Liberty

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-06/-flash-boys-programmer-in-goldman-theft-has-charges-tossed-out-ibrz5tyj ‘Flash Boys’ Programmer in Goldman Case Prevails Second Time

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-06/buffett-s-kraft-heinz-bet-valued-at-24-billion-in-debut

Happy birthday! Hope you are having a great one, and thanks for all that you do for this community! :)

Happy 4th to those in the U.S., have a good one! Careful with the fireworks. 8)

Well, maybe I'm easily impressed, but a 30-year-old founder of a company valued at 10bn by savvy investors like Larry Ellison, who built a business in a very tough and technical field, where large incumbent companies tend to dominate, and who wants to make hundreds of blood tests available in Walgreens and other drugstores to regular people for a few bucks impresses me. I wasn't seeing anyone else doing that quite yet, but maybe I missed it. We're likely talking passed each other, and it's probably my fault. You were probably just looking for more evidence of what Theranos is doing better than others, while I pattern-matched some of what you said and probably read too much into it (being "baffled", the "she's pretty.. but.." comment, "what's groundbreaking?", etc). I apologize for being a bit defensive. I also hope to learn more about Theranos. Maybe someday they IPO and we can learn more about what's going on in there. The recent press blitz certainly could be the an early step to going public.

Nice menu! https://www.theranos.com/test-menu

i think this is a good start on validity of the claims. the company got recently got some FDA approvals for their system and hiv tests https://fortune.com/2015/07/02/theranos-fda-approval/ OK I really don't get what is the big deal. With HIV testing there are now at home tests using saliva that can give results in 15min. How is theranos groundbreaking? As for hepatitus and herpes, others also offer at home test kits. Seems like to me when they run out of new sexy ideas to tout in the financial community like internet backbone they take an plain vanilla idea and sell some small improvement as out of this world.... I know she is pretty and has an IQ of 180 but I baffled how she can be worth $5B. So you know nothing about the company (which was in stealth mode until recently so very little is known about it), but your are baffled by how it can be worth a lot? I know little too, but it's not too hard to imagine that its tests can be significantly better (faster, cheaper, more varied, lower false positives, based on patented tech that is defensible for a while, whatever), and that this could be worth a lot of money. You don't need something entirely "new" to build a valuable business and improve things. The iPhone was far from the first smartphone, the Model S isn't the first EV. I think the rational position is to say that you need more information to make up your mind, not to try to pooh pooh her company and its technology. I don't know yet if Theranos is the Apple or Tesla of its field, but what I've seen so far is impressive.

ZeroHedge has been a perma bear and has successfully predicted 10 out of the last one crisis in the past decade. :) ZeroHedge has probably lost more people more money than most financial sites out there. Opportunity cost is real.

+ 1 ..they deserve the success and more, though the likes of holmes and musk dont seem to driven by the money. who would really work 7 days a week for 10+ years for an extra billion ? Exactly. I think it's probably really rare to become a billionaire if you are driven by money, because rather quickly you have more money than you can spend and if you don't find the work itself fascinating and rewarding, and if you don't have goals on the horizon that are more motivating than "one more billion", you probably won't continue. I'm sure there are exceptions, though.

Still progressing slowly through the book. Less exciting than I expected, but maybe it'll get better... Wrote some thoughts about it on Twitter. I'll just cut & paste them here, sorry about the reverse chronological order (start at the bottom): http://i.imgur.com/qlXeFuj.png

I think Larry Elison is probably a pretty shrewd and smart investor, and maybe the ultimate value of the company will be shown to be a little up or a little down, but I doubt money's being put in at 10bn and it's actually worth 500m or whatever. So maybe her current net worth is really 4bn instead of 5, but it cuts both ways. If the company really is as good as they say, and really is growing fast, maybe her net worth in a year or two will be much higher than the 5bn quoted now. If the economics of the business are really good, maybe an IPO would actually make valuations go up rather than down. But as I said, a billion here or there isn't what really matters to me. I'm just glad to see young entrepreneurs tackling really hard problems that can make the world a better place, rather than all follow the bandwagon and do things that if they were hit by a bus, someone else would do the exact same thing 10 minutes later (one more messaging app, etc).

I know that, but isn't Theranos a private startup still? With presumably very little sales? So this is your typical private equity pie in the sky valuation? again.... i am just trying to get the facts...... The facts are that this is a private business, so there isn't a minute-by-minute quote available, but so far VCs who are putting their own money in seem to think it's pretty valuable. But most importantly, I think the technology seems very impressive, and that's what impresses me most about Holmes. I also don't care how much profit SpaceX is making right now, but I care what they're doing on the tech side, and I know that if they keep being successful, they'll be very valuable.

For those looking to find out more about Holmes, this New Yorker piece should be of interest: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler Wikipedia also has a decent overview. Starting her medical business at 19. Very impressive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes Here's a tedMED talk by her: http://www.tedmed.com/talks/show?id=309114 http://www.inc.com/larry-kim/the-unusual-business-strategy-that-made-this-woman-a-multi-billionaire.html

Impressive entrepreneur indeed. Some people are just incredibly productive.

long term buy & hold isn't the only viable strategy. It also depends how much time you spend on investing-related things. If I spent a couple hours a month on investing, I'd probably never check stock prices. But currently I spend tens of hours per week on it, so that makes it harder to resist temptation.

Tjeez, old geezer is more like it... Age is not just about numbers :) As Stephen King said, I have the heart of a small boy... ...and I keep it in a jar on my desk. :-X

A couple things for me: I partly justify the more frequent checking because I'm young (33) and still accumulating, and still expanding my circle of competence. So I want to be able to jump on opportunities and check new things frequently... But that's not a really good reason because I could get most of the same result without the frequent checking of price action. The reason to avoid it, IMO, comes down to human psychology. It's been shown that we have all kinds of biases that are exacerbated by constantly looking at something, even something random (we do pattern matching, anchoring, loss aversion, etc), and our willpower is limited and can be depleted, especially when we get emotional. Looking at stocks requires the expansion of mental energy (at least for me, maybe it's totally frictionless for others), and it's not a really productive use of that energy most of the time, IMO. But I also find it satisfying, so it's hard to just give up completely...

Too much. My ideal would be to do something like Guy Spiers and check extremely infrequently and never input my trades when the market is open, that kind of stuff. But I don't have the discipline for that yet. I hope to get there someday.

Oh, and it was also Elon Musk's birthday. Probably not a very happy one...

Very sad. But it's impossible to do something this hard while pushing forward so many parts of the tech without accidents. They've been through worse before... I just feel really bad for everybody who worked on this launch for so long. Must be a really bad moment to go through.

Here's how I look at it. How many people read and post on this forum? Probably hundreds of regulars, and many hundred more occasional posters, and then thousands of lurkers, right? Let's say that 99% of people are super diligent and double-check everything. You'll still have a few handful of people at any time asking questions that are answered 2 posts above or that have missed something. Heck, even if 100% of people are super diligent, even diligent people make mistakes or have bad days. I think it's fine to want to improve things, and we should all strive to do better, but it's not worth becoming angry and calling people names. This is impossible to avoid with scale. 1% of people being annoying in a 35-people community and 1% in a 1000-people community might not feel the same because our brains can't keep track of large number of people and we always measure against whatever our limit is (many say about 150) so it seems like a larger percentage, but it isn't.

Can you explain your thinking behind your view that BRK is as oversold now as in 2009/2011? Thanks. BRK is now as oversold as it was in 2009 and 2011 on the multi-day money flow index, a good long term contrarian indicator how much capital flows in and out of a stock. Often times, this happens in a later stage of the bull market when a stock after a strong up movement becomes highly oversold after a 6 month consolidation or correction period, only to use this as a springboard for a rapid move upwards. BRK/B is definitely not as undervalued as it was in 2009 or 2011, but is still reasonably priced, with an intrinsic value around $167 per share. It should be noted that the p/b ratio becomes increasingly less relevant, since the percentage of BRK/B's free cash flow derived from non-insurance operations grows rapidly and will continue to do so in the future, so that using a 1.2x p/b multiple yardstick will cause many lost opportunities to buy the stock cheaply, as that particular ratio will only be reached during severe market distress. Thanks. The word "oversold" can mean many things, so I wanted to know which one you meant. Cheers.

Awesome, congrats Keith!

Can you explain your thinking behind your view that BRK is as oversold now as in 2009/2011? Thanks.

Started reading this recently. About 85 pages in. Good, but I dislike how Zuckerman repeats a lot of things 3-4 times... Hopefully that tendency doesn't last through the whole book.