alwaysinvert

I know nothing about this man or his investment record and I haven't even finished all of the video yet, but I liked his stories so much that I thought I'd post the video here. Covers how his parents survived Auschwitz and how he personally overcame a bunch of struggles to succeed with his mutual fund. It had so few views that I thought it deserved some more.

Atheism isn't a worldview no matter how many times you say it. It's the lack of a specific one - namely belief in a deity. It doesn't come with any other strings attached. You can believe in supernatural phenomena and be an atheist. You can believe in objective good and evil as well. There are numerous philosophical systems that do argue for exactly that without a deity. But I guess you have read CS Lewis and watched televangelists talk about spontaneous healing, so you are probably more qualified than Kant. I mean, it's fine if you want to believe in whatever. It's also fine if you want to discuss what you believe. What's not fine is spouting illogical nonsense and strawmanning all over the place. Your feeling that there can't be good and evil if there is no god has no bearing whatsoever on anything but your own thoughts. And your line of reasoning is still not an argument for the existence of a deity, it's at best a weak argument for why you should have faith (notwithstanding if there is a god or not). If we were to take your claim that you can't know good from bad without a god at face value, it still says nothing about the likelihood of there being a god.

What's constantly conflated in this discussion is truth and desirability. It might be perfectably desirable for us to have a god, but yet not be true. And the other way around. The mere fact that a godless universe is unpalatable to someone does not in any way make it any more likely that a god exists and is not an argument for belief - if your view is that one should believe rationally, that is. If your view on the other hand is that you don't need rational reasons to believe, then a debate about truth cannot be had. The question of truth in a philosophical discussion has absolutely nothing to do with morals. Morals can come only after you have established what is true.

Yeah, I agree and the same goes for a lot of Munger and Buffett sayings. On that note, my least favourite and most-misused buffettism is: It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price. Cue, everyone goes around paying 25x earnings for all famous companies because they "get good dividends" and they have a " long growth runway".

Now that just hurts :(

"People are always asking me where the [investing] outlook is good, but that’s the wrong question. The right question is: Where is the outlook most miserable?" - John Templeton

I think the multiverse argument is reasonable, but I don't think you need it to posit life. If the universe has been around for an infinite period of time and there's a close to infinite or infinite number of stars and planets, a one in a trillion chance is going to happen eventually. A second way of refuting your argument is to take a million numbers. Randomly select 50 of those numbers. What's the odds that those numbers came up in that particular order? Well, it's incredibly small, much smaller than your 1 in a trillion. So is that a miracle? I don't think so. The problem is that you can't argue some outcome like that after it's happened, and say, "because that outcome has a low probability, something special must have happened". Basically, outcomes are constantly happening. Each one always has an almost infinitely small chance of it happening, yet it does because some outcome has to happen. Yes, this is an extremely common misconception. Getting dealt a royal straight flush is a couple of hundred thousands to 1 (depending on the game you are playing), but it isn't anymore unlikely to be dealt that than any other possible poker hand. But what you are going to remember are 1) royals and 2) near-misses. Near-misses of course are used all over the place, either manufactured or sought out. Girls use it when turning down boys to make them feel better, or just to keep their options open (let's just be friends, I'm not at the right place right now etc). Slots and lotteries use them all the time, to the point where there actually is nothing but near-misses and jackpots. Extreme sports are all about close calls and the rushes they engender. Intellectually, all but the most simple people knows that it's the brain playing tricks on us, if they only think about it for a short while. But anyhow, the just-so argument for creation is stupid. With cosmological deep time, we have no idea how many 'experiments' have been run. Our universe could very well be inevitable and thus wholly unremarkable from an odds perspective.

Sort of like asking who is better Hitler or Stalin? Hitler is the better, obviously. If you like Stalin you have to like vodka and we can't have drunks walking around the streets. We should all be Nazis because Hitler was a teetotaler. What's to stop you from being a drunk if you are not a member of the NSDAP?

Well, some are still in mourning from that weekend. First that damn crossbar and the penalties, only for the next day to see the real flying dutchman. Football is brutal, must be the sport where most often the better team loses. We, my Chilean-Mexican family, are still trying to find a way to cheer us up. Not really. It's just that most other team sports in most competitions are played over more fixtures. Mauboussin had some stuff on luck in sports in The Success Equation: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2012/11/luckskill.png However, my national team lost to Portugal (back when Ronaldo was fit...) in the WC qualification playoffs over two games, so I certainly have less to complain about than you :)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/how-warren-buffett-and-don-graham-are-saving-675-million-in-taxes/2014/04/10/2636dd60-c0ec-11e3-bcec-b71ee10e9bc3_story.html?tid=hpModule_79c38dfc-8691-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394

Just one thing - the whole 'it was hard for me to get into the country, why should it be easy for them' argument is just stupid. It's a grown-up equivalent to the fourth graders saying that it's right to bully first-graders because when they were in first grade the fourth-graders bullied them.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/37796a04-b8e3-11e3-835e-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz2xago7tcJ

This is where I am at as of now. I do micro and small cap investing in Scandinavian markets, because I can read in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish and go through interviews, media, message boards etc. And often I can get a feel for how the company is perceived and all that. That is a lot harder in other markets, so when it comes to the US and all other countries I have thus far only coattailed in large caps. If you throw me the name of a Scandi company with a decent track record, I'm fairly certain that I know something about it and can relate to it in some way. These hunting grounds are skewed in my favour - it's often too small for the big institutions, but more than enough for me. However, the prices - in aggregate - just aren't that attractive in the Nordic small cap space now so I have had to branch out a bit more. I had no industry expertise when I started doing this, so my view is a bit different than "start from what you know". I would say, start from where you can get a structural edge - but with an eye on what the most fertile hunting grounds are at any one moment. Now, this may be big financials or old tech right now, I'm not sure, and there you obviously have a lower edge (probably the only one being time horizon). But I think time is too scarce to start with trying to analyze cloud businesses or social media when these are priced for perfection, even if you know something about the inner workings of those industries. That might be a foolishly academic approach (more security analyst than business analyst), but I don't know how I could keep myself motivated trying to learn about stuff that's not obviously cheap and could stay too dear for years and years. 52 week lows and quant screeners are great for identifying out of favour sectors or jurisdictions.

On the poker vs investing note - I have written a bit about this previously, but there was something I never touched on. I have experienced multiple BIG drawdowns in networth and know what it feels like (-50% maybe three times, -99% once, now how many decades is that in investing?). That's an experience which I think can be worth a lot. People maybe think they will be rational about it (or 'philosophical' as Munger puts it). But from my experience they won't. At least not in the majority of cases. I think only experience can make this easier for those who are in the normal emotional spectrum. Now, obviously you can mitigate these risks somewhat with portfolio allocation. Putting on 50% positions and such without positively knowing how you'll react to big drawdowns strikes me as naive at best. If you can take the heat, fine. But most people can't do it even with a dayjob to fall back on. Yes, I acknowledge that most people here are introvert rationals and that obviously helps. But I still think we are mostly closer to 'normal people' than to Buffett, Munger and Viktor Blom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Blom). I was an aggressive poker player who pushed small edges and played high stakes with relatively small error margins, but I still feel timid in investing when I read this board. Now, I'm obviously way less skilled at investing than many of the boardmembers, but I can't quite shake the feeling that it's a sign of the times.

It's Ajit Jain!

Easiest way to offset that would be anchoring some of their compensation to growth in per-share earnings, I guess. But I have no idea how you would be able to get the mix exactly right, since that may tilt the incentives too much in the other direction if taken too far. Edit: One could make a pretty neat model of how much BRK should go down in value on the day of Buffett's death/retirement. All that's needed is Buffett's average life expectancy on the day of his death (pretty simple), the difference in market-beating ability of Todd/Ted vs Buffett and the extra compensation they on average will take from shareholders during the time Buffett on average would have left. I'll leave the last two assumptions up to you :) If you PM me, I can give you a bank account where you can donate to show your appreciation of this highly valuable idea.

Just thought of something. When they manage all of BRK's money, won't the current compensation scheme skew Ted and Todd towards stocks versus buying out elephants? I'm thinking because the eventual market beating performance will likely (or at least has the chance to) drip faster into book value with stocks than with wholly-owned businesses? Yes I know, they have a high-water mark and delayed compensation but that doesn't seem quite enough to offset this effect if you consider the time-value of money to them personally. Maybe this is not a huge problem, but it seems clear to me that this will affect their incentives.

Yes, that was a bit surprising. I looked for a discussion on it too. But it will likeley be asked either on CNBC or at the meeting or both. The disclosure on common stock holdings changing was a bit frustrating for me, especially because Posco if unchanged probably is the 16th stock and would still (barely) qualify under the old $1b threshold.

Am I the only one having to smother yawns every few words I read from Marks? He rarely says anything that's not extremely general and bland.

I used it for a little while in 2010 or so for international messaging on my cell. But since imessage, fb messenger and skype app have erased this use area completely. I have no idea why it's still so widely used.

I'm a cheapskate so you won't get $5k from me. But I donated $200. Hope more people adds whatever they think they can spare.

Sick.

I believe so that he's fair to all shareholders. He doesn't like buying out his partners without telling him he's going to, since he believes they are selling at a low price. That said, he did bump that 1.1x buy order to 1.2x during 2012 when that long term shareholder had to sell his $1.2B holding. If I remember correctly, the PR went out the same time as the purchase. Very different from buying back shares over the market in terms of informational advantage.

I don't quite get how that's a moat since the online businesses are still loss-making.

Just for screening purposes - do Korean prefs all have slightly different characteristics or are most or all of them equivalent to common but no voting?