The Superinvestors on the Corner of Berkshire-and-Fairfax

[muscleman]

The absence of Ericopoly from the top returns makes your data seem suspect.  Although I think it's just because of the timeframe you looked at.

Eric doesn't initiate any threads. He only reads the existing threads and pick bets from there. This study focuses on the original idea generation, but investing ideas don't have to be original.

[Santayana]

Ah, good point.

[writser]

He is definitely an out of the box thinker and he is a good investor. I hope he stops by here every once in a while. I feel we will hear more about him.

 

Either he will resurface as a great investor or you'll read about him in the newspaper because he went on a rampage with a semi-automatic in a Wall-Mart wearing only his socks. Flip a coin.

[Castanza]

Could you track this against the “What are you buying” and “What are you selling” threads?

[Liberty]

Could you track this against the “What are you buying” and “What are you selling” threads?

 

Only a small subset of people post on those, though, and there's probably some self selection (more chances of posting about good ones than bad ones), so it doesn't solve much.

[oddballstocks]

I worked with someone to do this years ago.  Mined the archives from 2003 forward.  Looked at it very differently.

 

Looked at the number of responses and subsequent return over trailing periods.  Looked at people who posted specific investment threads.

 

Result was more responses the worse the returns.  There were some stellar ideas with zero to one comment.  And the people posting those would post multiple ideas.  Some solid gold from a few people.

 

The problem was they never received any feedback, and thus their incentive to post disappeared.

 

Nice work!

[ValueHippie]

Hi Nate!

 

I came to the same conclusion, although the impact of the number of comments was not that large. I did a multiple regression to see the impact of either no comment, at least one comment and the impact of additional comments.

 

How did you approach your research?

[Spekulatius]

Few responses often means that an idea just takes off. A long thread often means that an idea becomes controversial. and a battleground of longs vs skeptics. The performance in a lot of cases isn’ that great for those ideas.

[Liberty]

Few response can also mean much smaller companies that are familiar to very few people. Doesn't mean the ideas can't be appreciated by those few that found them, though (lots of lurkers on this forum, more numerous than posters, I'm sure), even if that's not critical mass to spark a lot of discussion.

 

Doesn't always mean that smaller companies do better, though. AAPL up almost 80% this year, f.ex., and up a fair bit since the thread was created. Same for GOOG and others..