Liberty

Your assumptions are made up. You don't know his expenses and how much he added per year, and whether the article just cites peak earning figures (as these things tend to do -- journalists love to just use the biggest number they can find). Fact is, someone who holds onto a 5m investment and turns it into 800m and someone who holds onto millions of Apple and MSFT from IPO is a great investor, especially since he did it by doing technical research and identifying these companies when they were basically unknown microcaps. 99.999% of other investors couldn't have done this, as is proven by them not being able to hold on a double or a triple for more than a couple years.

Parsad is right. Too many of you try way too hard to miss the point of these things just to complain and whine. I don't care that the journalist put all kinds of flourishes on it and called him whatever. This isn't the important part; can't you tell what's important and what isn't? Look at the life and the process and the principles. And it's possible to appreciate what someone else has done without caring that not everybody can do the same or whatever. Others successes never being good enough and pure enough and done the way you'd want is disguised jealousy... It's not supposed to be easy to replicate, it's about celebrating someone's success. And trying to create some math to show it's not that impressive. Give me a break. There are lots of entrepreneurs making a few milions a year that will never have a net worth much above a few tens of millions. Trump inherited hundreds of millions and I'm pretty sure this guy is richer than him (esp if you remove the fuzzy brand value) starting from zero. It's very impressive. Most here have trouble holding a stock more than a couple years or without selling a bunch if it doubles...

They put his net worth at $2.3bn. And the assumption that he made 10m/year for 30 years might not be correct, it could be a lot shorter than that. They say he bought MSFT at IPO and held it since then, so his returns there are certainly pretty good. He might just have put less than he put into HEI.

There's one part that seems to be contradictory, saying he likes to double down when the price goes down, and then it says he tends to sell when a position goes 25% against him. I'm guessing this is the journalist not explaining his reasoning fully (he sells if something happens to make him lose confidence and it moves by more than 25%, maybe? and if he remains confident, he doubles down). He's certainly a nice rags to riches story, boostrapping himself from dunce-cap dyslexic with abusive father, forced to go into the navy by a judge to inventor and investor billionaire.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2019/02/19/the-greatest-investor-youve-never-heard-of-an-optometrist-who-beat-the-odds-to-become-a-billionaire/#a76196b22e8a

Cool stuff. Claims can get to 3 cents/kWh, which combined with solar now at 2c is still competitive with fossil fuel plants (and price of solar keeps falling).

I saw the 2016 sci-fi movie Passengers. It wasn't my pick and I had very low expectations, which probably explains why I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting a 6/10 and it was something like a 7.3/10, so I'm not saying it's great, but there are so few decent sci-fi films and series that I'm mentioning it anyway. It basically felt like a short-story from the 1950s. Passenger wakes up early from cryo-sleep on a long interstellar flight. What to do next? I can easily imagine how someone seeing it with high expectations could not like it, though, so be warned. It's not deep or anything, but it's decent entertainment.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-18/arrest-of-baring-vostok-s-michael-calvey-is-a-message-from-russia

Transcript of Barry Diller interview at Recode: https://www.recode.net/2019/2/18/18228927/barry-diller-iac-expedia-netflix-amazon-prime-hollywood-kara-swisher-recode-decode-podcast-interview h/t @Bluegrasscap

Not sure if this one has been posted before, but I'm just getting to it now, and I thought others might find it interesting too: https://moiglobal.com/latticework-2018-tom-russo/ It's a podcast of a presentation by Russo from last september. Also an interesting blog post about Russo and his framework: http://www.scuttlebuttinvestor.com/blog/2018/6/11/a-capacity-to-suffer-and-managing-expectations

You should take a look at "Pirate Hunters", too. I enjoyed it more than "Rocket Men" for some reason (seeing as Rocket Men has higher ratings on almost every website), but it may simply be timing on my part. I haven't read it yet. Thanks, I'll add it to the list.

This emotion is in your own mind, and you're projecting it. In mine, there's absolutely no pleasure at what has been happening in crypto. In fact, I was quite glad that a bunch of early adopters were making large donations to some non-profits that I support, and I've been interested by cryptography since the 90s (the PGP book!) and quite like following the technical side of the field. I post things that I find interesting. I'm under no obligation to post about both sides or whatever, I'm not a wire service. I've been following the inflation and deflation of this bubble with interest, and when I saw that someone had compiled those numbers, I thought it was striking (I hadn't seen them before) and gave it literally 10 seconds of thought. Had I known I would be facing a grand jury on it, maybe I wouldn't written down a contemporary memo detailing my state of mind to make sure my good faith wasn't impugned.

I didn't know this was a "positive posts only" thread. There's plenty of crypto boosters around here, and nobody gets much on their case for not posting the negative stories, so why is it a big deal if I post a few negative numbers without always making sure to put a positive spin on things? Crypto snowflakes? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I never said these other things, you said them. I just posted a list of numbers, and everybody lost their minds.

Why are you taking personal that someone cites the drawdown since peak? Why do you feel you have to defend it and attack others and invent hypothetical situations that didn't happen? Isn't drawdown-from-peak a valid way to look at a big crash? Why always have to shift the context to one that makes it sound like it's up a lot rather than down a lot? If you made lots of money good for you. That's your reward. You are in a very very very small minority of people. Almost all the attention and money went into crypto way above the current level, and many bought on credit because of FOMO and lost more than they put in. It was similar with the dot-com bubble, by the time everybody was jumping in and the big bucks came in, it was a lot nearer the top than the bottom.

https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Divers-Adventure-Americans-Everything-ebook/dp/B000FC1RSC Great book on sale for less than two bucks right now. I'm currently reading his new one, Rocket Men, and that's great too: https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Men-Odyssey-Astronauts-Journey/dp/0812988701

You're right, I misread the 4-deep quote, I thought you were the person I replied to replying to my reply. So you're saying that crypto was also a huge mistake? Because these two were huge mistakes, and them being down this much isn't just short term volatility and the chances of them bouncing back to their peaks anytime soon is pretty slim. Oh, were you trying to shame me or something? How about you share some of your huge mistakes instead? It's the best way to avoid them, by removing resistance in acknowledging them, so that we can do it faster the next time. btw, I lost about 20% of my initial investment in Valeant, but that was after it went up around 150% and then back down to that level, so it was quite a ride. I lost a higher % in FTP, but I'd have to look in my notes to know exactly how much. I certainly learned a lot about jockey vs horse and about commodity businesses in that one.

I didn't say gambling is bad. I said it's different from investing, and that sayings/strategies/rules of thumbs that apply to investing don't necessarily apply to it. If I had those odds offered to me, of course I'd take the bet. Offer me those odds, pretty please. Problem is, the odds for crypto are unknown, and they're likely not the ones you made up for that example. You're confused. I didn't apply that framework to it, I said it didn't apply.

Yeah, I was posting the numbers showing how much various crypto coins were down since their peak. But you're the ingenious one, citing a common value investing saying with regard to something that can't be valued conventionally (what's the IV based on the discounted future cash flows of this? can you value invest in gold or oil or US dollars/Yen/Euros? What's the return on capital there?), and for something that is clearly not just random short-term volatility. When something is down 98%, it needs to be a 50-bagger just to get back. If the thing you're tracking is moving by that much up and down regularly enough that it can be considered just short-term volatility for that instrument, you're gambling, not investing. I don't think the same things apply to long-term investors and long-term gamblers...

Long term value investor cites short term price fluctuations as indication of long term thesis success/failure I just posted numbers. I didn't make any comments. You did that.

???

Yet that's not what has happened in the past 15-20 years. The difference between incomes and house prices has been bridged by increasing debt. So if we're to get back to the income/salaries trend, a significant correction (or long stagnation) would need to take place.

Looks like in the US, "debt service payments as a percentage of disposable personal income was 9.82% in Q3 2018 which was the lowest percentage since at least 1980." Meanwhile in Canada, looks like we're at record highs, and that without a lot of the interest-only HELOCs and other similar instruments popular in the past decade, many wouldn't even have made it this far.. Via

Historically, on average, real estate appreciation has pretty much followed inflation with a little extra, no? And there are all kinds of maintenance costs that people often forget to factor in when they cite how much they've made. Most of the return seems to come from leverage, which is fine, but we shouldn't forget that carrying a lot of debt can be a problem (price can fall, hells angels can move next door, houses can have expensive problems, etc). Tax free is nice, but a lot of people invest in tax-advantaged accounts too, and the friction to buying and selling tends to be relatively high, if you're not someone who knows real estate well and can bypass a lot of the fee-takers. To me, buying a house has a lot of non-financial considerations too, so looking at IRRs vs renting is only part of the story. Some people want to be real estate investors and don't mind flipping houses and moving every few years. Personally, I have no interest in that.