matjone

I wish I could find the article I linked to in the old post, but it appears it doesn't exist anymore. DTEJD1997 just pointed out a more recent example of how this can end in disaster. I wouldn't say quality necessarily means positive current earnings for the past year or even the last few years. I think it depends on a lot of factors, some of which may be hard or even impossible to put in a screen.

I posted one a couple years ago about a net net strategy that performed horribly in the 80s. It would be interesting to look at the companies that passed these screens in the past and compare them to what you would get more recently. My guess is that investors who stuck with strict rules on valuation had to accept lower quality as multiples increased. That's not to say that you can't find some great values with these screens but I think you'll need to do more sifting than in the old days. The quants will disagree with me though. Most of them are of the opinion that trying to handpick the results from the screens lowers returns. My question is, if these kinds of returns are obtainable, why hasn't anyone replicated them with real money? The people I've seen earn good returns with value investing worked at it and read reports. By the way I believe Tobias Carlisle has a book about this stuff. I haven't read it but I've heard good things about it.

ft.com

How good of an education can you get with an internet connection and maybe a few thousand dollars for books and other expenses here and there? My guess is that a lot of people who are reasonably intelligent and motivated could cut out a lot of unnecessary expense with this method. Personally I would have been better off watching MIT lectures on youtube than going in person to listen to lower quality professors at the school I went to. I also think that it should be easier to have these debts eliminated in a bankruptcy.

https://www.ft.com/content/a272ee4c-1b83-11e7-bcac-6d03d067f81f?segmentid=acee4131-99c2-09d3-a635-873e61754ec6 Thoughts on this? The solution I usually see proposed is to let the government pay for it. But shouldn't something be done about the cost? I would have thought the internet would have lowered the cost of an education, but it appears to be going in the opposite direction.

what is writser's blog?

Oddballstocks blog has turned up a few. CASA is one I always bring up in these kinds of threads. They had a lot of underperforming restaurants during the recession and were in the midst of turning it around. At the time he wrote it up I think it was around 1x earnings if you annualized the latest results. At the low the market cap of the whole company, which owned 50 restaurants, was less than the startup costs to franchise one restaurant. They ended up getting bought out for about 20x the low price. This one stings because I saw it and almost invested but decided not to. He also had randall bearings, which I think was a 10 bagger and a few others. Maybe he'll chime in. I had a good return on jadason in singapore. It was fairly speculative as a business but was at like 10% of ncav or something at the low. I've found that stocks with really low prices, in the single digit cents, tend to have more volatility which can sometimes provide opportunities. It think jadason went from .006 to .045 or something like that. Sitestar was another example of this.

I was just looking at last year's thread. I only looked at the first page and only looked at long stock ideas. I did not look at dividends or spinoffs, just price performance. Against the s&p (again just looking at price performance), the group underperformed by a little under a point, worse if you include those who responded "cash". The majority of the return came from a small sliver of the sample, mainly oil stocks.

Update: my conversion finally went through, but they definitely made me sweat it. I think I had around 15 chat sessions probably totaling 12 hours or more over the past 10 days if you add up all my sessions. Maybe they just got tired of dealing with me and pushed it through. Lesson re-learned, don't ever count on anything going smoothly, especially with these guys. Still listening if anyone has a broker recommendation for trading pink sheets stocks.

Hopefully a competitor emerges. As pissed as I am at them right now there is a reason I am with them, their combination of costs and access isn't matched anywhere else that I know of. However I am at the point now where I would be willing to pay up for a broker with access to foreign stocks and pink sheets who doesn't jerk me around with ridiculous rules. So again, if anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them. I already have a fidelity account and I would probably move over there at this point but they have recently restricted access to a lot of pink sheet stuff.

They are cheap but it seems you get what you pay for. This conversion process is ridiculously over-complicated and will end up costing me thousands in extra taxes if it doesn't get done in time. Doing this conversion should be a simple process of clicking a few buttons and an e-signature, or maybe mailing in a form. That's how it was when I did it before at Vanguard. This is a multi-step process and each step involves days of waiting between steps. BTW, after my initial post I checked some of the changes the guy recommended. For one of them there is no box available to check to make the recommended change. So now I fear that even after jumping through all of these hoops there is still going to be a snag that stops this from getting done. So I am currently in the market for a new broker. I'm looking for one with access to foreign markets and pink sheet stocks. The second criteria is getting tougher to meet these days as a lot of brokers have apparently decided they don't want to be involved in that market. If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them.

I am converting a little money to a roth IRA this year at IB and it is proving to be a giant PITA. First of all they had a rule against partial conversions, so I had to create a new linked account and then convert the entire thing. So creating the linked account took a little while, I first had to fill out an application, then wait for approval. Then wait for it to be opened. Keep in mind a lot of these steps involve waiting a day for it to go through. Last step was to fund it. This is where it got really complicated, because the permissions for some of my accounts did not match up. So I open a chat today to see if there is some way I can expedite this, and the guy hits me with the following steps that I still have to do: IB rep: first step. cancel your existing trading permission upgrade for new traditional account IB rep: 2nd step: apply IRA margin for both traditional IRA accounts IB rep: 3rd step: once IRA margin approval has been granted for your traditional IRA accounts, apply for trading capabilities IB rep: step: apply for SSF (single stock future) trading permission on linked traditional acct IB rep: 4th step cont’d, need to remove OPT, and apply for futures, futures option, and single stock futures on original traditional acct IB rep: 5th step: once trading capabilities have been approved, request internal fund transfer A lot of these steps require waiting periods too. This convoluted process, which I began with what I figured would be ample time considering I already had traditional and roth IRAs held at IB, may not get done in time. I think it would have actually been faster to transfer the money to another brokerage. Maybe I am off base and it is always this complicated, but it seems ridiculous to me. End of rant.

UCcmal, is it possible the rate of return will be the same as in the past but that more of your return will come from return of capital and less from earnings growth?

Yeah after looking at it again you are right.

Have you guys seen this before where only accredited investors could get cash+stock? I think this created a really nice wrinkle for accredited investors to exploit.

16:40 http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/ali-wentworth-im-going-to-take-a-percocet-and-let-that-one-go

This is an interesting angle. I don't know a lot about these things, cause I never considered them, but I think this would only be smart if the interest was higher than the expected return in your plan. For example, I know someone who was thinking about taking a 401k loan and the interest was 4%. You pull out 100k, but in 1 year the lost gains on the amount pulled out are likely to be greater than 4k. Plus you lose whatever that 4k would have done in your taxable account.

changedetection

I was curious about this as well. I can't get that document on Italian stock returns to load. Those are total returns aren't they? Maybe Gio will chime in with some explanation. Wikipedia entry - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Italy

Shalab, you're talking about spending 60k/yr and then 110k/yr for hs? At some point I think you have to measure the value received vs the cost and ask if it's worth it. You could spend a million dollars just getting your kid ready to have a career, or you could spend the same amount buying assets for him to fund the same lifestyle without working at all.

I don't know much about it, but this seems like insurance, so they must be pricing it so you lose and they win on average. That's fine for a risk you can't afford to take, but I'd imagine this isn't in that category for you.

The best piece of news for me was that there's a book coming out about the Buffett partnerships. This to me seems to be the biggest hole for those who would like to understand Buffett the investor. There has been a decent amount of coverage about his early days investing his own money and much in-depth coverage of Berkshire but the partnership is a bit of a mystery.

I saw several of these in japan pop up recently. These appear to be decent businesses if you strip out excess cash and securities, the trouble is a lot of these guys have been piling up cash forever and there is no reason to believe they'll stop. The devil is in the details with these things and I think you'd need to be able to speak japanese to figure out what was going on. If there is anyone out there who does and would like to partner up, I can provide a list of names that are quantitatively cheap but that's about all I'm good for here. These are always around. As Nate says, the trouble is not in finding them but in sifting out the bad ones. I posted a link to a backtest of this strategy a while back that showed underperformance, going back to the 80's if I recall correctly. I think it is easy to see what happened. Graham popularized this strategy, people made a lot of money on it, and it rose in popularity until it no longer worked. People kept drifting lower and lower on the quality curve until the pool of net nets was comprised mostly of companies that deserved to be there. I can think of two ways to go about this today. One is to wait for big market declines to produce big piles of net nets. When that happens decent businesses are grouped in with the crappy ones and they tend to outperform by a substantial amount when the market recovers. The other is to sift through them and find the good ones. One place to find these is in the otc market. It's kind of like going back in time. In a lot of cases computers can't look there and it takes work to sift through them.

I got a UTMA for my son and bought a few shares of berkshire. I decided that it was more important to teach him the basic lessons about investing in equities than to try to earn higher returns with strategies he won't understand like odd-lot tenders and the like (and anyway I got tired of that stuff). As he gets older it will provide countless opportunities to discuss investing because their businesses are everywhere and every time we get an ice cream from dairy queen or watch a BNSF train go by I can explain that part of those earnings belong to him. Maybe it will get him interested in saving and investing. Then again maybe it will backfire and I'll just be an annoying dad who won't shut up about this stuff. Also if you are rich enough to care about it, keep in mind UTMAs can be taxed as part of your estate if you die before they turn 18. In my state 529 plan contributions are tax deductible for state taxes which is nice, and you don't necessarily have to withdraw the money when you get to college age. I am not sure on the restrictions but maybe it's possible to just keep the money compounding tax deferred for his whole lifetime? With a coverdell you do have to pull the money out by age 30 and you can't put much in it, but there are fewer restrictions on investments so you might get a higher rate of return if you're a good investor. It is hard to make blanket recommendations on these things. Everyone has a different situation and it's probably wise to get an adviser at least in the beginning just to make sure you aren't doing something stupid.

If you don't care about quality it seems like you can always find these. I have stocks that I'm embarrassed to mention. Jadason in singapore is one example.