Valuebo

Nitpicking here, but "kankerpiemel" should be written in one word. Maybe that's why? Edit: Nope.

http://www.tijd.be/nieuws/politiek_economie_belgie/Belgie_staat_op_de_rand_van_de_deflatie.9538528-3136.art Sorry, it's in Dutch. Belgian "inflation" at 0.02% in August. Seems more and more likely Prem will be proven right.

There isn't a finite amount of stuff to do. It isn't as if you can say, OK now we have these jobs filled that is it, there is nothing left. Human wants are infinite, thus there will always be more to do. That isn't to say that someone who works 25 years in a factory and loses his job to automation won't be in trouble. At a certain age learning new skills is difficult. And who wants to start over at the bottom in a new industry late in life? Those people will likely remain unemployed, but the next generation will simply learn different skills. This is capitalism's creative destruction and there are always people hurt in the shuffle. It isn't a new phenomenon. There is always change going on...I work in an industry that is likely to have 85% less workers in about 5 years due to software improvements/learning (document review). What is interesting is the people I work with. Most of them are in their very late 20's and early 30's. Most of them still live at home. Most of them are saddled with $100k+ in student loan debt. A significant percentage have $200k+. They all have graduate degrees and are all professionally licensed attorneys. I have a hard time figuring out a good outcome for these people...They make enough to live, and perhaps to pay interest on the loans...but not enough to make a dent vs. the balance due. If these people stay in the legal profession, they simply can't make enough to pay their loans. These people are going to be a "lost generation". The other problem is that it is very rare to get 2,000 hours of work in a year. A more realistic assumption would be around 1,500 hours. This is because we work on a project basis. When the project is over, there is no more need for workers, and you get "benched". There are frequently multiple projects going at the same time, but there are times when nothing is going on (right now). Of course, the better you are, the more work you get. However, only maybe the top 5% are employed 2,000 hours a year. Some of these people went to highly ranked schools too. I work with a Georgetown graduate, Duke, Vanderbilt, University of Michigan...and others. The document review industry employs a lot of people now, but automation & improvements will eliminate a lot of those jobs in a few years. This will add to labor displacement. There is also a problem with off-shoring legal work to India. The ABA has said as long as it is supervised by an a licensed American attorney and the locals are locally licensed, it is OK. Thus, the legal industry has lost a lot of jobs, and it will continue into the future. How many other industries are like this? Quite a lot, I'd imagine. The sad fact is, if you are young and want to be employed you probably should be studying some kind of science or engineering. Maybe medicine or finance would work too. I've told both of my kids this already. Taking out student loans for any other field isn't going to end well. The world is what it is, not what we want it to be. Spending all kinds of money and just hoping it works out isn't a good strategy. I have a degree in Computer Science and spent my first few years out of college programming various systems. Then I realized I loved finance and worked to steer my career into a non-programming direction. Then I had the light bulb moment, I had two skill sets that are unique and combining them would be much better than just one on it's own. So now I have a finance startup. There are things we're doing that a programmer couldn't do without a very deep understanding of specific topic areas. But the power of automation is mind numbing. I can pull back every single bank in the US and value them 5 different ways instantly. In the past the problem was getting data, now it's applying the data. This is where creativity comes into play. It's been fun to work on this stuff and get both sides of my brain working again. I'm no longer 'running' from programming, I've merely embraced it and applied my finance knowledge to it. That's where the power is. I have no idea what to suggest my kids do. Anything my dad suggested I didn't listen to. My friend knows a guy who started covering one song a day on YouTube with his guitar. Then he branched out into writing a song a day and making a video. The guy isn't on MTV or anything, but he has enough of a following that he is living off the ad revenue from YouTube for his full time job. These aren't things colleges are preparing kids for, it's entrepreneurism and creativity combined with whatever natural talents are possessed. Cool stuff. Interesting oddballstocks. Really like the start up and hope you do well! I have a bachelor in finance and am starting a basic .NET programming course in 3 weeks. Classes at night 2 times/week, only a small fee and paid education holiday to study (government pays back my employer). I only know some front end web dev so no idea whether I'll like this. At the very least I'm broadening my general knowledge. Zero risk and at 25 still very easy to do. I could do this annually if wanted, quite a few things to try out! 8) Doing nothing is basically employment suicide over the long run. Sad most don't seem to realize this. Here too (back office in insurance), lots of jobs will disappear in the next 5-20 years. Those that remain will have to shift more and more to an advisory job and focus less and less on administration/input of data. I dare to bet that we'll continue to see technology develop lots of new sectors where jobs will sprout from. It happened in the past and it will happen again. Service jobs will increase as well and I don't see how they generally won't add value. It's simply a matter of broadened living standards and increased wealth that adds all these layers of things that are considered value adding and support the economy. Our economic limit is likely very far out, even if we continue to automate the most mundane daily tasks in our daily and professional lives. Just my 2 cents!

How does CAPE look without 2008-2009?

Hm, I think it's entirely unlikely that you grow your money 100-fold over 10 years. And how do you account for the fact that people that you help now can help other people later? Here is a true compounding effect worth mentioning. ;)

Maybe soon people will start claiming Buffett is wrong again for not buying internet companies like AMZN. They did after all say that in the nineties. That would be like saying that Usain Bolt is not a good athlete because he hasn't run the marathon in under 2:30. He easily could with some practice, but why would he if he is far better in something else? Silly.

On second thought, loosening standards seems unlikely given that most large caps actually aren't overly expensive. Nevermind! :) Haha great picture. I don't think we are even close to that scenario even in Silicon Valley. I'm afraid some might believe they run little danger of losing capital in those hot stocks today because we aren't even close to the 2000 extremes. Compared to those highs the market might never seem expensive again. Lately there is very little respect for mr. Market's mood swings, especially in some sectors. People forget what can happen on the downside if you don't remind them often.

Haha, who knows... :) Yesterday I read that Oaktree bought a position in CRM. At Oakmark they think AMZN is a value stock now because it is cheap based on sales. I guess such things happen if you have many billions under management but still. Maybe they are right, I don't know. Or maybe they are loosening their standards to find enough stock picks? Just guessing. Whatever happens; I doubt we'll be very surprised with the end result.

Well, this topic is about the long term. Long term means 5+, ideally 10+ years to me. For the TS, it was a minimum of 3-5 years. Maybe it's a shorter time frame for you guys, that's ok. You're returns will be much smaller with IBM than if you buy and sell various undervalued small caps over that "long term" time span but that was not how I understood the question personally. I'm not really capable of picking small caps and not looking at them for 5+ years so if I had to do it, I would lean towards IBM as a 70 cent dollar, forgoing some return but keeping my sleep. While large caps get less mispriced than small caps, I think they can still offer decent potential if your goal is simply buying and forgetting. edit: That being said and after thinking about it a bit more, maybe I should go with the JPM warrants. ;) Btw, my personal portfolio mainly consists of small caps. ;)

I'm totally the opposite. I feel like by starting out with the set of names a guy like Buffett has been interested in, I'll have a less polluted lake to swim in. It doesn't seem like a good idea to me to ignore his behavior and instead look over every stock in the market and only go with the names that I think are best (instead of peeking at the list of stocks that a few shrewd investors own). I'm aware of his experience and wisdom and... more importantly, mine! Totally agree. If there is one thing I have learned the last few years it's to rely more on others and less on myself when it comes to generating ideas. That being said and to get back on topic: IBM This topic is about "the long-term" and I think IBM will be there, at least in the next 10-20 years. Long term I believe safety is more important than immediate return, otherwise I would vote Intralot/FNMA or another one with a good option-like kicker. I especially like IBM because Palantir believes it's almost a good short. 8)

Nope you can't buy those through IB either. I was just wondering whether I could buy the hyundai and samsung preferreds through IB, I don't know. :)

Might be possible to buy those but I mean other south korean stocks aside from those two. I'm not sure I can buy those two through IB either.

Hi Phil. Can you also buy South-Korean stocks through ING? I recently inquired to buy them through ING Belgium (and BNP and a few others) but they weren't able to buy individual stocks for me. :(

That's more names than I have in my portfolio. :D Must say plenty of stocks have gotten cheaper quickly these last few days. AIQ, LRE, Fiat, GM, JPM, IBM, Intralot, .. for those that I follow closely. Let's hope the European correction blows over!

Everything here: http://new.bradjlamb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Condo-Millionaire-Toronto-MM040414.pdf Of course, this guy is getting wealthy on it. I hope he doesn't believe his own BS.

I guess it really isn't enough. Inflation at 0.4% http://online.wsj.com/articles/euro-zone-inflation-jobless-rates-fall-1406797310

Correct. Do most here believe that a correction is unlikely to happen because there is a lot of talk about corrections/overvaluation out there? I'm sure there was a lot of talk about a possible correction by mid 1936 as well (and many likely have predicted it publicly) yet the correction in 1937 happened nonetheless.

It's for charity and I wouldn't underestimate the value of all the publicity those guys got ...

Haha I saw that as well. To the guy of UBS: "Oooh patience! It's been 5 and a half years. Japan got patience. Woopedidoo!" It sure would be funny to see him proven right, if only to get more of those videos. :D

With quotes you can easily prove your point yet they can be countered by another quote just as easily: "Good things take time and effort. Nothing good in life is effortless." etc It's not Munger's style to short, which is fine. That doesn't mean you definitely shouldn't do it. What is very irritating for one person might be manageable for another. I guess it would be hard to pinpoint the level of general shorting that would be right for the market. Meaning the point at which the market shows a healthy scepticism and does indeed climb a wall of worry. All the articles tell us is that negativism has rarely been so low in recent times, despite valuations being higher than average. It's simply another good sentiment meter. I don't get your last assumption. If anything, the numbers show that most investors simply aren't worried about a repeat (or a simple correction for that matter). As for myself, I personally wouldn't own leaps and three debt leveraged companies if I was fighting the last war. :) You are partly right but it is not that simply. I have to be able to buy them for one. For example, I can't buy the Korean ideas Packer blesses us with, even if I wanted to pay a 1.5% commission with a minimum of 100€/trade. It can't be done. I also require an upside of at least 60-100% unless I can get a safer security leveraged through leaps. Good management, decent business, at least a decent understanding of the sector and business, ... I am also trying very hard to simply avoid (possible) traps like SHLD, EBIX, ... I'm not smart enough to know where they will end up. If there is any doubt, I'll look elsewhere. How many remain?

What about Russian stocks? or Greek stocks? I own a good chunck of Intralot. Took a while but the recent price drop got me in. :) Don't own anything European otherwise but run a very concentrated portfolio. My full portfolio is GNCMA (biggest position), AIQ (trade this one a lot but hold a main position), Intralot, IBM leaps, CRM short and short options and WDAY short (also trade around them). That's it. I am looking to add the JPM warrants but hope to pick them up at $15-16 some day. At that point I think it could return 100% in 2 years or 200% in 4 years. I like that the warrants adjust and it will be hard to lose money on them over 4 years, a good leveraged bet.

Not to mention that most new ideas on this forum nowadays start with "I found this company but don't have time/don't know the business, what do you guys think?". Not that I am a big contributor of new ideas but it shows the lack of lots of attractive ideas. I see myself opportunistically buying and selling some main holdings to lock in some return, other than there isn't all that much to do.

Funny how history rhymes... http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b5445190-069c-11e4-8c0e-00144feab7de.html http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/talking-numbers/even-hedge-funds-have-stopped-betting-against-this-rally-212933500.html Anyone else highly short versus his longs? I have been for a couple of months now both through general shorting and options. Must admit that it is harder to go against the crowd on the short side than on the long side.

Don't come here with your negative energy please. "There is always something to do" as Peter Cundill, a fellow value investor, would say. Please read the above post. YOU TOO can learn to read the market signs.

I'm picking up a lot of interesting signals here Kraven, thank you. I believe I have solved the market code through [move]behavioral and technical analysis and a combination of astrology and ufology.[/move] Allow me to demonstrate only a small part of my abilities by analysing your post and other signals I have recently picked up. ;) ;) ;) That's right: "Eddie and Munger the hippie can continue to do 15% a year in perpetuity." Of what is Lampert a chairman? Sears. 5 letters. Of what was Munger a chairman? Wesco. 5 letters. Boom! Not convinced? LOL. Ok... 8) What day are we today? That's right, it's Wednesday. Ring any bells? W(ednes)day? W(ed)day? WDAY? Mind "ed" in the word Wednesday, a very clear wink to Eddie Lampert. Did you also notice that the 5th letter in Wednesday is "e", just like in Munger?! What is Wday's stock price this fine Wednesday? $90. How old is Munger? ... Do I have to continue? This all shows they will announce my long awaited merger between Sears and Wday sometime today, or possibly another Wednesday in the near future. It all adds up. At this time I cannot show you my research on ufology and astrology that shows more clear signs of the prospective merger because it would reveal too many of my trading secrets. I'm sure a fine man like yourself can understand that. ;) :D ;D ;D As Munger himself would say: "Invert, always Invert.". I know he would be proud of us, true value investors, if he were to ever read our analysis. Keep it up guys! Disclosure: 146% long with short term options on $WDAY. 8) 8) 8) YOLO.