merkhet

I reckon I'm probably just in a crotchety old man mood today, but I feel like a lot of the complaints that people have levied at the site is that sometimes there are threads that get long, and you have to read through the WHOLE DARN THING to get information. Cry me a river. It's like asking for Spark Notes for the 10-K. Tough shit. Read the whole damn thread. You want to get caught up with a company that has a 100+ page thread? Read page 1. Then read the page right after it until there are no more pages left. There are greater tragedies in life than having to spend a couple hours reading what a bunch of pretty bright people have written... (It's also possible that in my befuddlement I'm confusing this with something that was posted on the Sears thread about there being too much to read...) I stand by my previous comment. It ain't broke.

If it ain't broke...

I read the following: WSJ FT (occasionally) Fortune Economist I would say that I have historically gotten the most out of Fortune. I bought into Bank of America after reading a particularly great interview with Brian Moynihan (something like "Can this man save Bank of America?") and I became comfortable investing in Fiat last summer when I recalled a Fortune interview with Sergio Marchionne entitled "Chrysler's Speed Merchant."

lol +1

That was a brutal game. Poor Manning.

I second this. I've read pretty much everything I could find by him. He's quite amazing.

My answer was to suffer for a while and use my savings.

Is the GP definitely the same?

Does that mean that the fund has to file now that it's over $150 million?

I agree with Heiko -- I'm not sure ETFs means crowded competitors -- perhaps it's just shifting mutual fund owners to ETF owners. Maybe if the total number of people investing in equity vehicles is increasing...

Anyone know why the digital version is only compatible with Windows? Is there any chance they're wrong and that it can also be viewed on Mac? I'd love to start subscribing to OID, but I have a Mac.

The lack of finance backgrounds is likely a driving reason for the board's outperformance. Bachelors in Mathematics & Neurobiology. Former corporate lawyer.

Said the turkey to the farmer. :P I actually agree with most of what you said, but let's not forget that technology adoption does not filter to everyone equally. Again, you are likely to be able to extract significant value from emerging markets that have to depend on older technology.

I have a feeling that this will be a long discussion purely because I think you have strongly held views, which tends to lead to long discussions. Disclaimer that I will be drunk in approximately 2 hours because there is a NCAA Championship game tonight, so if I come back on here to respond to your response, I may be nonsensical. Though you may think I'm nonsensical now. :P I don't think I ever said oil would be the MOST important commodity. Explain to me why this is crucial to consider. There are some strategic reserves in combination with some private reserves. Query to you. How likely do you think it will be for Lukoil or CNOOC to drill on American soil? (Think CNOOC & Unocal.) Well, Americans in that case would be the only ones with a functioning transportation system, so... it would benefit them greatly. Think about it in terms of food. Substitute oil for food. Fill your car up with natural gas lately? If I had all the food, would you suddenly substitute rocks for protein? Again, you're not thinking probabilistically. In one future, it will benefit Americans greatly. In another future, maybe not so much. I think whether you think it's the height of stupidity depends on a number of factors: (1) The speed at which each individual economy can develop their substitutes (2) Whether you can still extract a pound of flesh from emerging markets long after you have substitutes (3) How important you think the oil is to our country's survival in short-, medium- and long-term (4) etc.

It is equally baffling the certainty with which you present our ability to invent our way out of trouble. Think about it from the point of view of a person taking on a lot of future liabilities from a loan shark. On the one hand, it may be likely that one's income grows to make sure that those future liabilities are not a problem. After all, you still have your knees. On the other hand, this does not mean that prudence and conservation of existing assets for the payment of those future liabilities all of a sudden becomes silly. When you are a monopoly owner of assets, then... well, good things happen to you via value extraction from the other people. I don't remember which thread had the quote from Howard Marks saying that we need to think in terms of probabilities. There is some probability X that we develop sustainable new energy sources and some probability Y=(1-X) that we do not. Thus, a probability tree is formed. In the X world, we must remember that oil is also used in such things as plastics, which are fairly important to industry so even if we suddenly removed the 2/3 dependency for transport, it's not as if the oil suddenly becomes useless -- much in the same way that a put option expiring in January 2014 is not useless to its holder for the duration purely because it has lost value. In the Y world, things are obvious. FWIW, I think you're both right that there's a likelihood that we find something else before oil runs out. (Notably, I do not think this because of past history, but that distinction is negligible.) Let me flip this and invert it. (A Munger favorite.) Would you both be in favor of using every last drop of our oil over the next 12 months? I suspect the answer is no.

The very definition of cursory, in fact. There is some survivorship bias in your statement.

To each their own -- I just know it's not for me. I find great benefit to being able to stare at a large down move in one of my investments and test my conviction and my mettle. When I took the LSAT a decade ago, I took two practice exams a day for ten days preceding my actual test date. The actual test day was a bit of a breeze as my thought was "this is nothing I haven't seen before." I have a similar approach to not finding too much value in avoiding, what in my opinion are largely unavoidable, large downward movements in price. So I guess if one could consistently avoid large down moves (100%) with those "theories," then there would be some merit to learning them. I suspect that El Dorado does not exist. As in many things in life, it's highly likely that outsized return comes at the expense of some initial measure of hardship and sacrifice.

I tried to read that article, but I started to vomit when he began talking about Dow Theory and had to stop.

That they were really undervalued. :) Totally possible, but how many simply followed the few great investors that really recognized this? Hypothetical; lets say you had a group of people who simply copied Buffett a couple of decades ago. They would have outperformed, and you probably should give them some credit for choosing to follow Buffett. But it would be really one guy that would have been the great investor, not the group of followers (imo). So how many great investors versus followers are there on this board? I think the board, collectively, has had this conversation a few times already -- but there is a difference between (1) seeing that someone else has bought something and buying it based on that alone and (2) seeing that someone else has bought something and buying it after doing your own research to see if you understand it and agree with the valuation. It is difficult on results alone to say who falls into which camp.

That they were really undervalued. :)

I wholeheartedly agree with the last ten posts or so. For myself, I know that my 100%+ returns this year were a combination of fundamentally cheap stocks and really good timing on entering and exiting certain positions. (If I had held MBIA past the week of the settlement, my returns would have been materially lower.) This is unlikely to repeat in 2014. Also, I suspect that the average retail investor will be quite envious of the 30%+ move in the markets, and they're liking having quite a bit of FOMO. I would expect them to start wading back in soon, and that's as good a contrarian signal as anything else. As Mr. Buffett says, "the less prudence with which others conduct their affairs, the more prudence with which we must conduct ours." I thought the exact same thing when I saw those threads pop up! My spidey-sense was tingling. The only caveat to my increasing levels of fear is the fact that the economy may actually be picking up steam for the first time in the last five years...

I think GNP is about $17 trillion or so, and it would knock the calculation down to 114% or so. Not a huge difference.

Now that I've read this a few times, I think that Professor Epstein's view of the case is extremely colored by normative beliefs as opposed to the actual legal positioning. It's clear that he finds the entire 2008 situation and the 2012 Amendment reprehensible on a basic level (as do many of our posters here), but it looks as if even he's softening a little in respect to his position on the cases. There's a perfect example of what I mean on page 6: Notably, this seems to be a bit of an about face in what he was saying at the earlier conference at NYU where he said that these were "winning cases" or something to that effect. If memory serves me correctly, one of the panelists says "You have a pretty good case on [whatever]." and Epstein replies "A winning case." to some laughter in the audience. This was fairly interesting to me given that the balance of the court has shifted slightly to the right in the last few years (though I can't seem to find the Winship case that he's referencing to figure out which remaining Justices voted which way...) It's also notable to me that basically if the government loses in the lower courts, it's likely not going to be resolved until it gets all the way to the Supreme Court -- which is a good way to gauge a timeline for this stuff...

I just started reading the transcript, and I realized what bothers me slightly about Epstein. When it comes to law professors (especially at the top schools) there is a strong sense of "The World According to (insert professor name here)" -- where they've spent their entire academic life "branding" themselves with a particular framework approach to [Con Law/Property/IP/etc.] -- and they are flabbergasted that others cannot see their brilliance. This then leads them to also be flabbergasted if and when certain court rulings go against them. I have a sense that Epstein falls in this category.

It's back up again -- attached in case anyone else ran into the same problem I did... Richard+Epstein+-+Transcript.pdf