Liberty

I have the 2011 edition, and my understanding is that each edition builds on the previous ones, so you should get the latest. Just don't expect your mailman to like you after this. These things are heavy...

Here's Geoff Gannon riffing on this idea: http://gannonandhoangoninvesting.com/blog/2014/4/1/stock-price-guidelines I liked this part:

I think people shouldn't take "this time is different" to mean "it's always the same" either. I think it's a warning, but the way to find out the truth is to do a lot of work and see what makes sense, not to always assume that everything will be exactly the same. This time for newspapers, it's different. Same for a lot of businesses that got disrupted (you want to own a record store?). People who assumed that the GFC was a replay of the Great Depression had it wrong. etc. I don't think that the author is arguing that any level of valuation (ie. dot-com bubble) would be reasonable, just that if you look at the correct figures, things right now aren't much outside of historical norms, or at least not as high as the bears claim, and that historical norms weren't always as stable and mean-reverting as some might think. That's all. Who knows what will happen from here? Lots of gray zones. It's never completely different, but it's never completely the same either, which is something that people just as often forget and pay for.

Good read on profit margins and the flawed way in which they are often calculated (mixing 'national' data with 'domestic' data, etc): http://philosophicaleconomics.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/foreignpm/

That's why I said I'm not convinced that HFT does net harm. If they only make money that past less-efficient market makers would've made otherwise, that's fine with me. I don't care about those victims because they are just victims of a better system, and that's progress. I'm no HFT expert, but if there are HFT strategies that aren't in that category and that make a lot of money in a zero sum way without providing benefits to anyone (front running, whatever), I don't think there's anything wrong with changing things to block them, just like insider trading is banned. Otherwise they just add friction to the system, acting as a kind of fee on the markets (not that it affects me much personally, but it's still a problem if it's the case). But if all they do is try to react to news faster than others, that's fine with me too...

I just did the same thing. ;D I'm about a quarter of the way though the general section and I started with the 3 "Ask" threads, Packer, Eric and Kraven. There's some gold in those general sub-forums, especially from '09 -'10. Shows just how smart this forum is. So far I'm about mid way through 2010 and I found the strategy about the members who used preferred shares early in '09 hugely enlightening. After general I'm going to start the investment ideas section. It's time well spent for me. That's what I did when I first joined. I went through the whole archive. I highly recommend it to new members.

First, my comment was meant mostly as a joke. I'm not convinced that HFT is a net bad compared to the system that we had before. I'm all for them keeping spreads low and providing liquidity, but there's a law of diminishing returns that is reached at some point and what might have been good at first could stop adding value past a certain point. Everything looks crazy if you push it to the logical limit. What if there was a police officer following everybody around all day and night? See, the idea of having a police force is crazy! Sure putting delays of days or having randomly selected stocks would be hugely problematic. But putting a small random delay (it could be between 0.1 and 1 seconds, whatever works) would probably kill a lot of strategies that aren't adding much value and keep a fair amount of market makers around. The stock market is a system created by humans, all the rules were created by us, so changing those rules to try to improve how capital markets work isn't some crime against nature. It all depends on what the end goal is; is it to built a really cool casino or to build a system that allows the fractional ownership of businesses and the allocation of capital to those businesses. If it's a casino we want, I'm sure we could do a lot better than what we have now.

Add a randomized delay of between 1 and 10 seconds to everybody's trades ;)

Another downside is that participation is usually pretty low and unhappy people are more motivated to vote than happy people, so if there are 5 people who dislike you and rate everything you write 1/5 star, it soon looks like everybody hates you. It can also encourage groupthink if every time someone with a unpopular opinion gets -15 votes, soon enough you get an echo chamber of the majority. Places like Stockhouse have ratings, and it rarely tells you much about the real quality of anything in my experience... One way around that would be to have only positive voting with a limited number of votes, like 1 gold star per user par day. So when you like something, you could vote for it and next to the post it would say "X people gave this post a gold star" or whatever. The limited number of votes would mean that they are worth something (otherwise, people would just vote for anything and everything and it wouldn't mean much), and you could have a feature that ranks posts by gold stars to see the Best Of. For negative stuff like spam or things against the forum guidelines, you can already use the "report to a moderator button". This keeps it to the serious stuff, rather than thumbing down random stuff you mildly dislike and making everybody feel bad because they don't know why they are getting anonymously downvoted...

Handsome devil! 8) I wish I was able to attend this year, Gio. We are interested in a lot of the same companies/capital allocators, I would have been fun to compare notes over a drink. Maybe next year... I know it's early, but do you plan to make the trip again?

Thank you racemize!

Another interesting one from Brooklyn Investor: http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.ca/2014/03/10x-pretax-earnings-case-studies-ko-bni.html

I don't think anyone's saying that he doesn't have tremendous social skills. I'm just saying he didn't start out that way, unlike many others who are just natural social animals.

If you read his bios and listen to his interviews, you'll learn that he literally vomited from public speaking at first, that during social events he would go in another room and read annual reports, etc. He got over all that over time (Carnegie, Kay Graham), but that's certainly not where he started, not his natural inclination. I think he say that it could be a useful tool for him so he set out to consciously acquire those skills.

But unlike these people, you don't know Scott, so you have no reason to assume he's lying to us or to himself anymore than you have reasons to assume that any other person here is lying or mistaken about anything else. This makes you sound like those people who can't understand that some people are gay ("they should just try sleeping with someone of the other sex"), and to me that sounds very patronizing.

People not interested in sex or stuff are probably more common than good investors...

1) You didn't need to be rude about it. 2) You have no facts at all to make you think this was the case here. 3) By that standard, maybe you are a crackwhore projecting your own problems on others. Who knows, right?

That's a different topic, but an interesting one. I think it depends. Was Buffett advantaged or disadvantaged by having such a different lifestyle from most other money managers? By staying in Omaha rather than going to Wall Street, etc, some could say he wasn't networking properly and wasn't plugged in the "deal flow" or whatever, but others could say he was avoiding the echo chamber and groupthink and reducing pressure of activity for activity's sake. Later in life he got pretty social thanks mostly to Kay Graham, but in his early decades he was a lot more awkward and isolated, and definitely had a very frugal lifestyle for a billionaire (buying hail-damaged used cars, never moving to a bigger house, not eating anything fancy, etc). I think Michael Burry is also a pretty unusual person, and that seemed to have helped him see things differently and do things that others couldn't be bothered to do. In the end, if you're good at what you do, have integrity and other virtues, people will overlook almost anything. And those who don't, you probably don't care about them anyway... I almost envy Scott, I know that my investing would probably improve if I didn't spend so much time thinking about sex...

Most people, sure. But I thought this was a forum of intelligent free-thinkers who "don't follow the crowd". Surely it can't be that big a surprise that there are asexuals and people not much interested in material things out there? Live and let live, I say.

Why should he do things he doesn't want to do? To please you? If it made him unhappy, he'd make a change. People are different and have different needs. You might want to open your mind to that fact.

I also enjoyed it when I read it a few years ago.

I have no idea who that is. Explaining the joke probably ruins it, but there's a recent Showtime series called Homeland. In it, there's this CIA guy named Peter Quinn who is a pretty mysterious character when we first meet him. When we finally learn more about him and see his apartment, it's basically empty except for a sleeping bag and we learn he's some type of black ops operative.

Peter Quinn, is that you? ;)

And for those who have been following the series, part 3, 4 and 5: http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.ca/2014/03/buffett-market-timer-part-3-berkshire.html http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.ca/2014/03/buffett-market-timer-part-4-berkshire.html http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.ca/2014/03/buffett-market-timer-part-5-berkshire.html

That's fair. Thanks for considering it, Sanjeev. I certainly don't lack motivation to attend in person, I just can't this year and feel bad I'll be missing both the dinner and AGM. I hope that board members will share their notes on the event like past years. Thanks in advance to those who will do so!