ScottHall

Lmao Nice analysis. You, of course, have never picked a losing stock in your life. ;D

Love this documentary.

To an extent, yes. I am under a pretty standard NDA so I won't breach that, but I'll tell you about how I got started. The short version is that TMF has a stock picking game called CAPS. You pick whether you think a stock will outperform or underperform, and based on how right you are and your accuracy, you get assigned a ranking. I ended up getting in the top 0.6% of the game or so when I played it regularly (your score will generally deteriorate the less you play), and noticed the top ranked guy in the game had recently been hired by the company. I started a conversation about stocks with him and convinced him to buy a micro-cap E&P that doubled in two months. We stayed in contact and he recommended me for a job the next time there was an opening. I guess I did well enough in the interview not to tank myself, so I got hired. Funny story is that the E&P later crashed over 90% from its peak because its shale assets turned out to be pretty worthless, but we both got out with multibagger returns. You can always get lucky in the stock market. Sure. So, originally I was a highly concentrated investor, and would invest most of my money in just two or three companies that I thought had multiples of upside even if they also had high risk. There were some big winners in there (GGP, SSN) and I did very well with my winners. But there were also losers that crashed >50% (DBLE, for instance). That wouldn't really hurt much in a diversified portfolio, but giving back literally years of gains is pretty brutal when you concentrate heavily and it goes against you. This strategy ended up making me a decent amount of money on average - enough to beat the market, even with the losers - but I'm not sure it was actually +EV or if I just got really lucky. I do know that it was tax inefficient and took a lot of effort, so I gradually switched from this concentrated deep value approach to more of a GARPish approach. Now I place a lot more emphasis on quality of management and quality of business, and am happy to sit back and let my winners compound for me for long periods of time. Saves on taxes, and more importantly, it saves on time. I now allocate the time I spent diving into 10-Ks into hanging out with friends, playing games, and reading books. I enjoy my life more this way. I still beat the market overall, but I'm willing to settle for just a few points of outperformance instead of gunning for dozens. Not saying my way is the right way for everyone, but I realized that I already had enough money to quit working if I really felt like it, so why turn myself into a slave of my portfolio if I didn't really enjoy it. I find investing much more fun when research is only something I do when I feel like it, as opposed to feeling like I have to find a certain number of new companies to replace the ones that I churn off. Much more relaxing when I have a stable of winners that I can let run for many years.

I suspect I will kill myself with sugar in the same way that my father killed himself with alcohol. I do not dread this fate.

Hi Innerscorecard, I am still at the Motley Fool. I was pretty tired when I wrote that (was on the Benadryl as a sleep aid), so going back, I noticed there were a lot of typos. It was more a stream-of-consciousness rant than a post with any real rhyme or reason to it. I used to work as an analyst at the company, was promoted to senior analyst and am now working in the marketing department. Briefly, yes, but I refused to do the work so that didn't last for long. I am Scott. I am a novice in many fields and a master of none. I have ventured from investing, to marketing and general business principles. I am modestly skilled in all of them, but not amazing in any of them. You may wish to care because there are probably things you could learn from me. I'm not particularly bright, but I have a decent amount of accumulated knowledge. Tarot cards are fake. You must use a poker deck for predicting the future, and horoscopes are useless. But palm reading is real. My grandmother was an over-the-phone "psychic" who actually believed she was one. My family on that side is descended from gypsies, so I guess not much changed over the generations. Sure. Over the last ten years, my interests drifted into (and out of) politics, and I once considered myself a socialist because my internet friends said it was the intelligent thing to do. I've since decided that politics is a waste of mental effort, and moved into investing. I used my knowledge there to get hired by a financial newsletter publisher and worked on its analyst team for some time before moving to its marketing department. I forged transcripts and got into community college, briefly, before I decided that it was a waste of my time and dropped out again. My grandmother, both my grandfathers, and my father all died in the past few years. My grandmother from her dementia, one of my grandfathers from Parkinson's, the other from cancer, and my father from his third stroke brought on from drinking too much. Various members of my family have taken this better than others, but one of my siblings in particular has had a rough go of it. I'm personally fine, on account of I suspect we shall all die some day. There's no reason to get upset over the inevitable, I think. My plans for the next ten or twenty years are to wake up every day and try to enjoy myself with good meals and other treats. I may continue working, or I may travel around to experience the country and world. Basically, it's up in the air. I've never really made plans. You can ask whatever you'd like, doesn't have to be about my background necessarily. I'll tell you my thoughts on pretty much any subject that I have an opinion about. I just want to create some conversation here that isn't dominated by value investing. We can talk about you, if you'd rather. Yes. I don't want to dominate the topic, but since I started it I thought I'd put myself out there first. Yes, I don't think my way of life is ideal for everyone. Some people will need or want structure, and that's fine. I just ask that folks be open to attempting it. I will say that I've found my back feels much better from sleeping on the floor, although the bed is more comfortable while I'm actually doing it. I used to wake up with awful back spasms that wouldn't go away for weeks. Haven't had one in years. The blow up bed my brother left behind has yet to do that, but if it does I will certainly quit using it. A lot of value here also comes from the lack of maintenance I have to do for it. A similar thing: I don't wash my clothes often. I once went 6 months without doing a load of laundry, but was told by my family that people were probably just being polite about the smell. No one complained, though. The reason for not doing these things is because they're massive time sucks, in aggregate, and don't really add much value to myself. I would rather learn something new or perform an activity that I enjoy instead of these maintenance activities, so I defer them as long as possible. For an investing comparison... I treat my chores as John Malone treated his cable systems at TCI. Regarding why I deleted the post: I thought there was no interest. If that was the case, I was going to take it down and post it on one of my other online communities. But I'm anonymous on some of them, so I wouldn't like people to copy my stories in Google and tie me to this account as well. It is not so much my life story as some of the things that I've learned from life. A short version of my life story has been posted in the Buffett eats like a 6-year-old thread. Thanks Nate. I had good fun talking with you back then. Time sort of crept on me and I have not done a great job in keeping touch with you, except through Twitter, but it was enjoyable. I am glad that you found some value from it in your own life. For everyone else: I will repost the original shortly. I kept it saved in case I wanted to post it elsewhere.

No takers for a wall of text? Alright, fine. Feel free to ask away then, or just ignore this. Double edit: It's back now, in a slightly modified version. I told you all about my life in the other post, so I thought I should share the value of what I have learned in my life for each of you. You can take my advice or not. I accept they are unconventional and not for everyone, but they're worth a shot to some people. That's all I can really count on. Some of the things they have convinced you about public education are close enough to hyperbole to be fraudulent. You do not need any real level of formal education to succeed in the western world. I dropped out of the fourth grade - after much controversy with the county and my family - and never regretted the decision. The reason for this is what I was taught was mostly useless, and we were required to go at the pace of slowest folks in class. As the time, given this was an agricultural community in Northern California, the slowest people in class were the children of migrant workers from Mexico. So come Social Studies, we went at their pace. Took them awhile to read out a paragraph. A whole class sometimes. It's not their fault for being placed in a class in a language they weren't familiar with, but even so, I quickly understood that this was not a system I could tolerate, and left. It's a wonder I didn't make it out sooner, except my family tried to protest it at the start. I learned that what they wanted didn't matter, on account of I could just skip school over "sickness' to avoid its dreary existence. Eventually they gave in, we moved counties, and the hands weren't talking with each other. I spent the rest of my childhood playing video games, without any real friends to speak of. I met them online on the chat rooms. Talked to people all over the world, and found out that British people don't use dollars. Couldn't grasp the concept of alternative currencies at that point, but it was a good thing to understand. Boy was I lucky, because the internet really started taking off right when I hit my teen years. I could adopt so many subjects just by searching about them. I chose investment, studied it for a few years, and got a job involving looking at stocks on a day-to-day basis. I don't do that anymore, but it was a fun three years. Now I'm on to learn new business-related subjects, to improve my knowledge of how successful businesses operate and what their cost structures should look like. I am lucky to enjoy myself every day, so it's not even really like work. The summary version is that you shouldn't just accept what the government says when evaluating how to educate yourself or your children. As far as I'm concerned they have no business in my life at all, beyond coming for more money every year as a silent partner in everything I do. That is fine, but sometimes their ideas of what's optimal really isn't. College is even worse, at least where I attempted to attend it. Keep in mind the opportunity cost. The time bandit is the biggest bandit I know of. Another thing you need to know is that you shouldn't buy stuff just because most people do. You all are value investors allegedly, so this should be an intuitive thing for you. But many of you will not try sleeping on the floor to see how you like it. I did this for years with just an old sleeping bag and I felt great. I now have a blow up bed that my brother left behind. I now sleep on it, and will do so for as long as it has air in it. But when the time comes to replace it, it's back to the floor for me. Much of this, of course, is based on the hassle of learning to do maintenance activities that are of dubious value given the alternative. I am a very lazy person, and have structured my life around my laziness. I got out of school so I could play videogames all day. I got a job that offers very generous personal life balance. Unlimited vacation, and legitimately so. I took off two months pretty recently, and by the time I got back I had earned a promotion. There was no ill will at all. Sort of the opposite. You must also understand that one great way to accomplish great things for your company is to be willing to get fired tomorrow. Every day that I go in to work, I understand that I could say or do something so offensive that I could be fired for it, and I love that possibility because it is the ultimate freedom. Sometimes it is valuable to tap into that to get subjects on the table that would otherwise be considered sacred cows. If you're afraid of losing your job, it means you're probably not doing as good a job as you could be if you weren't. Life has slowly become something that I understand. And I have learned not to let it bother you too much, because bad things are going to happen to you. You just have to let them go, or at least not let them consume you. The dark spirals of depression and drug addiction are not good, but if you combine them, it's even harder to fix them. I suffered deep depression from my mid teens to my early twenties before I realized we're all probably going to die, so not to worry about it. Other people use religion for the same effect. That'll work too; we all need our delusions, so long as we're not delusional in our business and investing lives. More to come later. I am exhausted now and the Benadryl is kicking in. Scott

We sort of hijacked it. I was screwing around; I don't care if you talk about leverage. http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/hello-and-two-questions/ Edit: Wrong link.

We just had a great topic about this in General Discussion. In order to preserve that topic's status as a COBAF classic, I motion to table this discussion.

http://i.imgur.com/IW8kPlB.gif

I think some people (Taleb) criticize it because it might be describing cases of survivorship bias Survivorship bias? Not sure where that's coming from, but interested to hear your thoughts. Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by all indications, was fictionalized to the point it should probably be considered a novel. It recommends illegal or questionably legal activity and promotes reckless behavior. It's one of the first finance-related books I read when I was a teen, and I thought it was great at the time. In hindsight, it may be the worst mainstream book on finance ever written. It doesn't surprise me that it's so popular; it's targeted at people who want to get rich quickly and easily. The advice doesn't have to be useful because its marks don't know anything about the subject anyway.

Why is that? 1. Rich Dad, Poor Dad 2. "Not concerned about money," but wants freedom 3. Is willing to use 30% leverage to get it 4. While the markets are at all time highs 5. Is concerned he can't live off these capital gains 6. Does 20 trades a month 7. A lot of which apparently have a holding period of less than a year, some just "a month" 8. Wants this to replace his job income Conclusion, ~80% certainty: Gambler. I wish him the best. We've had some successful gamblers here in the past. I just hope he really knows what he's doing and I'm way off the mark here...

This thread is frightening on so many levels...

http://i.imgur.com/MnJqbMX.jpg

I bought one of these things a few days ago based on a pitch by a coworker, mostly to keep me interested. No real detailed thoughts, other than it appears to be pretty binary and it probably beats the scratchers. Wouldn't be shocked if I lose all $200-whatever.

Guys, I understand the urge to be rude to people on the Internet - I've done it myself many times - but is it really necessary to rain on someone who's having a good day? It's not like he's posting misinformation about Sears' credit agreements. Who cares if it doesn't really mean anything. Gio got a kick out of it, and that's what matters. I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean the stock market is going to zero on Monday.

Congratulations, Gio. Although I don't always agree with you, you're one of the most interesting members of the board regarding your career and accomplishments. May you continue growing wealthier with each passing year.

FB, AMZN, PCLN. Though I don't own Priceline, yet.

I don't like this book. The author is a scientist, and writes like it. It's dull and full of odd scientific anecdotes, detailing every little thing certain subsidiaries did, without explaining in much detail the financial jiu-jitsu Teledyne is famous for. It covers it, yeah, but in my view not much more than you'd get from reading any competent article on the company. I didn't get the impression that the author's intention was to cover this aspect well, so that may account for it. It certainly didn't seem like it, in any case.

I went to school in a hick town in the mountains of Northern California until 4th grade. It sucked so much that I dropped out. I don't regret it, personally, though that path is definitely not for everyone.

Loved loved loved this book. Another good one, profiling a relatively unknown but highly successful in his industry character: Whale Hunting in the Desert. It's about one of the top casino hosts of all time, and the tactics he used to become the best. How he lured players to the casinos, how he treated them in order to establish maximum credibility, etc. A worthy read for anyone interested in marketing.

I work at TMF. The key to winning at CAPS is "red thumbing" OTC crap and leveraged ETFs. My coworker was the king of the game for years and used this strategy with great success. I have an account, too, but I seldom update it so it's gradually gone from 99+ to 96. Also, because accuracy is counted for your ranking, scorebank like crazy when you're +5 on a pick... if you're not in a contest like this, anyway.

I read the book in the article, "The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King." It's pretty good, details his battles with the poker pros. Interesting to see what happens when someone so insanely successful enters a field where they have basically no experience, and how they try to solve that disadvantage.

My new year's resolution is to never post about Sears again.

Enjoy it, but I don't catch every fight or anything.

The casinos seem to be glorified money laundering schemes, but if you can live with that (I can), I think some of these look pretty interesting. I've been looking at them myself, but have not bought any yet.