Liberty

http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/overcoming-your-demons/ Good personal post by Morgan about his fight with stuttering. I have an acquaintance with a very strong stutter, and this helped get a better idea of what it must be like. But it's also about more than stuttering, of course. We all have things to overcome...

Happy birthday (a little late)!

Ideally, it might be possible to look at share count reductions over long periods and overlay valuations over that period to give more points to buybacks done at low valuations/high FCF yields and give less credit to buybacks done at high valuations. Of course you'd have to use relative valuations for each companies, since a really good business might always have a higher multiple than a crappy business, but buybacks done in the low end of that range might still be better...

Youtube version of the 25-min CNBC interview:

I thought this was an interesting article about the challenges facing consumer stable brands: http://intrinsicinvesting.com/2017/08/30/death-many-brands/

Important PSA if you know people who might be targeted: https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/how-online-filter-bubbles-are-making-parents-of-autistic

Finally finished it. Here's my Amazon review:

I use IB primarily. It's cheapest, and if you just want simplicity, you can use the web interface rather than the full app. I also have registered accounts with TDW and RBCDI and they're fine for what they are, but I prefer IB.

I love you too, Cardboard.

Same. I usually try not to get sucked into it, but once in a while something so crazy happens that I can't help it and fall into the vortex (presidential candidates bragging about sexual harassement and nazi rallies, that type of thing). The separate board makes it easier to ignore, so thanks Sanjeev!

Claude Shannon’s investment in Teledyne had a 27% CAGR over 25 years… He was a college friends of Singleton, who put him on his board.

Bought more Dundee common @ $2.64 Why? Do you trust management?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-15/canadian-home-prices-tumble-most-since-2008-recession-on-toronto

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-14/gates-makes-largest-donation-since-2000-with-4-6-billion-pledge

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/uk-coal-hibernating-summer-john-massey

I'm more than halfway through the book now, and the chapter I just finished (called "The Bomb", because the effect of Shannon's theories had the impact of a bomb on the field) was just excellent. I already knew many of the basics of information theory, but this was a good primer on how the ideas were developed and their game-changing impact. I appreciate how the book spends a lot of time on Shannon's work and theories and doesn't focus that much on every single detail of his personal life and childhood and such as some biographies sometimes do (not necessarily a bad thing, especially when you want the definitive bio of someone, but some people are more interesting than others and sometimes you just want the highlights).

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/home-capital-managers-ignored-warnings-from-regulators-industry-partners-report/article35896961/

http://business.financialpost.com/real-estate/toronto-home-prices-in-record-monthly-drop-as-sales-plunge-1/wcm/1b276698-c8b0-4cb9-a5a6-522557f062fe

http://www.greaterfool.ca/2017/08/01/almost-there-3/

Really enjoying the book so far. About halfway through and it's well-written and well-researched. The authors did an AMA on reddit about the book and the research on Claude Shannon:

Josh Brown wrote some counter-points: http://thereformedbroker.com/2017/07/27/tennis-with-howard-marks/

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Glad you liked it.

Tried it, it wasn't for me. Also tried Evernote, Trello, etc. The only one I use for general notes and some temporary investing notes is the iOS/Mac Notes app. Quite good since a major update to the backend and frontend a couple years ago.

You're disagreeing strongly with Buffett (among many others here). Of course, interest rates are not the *only* factor, but they're a big one. Lower P/E's elsewhere also have to do with other kind of risks (ie. political, demographic, or just the opportunity cost between markets with different prospects), so that worse markets need higher equity-risk premiums over the risk-free rates (or if the local interest rates are even risk free -- don't trust Venezuela's central bank!), but there's not doubt in my mind that all else equal, as Buffett says, interest rates "act like gravity" on stocks.