prunes

Two more book recommendations: -Wherever you go, there you are -- its author created and was former Executive Director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Very light on the mysticism that you find in some books. -Mindfulness in Plain English (available online here) -- good introduction to Buddhist style meditation. Writte by a Buddhist monk and heavier on the mysticism but good if you can overlook it.

I've been meditating twice a day, every day, since the end of last year. Ray Dalio is one of the wealthier proponents of transcendental meditation . TM costs gobs of money to study these days, so instead I practice a similar (and significantly cheaper) technique. Just wondering if anyone else here does this too. It might be fun to share experiences.

A company that I own is uplisting from OTC to NYSE MKT this Friday. I'm wondering what people's experiences have been using this as a trading strategy (buying in before uplistings and then selling afterwards). Thanks

Would love to trade notes offline if you're interested, IaVT.

To be clear, "all cancers" is not a claim that the company nor I are making. If you have some time and want a good read, check out http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0068561 This is an independently run study of the drug's mechanism of action at the Moffitt Cancer Center. Note that particular study was done on mice. A human study at Moffett is currently underway and the results should be out in the next few months hopefully. Edit: One other article that might be worth reading. This one is by the head of MD Anderson's melanoma unit https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0D003V6RyQqMDBfRTBoWHpsWm0tRHEwbHJTTXhTWmJJRUYw/edit?usp=sharing

My highest conviction idea is an under followed biotech that trades OTC. Ticker is PVCT. I could talk forever about this company and have been following it for quite a long time. I believe that 2014 is going to be a huge year for the company. Quick summary about the company: they have two development-stage drugs. Both are derived from rose bengal, a compound used, among other things, for staining the eye and liver. RB has been used for many decades and is recognized as safe by the medical profession. PV-10 is a purified version of RB. Their other drug, PH-10 is a diluted version of PV-10 suspended in a cream. PV-10 is being tested to treat cancer. The trial data has been promising and there is good reason to think that the drug will ultimately be able to be used on nearly any kind of cancer. The drug is an intralesional--i.e. you inject it--and doing so destroys the tumor you inject the drug into. However, what people are very excited about is that the drug appears also to elicit a immunological response whereby non-injected tumors shrink/ablate as well. Right now the main indication being sought from the FDA is for recurrent melanoma, but there is good reason to think that the drug will be able to be used on nearly any kind of cancer with good results. Additionally, there is good reason to think that PV-10 could be used safely with other immunological drugs like ipilimumab or PD-1 inhibitors due to PV-10's unrelated mechanism of action. Clearly not a Graham or Buffett play. However, I believe the company is significantly undervalued. I wouldn't put all of my cash into it as it is obviously risky, but I believe it to be a very asymmetric play with a good likelihood of playing out favorably.

Even though this is a value oriented board, there are a number of good analysts here. I figure there might be a chance that at least one or two of you cover biotech. I'm following a small cap biotech company that recently met with the FDA (type c meeting). I am interested in getting a copy of the meeting minutes. Management has them but hasn't made them public. I filed a FOIA request but it was denied on account of trade secrets and/or confidential information. I would think though that the FDA could at least redact the sensitive info instead of outright rejecting the request. I'm just wondering if I'm totally wasting my time here and would love to talk to someone who has more experience.

Based on my calculations, if I live to a long long age of 105, I'll consume around 55 cubic meters of drinking water. Take a guess at what that water would cost, in today's dollars. $70, excluding carrying/storage costs Surprisingly cheap. Increasingly in the news, one hears about water shortage problems. But if I wanted to secure a lifetime supply of water for myself, it'd be--financially at least--super easy to do it right now. It'd almost be stupid not to, just to eliminate the risk. The only question is where do you put it. Let's ignore the storage question for now. Water insurance seems like a not completely unrealistic idea. You pay me an annuity, I guarantee you a lifetime supply of water in the future. People can rest assured that they will have access to fresh water.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang/2014/01/26/china-halts-bank-cash-transfers-2/ Anyone familiar with the situation care to come in?

Influence is great. Didn't care for Seeking Wisdom. If you're interested in stoic philosophy, also check out Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. Currently 200 pages into Bleak House by Dickens. Not sure how I feel about it yet.

I have an idea for a business in the health care insurance industry and was hoping to get feedback from some industry insiders. Can you please PM me if you work in the industry?

Tangential question (as someone who has zero knowledge on any of this): what are the relative merits of the one sales strategy versus the other? How does Abrams' strategy weaken the business / Buffett's maintain its strength? I'm guessing that some how selling through Home Depot somehow weakens the brand and trades near-term sales increases in exchange for diminished competitive power in the future? If so, how?

No luck

[amazonsearch]The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal[/amazonsearch] Shot in the dark. Does anyone have a copy of this? If so, would you be willing to let me borrow it? It's $70 for paperback on Amazon and not available at the local library. Also, for those of you who were curious, this is what Taleb has to say about it:

This article is a little old but still relevant. The term convexity vortex is new to me. Love learning about market microstructure stuff like this http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-04/will-mortgage-bonds-enter-the-vortex-.html

You all raise great points. I certainly don't want to misrepresent anyone. In the site's current incarnation, it does imply that someone could have advocated or purchased a security that they did not. The optimal solution therefore has to be more nuanced than what I put together. Unfortunately I don't know if there is a feasible way to do this. Off the top of my head, the following options exist: i) Self reporting ii) Manually checking each thread iii) Some sort of removal feature (although most people don't want to email me asking me to fix things nor am I eager for the administrative burden) iv) There's also the idea of using some sort of weighting mechanism based upon activity within any given thread. I don't know whether that's something that is feasible for me to implement. None of these solutions seem like good ones to me. So I guess I'd put the question back to everyone. Is the project worth salvaging? If so, I'd love for anyone with a programming background to PM me on how they would approach it.

Thanks for all of the kind and constructive feedback guys. @mcliu: Yes, returns currently use the initial posting date as a starting point. @petec: Returns were calculated using Yahoo's adjusted closing prices, which are supposed to account for splits and dividends. @Parsad: The point you raise is correct and I tried to address this in the FAQ. I think it is wrong for someone to interpret these results as providing basis that one person is a better investor than another. Hopefully you guys find some utility to this project this limitation not withstanding. @hellsten: Great suggestions, thanks. Comparing against the S&P appears to be the most frequent ask and should be relatively easy to do. I would love to do textual analysis and/or correlate particular users' activity in particular threads. However, I think this would be difficult to do using a webscraping approach due to the amount of HTTP queries one would have to make. To do this right I would think someone would need access to the existing backend. However if anyone here thinks differently and would like to collaborate please do reach out to me.

A few random facts for you guys: What has been the best performing investment idea? MGIC (7.6x multiple since thread creation) What user has posted the most investment ideas? Viking (22 ideas indexed) What user's investment ideas have performed the best? This is a much more difficult question to answer, and the answer depends upon how you evaluate the question. But, possibly Packer16. ~ I've been working on a webscraper that crawls the board and tracks investment performance. I thought you guys might find this interesting and wanted to share it with the community. It's by no means perfect right now but it's at the point where I feel comfortable showing it to everyone. Depending on how much value the board gets out of it, I will continue to improve it. Note also that I'm not a professional coder. I just do it for fun. I'd love to hear everyone's feedback and whether there are any analyses people would like to see, features people would like added, etc. http://cobff.chrisdrane.com/

A blog post of mine hit the front page of Hacker News today. I think it's the kind of thing you all would enjoy as well. The title of the post is You're Smart. So What? and it is an examination into the value of soft skills. Probably not earth shattering to any of us but if you know of any teens or college students, they might get value out of it. http://blog.chrisdrane.com/?p=49

From Chicago, residing in NYC

Thank you.

I'm trying to track down a Buffett quote where he remarks about how many / most of his peers at Columbia Business School in the 50s went off to work for US Steel. I think I saw it on twitter the other day but now for the life of me I can't find it. Can anyone point me in the direction of the actual quote?

Feel free to reach out to me as well. I used to work in Big4 valuations.

Bass has convexity on his side. He probably isn't 100% right, and he probably isn't 100% wrong. If he's right, he'll do very well. And if he's wrong, hopefully he didn't put up too much of his capital. My guess is that, on a pari mutuel basis, he's got a good trade going.

Thanks for this.