west

Ajit? The skin tone and hair color (and perhaps age) seem to be right...

Sure, none of us are likely to become the next Buffett. But, keeping with your basketball analogy, if we want to "play in the big leagues", and not just do this in our spare time but do it professionally, it probably won't hurt to practice the way he says to practice. Especially when Combs followed his instructions (even though Buffett said most people wouldn't) and it worked out pretty well for him. Also, while 500 pages a day doesn't mean anything by itself of course, it is something to shoot for. I figure it's better to track this stuff and see improvement, even if you never hit 250 pages per day, than to say "Nah! I'm never going to hit 500 pages a day! So there's no reason for me to measure my reading and see if I can improve." Finally, I currently work on investing full time. Yesterday I read 111 pages of some hardcore, new-to-me, concept material. This took me about 10 hours. Maybe I'm a slow reader. Then, at night, I read some stuff that was both easier and that I was already familiar with. I read twenty pages in twenty minutes, no problem. The point it is, if you're not familiar with something, there's no way you can read 500 pages in a day and understand it all. However, if you're reading something that you've already read plenty of times before and know what to expect (for example, Oil & Gas Journal, the Wall Street Journal, Retailing Today, etc... you know, the things Buffett allegedly held up during that Columbia lecture where Combs was in the audience) and you have all day to read, and are a little bit obsessed with what you're doing, there's no reason to think you can't read 500 pages of that kind of material in a day.

This is my opinion, too. Reading 500 pages a day shouldn't be a big issue, especially if the data is in a highly structured format that you're familiar with like a 10-K. For me at least, if I know the structure of what I'm about to read, it greatly increases my ability to both read it fast and get the gist of it fast.

Sounds dangerous... being a good investor is being willing to sit on capital until you know the pitch you want to swing at. Being disciplined enough to sit on cash for another 6 months (when you really don't want to) would probably be good exercise. +1 I would focus on your exam (you're almost done with them!) and be patient. If you have to do stuff now, try reverse engineering one of Packer's ideas. He has one hell of an investment record: http://cobff.chrisdrane.com/user/Packer16 The GNCMA thread has a telecom primer or two in it that you can start with.

"“One of my friends used to work for J.P. Morgan in New York, and he’s now at Google,” Siddiqui says. “He’s a total chick magnet. He walks around with Google Glass on, and girls go crazy."" False. lol. Yup. Very true. It will be interesting when this is all over and tech is full of... tech people again. In 2009 and 2010 San Francisco was totally dead. It's completely changed in, say, the last year and a half.

You won't regret it. The book is simply amazing. There's no other book out there I can think of that explains such a large and complex, but still very simple at the same time, industry as well as this book does with the oil industry.

I checked at both the San Francisco (where I live) Public Library, which has a lot of awesome resources, and they don't have it. The Berkeley Business library has it, but limits access to faculty and graduate students that have special permission to access it. I'm guessing it's too expensive for them to grant general access to it.

I actually scraped the entire Japanese market 2013 price data from yahoo.co.jp and finance.google.com :). I scraped both to compare them and find inconsistencies in the data. The goal was to deal with the (hopefully minor amount of) inconsistencies by hand. Unfortunately, there are too many to deal with. And the price data on those websites doesn't always play nicely with the financial data I get from money.msn.com. So I kind of just want to deal with one data source at this point, versus trying to get different data sources to play nicely with each other. (An aside: I think I may have actually found a bug in Google Finance!)

I have never used a Bloomberg terminal, FactSet, or Compustat. However, my gut feeling is that, at least for their screening capabilities, you probably don't need one. My screener, while awesome for finding things in Japan where things are ridiculously cheap and you can actually screen for them, is much less useful in the US. At least this has been my experience so far. I still get most of my good ideas from other people or from following events.

Hey all. Over the last year or so, I’ve been working on a program to help me screen for undervalued companies in more nuanced ways than just your basic valuation ratios. Recently I started using it to analyze historic data sets. My goal in doing this was/is to write a paper about different quantitative value strategies and how well they’ve worked in recent years in Japan. Unfortunately, I’ve hit a bit of a snag. I scrape most of the financial data I use off of various free websites. While this works great for getting recent financial data, it’s not so great for historic data, especially price data. The data on these websites has a lot of flaws in it, and adjusting for all of these issues... well, let’s just say I’ve started to think that it won’t be a great return for all the time I’d need to invest in it to do it right. Before I give up though, I was wondering if I could persuade someone to help me get access to a more professional source of financial data, like Compustat, FactSet or a Bloomberg terminal. In exchange, I can show you what my screener can do (it does waaay more than just your basic comp/value ratios, like I said) and maybe do some custom historic analysis of your choice for you as well. In addition, I can point you to some pretty sweet Japanese companies I’ve found with it (a net-net trading at less than 4x normalized FCF anyone?), as well as send you photos from the most recent Japan Company Handbook (Winter 2014 Edition) about those specific companies, or any Japanese companies you’d like for that matter. I really appreciate any help I can get on this. Especially since I don’t want to see all the software I’ve written so far or the back-testing analysis work I’ve done go to waste. Thanks in advance. west

Yeaaaah... Gotta call bullshit on this. SF based (prior) software guy here. I have a few friends who make ~$140k at startups right now. They're top notch folks tho. And... I think that salary's more due to the startup bubble that's going on right now, and the lack of supply of software guys more than anything else. People I know at Google and other large corps in the area aren't doing that well, base. I do know a few people who are on paper millionaires due to recent IPOs/takeovers. But that's more luck (and good negotiation with their VCs) more than anything else. That's not bank-on-it salary.

No comments about it? Just starting this thread... because? (I'm not trying to be confrontational. I'm just confused...) I recently finished this as well. I thought it was a pretty good book, worth one read through while taking notes. My only complaint is I don't think it's worth the 40USD+ price they're asking. That and Staley tries to write in a folksy manner. And she's really, really bad at it. Which makes for painful reading at times.

Some of the more esoteric functions in Excel aren't there in the mac version. And, Excel is much, much slower with larger sets of data than a Windows computer with similar specs. However, if you're not dealing with large spreadsheets (20mb+) regularly, the Mac version of Office should work fine.

Never mind! It looks like finance.yahoo.co.jp has it. For example: http://info.finance.yahoo.co.jp/history/?code=3750.T&sy=2012&sm=1&sd=1&ey=2014&em=1&ed=3&tm=d&p=1 The right most column is the closing price adjusted for splits.

Hey all. I'm doing some quantitative analysis on Japan over the last couple of years using different screener strategies (NCAV discount, Magic Formula, etc). I have historical financial data for most of the market. However, I can't seem to find any reliable source for stock splits, which really messes things up. Although, honestly, it's not that bad. Does anyone know where I can reliable information about splits? I mean, if worse comes to worse, I can sort companies in my data by return and adjust the ones that are obvious splits. For example, JP:3750 did NOT go up 10000%. It split 1:100. However, I'd like use clean and pure data, versus manually inputting things myself and potentially missing something. Thanks in advance! Oh, and for what it's worth, I don't have access to any paid financial data services, such as a Capital IQ, FactSet or a Bloomberg terminal.

I'm not sure simply being an Internet forum explains the over abundance of engineers. It might have 10 years ago, and certainly would have 21 years ago (when I first had Internet access). But Now? Hell everyone I know from age 8 to 80 has internet access, this is everyone from any background and any profession. Look at Facebook, most people are not engineers. If non-engineers wanted to be here, they would be. rkbabang, I should have been more specific. I meant the Internet beyond Facebook/social media/news websites. My completely-based-on-just-my-gut-feeling opinion is that engineering/tech types are less afraid of exploring and engaging in the outskirts of the Internet, which I'd consider CoB&F to be. Given, I do think there's a natural overlap between the people who like engineering and the people who like investing. However, I still think we have some additional skew here due to the population we're getting our data points from.

For me personally (an engineer, as mentioned) I like both investing and engineering because there's the puzzle of how things work. Whether you're looking at a business or, say, a bike, they both behave certain ways for certain reasons. Once you understand those reasons, you know how the system works as a whole. Part of the reason why I'm more drawn to investing than engineering these days is because, sticking with the bike example, once you know how a bike works, you know how a bike works. There's not *too* much more you can learn about it. (Note: There *is* always something to learn, if you really, really want to try. It's just a question of how useful that knowledge is actually going to be.) With investing, it seems like it's a never ending rabbit hole, as far as learning how stuff works goes. And, if you do it right, *all* of the knowledge you accumulate is useful. As far as this board having a lot of engineers on it, I think part of that might come from the population it's selected from: The Internet.

Yet another engineer. Systems software engineer for networking hardware. Woot internet!

The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus is in the public domain. You can read/download it here: https://archive.org/details/moralsayingspub00lymagoog It's not bad, but it's no Letters from a Stoic. It's basically just a bunch of wise one liners taken from Publius Syrus's comedy/slapstick genre (from what I understand) plays. It's very short. If you've got time it's probably worth checking out.

I just wanted to bump this thread. I just found out e*trade doesn't allow you to trade international (read: Japanese) equities in their Roth accounts. If anyone has suggestions on where to go to do this, I would love to hear them. Thanks in advance!

+1 This book is a great introduction for investing. It's very readable, stays on the point and isn't too long (I'm looking at you, Snowball), and isn't technical at all. While it isn't too great with the nitty-gritty details, I think that's part of the reason why it's so perfect for new people. It gives you an understanding of the value investing mindset, and has a tendency to give people the Buffett bug. And for new people, that bug is what drives them to find out more. And wanting to find out more is what's really important :)

I think he's joking that you must be older than 44. ;D I was. Sorry if I wasn't clear. Colecovision was out in 1982 minus age 13 for a Bar Mitzvah = Birthdate of 1969 or later. Which doesn't make sense from what I hear about you. :)

Hrm... The Colecovision came out in 1982 and Kraven was thirteen at the time... Something doesn't quite make sense here! :D Joking aside, but Bar Mitzvahs not, I sometimes wonder if we need to do an, ahem, heredity poll here some time. You know, just for curiousity's sake...

Well... To answer my own question, it looks like they give some explanations in the associated paper: http://m.sgo.sagepub.com/content/3/3/2158244013497722.full.pdf For the lazy, it looks like the average Aspie score for males (I'm guessing most of this board?) is 93-94. The average neurotypical score is 109-113. I'm still not sure what the distribution stuff is, or what the axis thingies on that polar graph are though. I'll have to read more of that paper tomorrow.

Ok, so I took the test. I have quite a few concerns about it in general, but I guess my biggest concern is there's no explanation on how to interpret the results. For example, I'm 95 out of 200 on the Aspie scale. Hrm... What exactly does this mean? Is 100 the average? Or is it a linear, say from zero, scale? Or logarithmic? Or is it something else? I'm guessing I missed the explanation page somewhere... Also, I'm not sure how to interpret the polar graph thing at the end: http://www.rdos.net/eng/poly12c.php?p1=86&p2=52&p3=65&p4=63&p5=31&p6=78&p7=38&p8=62&p9=21&p10=16&p11=44&p12=12 Should I read the part to the left of, say, "Intellectual" as being associated with Intellectual? Or should I read the part to the right of "Intellectual" as being associated with Intellectual? Also, what does "Physical" mean? Just grumbling. Again, I'm guessing I missed the explanation page somewhere...