Liberty

I kind of like the look of that one, unlike the chariot thing at the top of this thread. As for what it's worth, well, whatever the next guy is ready to pay for it. Not my game.

+1. Not a shareholder of CSU (unfortunately), but Leonard is incredible. Just skimmed through a few years of annual letters. Wow, WOW, WOW This guy is the real deal. Shockingly good. I have some experience in software and am not easily impressed. He is impressive. (I'm sorry that I did not know about him 10 years ago and that he is looking to reduce his involvement in the company. I had exactly the same opinion. This is how to run a company. OK, so I'm gonna invert and prod people a bit: how come almost nobody from CoBF knew this company and/or invested a significant amount of money into it? If this is the best thing since the second coming of Buffett :D , how come this was mentioned only when it got to 10B market cap? If we missed this one, what other great small companies are we missing right now? What should we do to discover next CSU.to on time and not 10 years (or 2 years - that cost 4x return) too late? Thoughts? I've been invested in CSU for a while and it's my second biggest position, I just don't discuss all my investments. My #1 position has also never been mentioned here and it's 20% of my portfolio. Maybe someday I'll post about it. The problem with "discovering the next one early" is that when someone posts about it, people say it doesn't have the track record yet, and it's likely to look expensive anyway if it's growing very fast when small. Maybe the next one is already posted on the investment forum in a thread with no or few replies, buried on page 18... That's how it works. By the time there's the track record to convince people, many will say that it's too late.

I remember A Walk in the Woods being fun. Good pick. I recently saw the Reese Witherspoon movie where she walks the Pacific Trail, and it reminded me a bit of it.

Don't know about god, but he seems to be good at what he's doing. http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.ca/2015/06/jamie-dimon-for-dummies.html http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.ca/search/label/JPM

You're taking it out of context. He means that when this topic is usually covered, it is badly covered, so you can ignore the media's alarms about record margin debt because they are looking at the absolute numbers, which you can't parse properly on their own. Unless you think that relative margin debt should go down as the market goes up over time. Otherwise, today's nominal margin debt must be just crazy compared to the nominal amount in 1980...

Relative margin debt: http://econompicdata.blogspot.ca/2015/06/ignore-margin-debt-alarm.html (thanks Bluegrass Capital)

Amen!

Ok. Didn't make sense to me because I didn't read the whole article. Thanks for clarifying.

I just read the intro, so I could be missing something, but on average, all introverts vs all extroverts, the premise is probably correct. Recipe for being rich: 1. Think a lot 2. Judge people while doing it 3. Tell everyone along the way 4. $$$ I have no idea what your post means.

"How do you internalize what you read?" I mostly don't, probably, and that's sad to think about...

I just read the intro, so I could be missing something, but on average, all introverts vs all extroverts, the premise is probably correct.

Innerscorecard, what markets are you referring to where valuation is higher? There are 60,000 stocks that a North American investor can invest. There are always pockets of cheap stocks: eg., HongKong, Russia, Greece, many stocks in these areas are not trash as I think of the word. I definitely agree that there are cheap stocks out there, or sure. But the crucial variable isn't whether there are cheap stocks on an absolute basis, or even enough cheap stocks for individual investors to be completely fully invested. It's whether valuation levels are higher or lower than they were when this board was more active. All those international opportunities existed then, too, but there were also more US and large-cap opportunities then as well. So the aggregate amount of actionable ideas is lower now than then, even if it is still enough for people to be fully invested. Some people will be entrepreneurial and risk-seeking enough to find the ideas that exist currently. That's why we still do have posts on this board. And others won't, which is why there are less posts than before. For example, copying 13Fs will be less frutiful than before, because this only draws from the universe investable for 13F filers. I agree with innerscorecard. There will always be undervalued opportunities, but there were a lot more 1,3,or 5 years ago. My suggestion is to follow the threads about the stocks you are interested in and ignore the ones you find less illuminating. Nothing wrong with a little small talk on the fringes and it's going to be a larger part of the conversation when compelling investment ideas are few and far between. One of the things with most of those 60,000 stocks is that if you write about them, nobody is going to reply and the thread will sink. That's understandable, most people look for businesses they know and understand, which is why the period when everybody was writing about the big banks and Sears and AIG and GM and so on generated so much activity. Everybody knows these names. But start a thread about HEICO, and you'll be lucky to get a reply 3 weeks later if you ask for it, and that's still a multi-billion business, so forget about most tiny OTC stocks or foreign stocks that nobody has heard of when it comes to generating sustained discussion. I'm not blaming people. I'm often the same. I see a new thread, I have a quick look, but I have nothing to add about some small weird german business that is outside my circle of competence or whatever, and the thread goes down the memory hole... Just explaining why the big discussions will mostly be around big companies that everybody knows, and as long as these aren't particularly cheap, it'll be more effort to create sparks in the investment board.

So we're all reading constantly, 10Ks, 10Qs, conference call transcripts, news items on the companies we follow, blog posts, books on investing, books on tangential things (biographies, history, etc), right? That's what it takes to be a good investor as far as I know. So if scanning a list of topics that changes by maybe 10-20 lines per day for those that seem interesting, or clicking on 2-3 sub-forums rather than looking at the recent post list, is suddenly too much work, I fear that this is the least of our problems as investors. As I said, if you control for the fact that we just went through along period when everything was cheap, I'm pretty sure that the number of good ideas isn't doing too badly, and that if we go back there, the number will go back up again. And besides, the more good ideas are buried, the less competition there will be for them, right? ;)

I have the same question. Also, very interesting new chart. Great way to see how most of the returns from most investments seem to happen within 5-8 years.

That's it for me also. The quality of the board has diminished noticeably the last year or so. It's been a huge influx of new members combined with some of the older posters disappearing or at least going silent. I don't mind off topic threads but the same question being asked over and over again is really annoying. Apparently some don't know the forum has a search function to see if their question of comment has been asked before. Every online community that I've ever seen, about music, tech, everything, from the early days of the BBSes in the 90s, have seen complaints about this exact thing. Quality is apparently going downhill everywhere all the time. I doubt it'll ever change. I think it's simply because everything changes, and people who were there early notice the difference and always feel like things were better when they were all new and novel for them and they were in a steeper part of their personal learning curve, feeling more productive. Also, in this specific case, of course an investing board will have more juicy ideas when the market has just had the biggest crash in a 100 years than when things are more normal. Expecting things to go back to those crash days all the time is unrealistic. I do miss Sanjeev's and Eric's more frequent posting, and I'm not immune from this, but the only way that people can actually do something about it is by posting stuff that they think is good. I encourage you all to do so if you don't like what you see from others.

Complaining about general talk on the general board, eh? ??? You know what's great about discussion threads? They have a subject line. If the subject line doesn't interest you, don't click on it. If you only want to talk about investing, don't go to the general board, as it's designed to be about investing and other things. By sticking to the Fairfax, Berkshire, and Investment boards, you should be able to easily avoid threads that are not about investing, including this thread. And you know what? By not only just talking about balance sheets and NOLs, this board has become a community. The general board is very important to this forum, and maybe some people would have designed it differently, but I'm glad Sanjeev didn't try squash any non-investing talk. People here are smart, and I've learned a lot about other things from them, and I feel like I can size up many posters better because of the breadth of their posting.

A couple more page-turners: Losing My Virginity, by Richard Branson With the Old Breed, by E.B. Sledge

Thanks, good one.

If you want to internationalize it even more, the Quebec-french version would be "tête à claque" (literally: head for slapping) :)

I don't want to sound like a hipster, but I'm glad that Musk is getting so much recognition now. I've been following him since about 2006, and I've actually met him briefly in 2010 (we joked about the upcoming falcon 9 rocket test-flight, which had just been delayed IIRC), and for most of that time that I've been following him, either people didn't know him or were sure that he would fail. Glad he proved them wrong so far.

I've just started the book. I hope I like the second half better than you do... :)

http://bloom.bg/1PLkEAr

Very sad news...

Thanks!

http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-creates-a-grade-school-2015-5