Liberty

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-11/putin-s-34-billion-siberian-hoard-hunted-by-cash-starved-allies

Agreed -- I think you can find pockets of unreasonableness (CRM, Unicorns, etc. come to mind), but there are still places where value is "hiding in plain sight." Moreover, I've spoken to many people who seem to believe, as Jurgis pointed out, that in the next crash all correlations will go to 1 -- perhaps because of the availability bias that correlations largely went to 1 last time. Indeed, there are always pockets of enthusiasm. But this isn't 1999 when Cisco was worth half a trillion and Microsoft 600 billion and thousands of companies with no profits and barely any revenue were getting funded and IPOing and 1/3 of Canada's stock market was Nortel or whatever, despite the fact that just a tiny fraction of the number of people who are online now were online then, and each of those people were spending a tiny fraction of what they are now on online-related products and services. So IBB has been going up pretty fast in the past 2-3 years. Whoop-dee-doo. It was pretty much flat between 2001 and 2011. It's probably overvalued now, or maybe there's a secular trend with demographics, people getting older, etc. I don't know, but that's not 1999. http://i.imgur.com/4wGIWSL.png

It's not even just two fields. He's the chairman of SolarCity and had the idea for that company (run by his cousins), his hobbies include designing an electric plane (with vertical landing and takeoff) and the hyperloop (to which he open sourced the design), etc. He's really a guy for the history books.

Buying Visa Europe for $20bn.

Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html

A lot of the risks of the past were taken because there was not really any way to avoid them. Today, our technology is so much more advanced that we can mitigate many of those risks. Why not? Space Exploration will certainly advance faster if rockets don't blow up all the time and astronauts aren't killed frequently. It's not just to save lives, it's to avoid derailing the whole project and cause a major PR problem.

It's nitpicking, but I would say that the problem isn't that Buffett is too nuanced, it's that the people who follow him aren't nuanced enough. Buffett says "it's bad when hedge funds do this and that" and all people remember is "wow, Buffett really dislike hedge funds". It's like they dumb down what he says, and then attack that dumbed down version. That's no Buffett's fault.

Aren't these guys supposed to be smart? Well, I guess they're smart enough to know that people only care about soundbytes and headlines. When I hear stuff like this, I always try to imagine what Buffett might reply. I don't pretend to always know, but in some cases, the answer is obvious. ie. Buffett is not against all activists and hedge funds, he criticized certain behaviors by these groups, so obviously if someone from that group doesn't have that behavior, that's fine with Buffett. For example, 3G is not short-term oriented, Buffett's partnership had a fair fee structure that didn't reward underpeformance (and since then, he's used a vehicle that doesn't charge fees to people, so he's kept improving on that front), etc. This is the same tactic used to attack Michael Lewis on HFT. They pretend he claims that all HFT is bad, while Lewis just talked about the behavior of a sub-group in the industry that basically skims money while providing no value at all.

Hopefully you're buckled in for that ride! Its a testament to the whole "space" community that they spend millions if not billions on safety features like this, many of which may never even need to be used in order to protect the lives of their crew. Pretty sure SpaceX didn't spend that much on this particular feature. They just have a modern design that was built for safety from the ground up. Trying to retrofit that stuff on older designs would probably be very expensive, but the Dragon capsule has the ability to land under its own power, so they're just using that to double as a safety mechanism. Everybody assume that everything cool must be expensive, but developing the first iPhone is reported to only have cost 150m :) As for the ride, yes, you must feel like quite the pancake for a bit. But I suppose that's better than being dead. I was reading on g force earlier today, and rocket sled pilots have been exposed briefly to up to 45+ g forces... Crazy! What astronauts would go through here probably isn't too different from what some fighter jet pilots go through.

I find it remarkable how fast SpaceX is making progress on so many different fronts, with so many very difficult endeavors. Not bad for a private company founded in 2002.

Good read: http://www.philosophicaleconomics.com/2015/05/profit-margins-in-a-winner-take-all-economy/ Looking at just aggregate profit margin hides the truth.

Also would love to be able to buy a print of the poster online.

It's good to see Bloomberg doing this. The media so rarely calls out the forecasters. Everybody usually has a goldfish memory.

Was expecting The Onion :-\

Never had cable for TV, though I have it for the internet (ISP is Teksavvy). Keep in mind that this forum is extremely not representative of people in general (we're all INTJs for crissake), so you might want to be careful about extrapolating from it. Most people I know have cable and probably watch multiple hours of it per day. Especially bad for those who are into sports (mostly Hockey around here).

That's definitely a good part of why it feels so different. Investing doesn't feel like spending, and in fact, it can feel better than holding cash (with the right asset at the right price) because I feel like I own something productive, and while I'm sleeping and working, there are all these people out there working hard figuring ways to create value for me. Another reason is more strategic; what I want in life is to have control of my time, do what I want, read my books, work on my projects, spend time with my family. Investing feels like it helps me move closer to that, why spending on most other things, even if it can be fun in the short term, feels like it's taking me away from that.

I'm not the best at anything, except maybe being Liberty.

This feels especially stupid if you just made a few thousand on a stock that you just bought and made a quick gain on by nothing more than pure luck (that it appreciated so quickly thus the much higher CAGR). On the other hand it's probably sensible to review all expenses versus what you make in your day job and not versus temporary portfolio successes or drawdowns. But what Liberty does is totally normal. The fact that your account went up (or down) $20K a week does not mean that you should suddenly buy a new car or eat caviar at the restaurant. If fact, there is a known psychological bias to "spend" any "bonus" money multiple times. "Oh, I got this money, so I can buy a computer" and then couple days ago "I can get a vacation", and so on where in the end the money spent is larger than the money received. So it's good to go against it. That's true, but that's not what I was talking about. I wasn't even talking about spending money because my portfolio went up, just saying that it's weird that a hundred bucks can make me hesitate because it can feel like a lot, and then I turn around and invest 50k in a company that I like. Somehow the amounts feel different psychologically, and I understand why, but it still feels strange (it's like cognitive biases -- even when you know about them, you can't be free from them, like knowing how an optical illusion works yet still having your eyes-brain fooled by it).

Great stuff. Thanks for sharing. I can totally related to the disconnect between the sums I invest and what I spend on my daily life. I'll sometimes hesitate and agonize on whether I should be ordering a few more books or upgrading a computer and then turn around and invest 2 years' worth of expenses into a company...

http://basehitinvesting.com/risk-and-portfolio-management-similarities-between-joel-greenblatt-and-stanley-druckenmiller/ Good post by John Huber. Mentions a couple videos that have been posted here previously.

When the book came out and there was a huge media ruckus, we got the other side of the story. Everyone attacked Lewis, and their arguments basically amounted to nothing. Either they tried to act like Lewis was against all electronic, high-speed trading, and he isn't ("the spreads are smaller now!" yeah, but not because of front-runners and people sniffing your orders). Or they talked about liquidity and such, which is BS for the kind of HFT that Lewis went after (they actually mostly provide fake liquidity that disappears when someone needs it). So sometimes when you don't get the other side, it's because they don't have anything to say that would make them look good. They do it for the money, that's it. The best they can hope for is to confuse the public and muddy the waters and hope that the money tap isn't turned off too soon. There's no hidden positive reason for that specific kind of HFT to exist (or if there is, I haven't found it yet).

I would argue that you should be a politician. Basically all Buffett has done is found a really inefficient and incredibly difficult way to tax people and use the resulting taxes to fund health care, foreign aid etc. The same thing Buffett did is accomplished much more effectively by taxing people and funding things through government. One Deng Xiaoping is equivalent to a thousand Warren Buffett's. I enjoy this forum but sometimes I feel like everyone on here is going 120mph and I'm struggling to go 25mph. I have absolutely no clue what this means. Lol I was about to comment on this too - I'm not sure what the paragraph is getting at or especially how you would go about measuring Den Xiaoping in units of Buffett. I do however share Den's view on cats It's basically claiming that Deng Xiaoping had a bigger impact on the world than Buffett. It's true, but kind of pointless. That's like saying that the people who wrote the old testament had a bigger impact than Deng. So what? What matters is how much good you can do versus your potential. We're not all Buffetts, but most of us can do better than we're doing now and should strive for that. It would also be possible to get into the argument that Buffett is pretty much doing just net good, while many politicians do a mix of good and bad things (many from unintended consequences, over long periods of time), and that if you try to look at it net-net, maybe Deng doesn't come out that well, or maybe he was just cleaning up the mess that other politicians before him created, etc. I don't want to get into it.

That I would like to know. I've had mistakes in my RSP and TFSA in the past, and it sucks. TFSA I get being disappointed about, but if you have to have a loser RRSP is better than non-registered, imo. You've already taken a full deduction against the invested capital against income, which is better than a capital loss that you would get non registered. Or look at it backwards. If you have a big gainer in your RRSP, you pay tax at the regular rate when you withdraw. Not ideal, but nobody complains about gains. However, if you have a big gainer in a non-registered account, you pay at the capital gains tax rate, which is 50% less. That's a mitigating factor for sure, but it's still a bad outcome, especially if you take the long-view, compounding multi-decades inside the RSP. Even if I don't buy & sell too often, the absence of capital gains every time there's a transaction still adds up over the years to probably more than whatever I saved with the deduction vs 50%-capital-gains.

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21648624-housing-markets-across-globe-both-underperform-and-overwhelm-property-puzzles?frsc=dg%7Cd http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/original-size/images/print-edition/20150418_FNC602.png