Liberty

Fits right in with his boss. That article was pretty brutal. I guess the Forbes people are pretty pissed off. It makes one of their best marketing/branding tools look bad, so they're taking it seriously no doubt.

Security is so hard to get right... In good part because you usually can't have the best people in the world working on every single project, and because the best attackers in the world can pick their targets until they find a weak one (and they are a lot more numerous than whatever team you have working on security, and their incentives are probably bigger than yours for not screwing up).

Here's the letter: http://basehitinvesting.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/1972-Buffett-Letter-to-Sees-Candies.pdf John Huber on the letter: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4122148-buffett-1972-letter-sees-candies

Someone has a defective inner scorecard: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2017/11/07/the-case-of-wilbur-ross-phantom-2-billion/

Q3: http://www.haydencapital.com/wp-content/uploads/Hayden-Capital-Quarterly-Letter-2017-Q3.pdf I thought there were some interesting ideas in there. Fred also links this presentation on calculating incremental ROIC: http://www.haydencapital.com/wp-content/uploads/COBF_Incremental-ROIC.pdf

MIDD is one of my sins of omission. I looked at it pretty closely after seeing it mentioned in a report about high CRI/ROIC companies... Probably around 2012..? Not sure. Saw promising numbers, but had a few reservations about the CEO and too many things I didn't understand about the industry, so I passed.

Good podcast interview with Brad Katsuyama of IEX: http://investorfieldguide.com/katsuyama/ IEX market share keeps going up steadily:

Doesn't change anything about what I'm saying. When deciding to buy, cars get compared to cars, houses to houses.

I don't believe that's correct. There are definitely non-economic factors at play, just like with buying a car (what brand projects the type of image that I want to show? Will it attract a mate? etc), but money is still a big factor and not everyone is driving a Tesla or Maserati just because that's what they'd really want deep down. Right now what pushes people to overpay for real estate is the belief that prices can't go down for any period (so FOMO + fear of being priced out + we'll just take the equity out later to pay for consumption). If that psychology changes, or if lots of people start being unable to make ends meet as interest rates keep raising and RE rules are tightened, things will change... If you adjust for inflation, most generations in the past didn't buy the equivalent of million+ dollar houses (especially not ones that are just regular houses and not luxury mansions).

I've been buying back the CHTR that I sold at 390 last July...

http://www.bnn.ca/canadian-households-nowhere-near-prepared-for-higher-rates-survey-finds-1.892780

I'm not sure. Probably around 2003 or 2004.

Thanks

The ONLY reason people are willing to pay current prices is the orthodoxy that prices can't go down and can't stop going up. This leads to the widespread fear of being priced out because prices will keep going up, and the belief that even if they overpay, rising prices will bail them out because they'll just take the equity out of the house as they go (making them more vulnerable to any shock to the system since they're more levered) or flip it at a profit later when they realize that whatever they bought isn't what they want anymore. Doesn't seem wise to me.

I'd rather look at the base rate of what has happened historically rather than make theoretical scenarios about "what if everybody just decides not to sell and never pay off their houses". New households are created, people get divorced, have to move for work, the kids move out and the house is suddenly too big, need money for retirement, etc. There's always going to be a bunch of churn in the housing sector, and price discovery is going to happen at that margin. If suddenly buyers have to get approved for a mortgage at 5-6% and they're not seeing prices rise constantly (stopping the FOMO, and reducing the hope that even if you're up to your eyeballs, you can always just take more equity out of the house via HELOC to pay for consumption), the psychology is not going to stay the same.

When prices go up, people can find lots of reasons why it's going up. When it goes down, people will find lots of reasons why it goes down. It's the Halo Effect, but for cities. To me, it's not worth paying millions for a bungalow from the 1970s and expect it to keep compounding faster than Berkshire (which has cashflows and reinvestment opportunities, unlike a house), but what do I know...

If you want to learn more about the potential to cure (or at least delay long enough that new cures can be worked on) the diseases of aging, this is a good start: https://www.amazon.ca/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthroughs-Lifetime/dp/0312367074 Short overview: This is from 2005, so a decent amount of progress has been made since: http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research

Another CGP Grey video worth watching:

Don't believe the FUD propaganda by the fossil fuel lobby. That industry has gotten hundreds of billions in direct an indirect subsidies over the decades but now they feel threatened because they suddenly have competition from a few sources that relentlessly keep getting better every year...

Yeah, and that help for the downpayment seems to often come out of a HELOC, just to make sure that everybody is leveraged to local real estate to the max. Or perhaps the parents are adopting the Chinese practice of making sure their children have homes so can attract a desirable mate and produce grandchildren. If so prices have a long way to go before they match the levels in China. The motivations are varied, I'm sure, but the financial logic remains. Borrowing to borrow on elevated asset, and putting your whole net worth into one asset, at historically low interest rates at a time when regulators are tightening the screws isn't exactly a low risk approach.

https://electrek.co/2017/10/19/china-breaking-all-solar-power-records-aiming-for-50gw-in-2017/

Yeah, and that help for the downpayment seems to often come out of a HELOC, just to make sure that everybody is leveraged to local real estate to the max.

https://electrek.co/2017/10/16/new-wind-turbine-efficiency-so-great-utilities-repowering-farms-early/ I thought this was pretty cool. Just cool to see the tech keep getting better and better, not only on brand new turbines, but with the ability to retrofit old ones.

Good book so far. I've posted a few excepts if you're curious: