UhuruPeak

about 20% (I historically have been tracking from March to March to coincide with Tax season; this is the first year I look at year's end). What helped was the huge run-up in Gold/Silver; what hurt was the huge crash in Silver, when I lost probably 40% of my financial assets (in 4 days when silver went from $50 to sub-$40 in early May and leverage bit me hard). A lot (a lot!) of activity during the last 6 months for a meager 10-12% increase. All in all a decent absolute performance but terrible investing/trading grade for me!

Thanks for the detailed answer. Note that Abe Wagner (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Abe-Wagner/94817528667) is also a pro MMA fighter, and his diet follows Mark Sisson's advice; I think we can probably find examples and counter-examples for just about any diet if we really look hard enough :) Twice I've gone nearly 100% meat/eggs/fish for a few days and twice I felt better when adding some veggies/fruits back in. I actually started watching that movie you mention last week-end but stopped when I heard the slant against meats - I guess I'm not ready for that :) I want to continue experimenting with the high fat / fairly high protein / low car diet until I see the results from my bloodwork at the very least. I value your opinion highly however and understand you are farther into the healthy eating journey than I am, so will keep your experience and beliefs in mind as I keep learning how my own body responds to diet. Thank you

Late response and out of turn, apologies if others already jumped in to answer this question. France has free education for university, engineering school but it can be quite expensive (relative to the average household income) in business schools. University is very hard because the kids are left alone, there's a lot of attrition during the first 2 or 3 years; I believe it gets pretty good for anyone sticking with it a bit longer however, and you can go up to PhD level (or MD, JD equivalents) for free. Unless you have one of these professional degrees however, perspectives after a University degree aren't very good, companies like engineers better typically. These schools are often free but not always, and French engineers are well respected outside of France as well as inside. Now, even assuming this all is free doesn't mean kids have equal chances - sons and daugthers of professionals & teachers do significantly better than others on average. I'd think the German system is superior in that sense, with any kid able to chose a field of his/her choosing and opportunities real & well remunerated even after trade school. In both countries, one of the downside is that students do not have much sense of urgency so they can end up costing a pretty penny to the tax payers.

I guess I'm still not sure why you cut the meat? What's wrong with it if organic + grass fed/finished? Btw - agreed on Taubes not dissing carbs per se; the Jaminets (perfect health diet) and even Sisson (Mark's daily apple) don't either. I'm probably around 100 grams of carb / day on average, but above all I cut the bread/pasta/rice + most sugar & usually try to limit high glycemic fruits & milk - so I do mostly meat/fish more because I lift (heavy) weights than because I think that's the only thing I'm allowed.

Ericopoly, I haven't been following the blog in a little while, so bear with me if you already answered that one at length. Back a few months ago, you seemed very much into Taubes (GCBC, Why we get fat), and with great results if I recall (allergies, weight loss, perspiration, sleep); I purchased & read both books, and have spent countless hours reading Mark Sisson, perfecthealthdiet (Paul Jaminet) and others, which all advocate the same general food philosophy. Yet a day or two ago, you wrote on this thread that your family moved to (near-)vegan for health reasons. What specifically triggered the decision? PS: I had blood work done a couple of weeks before I changed my diet last January, and will have one done in a week so I'll be able to see how my own body reacts to more meat / less carbs - but I am very curious about your own example.

Re. silver, "either you get it or you don't" :) there have been numerous discussions on this board, and many here have no interest in this sector, which I am totally fine with. My first purchase was at $5.5 I think, and silver is now ~$35. I believe the next couple of months are going to be like fireworks, hence my decision to forgo any diversification and go all-in in silver (AQG, a fund doubling the moves of the metal) and silver miners (SIL, an index). In the process, I have sold every thing else, including gold miners (GDXJ) and a 4th (tiny tiny) position I had, Strathmore Minerals. I can't tell you about fundamentals, but I can tell you about 'Old Turkey' from "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" of Jesse Livermore fame: it is a bull market you know Uccmal, I'll check the SSW thread, thx

Funny - looks like a number of us have been selling in the last few days. I exited SSW last week and sold out of FBK today. I may end up regretting it, or may be not - we shall see PS: all cash will be reinvested in Silver / Silver miners w/in the next few days as I expect a pullback there. Not trying to convince anyone that what I'm doing is the right thing for every one, please don't shoot bullets at me - just disclosing the reason I'm selling two pretty good investments.... which I may rejoin in a couple of months. btw - Uccmal, do you really think SSW will increase the dividend when they still appear hell bent on acquiring yet more ships? I'm curious, the thought hadn't crossed my mind

Congratulations on a nice trade. You feel it is close to fully valued, it is ok to sell; at worse you left some profit for the next guy. Turn around and find something else that sells for $0.20 or $0.50, rinse and repeat.

I was thinking the exact same thing :P

<IV, thx so much! I had looked for it but didn't find on the WSJ site

I don't think that's right. You need to calculate the terminal value and then apply the discount. Your 18% is going to be compounded every year

Congratulations!

I hate you guys - because of this thread, I've been drinking my black coffee w/o sugar and it is just no as good :( As for the following... This thread 'part en couilles' as the French would say. Not gonna translate to English lest young eyes read it

If oil goes too high, it will lead to a recession which will slow inflation & drop oil prices back down; no such thing w/ gold/silver

Thx. I hadn't read him in a few quarters, but it is always a pleasure - and this particular letter is probably the best I've seen in a long time, by anyone. Conceptually not much new to most of us here on this board, but always good to be reminded of how bubbles go up and down. Going on a tangent now... I don't think that playing these trends is not necessarily doing Technical Analysis, but rather behavioral investing. Indeed, this is by far the most important reason why I'm still heavily long gold/silver in spite of being in it since 2003 already. I won't convince anyone here I'm afraid. No, I am no gold bug - merely someone who got lucky to figure out early that a new long-term trend was forming and jumped on the bandwagon. I figure we still have this current intermediate cycle plus probably another one. This is the Shumpeterian K-trend, 17 yrs up + 17 yrs down or whatever the number of years it is. You just need one great investing decision every decade to do very very well. But what goes up will come down, gold/silver will eventually crash and stocks indexes will then do great again.

Yes, saw this - again, underwriting is very impressive yes, 50% of (current) market cap over the past 5 years just in dividends, impressive indeed Well... forget about Berkshire, the stock hasn't done anything in a few years. Where was FFH at 5 years ago? Even with the 50% dividend out by RLI over the last 5 years, FFH's stock did much better; I'm not a 'hold forever' kind of guy, I buy and sell stock

The underwriting is amazing, and the company is cheap on a P/E basis + decent dividend yield (I'll ignore the $7 special dividend last month). In times of such low interest rates and considering their large bond portfolio (>5x the equity one) however, why would I want to buy a company that will face such head wind?

... but credit him for jumping on the bandwagon; the next big test will be whether Sprott and others (and yours truly) manager to hop off it on time. Till then, why don't you assume that he jumped on commodities by skill rather than luck?

thx twa

Thanks for the link! it is inspiring indeed

Traders count 7% average loss when deciding how much power to procure

Nice! :D

Since we have been talking about expected rate of return & such lately, I figured I'd start looking way ahead and wonder how I'd ever be able to retire before 60 or 65 or whatever, assuming I had enough in retirement (tax deferred) savings such as IRAs. As it happens (and mentioned in passing a couple of times here), I've done pretty average on my taxable account but pretty good on my tax deferred so the only way I'd ever be able to retire early would be to dip in my tax deferred accounts... but I'd rather avoid the 10% penalty if possible, obviously :) I am based in the US obviously. I just looked-up this SEPP thing, it looks like we can actually withdraw monies from an IRA before age 59 1/2 without the 10% extra penalty if done through a SEPP: 3 different methods, at least 5 years... has anyone on the board done this? ERICOPOLY? Again - I am not close to having that problem in front of me, but hopeful to be faced with that question in the future. It also has implications of where I'd want to put new money saved between now and then. And by the way... isn't IRA money off limits to lawsuits and gold diggers? that could be an added benefit. I guess I'd really have to talk to an Attorney for that one though.

"rookie" mistakes probably never completely stop. You know, starting at the top is actually a great thing since you get to make your biggest mistakes before you have too much to lose. I consider that $$ lost 10yrs ago a pretty decent investment overall; learning the same thing now would cost me significantly more. Besides... it looks to me like you're not doing that bad yourself anyway ;)

Quote from Broxburnboy on other thread, my response is more applicable to this one Quote from: broxburnboy on Today at 05:39:31 AM I made all my rookie market failures when I was young and resilient.. did the churning, the gambling with options, the follow the herd and paid the price early Same here; my initial investment in the stock market (a number of years ago) went to $0.00; yup, I lost it all, over the course of a few months: - started at the wrong time (Feb/March 2000, please don't laugh) - invested in the wrong area (small High Tech, please don't laugh) - didn't listen to my inner beliefs: though trained and wired to do fundamental analysis, I focused on mo-mo and used Technical Analysis but didn't even trust what I read in the charts and invested long anyway. Fwiw, I actually would have been able to make money in TA if only I had used a proper structure and didn't override my understanding of the charts constantly; I remain convinced it is possible to make money w/ TA, I'm just not strong enough to do it consistently - when I started losing too much, I used options - when I started losing too much, I used very short-dated options that would swing 30 or 50% a day, trying to both time the market and do quick intra-day round trips (please don't laugh) - at some point the trading fees finished me off and brought my account to just a few bucks, until I gave up and let the inactivity fees complete the wipe out - somewhere at some broker, I may still have an account, I don't even bother checking this, lol! Just like many on this board though, I licked my wounds and learned my lessons. For one, I stopped all "investing" for a few years and read everything I could find instead. My first stock was BRK, I found a couple of good investing boards, kept learning... I am happy to report that I've been doing better since then Cheesy