Liberty

Wow, and that had a zero percent chance of happening! Is that what they call a black swan? :-X

New Yorker piece: http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/becoming-warren-buffett-the-man-not-the-investor

I saw it and liked it. I mostly watched it for the human aspects of it, as I don't think there's much new left to be said about the business side for someone who's been in the spotlight so long. I thought it was nice to see a lot of the stuff that I had read about in the Snowball. Overall I thought it was good. My wife watched part of it too, and it was a good introduction to parts of the story for her, and she said that she recognized a bunch of stuff that I had told her about too.

If it's fake: Kudos to him for committing to the performance so much. If it's not fake: It's one more example of what we frequently hear about lottery winners losing all their money within a few years.

Hey, I know many of you know of RationalWalk.com The author (@rationalwalk on Twitter) has started a new website that is more about personal finance: http://www.spartanspendthrift.com/ Thought you might enjoy it. Cheers!

Indeed, very inspiring.

I don't know, I didn't keep track, and I read a few other things in parallel. It's not super long.

This isn't about investing, but there's a lot about running an effective company culture, what good management is, how bureaucracy and inefficiencies can creep in, etc. It's the memoirs of an engineer, who eventually became the boss, as Lockheed's Skunk Works secret R&D lab. Among other things, they created the U2 spy plane, the F117A stealth plane, the SR-71 Blackbird recon plane (Mach 3 at 85,000 feet!), and other cool stuff (a stealth ship, more recently the F22). I really enjoyed it. Gave it an "A" in my own rankings. If you enjoy aerospace stuff it's a must, full of good anecdotes about both operations sorties and engineering problem-solving. https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed-ebook/dp/B00A2DIW3C

Thorp's book here: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/books/a-man-for-all-markets-ed-thorp/

Coming out January 24. Seems like this has a good chance of being really interesting. There was a fair bit about Thorp in Fortune's Formula (by William Poundstone), and it was quite interesting IMO. https://www.amazon.com/Man-All-Markets-Street-Dealer/dp/1400067960/

Glad you are liking it. The best part is yet to come.

More people should read this great book. Maybe this piece in the NYT will help spread the word: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/nyregion/james-bond-of-philanthropy-gives-away-the-last-of-his-fortune.html

Here's a 1-minute trailer for the HBO doc:

https://www.thestar.com/business/2016/12/21/toronto-eclipses-vancouver-as-countrys-least-affordable-housing-market.html

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/13-605-x/2015006/article/c-g/c-g04-eng.gif Pretty sure it kept going up since 2014...

Edit: I posted the wrong link:

House prices going up double digits for years while incomes go up low single digits, the difference being made up with debt, which is taken on at generational lows in interest rates, which have already begun to rise. Mortgage brokers, private mortgage lenders, and cash-back mortgages allowing almost anyone with a pulse to borrow leverage of 19-20x for years. While Americans have been delevering, Canadian have kept levering up. Yes, no problems. It's not like our economy is rather cyclical and undiversified in nature. Toronto and Vancouver aren't the only places that have green belts and other restrictions to development, or that have immigration. And Toronto has had more cranes and high rise developments than anywhere else in North America (including NYC) for many years of the recent past, yet condo prices haven't exactly stopped going up. I think a lot of the reasons used to rationalize this bubble will be looked back later on in a different light. Every time things get irrational, people have plausible-sounding reasons, but it's like the Halo Effect -- price movement drives the justifications, and not the other way around. Animal spirits have a lot to do with it; Canadians think their RE is invulnerable because what happened to Americans didn't happen to them in 2008, and they think that a house is the only place to put their wealth because the dot-com and GFC events have made them mistrust other investments and because they can't get decent rates from GICs and safe bonds. Once something has been going up fast enough for long enough, FOMO kicks in and everybody's pretty much ready to pay anything to get in on the action. Besides, most people here seem to think that owning a house is a kind of human right, and you just pay whatever it costs. Your life isn't complete until you can watch HGTV from your own living room. What does it matter, interest rates will always be low and house prices always go up anyway, right? I mean, even San Francisco, which has even more supply restrictions (legal and geographic), and happens to be home to a few trillion dollars in market cap and much nicer weather and culture, isn't as expensive as Vancouver.

Congrats, that's very good. Do you use leverage?

A little upbeat video from the Bank of Canada for the holidays:

http://torontolife.com/city/life/jim-estill-the-man-who-saved-200-syrian-refugees/

The reservoirs of some of those large hydro dams are truly gigantic. If right now you run them in a ratio of day/night of say 70/30, if you switch that to 30/70 because the daytime demand goes to solar, that's still the same amount of water flowing through, you just moved it around, and the reservoirs don't even have to be modified (and most have quite a bit of buffer to compensate for years when there's a lot of precipitation versus very dry years).

Or installation of a DC power grid to ship the energy around the globe from where the sun is shining to where it is not, http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build-a-global-power-grid That makes the most sense out of anything else I've seen. Let the free market and the law of competitive advantage work its magic. Generate electricity wherever in the world it is cheapest and easiest to do so and move it to the places it is most needed. The one flaw is that people will worry about terrorism and/or acts of war cutting them off from the grid and money will still be wasted on local power generation even where it doesn't otherwise make much sense to have it. Technology, markets, and people are awesome. Politics, radical religion, and people suck. Nothing says the price of solar won't keep falling a while further. At a certain point, panels are cheap enough that they'll be distributed everywhere, on roofs (especially with the kind of new SolarCity roofs that are basically better than traditional roofs) and there'll actually be less concentration of sources than there was with coal and gas plants. V2G systems with EVs will help store energy in the grid, as will cheaper batteries over time, and as other mentioned, hydro can also help (ie. Norway can act as a battery for parts of Europe). We'll see how it plays out, but one thing that solar won't do is make geopolitics more unstable. EVs + solar will solar all kinds of problems on that front in the fullness of time.

Watsa must think the stock is on the high side of he's considering issuing that much.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/world-energy-hits-a-turning-point-solar-that-s-cheaper-than-wind