Liberty

I'm using a 40$ used Fredrik IKEA desk set up in standing position. Love it. Takes about 2 weeks to get used to it (feet hurt at first), but after that it's fine.

Number of MW installed is growing nicely http://amda-14lqre.client.shareholder.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=796398 Stock up over 18% right now on that guidance.

[amazonsearch]The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon[/amazonsearch] Where else to buy this than on Amazon? :) This was mentioned in the Amazon discussion, but this is probably a better place to discuss it when it comes out...

I like Gladwell's stuff. He's a great raconteur and there are lots of insights to be found in his writings.. I'm just not sure his conclusions are always based on a sound, scientific methodology, as has been demonstrated. Hence the grain of salt required (you take some, you leave some). Doesn't mean he's wrong about everything, just that his process seems a bit lax... That's the danger. Gladwell's talent seems to be to have one big idea and then dig up juicy anecdotes in science and history and weave great narratives around them to support the big idea. That's fine. It can be very entertaining and insightful. Problem is, when things get more complex (in fields like statistics and psychology) he apparently sometimes bases his stuff on weak or flawed studies, or studies that have been contradicted, or he cherry picks and doesn't try to falsify his hypotheses, and because he's such a great raconteur, you end up with 50 million people retelling those incorrect things to their friends on the bus. I love Munger to death, but he's not infallible and it's not because he likes something that it's without flaw (Lee in Singapore or the Chinese government come to mind).

Heh, now if we can find something bad that Gladwell wrote about Taleb, that'll close the circle. I think it's very possible for both Taleb and Pinker to be right; existential risks are higher and potentially more destructive, because human technology is much more powerful (nuclear war, global warming, biological weapons, etc) while our everyday life is a lot less dangerous and violent than is used to be (Pinker's thesis in Better Angels).

I quite enjoyed reading Gladwell's The Tipping Point, but after that, I read some things about him and his methodology that made me take everything he says with a grain of salt. F.ex, see here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (piece by Steven Pinker, one of the smartest people I know of -- I highly recommend his book 'The Blank Slate') http://ksj.mit.edu/tracker/2013/10/should-we-stop-believing-malcolm-gladwel (an overview of some of the criticism)

Sad news. I never followed him that closely, but I've heard lots of good things.

I'll tell you what type of person he is. While I had met him before a couple of times, it was in Omaha 2010, when I actually spent a fare bit of time with him. Mohnish, Guy, Alnesh, Dr. Ajay Desai, myself and a couple of friends were having a very late bite to eat, about 1am or so, at the burger restaurant in Harrah's in Council Bluffs. During all of the discussion, Guy is occasionally taking photographs..nothing unusual. A very charming, affable fellow I found him to be! About two-three weeks later, a package arrives at my desk in my office. It's a photograph Guy took of Alnesh and myself. He had it printed, labelled, framed and shipped over to me for no reason...other than that is his nature. It's on my desk to this day! Cheers! Great anecdote. Thanks for sharing :)

Thanks, that was good. Very candid interview. :)

I know he wishes he could've bought more BAC in his fund (but was limited to 10%). Next time banks get real cheap, I'm sure the hedge fund will load up.

Thanks for the link. Seems like the authenticity shift is part of the first book too, though.

[amazonsearch]Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time[/amazonsearch] Starting this thanks to recommendations from this board. Thought it deserved its own thread. (Btw, I'm also halfway through 'The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt'. Great stuff! Not really investing related, so probably doesn't deserve a thread, but definitely a lot of life lessons in there.)

Instead of looking at 'recent posts', just go to the boards and look at which threads have new posts and interest you. Problem solved. SHLD, BAC and AIG had a zillions posts a day too for long periods. Should they also have their own sub-forum? It's easier if each person filters on their side than to try to change the structure of the board, because there's no one-size fits all. I also don't think there's necessarily opposition between growth and value. Buffett doesn't see it that way, and Apple at 400s and Google in the 400-500s (when the thread was most popular) aren't exactly CRM and Tesla. The main difference is the news flow.

Agreed. Don't like something, don't click on it. Parsad can moderate when people go over the line; he's been a wise leader so far and has created the best investing community on the net. Creating some ghetto within the forum is pointless. Next we'll have someone who wants a separate board for banks and then telecoms and retail such and that'll just make discovery and cross-pollination harder (making life easier for the subset of users who use RSS and don't want to see tech isn't worth making life harder for the vast majority of users who come to the website and already have many different sub-boards to monitor -- and if we look at the number of views on the tech threads, there is obviously a huge interest, these views don't all come from the 15 people who post).

Thank you, very interesting. I had seen him say something similar in the speech, but it's much Easier to follow in this format.

Absolutely. Someone on another forum cites a very apropos Cialdini excerpt:

Something a bit different from investing, but I found it quite interesting. http://www.orangecoast.com/features/2013/09/23/center-of-the-universe For the horrific background on Randy Kraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Steven_Kraft Fact checking for the story: http://www.orangecoast.com/webexclusives/2013/09/24/a-factcheckers-journey-to-a-1980-afternoon

Thanks :)

Great analysis Sanjeev, very clearly explained!

Your biggest mistake made you +64%? Not too shabby...

Thanks for the notes, hellsten! :)

The problem is when the owners are the one buying out everyone else.. Right, I think my brain skipped that last part about holding ratio... Not sure how to mitigate management lowballing you, except maybe to look at historical undervaluation; has it been very cheap in the past? If they didn't pull the trigger then, it might be an indication that they won't in the future and prefer staying public, though certainly not a guarantee...

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/09/gta-vs-stock-trading-platform.html :P

The first thing that comes to mind is how much skin management has in the game. If they don't own much stock, acquirers can dangle shiny things in front of them to convince them to support a sale. If they own a ton of stock, suddenly a lowball offer doesn't seem so attractive anymore... I'm no expert by any means, but this is what I would look at first.

Thanks for the recommendation. The hardcover is incredibly cheap on amazon.com (but not .ca) for some reason.