Liberty

You're misunderstanding what he's saying. The way I understand it, his wife his claiming that he told her he'd retire and take care of the kids, but in fact didn't and couldn't have because he made lots of money investing. He's saying that he made lots of money, but that it didn't take much time because he didn't do it by working full time at it (doing lots of trades, following lots of companies, generating lots of original ideas through research, etc) and had plenty of time to take care of the kids. So showing to a court that he was actually retired and taking care of the kids back then and that investing was a hobby, rather than working full time and neglecting to do what he said he'd do, would indeed help.

Does anyone have the URL of the old MSN boards? Have you looked on archive.org and archive.is to see if copies have been archived?

I'm so sorry to hear what you're going through, Eric. If I had been on the board in those years, I'd be digging through archives and helping in any way, but I joined later (in 2011). But for the little that it's worth, I can vouch for everything that you wrote above to the best of my knowledge. You made very few, very intermittent bets that happened to be very large and asymmetric. You made your money by being smarter and having higher conviction, not by spending more time on investing than others. You've always presented yourself as retired and doing this as a hobby, and you explicitly said that your big trades were based on what public investors did (ie. BAC trade was after Buffett invested, etc), you wrote about all kinds of non-investing topics, and even many of your investing-related posts were clearly more thought-experiments to amuse yourself than anything you'd actually try to make money with, and you frequently talked about your family and your kids and walks on the beach and enjoying your free time and freedom from work. Wishing you the best!

That's what I keep hearing about it, but I haven't read that one.

This has gotten a lot of praise in the past few years, and I've finally got to it in the recent past. I can recommend it too, it's a very interesting book that covers a lot of ground in a very interesting and useful way (IMO): https://www.amazon.ca/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/077103850X

This video showing a simple (and entertaining) explanation of how machine learning probably belongs here, then:

https://www.movesmartly.com/articles/the-mistake-that-cost-sellers-millions-when-torontos-housing-bubble-burst

With the rates on the 5-year bonds going up in Canada, it'll be interesting to see what happens when mortgages start going higher again.

https://twitter.com/alex_macdonald/status/996416773057474561

At this size and without a huge engine of organic growth (like FB/AMZN/GOOG), beating the market will be hard, but I think risk is also much lower than with the market, so keeping up with the market while providing better sleep at night looks pretty much like a win on a risk-adjusted basis.

Too many... But if you haven't, you should probably read 'With the Old Breed' by E.B. Sledge. It's a memoirs.

Doesn't work for me, even if I go in private browsing mode. What I liked about the old Google Finance was the speed of it, the automated news tracking next to each chart, the "related" stocks from the same industry, and the real-time watchlist in a pretty small amount of vertical space. Could keep an eye on a long list of 50-100 stocks, and if something suddenly pops up 10% or down 10%, I can quickly have a look and see if there's any news, and if it's something from my "patience" watchlist, maybe decide if a buying opportunity is coming...

When I was in Toronto last month someone there told me that they were still on the old Google Finance too. Could just be a delayed local rollout for some random reason (they forgot to flip the switch in that datacenter?). I wish they'd just turn it back on (even if they keep the new in-search stuff) and just put a couple engineers on the project of modernizing it (rewrite the flash graph engine in HTML5 and fix a few big bugs)...

The hottest days tend to be the sunniest, so solar panels produce the most when demand for A/C is highest. That's a nice benefit.

I'm pro nuclear, btw. The life-cycle analysis for solar PV is much better than for the current mainstream alternative, which is natural gas (new coal plants are not being built, hydro is rarely built, and nuclear isn't being built). Gas never gets in positive territory when it comes to carbon footprint while PV gets there after a few years and then stays positive for a few decades. But the idea is that as the grid becomes cleaner, the manufacturing plants that make the solar panels also run on clean energy, so the maths gets better and better over time, which isn't the case for fossil fuels. I'd be fine with removing all subsidies for clean energy if we also removed all subsidies for fossil fuels, and idealy could somehow retroactively remove past subsidies for fossil fuels (direct and indirect, like military protection for oil routes and such, which amount to hundreds of billions). But that's not looking like it's happening. There's a huge double-standard going on. People are quick to look into the impact of building batteries (which can be recycled, the materials aren't destroyed, unlike when you use fossil fuels) and solar cells, but they don't hold other things to the same scrutiny. They'll complain about relatively small subsidies for new technologies that are in the steep part of their cost decline curve, while they rarely even think about decades and decades of large subsidies for old industries that are mature and don't need any help.

If catalytic converters in cars were useful, people would just voluntarily add them in as options. If coal plant particulate scrubbers were useful, coal plant operators should just be left to voluntarily install them. When you can externalize your costs to the rest of society, life's good. Defaults matter, all behavioral studies show this. There are a lot of things that are good for people and that make sense for them but that they don't do because of inertia/ignorance/etc. In think that in a very sunny state, where power is relatively expensive and where solar panels will actually reduce a house's monthly cost of energy by more than it increases the mortgage payments while also providing benefits to society at large, it's not a bad idea to make it a default (with exceptions for when it doesn't make sense). Just like having smoke detectors/banisters on staircases/breakers in the electrical box installed by default in new houses is a good idea even if they make sense and everyone should, in theory, add them in if they were not a default.

Doesn't work for me. Could be some weird local datacenter that wasn't updated yet? Are you traveling?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-09/california-votes-to-require-rooftop-solar-power-on-new-homes

Another good interview, different enough from the one above: http://capitalallocatorspodcast.com/2018/02/05/annied/

From free to almost $550 CAD/year :P Let's see if they have pricing power...

Not all excess or overvaluation is a bubble. The market doesn't spend much time right on the "historical average" line, it's usually swinging back and forth between over and under. So while I think we've had some bubbles in the recent past, I think some of what many people are qualifying as bubble doesn't fit that description, at least for my understanding.

Today is Claude Shannon's birthday (born in 1916, died in 2001). Probably a good day to go on Amazon and order this book! ;)

Well, at least you have bragging rights, right? Or is it worse to be right but have made almost no money than not to have invested at all..? :-\ Somewhat off-topic, but "having bragging rights" reminds me of this comic about exposure: http://s3.amazonaws.com/theoatmeal-img/comics/exposure/exposure.png

CHTR