ScottHall

Anyone been looking at these? They've been hammered pretty much across the board, as China's corruption crackdown has made Macau gaming revenues drop for the first time since the dinosaurs walked the Earth. Looks like there's still a lot of bleeding yet to come, and they're not "stupid cheap" yet, but I've got these on my watch list. I don't currently own any, and probably won't in the near future. There's a lot of hair here (money laundering, weak Asian economies, corruption in general), but the market seems to be an interesting one with the regulatory hurdles to opening up shop, so I thought it was worth putting on the watch list in case they continue to decline. http://www.dicj.gov.mo/web/en/information/DadosEstat_mensal/2014/index.html

Yes flash cards have been helpful. I can see them being helpful for CFA especially for someone who does not have an investing or finance background. Flash cards help keep stuff in your mind. Even if you are not entirely sure what is going on you will eventually have your "Aha!" moments if you keep stuff floating around in your head long enough. I am not one for diplomas or certifications either. I never finished High School nor do I have a degree. I have never taken any of the industry certifications in my tech/software career. The funny thing is I will probably never be able to use the CFA designation because I don't have the 4 years professional experience required and don't plan on changing careers to work professionally in finance or investing. I do manage accounts pro bono for family members but that is explicitly called out as non-qualifying in the requirements, which makes sense. But by learning all the material and taking all the tests I am rounding out my knowledge base and getting a better understanding of what other competitors participating in the market might know or think about. I have found it mostly enjoyable. I also know that I am generally much more motivated when there are deadlines/milestones. I understand your feelings about it being "one of the great certification cons". The other way to think about it is to compare it to getting an MBA. My understanding (which could be wrong) is that in the industry the CFA is viewed equivalent to a graduate program. The cost of going through the CFA program and the fact that you can do it entirely on self study makes it a compelling bargain. If you study with just the curriculum which is entirely possible and regiester early for the tests it is very inexpensive in comparison. Of course you won't have the prestige of an actual degree but thats what you pay colleges for. I was actually fairly impressed with the quality of the CFA books. I have picked up quite a few investment and finance textbooks at goodwill and find I like the CFA books better. Just wanted to note that I'm not using con in the traditional sense of the word here... what I mean is the CFA has a very good business going for itself.

I think this is a little bit silly. My thoughts on the matter have always been that the aggressive proponents of Conscious Capitalism miss the point... if you can create shareholder value by treating customers well and providing them great service, good. Of course that can create a lot of shareholder value. But if you have a largely unregulated monopoly, as Malone did at one point, you can also create a lot of value by taking your customers to the cleaners and returning gobs of cash to shareholders. Both work, they just work in different situations. I think it's better to have a nuanced view here, rather than take anecdotes and correlations - as if you could really prove a causal relationship... people with agendas try to pull the wool over our eyes with fallacious interpretations of data all the time - and coming to strong conclusions either way. Much of the world does not lend itself to analysis by spreadsheet.

Diplomas and certifications aren't my thing, but I helped one of my coworkers with the level 1 test. She had failed the first time (barely), and the second time she really doubled down on studying and found that flash cards were a very helpful way of practicing any time you have a few spare moments. She's smart, but she didn't really have much of a financial background (she worked as an editor for most of her career), so a lot of it was new material to her. If you've been a serious hobbyist on top of dedicating a lot of time, I imagine you'll have a pretty good shot. CFA may be one of the great certification cons in America... fail a ton of people and make a fortune in test fees. A prestigious certification to have for the industry, so people want to get it. Great business model - wish it was a public company.

Hi Mhdousa, My recommendation to you would be - if you haven't yet - write down all the reasons you might want to take this job and move your family, and then compare those to the benefits of the life your family already has. If it truly is just a prestige thing, working for this hospital, that probably won't make you very happy because your status relative to your new colleagues will probably go down compared to your status now, even though your overall status might increase. In short, it's a lot easier to be the big fish in a small pond, and potentially a lot more satisfactory in regards to self-perception. That said, if you think there are learning opportunities available at this hospital that will help you improve yourself and aren't available where you currently work, then it may make sense to take the job if that's something that interests you. I've had a relatively short career - less than three years - but I can tell you without a doubt that the education I've received from working for my employer has far outweighed my actual compensation. I've expanded my understanding of business models substantially just from analyzing how our business works. If you think there are similar opportunities for you, evaluate how valuable they could be to you and act accordingly after considering the drawbacks. I personally don't regret moving cross country for a job because I've learned a lot of transferable skills from it. If that wasn't the case, I absolutely would regret it because I see my family only a few times a year now. It's something I constantly weigh to determine when I am ready to move back to California for good. I think Oddball's advice in general is very good, even if I don't agree entirely with his conclusion. I think the only people who can tell you whether you should take this job are you and your wife. You know a lot more about your situation than we ever could - all we can do is hope to give you are some insights to help inform your decision.

Read the credit agreements if there are any, not the 10-K.

One thing to note is that just because debt is secured doesn't necessarily mean non-recourse. In a bankruptcy situation, for example, if you have a first lien on an asset and that asset turns out not to be enough to cover your claim, the remainder will generally become a general unsecured claim. That's not to say that there's no such thing as non-recourse debt... there is, obviously. You just need to make sure not to conflate the two in your head.

This was excellent. Thank you.

Scott, I would think you make an error here. It is not because it worked out well for you than it would for everyone. I tend to think that statistically, people who drop out of school so young won't really succeed, they would proably have many problems just dealing with simple real-life situation because they would miss important skills like reading, writing and counting a bit. Education is statistically better for the whole population, even though there always will be some people that would have done better otherwise. Hi Jeff, I'm not sure what you mean by an error. I didn't say anyone should follow my path or that it's ideal, and indeed, I did say that having a formal education is probably a net benefit to a certain point. All I was saying is that when you cross that point, you get in to trouble. And at that point, it is very possible to end up in a situation where you can end up worse off than a dropout because your indebtedness more than offsets your higher earnings power. Sorry if I wasn't clear. Hi Ericopoly, Merkhet is basically right. I started "home schooling," which was still halfway supervised by the school district. Eventually my family moved, and we just didn't register with the new school district. No one really cared. I should note we were from the backwaters of California. A little hick town of about 500 people in the Shasta Cascade region.

Most probably. Is it good for energy? I'm not even gonna guess on what the second and third order effects will be. My usual thought pattern regarding elections is that, for the most part, the status quo won't change a whole lot regardless.

Well, that's unfortunate. What's even more unfortunate is how so many people are marks for the formal education system. After decades of indoctrination through after school specials and government propaganda, it has become almost a sacred cow that going to school is good for you. It probably is, to an extent, but it's no silver bullet and can be very harmful to yourself if you take it too far. As a fourth grade dropout, I am in a better position than a lot of people who spent money on college educations because they bought in to the delusion that college is the golden ticket to the good life. This is the sort of thing that happens when people don't stop to ask questions. College must be good for me, because I've been told it was ever since I was 4 years old. Everyone else is doing it, and the whole country can't be full of idiots, right? The combination of social proof and positive reinforcement from those in authority makes for a hell of a cocktail, and an even more wicked hangover.

The best part about this article is how CIS insists upon his anonymity, and then proceeds to give away everything an interested party would need to identify him.

First thing I'd say is that you have way, way too much stuff in this model. You have 12 tabs and most of them don't seem to feed in to anything. I also can't really tell if you're going for a FCFE or FCFF model here, because you take all the trouble to forecast out interset expense by year but then use EBIT as the jumping-off point for your DCF. That's cool, whatever, but then I notice it seems like you're not accounting for the debt anywhere on your DCF page. It's possible I've missed it on one of these tabs somewhere, but assumign the "Discounted Value" tab is the DCF tab, I don't see it. You'll need to account for that one way or another, if you haven't. I'd suggest taking the model out at least five more years. Your terminal growth rate is really high, and as a result of that you're just dumping your value there, but it doesn't really mean anything as it probably hasn't really been thought through. I agree with everyone else about how CapEx won't substantially exceed D&A forever, so you really do need to get that right in your terminal period or you'll get a valuation that's way too low. Also, I wouldn't just forecast recent results out willy-nilly. Think about why and how those line items are going to develop. Is this a business that will benefit from any operating leverage over time, even if it hasn't yet? You need to account for that, if so. Right now you have pretty much flat EBIT margins going in to forever. Not saying you're wrong about that, just something to think about. I'm not going to dig in to your various formulas right now, but I'd check those too to make sure you're doing everything "by the book," so to speak. You can easily botch a valuation by screwing up the order of operations or just not accounting for something. I may come back to this later, if time permits. I also may not. I would amplify this by saying all of the capex should not be subtracted. Capex is made up of maintenance capex + growth capex. Only maintenance capex should be deducted, and this is frequently approximated by D&A expense. The hard part is estimating how much of total capex is really growth capex, and most companies do not explicitly break this down for us. This is inaccurate. If you're forecasting growth but don't deduct growth CapEx from your FCF, then how are you going to get that growth? In most businesses, you need to "spend money to make money," as they say, and if you spend that money on CapEx you can't exactly dividend it out to shareholders. That's about it for a five minute look over. I may come back with a more thorough take later, but feel free to point out anything I've missed if you think I inaccurately described your model. Best wishes, Scott

I'd say no to that. Part of the reason Buffett liked GEICO so much is that it provided more value to its customers through its cost advantage. Bank of America does have an extremely low cost of deposits, but I'd say that probably accrues more to its benefit than its depositors. I think some of the online banks are more like GEICO, in that they offer higher rates on deposits but have much, much lower overhead because they don't have the legacy branch structure. BofI's efficiency ratio last year clocked in at about 37.6, for example, compared to Wells Fargo's 58.3. No comment on the attractiveness of any of these companies at today's prices, though I do own Wells warrants.

The lion's share of my net worth is calculated monthly and set to me in the mail, to which I just add my investment accounts and shares I own of a privately held company. It takes like five minutes.

http://www.jungfrau.ch/en/quick-navigation/company/

One of the big differences between now and then is that most of the publicly traded tech names are real businesses that might just be overvalued as opposed to worthless. I have no opinion on the valuation of Twitter, FB, etc.

Not really. Most financial commentary - or any commentary, for that matter - is useless. There are a few people whose articles I read and several more I follow on Twitter, but that's about it.

Could be an honest mistake, but a lot of OTC companies are run by jackasses who are very hostile to outside shareholders. I'd call up the company and ask for whatever information you want.

Analysis and Valuation of Insurance Companies http://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/ceasa/research/papers/industrystudies

Our CEO enjoyed this film to the extent that he had the company take an afternoon off to watch it.

I read this over the course of two days. I really enjoyed it. I would absolutely recommend it, and I like the focus on strategic costs vs. non-strategic costs.

Hilarious.

As with most things, I do not think generalities will work well here. Women are people just like everyone else, and they are all at least a little bit different. Some will be detrimental to your life, but some would probably be a great benefit, too. I think it just depends what sort of people you spend your time with. I have found that my life improves if I associate with people who are smarter than I am, so that I can learn from them. I imagine there is some sort of equivalent for relationships, but I don't have any experience in that regard.

I get Capital IQ through my employment for free. I like it as it helps me see decades of financials on one screen, but I wouldn't pay for it personally. As for everything else: you guys can think I'm crazy or not. A good chunk of my office does, but we get along well anyway. I don't really let what people think about my lifestyle influence me, because it does not really matter to me what anyone thinks of me. I dropped out of the fourth grade and became a recluse for over a decade before I was hired by my employer. I'm happy to go back to that lifestyle should it ever be necessary. For various reasons I don't have to work, I just do so because it gives me something to do. This is true freedom to me. Beyond the laws of the land, I don't have to answer to anyone if I do not want to, which I think is an advantage as it allows me to run my life my way and live by my own principles. I'm not going to condemn any of you for having more lavish or more frugal lifestyles than I have. If that is what makes you happy, then I am glad for you. My way is not for everyone and I know that, but it is the best way for me that I have found. If I ever find a better one, I will change, but until then, I am happy with how I operate right now.