oddballstocks

+100

Bloomberg has issues as well. Everyone has issues, that's the nature of the data business. Imagine collecting information from thousands of sources and trying to make sure they are all in the exact same format. There is a reason data sells for a premium. As someone who thought "I could do this myself" I've seen behind the curtain too. The SEC data is the lowest common denominator of data. Everyone has tools on this stuff, it's easy to get and easy to write a parser. I cranked out a .NET parser in two nights a few years ago as a test concept. If I can do this then literally anyone who can code can do this. The key is having: a) data that isn't available elsewhere b) digital versions of paper data c) a network effect If all you need is BRK's stats you're better off going to SEC.gov. If you want bond prices for Angola you won't find it online.. As a side note, I recently cancelled my Bloomberg subs. I realized I could get 90% of the information I need from Morningstar premium and Screener.co. Together they cost less than a month on Bberg.

My wife has started to notice the same thing. That said sometimes a single purchase can mean savings that equal the value of a membership for years. We also don't buy much food there, although that might change. I have four boys and the older ones eat a TON of food. There might finally be some savings from buying 50 oranges at the same time..

You weren't kidding about Breakthrough Advertising ($450 minimum & interestingly enough Amazon offers to let you trade in your copy for $2.) Thanks for these suggestions (added to the stack...) You can find the PDF online.

The Boron Letters Ca$hvertising Breakthrough Advertising - Schwartz (expensive, the Margin of Safety of copywriting) You need to ask yourself if your product fits this style. If it does then this is THE best way to sell.

There's a great website for ultralight backpacking: www.reddit.com/r/ultralight People do everything from shaving toothbrushes down to nubs, and cutting off excess backpack straps, all in order to lighten their pack. Really cool stuff even if you don't take it to that extreme (I don't!) Ah cool, thanks! Didn't know about the Reddit site. I visit backpackinglight.com and whiteblaze.net I did an endurance backpacking event last year, the North Country Trail A100. Goal is to walk 25/50/75/100 miles in 50 hours through the National Forest. It's unsupported so you need a backpack with gear, food, water, etc. Last year I completed the 75 miles and I'm training for the 100 this year. I have my base weight down to 7lbs for a spring/summer/fall setup. In true value-investor fashion my sleeping bag is a $25 Costco down blanket, pack is a $50 Eddie Bauer pack (650 grams!), cheap Amazon tarp etc. Once I discovered you can go light and fast my eyes were opened. I used to look at longer trails and think it'd be impossible to do because I can't just stop working for a month. But now I look at longer trails and realize they can be done quickly. Something like the Sheltowee Trace or Mid-State trail (300m) is a 8-9 day trip. Suddenly these longer trails are feasible.

Sleeze... I think the problem is the whole business model is built off of something that's a bit shady. "Hey guys, let's build a hotel except we'll sell the rooms for a high upfront cost then charge people a yearly fee to use it." Consumers think "oh it's an INVESTMENT" and that they can get out. Except there are so many suckers buying these things that developers have trouble building enough. The market is saturated and there's no residual value. How could there be residual value? You're selling a liability!

This chart is fascinating. One thing I love to do is light weight backpacking, also called fast packing. In lightening up a pack you need to critically look at food as well. The goal is to find food that's 100 calories per ounce or more. Otherwise you're carrying empty weight. There are some tricks with this. People will drizzle oil on nuts to bump the calories. I've found nuts fit the bill, same with some beef jerky as well as peanut M&M's and Snickers bars. A Snickers is really a perfect energy bar, the sugar, the nuts, very calorie dense for its weight. Sugar is an amazing energy source. I see it in my kids after they have a treat. The most random example of this is something I experienced this past May. I was driving back from an annual meeting in Tennessee and stopped at a gas station and picked up a bag of sour patch kids. I ate the whole bag, it was way too many. I was amped up from eating them. I was on a backroad through some National Forest. I pulled off and ran up a mountain. It was about 1,000-1,500 in elevation over a few miles, I sprinted up. It was those sour patch kids! My energy level was almost super human. It didn't last, and thankfully once at the top after I ran out of sugar the trip back was downhill, but it was crazy. Researching the caloric density of food really opened my eyes in a lot of ways. It wasn't an aspect I'd ever thought about before.

I have no idea where I picked up this story, but I heard of a group of people that did this thing with an HOA. It was a semi-empty condo complex in Las Vegas or somewhere like that. They purchased up as many units as they could then voted themselves into the HOA and effectively took control of the place. They fixed it up and increased the value of their properties then sold out. Good luck buying enough timeshares to gain control of a Hilton or Marriott! You're better off spending your billions on public shares and getting onto the Board.

Do you still eat fruit? In 2010 I became clued in on health. Let me backtrack, I grew up in an athletic family, was an athlete in high school and stayed active in college. But after college I sat in a cube and became pudgy. I didn't really know what or how it happened. Then in 2010 a co-worker made an off-hand comment about calories and how drinking a Coke at 140 calories would require about 1.5 miles of walking to burn it off. He said "it's a lot easier to not drink a Coke vs walk 1.5 miles." I'd never made that connection. Long story short, from there I lost 45lbs, became active again and have stayed that way since. I'm back to running 6-8 miles a day at the same pace (and sometimes faster) that I ran in high school 20 years ago. In terms of diet I try to avoid carbs like pasta outside of dinner. Breakfast is eggs, lunch: fruit, veggies and nuts, and dinner is whatever my wife makes. She cooks everything from scratch, I watch my portions. I've worked to cut down and mostly eliminate sugar, except I recognize I'm getting it in fruit and honey (mentioned below). I'm on the fence about this. Supposedly fruit is ok because it's balanced with fiber. When you don't eat as much sugar and then do you can see the difference. Here and there I'll get this urge to pig out on some candy or something (usually at holidays). I'll be like a drunk at the bar except my drink is having cookies and cake and seconds and thirds of both. It tastes awesome, and about 20m later I feel like trash. Now the converse theory to this is if you're always in a calorie deficit (such as Scott) it doesn't matter what you eat. If you're in balance what you eat matters, but if you're in a deficit your body will be much healthier. I used to keep myself in a slight deficit but as I ramped up my running I kept finding myself either bonking on long runs, or extremely fatigued the next morning. I wasn't eating enough. Once I increased my intake all of that went away. Here's a pro-sugar tip. The BEST energy drink/item is pure unfiltered honey. I'll have a tablespoon of honey right before a long run. Honey doesn't spike your bloodsugar and there's something about the type of glucose that gets to your muscles quicker. We buy some local stuff, it's very thick. Stay away from the grocery store crap, it's basically bottled yellow syrup. I do the honey thing 2-3 times a week, yes it's sugar, but I have perfect blood pressure. I have no idea if I have inflammation or not. How would I tell?

What are you trying to do? Sell software or purchase software? Are you asking to write an rFP or respond to one?

25 years ago Klarman talked about this sort of effect that indexing would have on the market, he even called it a fad. Same with Stahl and other active managers. As Dwight from the Office once said: " They’re going to be screwed once this whole Internet fad is over."

Or a great marketer. This. I saw a video where the interviewer asked why he didn't re-release his book and make it available. He said he liked that it was selling at a premium, it showed it's value. Another perspective. I heard someone say if his book was $20 it would be considered a run of the mill investing book not worth seeking out. But since it is so rare and expensive people think it's special. Bottom line, the guy understands marketing better than most.

You can look at selling on redweek.com. Like the others have said you'll be paying to exit, or be close to paying to exit. You can tell the family their money is gone unfortunately. You want to mitigate the ongoing costs.

This is absolutely brilliant, 13,000 people watching right now and growing. Think about that reach... incredible.

I tuned into this, very weird. The guy is wearing a wolf mask, so unusual. This has to be staged. I don't pay attention to anything like this and yet here I am watching a YouTube feed. I'm just waiting for the product pitch, I'm almost positive it's coming. There was someone who did this in 2004. They sold everything they owned and put it all on red (maybe black?) in Vegas. They were either going to go broke or double their money. They ended up winning, but the thing generated so much publicity for the casino that people started to wonder if it was just a publicity ad. Found it:

This stuff works, it's a fairly tried and true model. I've been the catalyst for two activism campaigns and played a hand in a third. The reality is unless you have the deep pockets, time, and inclination to do this then writing on the Internet is no more than journalism. Whenever I've uncovered a situation and pushed I viewed myself as a journalist encouraging others to action. The playbook on these things are all the same. Run for the Board, exert pressure, move for change. If it doesn't happen you need to sue. Sometimes (often?) you need to sue regardless. The unfortunate truth here is you need to be hiring white shoe lawfirms, and the largest/bet proxy solicitors. If you don't the company will shoot down any/all proposals and proxy contests. The cost to hiring these guys isn't cheap. I know of a fund that uses this activism model as their business model. They are very successful with it. There's a lot of this already happening, it's just floating around in emails (sometimes) or on the phone (most of the time). Everyone is worried about creating a "group", but that's mostly armchair lawyering at work. Talk to a lawyer about it, it's not much of an issue. You don't put this stuff online for the same reason the military runs a closed network. You don't want the enemy to gain access. If you talk about this stuff you'll find very quickly that these target companies know who you are, what you do, and have read everything about you. It would need to be a private message board where you had a way to physically verify membership, or it just stays how it is now...offline. If you have some online secret forum it's a matter of time before the companies worm their way in. You might think that isn't possible, but most of these execs have millions of dollars on the line if things change. Is hacking a message board, or impersonating someone worth millions? To management teams without ethics (which is 99% of these situations) it isn't a big deal. I'm not trying to rain on your parade or anything here. I'm just saying this isn't a new idea, it's happening already. The internet has already changed how activism and microcaps work. Your better bet is to say "email me or call me because I want to talk" and you'll probably end up with a flooded inbox. But what the heck...if you start a forum I'd like a login as well. Might as well see what companies people are interested in taking action on...

Subscribe to Morningstar. I'm looking at cancelling my Bloomberg sub and I'll subscribe to M* once I do that. The data is comparable for most stocks (even international). Morningstar's screening tools are terrible. For reference, I was quoted that to buy two fields of M* data for 1,000 stocks would be $800/mo. This is why GuruFocus doesn't have everything, it's a per field per stock cost. Or you can just subscribe to M* itself for a few hundred bucks and get everything.

Here's another deal for beer drinkers. I have started to buy my beer at the wholesalers. In PA wholesalers sell to distributors and retail outlets. Most people buy beer from a grocery store (retail) or a distributor. I've found I can save $7/case on an average case ($35 case and below) and save even more as prices go higher. The downsides are by law they can't take credit, so it's cash only, and their hours are 8-5 M-F, neither are a problem for me. Here is some of the craziness. They have Oskar Blues Da Gubner for $68/case, at the grocery it's $120/case. I purchased a case of Stone Xocovecia for $35, it goes for $65 in limited quantities at the beer distributor, even more at a retail outlet. The guy at this place told me a story about some crazy high end beer. They were selling cases for $120, he said the grocery store was selling them for $65/bottle. He said it blew his mind that anyone would pay that when they could pay the price of two bottles and have a case. The wholesalers are the guys with trucks driving around to bars to make deliveries. People don't think you can buy from these guys, but all you have to do is walk in with cash and they're happy to sell. To them a sale is a sale, it doesn't matter who the end buyer is. And of course if you want cheap beer they have "American Beer" for $9.99/case and "Pennsylvania Beer" for $9.99/case. In both cases that's about $.41 per beer.

Haha I appreciate the humor. I know that you're interested in the kind of investing I'm trying to learn more about. I would appreciate any books suggestions that would scratch this... "Modern Security Analysis/Distress investing" itch. Hopefully help some future wanderers who consider going down this dizzying path too lol. Nailing down the good material in investing is a skill in of itself I believe. I pushed through to read the Aggressive Conservative Investor. I remember getting to the end and thinking "I've turned all of these pages, but I can't remember what I've read." Here's my $.02, read Security Analysis, the 1941 edition if you're into asset investing. Each edition is different, dramatically different. From 1941 to 1951 the book changed a lot, and by 1962 it was almost a different book. In 1962 Graham spends time talking about EBITDA, cash flow, and buying the best name in each industry when the market crashes. He also spills ink for chapters discussing how to forecast what level the market "should" be at with a fascinating formula that combines inflation and GDP growth. Check out: The Art of Profitability

If you enjoy reading books where sentences are randomly abbreviated into acronyms then you'll love the writing; IDLWLT (I don't like writing like that), so it never clicked with me and since IDLWLT I had trouble finding value in the books (VLB), but I've found VLB in other books, so all was not lost. Oh wait, did my sentence just run on forever? Marty's do as well..

The emotion of 2008 and 2009? I remember placing a buy order in March 2009 and thinking "I will lose this money, maybe some of it, maybe all of it, but there is a tiny chance I won't." That was the psychology. Everything you did was a loss, everything. But it wasn't just the market. There was a tangible fear in the air, in people, it was everywhere. Everyone was worried if they'd still have a job, or if they'd have clients, or what the future might be. The fear was daily. Every single day people were on edge waiting for the latest development, who was going to fall today? It was scary and stressful. The best market analogy? Imagine you're in a very crowded room with a single door and someone yells fire. That's what the market was like, everyone stampeding towards the door regardless of the consequences. There are still aftershocks from the crisis. In most of the Rust Belt people talk about how the economy hasn't recovered from the crisis yet. This is crazy given how much time has passed. It's also crazy when you look at current market levels. Multpl.com shows that we're at the third highest Schiller P/E ratio, higher than 1929. Right now we're fourth in line to 1999, 2002, and 2008, food for thought.

Yeah, weird question. If you want to find out who the professionals are I'd start a new thread: "I have $1m I need to invest ASAP with a money manager please PM me or give me advice." Your inbox will be crawling. They'll send you letters and performance information as well.

This reads like some punk rocker writing about classic music. "pianos, who needs that crap? Melodies? They're worthless!" I appreciate art. Like anything there are a lot of different styles. I acknowledge and appreciate the talent that went into sculpting, or creating lifelike statues out of marble. Think of the challenge in taking a piece of rock and making it look like a person. I also like landscapes and paintings about specific things. My guess is you're ranting about modern art. Most seems strange, but some is fascinating. Art is a medium for an artist to tell a story. I personally enjoy writing, that's the medium I use. Others use a paint brush, or chisel, or musical instrument. If you view art in this context I think it's easier to appreciate. Most on here probably agree with you. I enjoy lingering at art museums, looking at the paintings and imagining the emotion that created the picture. My wife will breeze through "looks good, where's the exit?" Art is a medium to be respected. It's one of the only timeless artifacts. Reading 10-K's and investing? No one will care in 500 years. Statues and monuments created today might persist for a thousand years or more. We are still analyzing cave paintings from 10s of thousands of years ago. Ponder that for a few minutes. For most of us 100% of what we create will fade into the wind. But paintings in a cave still have meaning.

Here's the funny thing. To 99% of business people who've never heard of value investing this concept is the foundation of "business." You buy things cheap and sell them at higher prices. I've heard dozens of stories of people who buy cheap items on Craigslist and then turn around and resell them at higher prices right on Craigslist. Or garage sales, real estate, or really anything. Businesses are looking for low cost supply and then aim to profit on the sale. I've found myself that after a few weeks of watching Craigslist and eBay for certain items I can learn the market and find these same arbitrage opportunities. You need to look at a narrow market then follow for a while. Eventually you'll *know* what things generally retail for and can spot a deal. You need to act quickly and move fast with cash to close the deal. Some people are just deal hunters. They can hunt in stocks, or in guitars, or horse trailers, or really anything. I enjoy these stories as well.