Liberty

Well, see, I mistakenly stumbled into doing something good. I like when that happens. You're very welcome, augustabound and tengen :)

Why discuss anything? Are we about to crack investing? Making judgements under uncertainty* is one of the most important skills in life. If every time we can't know something for sure we just give up, we'll do worse, not better. Personally, I feel like I've made progress by discussing these things with others and learning about their hard-earned lessons. If you feel you haven't, maybe you should still avoid being snarky. Here's a couple good books on that: http://www.amazon.com/Judgment-Under-Uncertainty-Heuristics-Biases/dp/0521284147/ http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Choice-Uncertain-World-Psychology/dp/1412959039/

Anders, maybe all you need to do is take a breather and figure out what you really want. I mean, maybe you figured what you wanted at age 20 and then worked for X years in that direction without really stopping to think "is this still what I want? is it turning out to be what I expected?". Maybe you don't really want to be the next Buffett (or even a quarter of a Buffett). If the summum bonum of your existence is spending time with your family and having financial independence so you are master of your own schedule and don't have to worry about paying the bills, you don't need to be a billionaire to do that. Some people can probably pull that off with a frugal lifestyle and a lot less than 1 million...

That's very wise, and definitely something I recognize, in myself and others. My wife is a rather perfectionist person, and she'll always focus on the 1 thing she got wrong even if she nailed the 99 others. This leads her to be very hard on herself, which leads to exactly the opposite reaction that most people who succeed at something have (instead of being happy at the accomplishment, she's sad that she didn't get 100%). I suffer from some of the same, but not quite to the same extent. Those of you who recognize themselves in that might want to check this out: http://www.amazon.com/When-Perfect-Isnt-Good-Enough/dp/157224559X/ It's a book I ordered for her. Haven't read it yet, so not sure how good it is, but it sounded like it could help. So now we're off-topic from even the off-topic music discussion... How did we get here? Oh well, that's what discussions do :) "Contentment is under-appreciated." Words to live by.

This is getting off-topic, but I so envy people like you. I love music. I probably own over 2,000 albums of all genres, love discovering new things and immersing myself in the world of all kinds of artists. But I can't sing and I can't play. I tried electric guitar for years, and I had good technique but no ear for it. I have synesthesia so sometimes I think that I enjoy music differently than other people, and that this hurts my playing because I don't see the notes the way most people do in my mind's eye... Anyway. Enjoy your good musical genes for me ;)

I've just noticed that Gio has also posted it in the OAK thread on the investment board. Apologies for the duplication.

http://www.oaktreecapital.com/MemoTree/The%20Lessons%20of%20Oil.pdf

Good point. You reminded me of something. I used to have a computer desktop background that read: "What's the most important thing you could be doing right now and why aren't you doing it?" Sometimes doing better is just about paying attention and not making too many choices by default... I'm not saying that the desktop reminder worked and that I almost did the most important thing, but sometimes it did work, and made me realize that I wasn't consciously avoiding doing more productive stuff, I was just drifting away from it. It's cliché, but if you really want to get somewhere, keeping your eye on the ball at all times is the first step.

I wonder if in 10-20 years many investors who started out close to 2008-2009 will regret that they expected it to repeat every few years... That certainly seems to be the case for many people.

These questions repeat themselves because there are new people coming in the community all the time. It isn't Parsad that is asking for tips on what to avoid in the beginning and such. Whenever you started out and didn't know anything about anything, I'm sure that having a friendly place to ask for advice would be much appreciated. And if people discussing things in threads that nobody is forced to click on is really enough to scare someone off, then that person will have nowhere to hide on the net. But I don't think that's the real reason anyone would be driven off anyway, though it might be a convenient excuse. Nobody who liked everything else here would give it up because of harmless threads like this one. It's also funny when I hear some people talk about how this forum has change since 2008-2009 or whatever. Of course. Everything was on sale in a once-in-a-lifetime fire sale that lasted for a long time. Of course there are fewer life-changing bargains to write about today. It's not this forum's fault. I think Plan just preferred the Twitter format, where he posts regularly. He also stopped writing in his blog...

If that's what you meant, then I misunderstood you. I've just seen too many people write sneering remarks of the kind. My apologies. Hmm. I thought that was exactly what value investing is all about. You know it isn't in this context. Finding undervalued companies and betting on them when it's an unpopular opinion is different from writing condescending remarks on the internet.

Some people are investing hipsters. They publicly complain about what other people are doing, implying that they're better than them, etc. It's a lot more annoying than people discussing whatever they want to discuss without forcing anyone to participate. Don't like it. Skip it. What is a waste of time for you might not be a waste for someone who is at a different point in their life journey, or who simply has different tastes and priorities. Nobody needs to know how OG Investor you are because you only think about 10Ks 24/7 in between reading your daily 500 pages...

Thanks. I think this deserves to be highlighted for people who judge everything based on indexes and ratios based on indexes:

Funnily enough I found Prem's slide on interest rates after the Wall St crash and in Japan today. Average trough for long term rates 2%, average time taken to get there after the panic, 14 years, average rates 20 years after the panic 2.5%! I know these are different times, but I do wonder whether we are in for a much longer period of low rates than anyone thinks. Maybe, maybe not. First thing that comes to mind though is that the US is pretty different from Japan on many levels.

Apparently, making predictions is hard...

Why do you guys typically put in your investing journal? Is it to write down your investment thesis for a particular investment, or just general investment thoughts? I can't speak for others, but I mostly write down investment theses and updates on how things are evolving, I put URLs for interesting things I find, notes on conference call transcripts/audio, investor days, interesting excerpts from articles and blog posts, thoughts on overall strategy and portfolio construction, try to understand past mistakes, etc. I also put related tickers in each paragraph and highlight the key words so that it's easily searchable and skimmable.

I did the exact same thing. I find it very useful. I've also been keeping an investing journal for almost a year and that has been great too.

I'm only 32, but I was a late bloomer. Wish I had started reading more books when I was younger. Also, spending more time listening to music and discovering new artists and genres. To me, books and music are a bit different from most other 'inputs' because they require more active participation to truly get the most out of them, and so the reward is often more proportional with the effort. Also, I wish I spent less time on ephemeral info and more time on "settled science": http://lesswrong.com/lw/ow/the_beauty_of_settled_science/ The principle explained here applies to a lot of things, IMO, not just scientific stuff. I wish I had learned it earlier.

:D

Having an edge doesn't have to be just informational. I think what you describe is an edge (patience, a different approach, focusing on fundamentals, etc).

Not to give a serious answer in what is turning out to be a joke thread, but in my experience, people fall in value traps (including me) mostly when they fixate too much on quantitative aspects of a business and forget to properly take into account the qualitative aspects. Something cheap can always get much cheaper, and sometimes IV falls to meet the stock price rather than the other way around, so you need to figure out why the market should value a company differently at some point. Is it a melting ice cube that will just melt faster and faster, with management making the wrong moves and forces outside of the company's control further eroding value, or is it positioned well for growth or unlocking value in some way, with enough levers in management's competent hands, to at least maintain its IV long-enough for Mr. Market to realize that it's cheap? Some businesses are just very tough. A good mental exercise is to imagine what you'd do if you were CEO of the company you are considering investing in. Sometimes crossing your fingers and hoping for a favorable environment is the best you can do if you run a capital-heavy, commodity, undifferentiated business in a very competitive industry.

I enjoyed this essay and thought that others here might enjoy it too: http://paulgraham.com/know.html Some choice cuts:

I enjoyed that book. Was sad to see Dennis' obituary in The Economist a few months back.

;D