Liberty

That's why keeping an investment journal where you write down exactly what you're thinking before doing anything is so valuable. Memory plays tricks on us, and this is a good way to mitigate that.

*roll eyes*

A thread asking people about their misses for the past year is by definition about hindsight. That's the point. My biggest miss of the past year is probably premature accumulation in a very illiquid OTC microcap. I thought it was very cheap, and it then proceeded to get much cheaper (volatility is pretty crazy, there's almost no float and the bid/ask is often 10%+). I think it's only a temporary loss, with fast-growing IV being much higher than the quoted price, and I'm comfortable holding it for the long-term, but I do wish I had been able to buy more at lower prices before getting to a full position.

Thanks Sanjeev! :)

Thank you for the recommendation, I added it to the list. Cheers! :)

Welcome! :)

http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.ca/2014/12/the-oil-price-shock-primary-secondary.html

Unspectacular year? Just to put your "unspectacular year" in perspective. If you start with 100k with those results you'll be a billionaire in a little over 37 years and if you have 1M then in just 28 years. I already have 37 years, so what do you think about that! Nice to dream, but size becomes an anchor rapidly, an multiply any number by zero just once and...

Thanks Jawn, added it to the list.

Thanks for sharing. I might need to try something like that at some point.

Just eyeballing it, I'd say up around 40% so far (in CAD, part of that is currency gains in USD vs CAD). I dodged a few bullets this year. I sold my CFX and ALS positions for strategic reasons, and immediately after that they tanked. I don't expect to be lucky like that very often.

Thanks for sharing JoelS. Must've been quite the trip! If there's one person I'd like to know more about how their thought process worked, it's Singleton.

Nice attempt at channeling Buffett, but he's not saying he wants to sell because it's the end of the year, he's just looking for feedback on what he owns, and the end of the year is as good a time as any for that.

Thanks. Have a good one everybody! :)

Got this one in the mail today.

Energy investors are getting coal in their stocking this year.

Thanks for the links, West. I knew some of those but not all, so I appreciate it very much.

Thanks leftcoast. I'll add that one to the list :) One that I heard about via a recommendation is: http://www.amazon.com/Flight-Titans-Boeing-Airbus-Battle/dp/0753510146 But the reviews make it sound like it's ok, not great.

Transdigm (TDG) has a wide moat. Sole source supplier of most of the relatively low-cost (compared to the price of a plane) but critical parts that they make, regulatory barriers and low absolute market per single part make it not worth even trying to compete, airframes stick around for decades and need aftermarket parts rain or shine (annuity-like characteristics), and they're supplying parts for pretty much everything that flies, civilian and military, so very well diversified. Mastercard/Visa, for reasons that have been explained frequently.

Any recommendations? (Can be civilian or defense or both) Thank you in advance! :)

For the record: Merkhet's a true gentleman. We had a nice private discussion. Sorry everybody for derailing this off-topic.

Now you're the one projecting. I said I was calm, I just wrote what I thought about your comment and that's it, there's nothing to get over. Most of what I know about nature vs nurture comes from evolutionary psychology (The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker and The Moral Animal by Robert Wright are good books that summarize some of the big findings of the field), but it doesn't mean I'm not learning and gathering food for thought from other people's experiences, from Ben Franklin to the people here. So yes, I'll keep doing that.

I'm super calm. I just have something against condescension. Maybe that's not how you meant it, but "I feel like if we debate it a little bit more on the Internet, we should have this question wrapped up in just a few more posts" read basically as a big eye-rolling "you guys are stupid, this is pointless". I just wanted to point out that I didn't think it was pointless, and that even if you thought so, there was no reason to be rude about it. Maybe I misread what you wrote, which is always a possibility with the text format (the exact same line can be read in 10 ways and with 10 different tones and that can change a lot). And I'm the one who posted about settled science, but I didn't mean it as anything that applies here.

I like snark, I just dislike when the implied message to people here is "you guys are stupid, your discussion is pointless". But my main point wasn't that, it was that I thought he was wrong to say that we should not discuss things that we can't conclusively prove. Most knowledge isn't binary. If you can move your priors from being 50% certain about something to being 75% certain about it, based on whatever experience and data you can gather from others, it might be enough to totally change how you act and how the rest of your life turns out, yet you might still not be able prove anything.

I think you missed my point. But fuck North Korea.