LC

Best option here is to work with an established roofing company. They deal with the insurance company daily and know exactly how your insurer functions, probably better than the adjuster. And they are incentivized to get as much money as possible (so they can charge you). We had new roofs put in, probably 30K worth of work. Premium increase was a couple hundred bucks annually, by my estimates it's over a 60 year payback.

I figured as much! I should have given you the benefit of the doubt, my bad! No hard feelings and of course I agree on both items (the "real risk" ;D) and the fact that the US does seem to be reaching a mature stage and this requires different incentives etc. Thanks for the link as well.

John, I think you’re right especially knowing Cigarbutt is never anything but cordial. The sentence just read so oddly to me that I had to ask! And more so, a fair point to make. To approve massive infrastructure spending, both parties need to buy in. Very difficult in today’s environment.

I would suggest those interested read the interview with Damodaran in the GS report you linked. Allison Nathan: But are these cash-rich companies engaging in buybacks just not looking hard enough for opportunities to innovate? Aswath Damodaran: You can look as hard as you want. You can make a reincarnated Steve Jobs the next CEO. But you can’t change many of these businesses. The fact of the matter is that many of the companies engaging in the largest buybacks are in the late stages of their lifecycles, and you can’t reverse that aging. Another good point is actually the question prior to this one, where AD talks about re-allocation of capital as Cardboard alluded to. However I am not sure I would agree with that point. A bit rude, no? :-[ I wanted to discuss the factors causing firms to drastically increase buybacks. Now of course we know where the cash comes from, as mentioned a lot of this excess cash comes from tax reform and the fact that many SP500 juggernauts are late-stage cash cows. But firms still have a choice how to spend this exesss cash, i.e. return to shareholders vs. invest in the company. Rate of capital investment does not appear to have changed trajectory over the past 5 years or so. Wouldn't one therefore conclude that internal investment opportunities have been essentially exhausted, hence the decision to return the majority of this excess cash to shareholders? So where are the best marginal opportunities for reinvestment, if not in the SP500 companies which have dominated the past decade? Financials, Real Estate, Consumer Staple/Discretionary, Autos...all seem "tapped out". Even tech appears closer to this end of the spectrum. One poster suggested infrastructure, this seems reasonable. But I think this is a real question that the US economy will have to face over the coming years. That is the question I wanted to underline.

Cannot argue with you but the more concerning aspect is not a buildup of balance sheet but it may signify a lack of reinvestment options.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/29/buybacks-companies-increasingly-using-debt-to-repurchase-stocks.html The level of buybacks to free cash flow hit 104% for the 12 months ending in the first quarter of 2019, the first time that number has topped 100% during the economic recovery that started in 2009. In 2017, the level was 82%.

Haha, thankfully for my lifestyle that’s definitely not the case. ;D But I hope you keep compounding at that rate, I’m sure it would be useful! Gratefully I can put the time towards more leisurely uses.

Gerg, you can just ask for 50 bucks...

Spek ;D

Whats the reason for the switch? You see more upside with PayPal? Long term yes. Short term also capitulating to any bearish ideas. The original idea was to invest in some recession-resistant dividend paying companies with at least some pricing power. But growth has totally outperformed this idea. Mostly I think I need to move towards a more passive (indexing) option, at least for the near term (3-5 yrs I'd guess). Over the last year I haven't really had the time/energy/pleasure to actually do any investment research, and the results reflect it. Even worse, I haven't really cared... The reality is given my situation (age, net worth) my ROI is higher concentrating on my career than on my portfolio (ROI both in terms of amount and volatility of cash inflows). Something about whole-assing one thing vs. half-assing two things ;D ;D

Sold Verizon, bought Paypal

They are absolutely worth it. Silicon valley investors are a dime a dozen and add little differentiated value. Quality engineers on the other hand are a rare commodity. If your friends/family are truly the latter they should be out on the west coast getting paid.

Take it to the extreme: you only review and know the answer to 1 question. Is your skill level still very high?

But is this luck? To me this seems like pure skill. By applying enough skill you can guarantee a 100 on this test. No luck is required. Luck is applying zero skill, having the teacher get a better job at the school across the street and having the test cancelled.

Beautiful story! So happy for Chica and Max. Dogs are the best :D

I do what my previous post mentioned: set up a RSS feed for 10-12 (spinoffs)/13E3 (going private)/SC-TO (tender offer) filings from EDGAR. You can also set up google news alerts for things like "spinoff". As JayGatsby rightly points out, there is a learning curve to make sure you don't miss potential special situations. Personally I look for a more hands-off approach so I don't invest in special situations anymore.

Yes. That's why the duration of growth (and ROIC) (what Mauboussin calls Competitive Advantage Period) is so important. And that's why Visa and MC were undervalued for so long. Investors were either underestimating the durability of the growth or ignoring it altogether. http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/pdfiles/eqnotes/cap.pdf Thanks for posting this, I look forward to reading.

IMHO and in my experience ML techniques are better utilized in the consumer space, particularly consumer credit. These models provide some lift over traditional logistic approaches BUT I would argue it is still requires more time to manage stability concerns. Even forgetting regulator concerns, boosted trees, neural network variants and such are so difficult to understand you do not know whether this lift is attributed towards additional intuitive patterns being exploited, or random chance or some other factor which may not be relevant. Interpretability is a real concern. On the trading side there is obviously much more opportunity, but this is why these models will IMHO have a more difficult time adding value here. One these markets are so picked-over it is ridiculous. Every intelligent statistician wants to design trading models. Two the majority of buyers are sophisticated. Compare the average derivative buyer (i.e. a highly educated bank/fund trader) to the average credit card buyer. Three, securitized financial products have more generally-accepted pricing mechanisms. (BS, Heston, etc.) What does the ML model add here? ML models excel at finding nonlinear patterns, and perhaps you can combine this with a traditional BS approach but you still run into the problem of interpretability. Obviously I am speaking in hindsight here but it has become clear why ML techniques are having a difficult time on the trading side of the business. In this sense, I think a lot of the folks who jumped into this business based on the glamor of combining their ML experience either from a digital or consumer credit space towards a trading landscape, they have found themselves in front of something of a brick wall and are withdrawing their claws and turning heel so to speak. Another area where ML approaches perform very well is in fraud use cases. Fraud techniques change rapidly (remember the old Nigerian Prince scam?) and fraudsters are adept at gaming basic systems. Easily you can see why the ML model excels here: it is highly adaptive and specializes in pattern seeking. As with all modelling you are not always looking for the best short-term fit but you are looking to match a particular methodology's strengths/weaknesses with your problem/use case. One big drawback of ML models is managing overfitting. These models have traditionally shown very real stability problems out-of-sample. Regularized learning intervals is one method used to manage such risk, however this leads to "momentum" as I alluded, as the model is regularly updated to take into account and weigh more heavily the most recent data. Curious what your thoughts are in terms of overfitting and managing stability in your particular use case, or prior use cases where you may have had experience.

Are you talking about QC? No need to answer of course, but NYS has been purchasing from HydroQuebec for decades. http://www.hydroquebec.com/international/en/exports/markets/new-york.html On the topic of human divisiveness, while I too share the concern I would argue that in times of real, in-your-face catastrophes, people do band together. It is human instinct, we increase our odds of survival when we work together. In NYC I saw this first hand with 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy. My hope in humanity is not dead yet ;D

Lightwhale, any thoughts on ML applications either generally or in specific cases? We find they are, in some popular use cases, essentially momentum strategies.

Another interesting thing to note is that, the US electric grid was cobbled together piece-meal. In terms of things like national security and such, apparently this is beneficial in that the lack of inter-connectivity ensures there are little to no critical bottlenecks that could become terrorism targets. In terms of NYC, Con Ed is a mess but it is not really their fault. This was not a modern, planned city. It has evolved over centuries. Look at the history of how the city was built and how these buildings get heat and such. I mean, they are still using steam for temperature control! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system So while it is understandable that old technology will suffer unreliabilities (or not if you look at it from a survivorship bias perspective), it is much more expensive for NYC to lose power, than say Bergen County. In terms of the people living and their health as DTEJ mentioned and also in terms of productivity. Banks, corporations, etc. going down for 24 hrs is much costlier than if Joe's Bakery can't make some pastries for a day. And, residents pay very high city taxes comparatively, partly to prevent this sort of thing. So an investigation is certainly warranted. Perhaps we should involve Bob Mueller? ;D

I am appalled by the lack of taste of some friends on this thread :P Kidding. I could wax poetic about schwartz's for hours but I'll spare everyone. Just eat, drink, laugh and smoke on the streets of montreal. Cannot have a bad time with those ingredients. ;D

Bingo. The tri-state area is not the same "NY" as Flatbush Ave. Yes, hence the:

Thanks for the recommendation! I didn't find a place but I have reservations for Toqué and Damas. Are those ok? I also have reservations for Cafe Boloud and Bar Isabel in Toronto and Riviera in Ottawa. I wanted to try Joe Beef in Montreal but there was no availability online. Where do you recommend to have breakfast? Hi Dan, We ate at toque, pastel , and joe beef (we had some friends who got us in last minute). I thought pastel was best. I am glad you cancelled your reservation at toque as I felt it was underwhelming. The best thing about the meal was the service. Although I will say the wine list looked good. Pastel was hilarious. Head chef kept talking all kinds of shit and was a general mess of a human being. Loved it. Try calling - they may be able to squeeze you in if you are so inclined. Let us know how damas is, it was on our list but we didn't have time (or energy). You can also hit up liverpool house which is the same guys from joe beef and same location. Schwartz's is a necessity of life. Medium sandwich, I go fries a pickle and a cherry coke. Others believe the slaw is necessary, or a non-cherry soda. These poor souls have been misled and you should give them no mind. It;s cash only and there's a line if you go during normal human lunch hours. Nobody has ever said it wasn't worth it. Personally I like to walk the neighborhoods when I visit. Plateau, old port, and griffintown are all incredible. The city, particularly the central area, is very walkable. Old port has tons of construction going on so it is a bit more crowded on the sidewalks. I love walking St laurent, shopping in the boutiques. Mt Royal is also beautiful as cigarbutt mentioned but it's a walk - it depends how active you like to be on your holiday. Two other more affordable/cozy spots are breizh cafe for crepes in the morning, and lola rosa (the one in the mcgill ghetto) for vegetarian lunch and goblets of sangria ;). Just take everything I say with a grain of salt, I prefer a "grittier" experience than most, my nights wind up drinking cheap beer @ biftek (a student dive bar on st laurent) for three hours, eating 2 dollar peanut noodles across the street at 2 am, smoking too many cigarettes, and passing out until noon. Barfly is another gritty dive bar if you like that. Actually there is another nice spot called le majesqitue right across the street from barfly that is yummy. Le distillery (i think its renamed distillery no. 1) is a cool spot for mason-jar cocktails. Again a little grittier. Bar Furco is a nice trendy spot, there are other similar trendy bars east of peel and south of sherbrooke. If I am drunk late and have been wondering I wind up in this area. The french party late. West of peel (again below sherbrooke) you have places like brutopia, this area is a little more anglo-friendly and has more of the pub vibe vs the cocktail vibe when you go further east. Let us know where you go and how you liked it! I keep remembering stuff. Patati patata is great poutine. Beauty's diner for a morning bagel (beauty special) and coffee.

I was actually just going to post given the downgrade today. Not much positive that I can imagine. The only area where new storage > destructions is the other int'l segments, which only make up 15% of the business and only growing at ~5%. This is either dead money to me or I sell at about an 8% net loss. Probably wind up selling...glad I didn't sink more into it.