Liberty

I agree with you on how it's often used, but that doesn't make the number itself BS. It is exactly what it says it is, which is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. You can say that management is often full of BS. But saying that the number ITSELF is BS is itself BS, if you follow ;)

It measures what it says it does. How is that bullshit? I mean, if someone says that EBITDA is a company's owner's earnings, now that's bullshit. But if you use EBITDA a EBITDA, how is it anything other than what it is? In other words, if you pass someone's weight minus arms and legs as his total body weight, that's bullshit. But if you clearly label it as his armless and legless weight, it's accurate. How you use it, and why you'd want to use it, that's another matter. But it's just a tool, that can be used well or badly. EDIT: Kraven beat me to it while I was writing this...

[amazonsearch]Talent is Overrated[/amazonsearch] Not specifically about investing - though Warren Buffett is a recurring example that they use - but definitely useful to those who want to become better at investing (and to do that, you need to understand how one becomes better). The concept of 'deliberate practice' is definitely useful. I knew a lot of this, but they give an overview of interesting studies, and as usual, it's always good to reinforce mental models and get motivation from external sources. I haven't finished the book yet, but so far (70 pages in) it's interesting and well-written.

Thanks for the feedback. I've now finished it, and I gave it a grade of A in my list of books read. Definitely recommended to others here.

Well, P/E and P/B and all other ratios are bullsh*t too when think about it :) The question is: can some of them be used in useful ways, can we keep in mind their shortcomings and make proper use of them, and are we talking about an investor using the ratio as a tool, or about management trying to pull the wool over investor's eyes with pro forma bullsh*t? I think Munger was probably talking more about the use of EBITDA in company communications to shareholders than about its use by informed investors.

http://www.economist.com/node/21558281?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/the_rotten_heart_of_finance

I didn't get passed the first few answers, but the marketing-speak is so heavy. I can't imagine Steve Jobs saying any of this, or even Larry Page/Sergey Brin.. Maybe Microsoft, though, so I guess RIM would be a good match culture-wise if they buy them ;)

I don't know the answer, but calling your broker is probably the best way to be sure since different brokers might have different rules (unless the SEC is very clear about this and things are applied uniformly).

On this topic : http://www.gannonandhoangoninvesting.com/blog/why-we-cant-use-owner-earnings-to-talk-about-stocks.html

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-06/berkshire-buys-gm-before-plunge-as-backups-pick-stocks.html

Good interview with Gates. I love all the work he's doing at his foundation. Truly marvellous.

http://simplyizzy.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/happy_birthday1.png

I think most people look at it from a different perspective than investors (though those too probably wish the many billions earned by the company over the years could have been allocated better). MSFT used to be the most feared company in technology, and the most talked about. Everybody judged startups by whether microsoft would buy them or compete with them. Not anymore. Paul Graham, one of the most influential people in the startup scene in silicon valley, explains it here: http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html The title might be a bit much, but it gives you an idea of what I mean. Note that this is from 2007. The comments here should provide more color: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4194372

Now I'm hungry :P

My natural inclination is to avoid these types of conflicts. But if I try to be rational about the situation, I gotta recognize that from a game theory perpective, things are better when there are consequences to getting caught promoting something that is probably a scam, or at least not as good a deal as you made it sound (it's a well-known cognitive bias that being paid by someone to "review" their stuff clouds judgement -- we should all know better and not pretend to be immune). He probably did it in good faith, but the public opprobrium will make him and others think twice next time about taking money to promote a penny stock and increase the chances of more due diligence being done. Otherwise, if there are no consequences to something like this, the good names of people can be bought more easily and the signal-to-noise ratio gets worse. So as much as I find threads like this uncomfortable, it's probably better than a world where, say, Parsad gets paid to created "sponsored threads" on his site and after one of his recommendations crashes by 95% and is revealed as probably a pumped up scam, everybody goes "oh well, it said 'sponsored' and he did it to make money for his family, so it's ok". Some will say: "But that is common! Most analysts are paid by organizations with conflicts of interests and there are tons of stock pumpers out there! Everybody should alway do their due diligence and never trust anything any one says!". Maybe, but something being common doesn't make it right, and since due diligence can't always mean rediscovering the atom, you have to end up trusting certain sources at some point, so weeding out untrustworthy sources publicly is a service that reinforces the whole system. And at least analysts always publish as analysts, while web-publishers can wear two hats and make things a bit fuzzier. My 2 cents Canadian.

I haven't read this piece yet, but it seems interesting: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/07/microsoft-downfall-emails-steve-ballmer

Sorry if I sounded defensive, but I had just written "I'm confident in management" in another thread and I saw it here, so I wasn't sure if it was directed at me. Cheers.

I think this is a crack at something I wrote recently, which is strange when you consider that people like Buffett, Munger, Watsa, etc.. Constantly talk about how important management is and how their confidence in the management of many of their investments is one of the most important elements to their analysis. Personally, if I don't feel confident in management's abilities after a lot of due diligence, I won't invest even if the "tangible" numbers look good. To each their own I guess..

Thanks for that, I hadn't seen him in action! I think it is further evidence for my point above: He was the best in the world at fixed push hands and co-winner in the moving category (because the judges were corrupted, but that's another story), yet it looks nothing like the "old men making students fly around or fall down"* videos that you can find on youtube. Totally different. More like a kind of very technical wrestling that follows the laws of physics :) * Here's the top result that I saw on youtube. I bet that kind of stuff has been debunked numerous times (ie. it works on the students of that old master, but ask a random guy who knows nothing about the old man to fight him and things suddenly won't be as 'mystical-looking', though I bet he can still fight conventionally too). In fact, I vaguely remember seeing a video debunking that kind of stuff years ago, but I don't remember enough about it to find it on google.

A few microsoft items that I saw and that might interest some here: http://allthingsd.com/20120702/microsoft-writing-off-nearly-all-of-the-6-3-billion-it-paid-for-aquantive/ http://mashable.com/2012/07/02/microsoft-windows-phone-market-share/ http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2012/07/02/upgrade-to-windows-8-pro-for-39-99.aspx

I believe that most of these videos with an old master making students fly around without doing much are faked, or rather an interesting example of psychology and pseudo-mysticism (kind of like public hypnotism shows, which is more about finding willing partners to play along, consciously or not). That's different from actual tournaments where strangers fight. That's my understanding, anyway...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-02/berkshire-s-pederson-says-u-s-businesses-scaling-back.html

That's true. As I said, who the hell knows what is really going on? But when reading the economist, I had the impression that they had a pretty good bullshit detector, and what convinced me most are things that aren't so much dependent on official growth numbers but rather on things like total capital investment per capita, increasing internal consumption and the fact that almost all the debt in their system is local and the opposite of hot money that can easily leave (like in the previous asian crisis). Doesn't mean things can't get rough, but they seem to have lots more margin of safety than some think. But we'll see, i have no power to predict the future.

Great. I'm curious to know what you think when you are farther along. I'm on p. 118 and so far so good.

I didn't expect to like the martial arts chapters as much as I did. But his strategic approach makes it seems almost like chess. And that's kind of the point... Lots of approaches and skills are transferable.