LC

That’s funny, Ample Hills provided ice cream for my wedding years ago. That place is delicious!

To the man with a hammer...

A man and his dog are playing chess in the park. A woman walks by and says, "Oh my goodness, your dog can play chess?! That's amazing! What a brilliant dog!" The man says, "Pffft. He's hardly brilliant. I've won 4 of the last 5 matches."

I was able to keep them but I could not add any additional. So I deleted down to 2 in order to add another. I'm doing exactly as you mention - aggregating outside IBKR and transferring in/out as needed. Not a deal breaker, just an annoyance :D

Meiroy, thank you for articulating that better than I could.

Real life does not have black and white solutions. My guess is that many here agree with the following two statements:

That's weird. I have a ton from multiple geographies. Weird is right. 6 months ago I had something like 8 accounts linked. Not sure what happened but at some point I tried adding another one and the platform refused and said I had exceeded the amount of linked accounts. I reached out to customer service and they said IBKR now limits it to 3. Maybe they think I am an AML risk :D

My gripe is they have limited me to 3 linked bank accounts.

There should be executive order for all rich people to book a dinner, stay, golf package at Mar-a-Lago or do time. We should not have unpatriotic behavior of hiding in their mansions. Jawohl! I don’t know the current status but there was some chatter recently about making leisure travel expenses tax deductible for the year or something like that. Not kidding. :o For people who are not scared to travel/etc., there might be some good travel opportunities around. ./shrug Airfares and air travel though might not be very attractive, since airlines cut a lot of flights. Chicago-Tampa flights are fully booked - albeit with social distancing seating.

There are some benefits to experiencing poverty and disease. As they say, there can be no light without the dark.

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/17/878946307/the-rich-have-stopped-spending-and-thats-tanked-the-economy An interesting implication as the wealth inequality gap widens.

Bought a little more Livenation. Curretly sits at about 2.75% of the portfolio. Cloudflare is the other newer addition to the portfolio at about 1.85%. Should've swapped the investments around percentage wise :D My hesitation with Cloudflare is (1) I don't know the industry dynamics as well and (2) I was not sure how their middle-market offerings would be received in comparison to similar offerings to larger customers who may place more reliance on the various security offerings provided. Livenation by contrast I know the market more intimately.

That's a fair point as well, but over time I would expect housing starts to follow overall demographics: Adjustment factors: -regional variations -quality of existing housing inventory -temporal shifts as you mention (some generations stay @ home longer, then this pent up demand is released [or vice versa]) -household composition as KJP mentioned All these factors combine and you get some curve which oscillates around the demographic movement. And the shape of that curve is pretty important to where WFC's mortgage business sits.

Fair points on geographies and average household size.

Usually the solution to declining births per capita is immigration. Cigarbutt, on the point of elderly: I believe we are also seeing the average length of life (at least of males) declining. So to your point on old people working longer I agree - but perhaps not living longer. I believe as well that this is somewhat correlated with quality and access to healthcare. My point here is that on this topic of declining population growth, the US does have options: (1) a natural demand for immigration both from the southern border and overseas; and (2) "room to improve" in its healthcare to catch-up to other comparable nations. Of course this would require policy changes from government but the conditions exist for those policies to succeed. Finally, one item I regularly hear mentioned is a supply shortages for homes/high demand for new housing starts. I wonder how to reconcile this statement with the demographic trend.

Well, you can pay for various industry publications but need the subject matter expertise to understand the nuances, as I’m sure you are aware. To combine industry knowledge and investment knowledge is a valued skill and those folks are usually in senior management or employed on the buy side.

This is usually proprietary information and keeps people employed. At the risk of sounding offensive, why do you expect them to give away their expertise and livelihood to you, me, or anyone else, for free?

So the regulators aren’t doing the same for the other big money center banks? How does the regulatory oversight prevent this? Are they at the loan level overseeing the underwriting? I’ve heard this before but don’t fully understand how. If they are down to regulating at the underwriting / loan level then the loans may be safer but it will also impair their ability to underwriting higher risk adjusted loans as well. Yes they oversee all the major banks. Consider them super-auditors. They can request whatever data they want, and run their own analysis. Banks have a defined risk appetite framework which determines things like underwriting decisions.

To your latter question: doubt it. Regulatory oversight prevents a lot of problems within the loan book.

I was buying in the 170s, and already own calls I purchased back in the 180 range. I feel pretty good about Brk's main areas. The cash gives optionality as well.

bought a little livenation

@2CC: that is true but in practice, MF is not designed to exploit capital structure nor is it aimed at PE firms. MF is composed of a quality (ROIC) and cheapness (EBIT:EV) component. Assessing price based on EBIT is assessing the price of the entire enterprise, which I would argue is more useful to a takeout firm than a minority equity investor.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09/apple-plans-to-announce-move-to-its-own-mac-chips-at-wwdc Cutting out Intel.

This is a very fair counterpoint to the "Buffett did nothing!" criticism. You can earn a great return investing 6, 12 months after the crisis when the smoke has cleared.

That's correct - to hit LT capital gains tax. Also what bothers me is putting conditions. "MF outside the US" Okay, when that doesn't work what will it be next? "MF outside US and Southern Europe" "MF outside US, S. Europe, China" "MF on these 30 stocks from another screener I just ran" Also, I don't like using EBIT. I never have. Is interest not an expense? Taxes? Do they not provide informative value about the business itself? I'd argue they do.