he's just that damn brilliant. The dude is holding 20% cash and beating the market in weird pharma stocks. But otherwise, I can't think of an investor holding 20+% cash and outperforming. We're no Baupost or Klarman, and we manage a fraction of what they manage, but we've averaged at least 20% cash historically and beat the market from May 2005 when we launched. Bull market, bear market, bull market, sideways market, bull market...we just keep chugging along. And you can check it for yourself in our Annual Reports by simply adding cash at brokers to any T-bill securities we held! Yet, like so many managers, we struggle to find partners and keep the ones we have. Go figure! Cheers! When is your annual report out?

That SNL skit already exists:

Even the very concept of beating the market is completely unknown and/or meaningless to most people. They can't visualize how good a return like 10% p/a is, let alone how good it would be to beat the index with 20 bp. Numbers - not to talk of exponentiality - are completely non-intuitive to human beings. It's expert's curse which makes us forget that. Have you talked to friends who recently entered the stock market, perhaps again? Do you think they have any concept whatsoever of reasonable annual returns in the long term when they consider buying Snapchat? Of course not. The only difference between that and playing slots is that even otherwise reasonable people can fool themselves into thinking they have an edge.

Scott, I wasn't implying they are incapable of ill-thought out statements. In Buffett's case, seeing as he hates controversy above all, this clearly was as such an instant as he seems blissfully unaware of some prudish aspects of our social morase. Some of which have rendered it a faux-pas to allude to innate differences in sexual strategy between the sexes. What is socially acceptable and not varies with time and culture and we are prone to view everything through the moral lens of the current climate. I don't mean we shouldn't stand up for what we believe in, just that we could use some epistemic humbleness; after all there is no inherent reason why every single moral stance is better today than it was in the past. It may be the most common fallacy of our era to view moral evolution as a progressive deterministic force ever upwards. There Munger's and Buffett's views "from the past" are worth considering as it seems exceedingly likely they are thought true as most of their views are. The same goes for all the other "old white guys" who have contributed to Western thought, by the way. If you consider and then dismiss them based on balanced personal judgement, that is great. It was dismissing out of hand with buzzword thinking which was what I was criticizing. And we are now talking past each other to some extent, I don't actually disagree with anything you wrote in this post. Just thought I should clarify what I meant.