Valuebo

Man, we really are going to see no wealth effect on consumers on the way up and a massive recession once this turns around, won't we? Rip Coupang & co.

Feel free to reach out of you would like so tips in terms of sightseeing and bars/food you should try out!

Agreed! My absolute personal European favorites are probably Lissabon, Prague and Rome. But the list is endless. Just to name a few others I love: Krakau, Budapest, Porto, Siena, Matera, Lecce, Copenhagen, Granada, ... But the list is truly endless and then you don't even mention all the obvious ones. I think we sometimes forget how lucky we are to live here in Europe. --- Anyway, sorry to derail this topic further! I'd say my number is 3-4 million personal NW to feel truly wealthy whilst also having a partner. I'm well over halfway there in my thirties but for a good part that's because of an inheritance that helped kickstart this further. I'm fully motivated to keep doing my own projects and grow opportunities whilst not becoming a slave to my properties / general material wealth. Living the good life is fun but without the other side of the coin, you kinda start taking things for granted and can appreciate those good times less.

Oh yeah, the Sint-Michiels bridge is one of the best and most famous spots here to see the most impressive architectural landmarks all at once! What is crazy is that the Sint Michiels church (it was to your right side when you took the first picture) was meant to have a tower of 134m in height initially in the 1600's. To compare, the Sint Baafs cathedral is "only" 89 meters. Sadly they ran out of money back in the day so it go stuck at 80-something meters and a flat tower roof. I've jokingly posited amongst friends before that they should make a big wooden terrace on the flat surface of the Sint Michiels Tower, ask an entrance fee for what surely would be the best historical landscape view in Belgium and invest it back in the city! In any case, it shows the absolute wealth we also had in the The Netherlands / Flemish regio at the time.

Would be great to see those pictures! Great to hear you had such a great time! I'm actually in the market for a new home here. Visiting a couple this week. So exciting times. Luckily (and obviously) we don't pay the eye popping prices of Amsterdam or London but it's definitely getting expensive for regular young people to buy here, especially since so many people like it here but the city itself is so very small. Truly blessed to be in a situation where I can just decide to live here in all comfort without sacrifices.

Yes, it's Ghent. I always tell people all over the world to not necessarily go to Bruges or Antwerp but head straight to Ghent when coming from Brussels. Ghent has even more charm than Bruges and far less tourists and chocolade shops. It's a student city with thus lots of younger people but obviously has evolved to become one of the more expensive places to buy or rent a home in Belgium.

Absolutely. I've been living nearly all my life in what I still to this day call the most beautiful (albeit small) city in the world. I used to think people claiming their kid, house, city, country, ... is the best are silly but I do kind of believe this for my city. Obviously this is extremely subjective and you can choose many parameters to try and debate this, but in the end everyone values things differently. I still absolutely love going to the other side of the world, visiting awe inspiring nature or crazy cities like Tokyo, Bangkok or New York and then coming back to my small and well known city. It is the complete opposite and some form of safe haven where I can relax and soak up the beauty of the architecture and my memories here. Picture below (gonna dox myself here but that is fine) from a couple months ago in my home city and there are many well preserved historical spots like it. I'd hate to one day leave and never come back here, despite traveling for months every year already. It's truly part of my identity. Anyway, your post reminded me and made me reflect on this. So thanks for the discussion.

More Terravest and new (well I had before but I reopened) Nintendo and Copart positions. First one 1% of NW, others 0.3-0.4% so obv looking to increase. All with CPNG profits, selling some short term calls into this strength.

You really shouldn't drink so much beer!

The biggest argument for buying BRK currently is simply that it's generally a very good hedge when the market gets frothy and will fare better in a min extended downturn. Esp when you have more capital over time, you get to sleep a lot better having a good chunk in brk, but that's just me.

Bought Terravest on the dip below $120 only to see it's again already $140 today after a few days. Weird stock but I'm not complaining. Bought it around $125 in december but barely had a position so I didn't sell any after a quick run up. Also bought Nintendo around $13, BRK at $472, Adobe sub $250, Domino's around $270 and some CSU. Mostly with some gains from Gitlab and Coupang options, although i'm definitely underwater on some other Gitlab options I bought a while back. Consistently trimming some leverage in favor of stronger laggards as I prefer market fear over whatever the hell this market action is.

Is there anyone who is of the mind that "AI" actually got smarter or at least edged more towards some form of determinism when comparing to say a year ago? It only seems to get better at things where it can lean on more training data and compute, like coding. I've held since years that actual AI is obviously nowhere near reality and I believe the market will grasp this in the coming quarters as well. It's gonna keep doing exceedingly well as a tool when used correctly, but at a financial cost and with the knowledge that you can't let it run freely without supervision or critical thought, as it can't ever actually "think" (despite model bullshit talk obviously claiming otherwise). I'm finally starting to see people around me wake up to the fact that these things just make shit up, lie, pull from untrustworthy sources and simply have serious limitations outside of some areas where it can be very powerful. Good to see this in actual day to day life and not just on Twitter. As the saying goes, buy when the stock doesn't go down anymore on bad news. The story has hopefully reached max pessimism for software companies and new actual developments in the space (versus make believe and hype stories) are likely to taper off further, with each incremental gain to be smaller than the last and showing more and more limits and possible issues as time goes on. I'm really curious to see where we will find an equilibrium for usage versus cost, not only financial but also in terms of people and environment. Especially post subsidizing and peak AI delusions.

Held my nose and bought more GTLB calls and also some BLDR calls aside from common I already held. At least my CPNG calls are turning around slowly and I sold some TEAM leaps a few trading days ago for a quick profit. Especially GTLB I'm scratching my head, but I guess it could always trade below 2 times revenue ex cash?

Bought more CPNG leaps with TEAM profits. Got to love the pain!

Can I pay to give up that thread?

Sold 40% of my TEAM leaps position for around 50% gain just now. No short term tax gains here so always nice.

(Temporary) Bottom ticking with options is a nice job if you can get it.

Yes, it's wild. It's a self-reinforcing echo chamber where people seemingly completely unfamiliar with the inner workings of large, complex, slow-moving businesses spin fairy tales about AI taking over. I reaaaally want to see the first major company overhauling half their internal operations in 2027 or 2028 because they decided to replace something like JIRA (or any other mission-critical infrastructure) in favor of some in-house made, half-assed, non-audited slop for which they have no proper documentation, no external support, no legal accountability and unreliable maintenance costs. Let alone financial players simply replacing COBOL for their mainframes. Not to mention the shitload of people you have to re-train, potential compatibility issues, management career risk, impact on operations and sales, ... It's simply laughable and that would still be true even if you could perfectly code a decent replacement of existing systems and implement them with minimal risk. It's just not going to happen overnight. Have any of these people who believe SaaS is already going to lose a decent chunk of their revenue in the next few years ever actually been inside the departments of these companies working with this software? Do they realize how hard it is even today to get Sally from sales to properly fill in the expense reports? Even if AI suddenly became somewhat capable of deterministic outcomes without real risk of absolute catastrophic faults or hallucinations, you are not going to see any major moves towards these tools for most of the big companies in the next 2-3 years. For this to even happen over the longer term, the actual claims of AI companies still have to come to fruition as well as it currently is still all based on open source knowledge and statistical guesswork with a lot of human intervention to make barely working and half assed projects. There is general expectancy that more data and training of models will keep the evolution (and pace) of AI intact, but the jury is still out. So far, it largely remains make-believe if you ask me. Good tools exist already, but they make up a small part of what makes most successful SaaS companies work. Sure, margins can take a hit as the market rebalances but I don't believe we should expect earthshattering movements for all companies here either. In fact, I believe the current crisis will finally be the push many of these SaaS 1.0 companies need to right the ship in terms of costs bloat, SBC, ...

Absolutely. And we all know what the cure for high prices is...

TEAM and GTLB 2028 leaps. We'll see.

Lol that Citrini piece is pure garbage. Hilarious read tho!

Thanks, RichardGibbons! I bought the first Dungeon Crawler Carl this week as well. Will likely read it soon. Really curious. Love the cover already at least! I've also added Hyperion to the list. Would you recommend starting with book 1? It seems there is a prequel (book 0.5?) named Prayer to Broken Bones?

I'll bump this topic in the hopes of setting my sights on some new must-reads. Some personal reading in the last few months: I've been reading a lot of fiction lately, mainly sci fi. This week I read The Martian by Andy Weir, but I didn't find it as good as Project Hail Mary, which I read a few years ago and will definitely check out in the cinema when it releases. Maybe it's because I saw The Martian first in it's film version and am also not terribly versed in science. Still a very enthralling read! Currently reading Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. Well, I started this afternoon (yay, Sundays!) and am already nearly halfway. Very compelling to just keep reading! Dune and Dune Messiah were amazing a few months ago and I also enjoyed the humor of The Hitchhiker's Guide a lot more than I initially expected. Metro 2033 was great but at times felt more sluggish and I am unsure whether I should read 2034. Opinions? Also read Fight Club (perfect one day read), After Dark (Murakami), City under the Stars (Arthur Clarke) The Road (Cormac McCarthy) and re-read 1984. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was good too and I was positively surprised to see that the films were only loosely based on the initial work. In terms of non-fiction, earlier this month I read Upheaval by Jared Diamond in which he makes some interesting observations but found little earthshattering. His knowledge across domains is impressive nonetheless. Currently reading The Psychology of Money which is ideal to read a chapter in when you're short on time and want some timeless insights and advice. I wonder if I'll like the Art of Spending Money as much. Anyone who has rec's based on the above can always shoot me a line! I've also been eye'ing graphic novels (I'm a sucker for physical copies of books etc already...) but find it daunting to find my preference in terms of style and story. Bought Watchmen among others but I haven't come around to reading it yet. I also hadn't yet read Maus and I found it very decent. Definitely something accessible for younger people that might not have gotten a decent grasp on that part of history. Although books like Man's Search for Meaning are hard to beat in that department, I remember the latter part of the book as slightly harder material to grasp fully as a non-English speaking 20-something.

More CPNG 2028 leaps. Now 3%-ish of net worth. Sure, that's plenty. But I'd have lots that easily if I had 10% of my net worth in the common stock at $34 just a few months ago. Not saying it's the same thing. Just believe in 24 months I'll either sit on some nice profit or I'll have bigger fish to fry portfolio wise!

Agreed. The cure for high prices, is high prices. We'll experience the same kind of glut sooner or later that we had 25 years ago.