Liberty

Quite an interesting book. I'm almost done with it (got the audio book, and it's only something like 11-12 hours, so at 2x speed it's quick) and it's a fascinating look into the White House and Trump, and how he thinks and makes decisions. We've seen a lot of events from the outside, but it's really something else to discover what was going on behind the scenes at the time. How the sausage is made, so to speak... Woodward has obviously been talking for a couple years, as things happened, with something like 1/4 of the white house staff. It was clear for a long time that this is a super leaky ship and that everybody was talking to the media, but this shows that it's even more than that. You can kind of triangulate his sources by who was present during things... Pretty sure he has hundreds of hours of tapes with Bannon, Lindsey Graham, Cohn, Tillerson, maybe some with Kushner, Kelly, Matthis, McMaster (?), surely some staffers under them, etc. From a purely investor point of view, it gives some insights into how Trump thinks about trade and the economy (service economy vs tangibles, etc) and the power struggles within the white house between various factions, and how the balance of power might have changed now because of the high turnover. I highly recommend it. It's rare to get such an in-depth book about something almost as it's still going on rather than years later. https://www.amazon.ca/Fear-Trump-White-Bob-Woodward/dp/1501175513/ https://www.audible.ca/pd/Fear-Audiobook/1508240108 And please, no complaints from those who haven't read it yet... That's just fake news if you haven't read it.

Bill Nygren on intangible assets and GAAP: https://www.oakmark.com/News/The-Importance-of-Intangible-Assets.htm

That you point to this as a source says more about you than about anything else.

I saw this about Sept 11, 2001, and thought it was a great example of what a classic narcissist would do about such an event, which is to try to make it about himself:

Interesting. The data seems to show that money has been going out of equities funds: Why do you think it started in 2009? You don't usually calculate from the bottom, rather from when you reach the previous peak... and in between we've had lots of rough markets with lots of things down 10-20%+ (2011, 2015-2016, etc), has had people worry all the way up, with the bulls rarely being really in control (maybe part of last year when volatility was super low, until the market fell 10% in a few days in February). "They need to stop w the false narratives (see article). 2015-2016 was a bear market! Biotech -35% Jul 2015 - Jul 2016 $XBI Consumer Good -21% Jul 2015 - Feb 2016 $IYK Energy -64% Jun 2014 - Feb 2016 $XLE Financials -22% Jul 2015 - Feb 2016 $XLF Healthcare -18% Jul 2015 - Feb 2016 $XLV Industrials -29% Jul 2015 - Feb 2016 $XLI Materials -27% Jul 2014 - Feb 2016 $XLB Technology -26% Jun 2015 - Feb 2016 $XLK Russell 2000 -26% Jun 2015 – Feb 2016 $IWM NYSE -20% May 2015 - Feb 2016 Globally... Australia -20% in 10 months $EWA Brazil -50% in 6 YEARS $EWZ Canada -22% in 1.5 YEARS $EWC China -50% in 10 months $FXI France -25% in 10 months $EWQ Germany -28% in 10 months $EWG Hong Kong -35% in 10 months $EWH India -24% in 1.2 YEARS $INDA Italy -50% in 5 YEARS $EWI Japan -28% in 10 months $EWJ Mexico -45% in 4 YEARS $EWW Russia -74% in 8 YEARS $RSX South Korea -17% in 6 YEARS $EWY Spain -36% in 10 months $EWP You know what's interesting? Almost every single market we track bottomed simultaneously in February 2016. This could mark a generational significant low. $SPX $SPY $EEM $VEU $VT $FDN $SMH" And things aren't so rosy around the world: Not saying I know what tomorrow brings, but I keep hearing a revisionist narrative about the past few years having been smooth sailing and straight up, but all along I've seen people hand wringing and calling the last inning (since 2011)...

Yeah, "Jesse Livermore" (obviously a pseudonym, for those not familiar with the historical figure..) is a tremendously smart guy. He deals in aspects of finance that I usually don't worry too much about (macro stuff), but he does it with such insight that he's a pleasure to read.

New book from a former employee about product design and software engineering at Apple during the Jobs era. I've heard good things about it, but haven't read it yet: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250194466 Sample available here: http://creativeselection.io/

Good new blog: https://www.insecurityanalysis.com/writing/

I'm not a member, but I would certainly guess that the content is high quality based on the publicly available stuff.

Not new or unknown, but some of my faves off the top of my head are: http://basehitinvesting.com/ http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.com/ http://valueseekerinvestments.blogspot.com/ http://yetanothervalueblog.com/

Welcome to the board!

https://bloom.bg/2Pvnsn6

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambler-who-cracked-the-horse-racing-code

https://player.fm/series/the-joe-rogan-experience-142216/ep-1109-matthew-walker As a bunch of people trying to make money through good decision-making and analysis, I think more of us should think about the quantity and quality of sleep we're getting. Good interview with Matthew Walker, " Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Founder and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science" He also has this book: https://www.amazon.ca/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501144316/ Though I haven't read it yet, but I've added it to the list.

For those who were wondering if this trick works, I've been on the same blade cartridge since I posted that, and it wasn't a new one at the time. I don't have a Homer Simpson beard, though, some your mileage may vary. Another update. I'm still on the same blade cartridge as back in February. The whole disposable blade industry is built on a lie. Granted, I'm not Homer Simpson in the beard department, but still, I'd usually have gone through multiple cartridges since last Feb if I wasn't doing this trick...

I read the previous discussion - not much info regarding should I now use IEX. Also the discussion is 3+ years old.. so much could have changed since. I just like linking related threads so that people who stumble here first and want more can easily find the other. As for IEX, I'm on IB and I know that IEX is in the mix used by their trade execution algo, and I trust it to use it when it's most beneficial. How many trades are you doing that you think it's worth trying to micro-manage which exchange you're trading on rather than just trust IB to use what's best for you (IB is one of the ones that isn't selling trades to HFTs, afaik)? Seems like unless you have trading many millions frequently or are a day trader, the effort to do this might either provide returns too small to measure or might actually be counter-productive (ie. you restrict trades to IEX, but maybe some other exchange had a better price at the time that wasn't being spoofed). The simplest way is probably just to decide on the price you are ready to pay, put in a GTC limit order, and just let it fill or not whenever... I'm glad IEX exists and more traffic is going to it, but as a retail investor, I'm not really in a position to move the needle with my volume, so I'll let that to the big whales...

Previous discussion for reference: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/books/flash-boys-by-michael-lewis/

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/toronto/article-supreme-court-wont-hear-long-running-toronto-home-sale-data-case/

For those interested, there's this documentary that I saw a few years ago that I thought was informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B9SOJHvLSU It's not the best documentary on many levels, but on a few levels, I think it's very informative in helping us understand some of the traits of the dark triad first hand.

I totally understand that position, and it's usually the right one. But the exception that confirms the rule is someone like Trump who has been so exactly textbook NPD in public view for decades and decades that his photo could basically be used in the DSM. If Trump was shown as a fictional character in a movie he'd seem like a caricature (in Back to the Future 2, the Biff in the dark future that runs the town is based on Trump, with his paintings of himself and his Trumpian office, and he seems way over the top), yet here we are in real life. A lot of other people have narcissistic tendencies in politics and hollywood and business, but it's usually kind of hard to tell or just partial or just kind of leaning that way on the spectrum. Usually we lack data (we see actors a lot, but rarely as themselves). In this case, I think it would be burying my head in the sand and irrational to pretend this isn't the case just because I don't have some official paper saying that's what he is. It's like if you've known someone for a long time who is clearly deeply autistic or has down syndrome or is dumb as a brick (IQ below 60). Do you tell yourself that you can't recognize what you're seeing because you don't have an official diagnosis and pretend nothing is going on, or do you trust your judgement? Well, in this case it's not just my judgement, it's basically almost everybody who's been around him who describes these traits (ie. he's not just playing a character on TV and then reverting to a more typical personality-type).

I don't think that's quite true. I don't think people understood. The whole Scott Adams argument that he's playing a role to get what he wants but he's actually not really like that and actually quite smart, etc.. No, he's actually that shallow and petty and thin skinned (spending years circling his small hands in gold marker on magazine covers and emailing it to a journalist who once mentioned he had small hands). But that's not even for most people. The Adams rationalizations worked well on the more intellectual bunch who needed a narrative to believe, but I think most people don't do research on forums and read long New Yorker profiles or whatever. They just think "he's a billionaire, so he must be a good businessman, right, and he constantly talks about all his successes, and most people aren't liars, so it's probably true that he's that smart and successful". The used car salesman tactics actually work if you do them long enough and consistently enough, and Trump's whole life has been that act. Damn, you've dragged me into it... Trolling successful I guess? Anyways.

I agree with a lot of that, I just think it's a different discussion.

Ah, so just trolling, my mistake...

They watched some promo videos from funds to determine this? Seems like a pretty weak study...

It's almost as if timely information was sometimes released in a timely manner to inform the public about timely things.... Almost the reverse of paying people off so that damaging information only comes out after an election...