alwaysinvert

Uhm, teaching statistics "adults and kids (14+)" with fairy tales about sorcerers and lessons on bullying? I don't get it. I apologize if it's you or a friend of yours who is behind this but it seems half-baked to me. I'm all for more statistics and Bayesian thinking, though, so good luck to them.

My best investment in the last few years, Protector Forsikring: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/investment-ideas/protct-protector-forsikring/ Starting to get a bit pricey, though.

Wait what? There is no Seeking Alpha for Europe so you can't invest in individual stocks? I'm getting more confused by the day.

I've had this feeling with investments that have done well too. Maybe you attribute it to some kind of deep insight only when things turn sour and forget about it if everything works out. I can hardly recall a single stock which wasn't uncomfortable to hold at one point or another. On another note, I think maybe some people systematize a bit too much. I see people post checklists with 150 items on them. To me that's just silly. You aren't going to learn about the salient features of a business from going through 150 checkboxes, I promise. And combining this with an approach of owning 5 or so stocks seems just weird to me. You can't keep up with a handful of companies without an elaborate system? It would be one thing with a more mechanical approach and more holdings. Trying to quantify the art aspect of investing strays dangerously close to scientism, physics envy etc.

GOTL-A/B - Gotlandsbolaget This is a government subsidized monopoly ferry operator and shipping company. It trades over-the-counter in Sweden so I have no idea if you can even buy it from other countries, and the liquidity is not the best anyhow. I could say a lot about this one, but the case in a nutshell is that they trade at something like 10x earnings at market cap of 2.5b, a huge cash buffer of 2.1b, with the ability to add quite a bit of debt and a proven record of retiring shares aggressively.

I don't think Eurosport is comparable to ESPN at all. What's their biggest rights? Cycling and some tennis coverage. For the average sports fan Eurosport is pretty much a joke, although obviously there is a niche audience for tennis, cycling, snooker, darts etc.

Why? Someone who is (significantly) above average doesn't need a teacher. Even more reason not to waste your days in school, then.

I have no experience of homeschooling at all and it's not even legal here, but I have a hard time seeing how anything can be worse than public schools for anyone with above average abilities.

I read The Intelligent Investor as my first one on value investing back when I hardly knew what a bond was and thus understood very little of it. Recommending that one to a total novice is a case of the curse of expertise. Or perhaps just the aping of you-know-who. The Warren Buffett Way and the Peter Lynch books were way more appropriate to my level of knowledge at that point. Or maybe this is the right fit:

I don't have anything to add to the discussion at the moment, but to yadayada: it's basically. You use the word very often and it feels like a knife in my eye every time it pops up, which is a shame since it, at least for me, detracts from your otherwise very useful posts.

You always seem to make the most sense in these kinds of threads. Someone (moorecapital?) suggested one year that people should put the size of their portfolio in their posts too and he got heckled for it, but while 70% is always 70% it is significantly less impressive if you manage $20k than $20m. Well, anyway. I'm looking at my primary account and it is +24% for the year. I have another account with approximately 10% of the total portfolio, which has not done as well. It's been a rollercoaster after the summer and I'm down since back then. Mostly, it's been a year of very few ideas and the biggest one (in oil) has netted me a loss of -35% thus far. CAGR since '08 when I started with some stock picks but mostly indexing is 20%. Counting from '09 (yeah I know) when I took full control it is 30%.

Why would this be an issue if you marry for love/with the intent to stay married? If I met a billionaire woman, I wouldn't take offense if she wanted to make some arrangement to protect the bulk of her networth from me going after it, just in case. I can't see the good argument for not taking precautions here (the issue is somewhat different if you marry "poor" and then one of you go on to make lots of money; then it's down to to in which terms you view your partnership). Surely, everyone who marries realizes that they can't see the future? I don't see how recognizing reality is detrimental to trust in the relationship. If you are an awesome rock climber, you don't skip the security line just because a slip-up almost never happens. For me the answer is pretty clear-cut. I would never, ever marry someone of significantly lower means than me without a prenup or the equivalent. In fact, I think I would insist upon it even if I married someone richer than me, because to me it seems the fairest thing no matter what.

Given that he's a self proclaimed cloner I wound't have expected to find anything different in his portfolio...would you? Actually I don't really pay too much to what he says because I see a lot of contradictions. I know he recommends cloning, but if you say that then how did he achieve his amazing returns circa 2000? It couldn't have been through cloning. So was he in a different phase of his investing journey? If so when did he change into a cloner? And maybe we should discuss his pre-cloner results with his cloner results. I really try hard to find what every great investor has to offer, but I cannot learn from Pabrai because he just seems to be all over the place. I'm not sure if he had come up with the "concept" at that point (although Buffett and others practiced it heavily some 50-60 years ago under the name coattailing), but why couldn't he have? You don't have to clone gurus with billions under management. I have cloned a completely unknown close friend of mine on multiple occasions.

So, going by the general atmosphere in this thread and keeping in mind the regular pattern of when these kinds of threads turn this way (Berkowitz, Fairfax) I'd say now would be a pretty good time to, if any, invest in his fund. Or at least look more closely at his holdings.

I don't think you really know that until you have lived it, to be fair. You are a guy who appears to be doing a lot and seems to have pretty much two careers. I'm also guessing you have quite a bit of money. It's easy for you to rack down on ambition and whatnot, because you already have it by the bucketload compared to 95% of people. I have this not-so-close friend who is in sales. He's a decent guy, but very hyper and in your face. He earns a lot of money for a guy in his mid-20s (+$10k/month) and has been doing so for a couple of years now. He likes to spend at least as much as he earns and he doesn't shy away from talking about vacations in Dubai and whatnot. I never hear much about this directly, though. Probably because he knows I could outspend him but choose not to, so I wouldn't be impressed or jealous. Instead I hear of this through our mutual friends. They are easier targets because they work as teachers or go to school etc. You know, the usual stuff young and not rich people do. My point is that maybe you don't really know everything about what your friends think, because you (at least in some aspects) are probably the most successful one of the bunch. That was a tangent; but this stuff about "status" not mattering irks me a bit. Every single one of us thinks about the relative status of everyone in our lives, even if it may not be on a conscious level. I think it's delusional to think that family and friends will treat you the same whether you are a doctor or a garbage man, no matter how nice and open-minded they seem under present circumstances. In theory, everybody's a saint. Sorry for rant, but now I have written it so I will post it too. A lot of presumptions here about me, none true. I speak as one who's chased promotions, better titles, better positions. For a long time the grass was always greener, what I wasn't doing was always better than what I was doing. I've been on both sides of the fence and invariably where I came from or where I'm going was always 'better'. I currently live in a city neither my wife or I are from that we moved to for a job. When others talk about driving to visit family I agree it's doable, but I also know what a pain it is and how much my wife wishes we lived where her mom is. I am living what the poster asked. In terms of status this is something I found out myself, I also found out that contentment is better than status, money or whatever else. I don't have a bucketload of money like you presume. I've never been as successful as your friend, I've never earned a six-figure salary in my life. In terms of this board that might make me a failure, it's not something I care much about. Now some of my career dissatisfaction has driven me to do my own thing and work to branch out on my own. So in many ways I'm glad to have failed at the typical corporate American office job. If I hadn't fought to get up the ladder I might have never had the motivation to start my own company. And for how our friends think? They as well as family have the impression we're poor, we heard it first hand and third-hand. We live in a smaller house and drive used American cars. We're constantly bombarded with quips about how cheap we are or how little money we must have, or how we can't afford certain things. I've lived payment to payment before and decided that after paying off debt and starting to save and invest that I don't want to go back to that. So status, or lack thereof hasn't been an issue. Living differently has been rewarding, I'd be embarrassed to share our financial status with friends, I wouldn't want them to have a number color their perception of us. Likewise I hesitate to ever post performance numbers because I want any work I do to stand on it's own, not how I've done in the past. Maybe it's true that you know don't until you've tried, so in that case the OP should just move to see what it's like. I wasn't trying to look down in my original post, rather I've lived their experience and I was hoping to save them some of the pain I've gone through myself. I wasn't saying I thought you were filthy rich (bucketload was for ambition, not money). But having a few hundred thousands or even a million in (net) assets makes you much better off than the absolute majority of people. From the few things I have read about your performance, I made a guess that you were in the vicinity of those sums. If that was wrong, I apologize for jumping to that conclusion. Anyhow, my point wasn't primarily about wealth, but about the status coming from being an ambitious guy and even something more simple like being well-read. I think most people on this board falls at the very top in those aspects in pretty much any social setting they might find themselves in. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not arguing for chasing status. I live in a small rental and drive a six year old car, so that's not were I'm coming from. I also get jokes about being cheap. My point is that status is not irrelevant to anybody, and even if you view yourself as an underdog, you might not be as much of it as you think. I don't know about you guys, but I have had my mind blown on a couple of occasions when getting a glimpse of how I'm viewed from the outside - often it has been extremely far from my personal reality. I think you post good stuff, was just trying to nuance the status bit from my perspective. What you wrote about that worked a bit like a red rag for me, with my hippie radar beeping angrily. That was probably unfair, but I still think that status has to be accounted for in order to be realistic. I also come from a small town and hang around a lot of younger guys who won't have careers, and older guys who often regret not seeing the world or aiming higher. At least that's my impression. That's at the other en of the spectrum from the status race. edit: on being ambitious and how you don't seem to view yourself as such (anymore): I don't work, I only invest. I don't have a family or a significant other. I keep a blog that has had like three updates this year. You have a full-time job, some bank analysis website, a family with kids, a well-updated blog, a newsletter and still manages to outpost me by 2x on this board. You may reject the rat race, but ambition you don't lack.

I don't think you really know that until you have lived it, to be fair. You are a guy who appears to be doing a lot and seems to have pretty much two careers. I'm also guessing you have quite a bit of money. It's easy for you to rack down on ambition and whatnot, because you already have it by the bucketload compared to 95% of people. I have this not-so-close friend who is in sales. He's a decent guy, but very hyper and in your face. He earns a lot of money for a guy in his mid-20s (+$10k/month) and has been doing so for a couple of years now. He likes to spend at least as much as he earns and he doesn't shy away from talking about vacations in Dubai and whatnot. I never hear much about this directly, though. Probably because he knows I could outspend him but choose not to, so I wouldn't be impressed or jealous. Instead I hear of this through our mutual friends. They are easier targets because they work as teachers or go to school etc. You know, the usual stuff young and not rich people do. My point is that maybe you don't really know everything about what your friends think, because you (at least in some aspects) are probably the most successful one of the bunch. That was a tangent; but this stuff about "status" not mattering irks me a bit. Every single one of us thinks about the relative status of everyone in our lives, even if it may not be on a conscious level. I think it's delusional to think that family and friends will treat you the same whether you are a doctor or a garbage man, no matter how nice and open-minded they seem under present circumstances. In theory, everybody's a saint. Sorry for rant, but now I have written it so I will post it too.

I'm guessing you are thinking that in the future you will regret not moving when you had the chance. And you are probably right. So why not try it? It's not like it's a choice that can never ever be undone should it not work out.

Not new at all, but I think Hazlitt's Economics in one lesson is considered the gold standard (pun intended) primer.

Well, he says he holds BRK in the book and pretty much that he won't sell. And he said he bought PKX recently. I don't know any other holdings.

I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong in making a "nepotist" hiring. Sometimes it can be optimal because you know their capabilities best from prior experience. But if it goes awry the way it did in this case, you clearly have not taken the necessary precautions, which due to biases should probably be even more stringent than if you hire someone you don't know. Philandering and sexual harassment are not habits you suddenly take up at age 61.

You should read it PRONTO. That pesky market timing habit ain't gonna sort itself.

Is that part true? If it is, it really doesn't bode well for BRK post-Buffett. On the other hand, pardon me if I'm being sexist or something here, but hiring her straight out of school when he has turned down multiple super talents with far more experience (Pabrai comes to mind) who also offered to work for free/very little may not have been optimal either.

Shouldn't really affect the credibility of the once for the sciences, since it's not awarded by the same organization, or even in the same country. I wonder why Obama would be the last drop though, when it has been awarded to Mother Teresa, Al Gore, Yasser Arafat (also in expectation of something which never materialized) and Henry Kissinger long before that. Also, note that the Nobel Prize for economics is not a "proper" Nobel Prize even if it is a heck of a lot more credible than the peace prize.

Why do you claim to know that's the case? It could just as well be that women are more upset by slights than men*. If gender stereotyping/injustice towards women is more common than gender stereotyping towards men is as far as I know not known. But I'd make a bold guess and say it's about the same for both sexes. After all, stereotypes exist for a reason, be they good or bad - or wrong. One thing that many people never think about is that women are seen as inherently more valuable for who they are (for natural biological reasons), while men are valued on what they do. That's also probably why you see such a huge, huge gender imbalance among the homeless. *From what I've read (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/04/men-are-harassed-more-than-women-online.html), males receive more abuse online than females, for example. You wouldn't know this from the discourse, because we, both men and women, are primed to care for females under distress. That, and the abused males "suck it up" or plain just don't care very much. Next I'll be attempting to show you that people with "black" or "brown" skin are often treated differently, and mostly worse, than people with "white" skin... And that despite the fact that people with "white" skin also have problems, this doesn't make racism okay and it's possible for two separate issues to exist at the same time. No thanks. It is okay for two separate issues to exist at once, yes, and they certainly do. But you claimed something which you could not back up, i.e that women are treated badly more often than men. The fact that you and others feel that this is the case doesn't make it true. It just makes you emotional. I wasn't trying to tally up oppression points against each gender, but making some counterpoints to your statement. If we don't have hard data, and everyone are biased by their priors, I find the position that discrimination exists in roughly equal measures towards both genders to be a reasonable starting point.

Why do you claim to know that's the case? It could just as well be that women are more upset by slights than men*. If gender stereotyping/injustice towards women is more common than gender stereotyping towards men is as far as I know not known. But I'd make a bold guess and say it's about the same for both sexes. After all, stereotypes exist for a reason, be they good or bad - or wrong. One thing that many people never think about is that women are seen as inherently more valuable for who they are (for natural biological reasons), while men are valued on what they do. That's also probably why you see such a huge, huge gender imbalance among the homeless. *From what I've read (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/04/men-are-harassed-more-than-women-online.html), males receive more abuse online than females, for example. You wouldn't know this from the discourse, because we, both men and women, are primed to care for females under distress. That, and the abused males "suck it up" or plain just don't care very much.