Rabbitisrich

He is definitely smarter than me, but not for that wager! First note that the wager relies on the unproven statement that there are two possibilities: A specific God concept exists or it does not. What about other God concepts? Or what about concepts not even considered by the wagerers? So you end up with an even bigger problem: How does Pascal assign probabilities to his scenarios? If he can't assign, even with huge errors, a probability to that specific God-scenario, then what distinguishes it from any other scenario? You could just as easily say that God is seeking arch-positivists, and has seeded the world with tests to weed out the faithful. It's simply too unspecified a wager to lead to fruitful insights.

A moral violation in a no-God paradigm? I've been arguing this conditional: if God does not exist, there are no necessarily true moral propositions. Well, I still think that is true. As near as I can tell, you agree. My confusion is that you aren't arguing the conditional. You simply state is as a tautology. Obviously, we can come up with many tautologies, but it would be a trivial exercise without some method to identify it in reality, in other words to find reasons that one concept is more likely than alternatives. Let's ignore the word "morality" because we are getting stuck in language. Please identify how we would distinguish the two universes, God and No-God, when someone commits something that may be considered wrong. There must be a non-trivial difference, as opposed to simply stating that God exists in one, and therefore in that one a wrong is immoral.

Since tautologies are true (necessarily so), I'm not sure it really matters, if all you were asking was how He could contribute to intrinsic morality. But one possibility is to follow Robert Adams: "Any action is ethically wrong if and only if it is contrary to the commands of a loving God". If true, this grounds morality in God's nature itself. Can you provide an example that would show the difference between a moral violation in a God paradigm versus a no-God paradigm? I'm looking for some method of discrimination that doesn't rely upon being true by definition.

Perhaps a better way to phrase my view is to figure out how Proposition I is not simply tautological. Let's agree with both propositions. Now what? What is the non-tautological distinction between the God paradigm and the subjective paradigm that makes the former objective? For example, you do something immoral in both paradigms. What's the non-tautological difference?

Eric, I'm still waiting for your response here. Honestly, I really value your opinion and I'd like to know if what I'm assuming is true for you. Sorry to hijack your question to Eric, but this question is something Enoch1 brings up and I have trouble understanding the perspective. What exactly do you mean by "absolute"? Is there a non-tautological identification for absolute good or bad? What does a morality independent of human preferences look like?

Even with God, the same would hold. God would simply overlay an additional punishment/reward scheme. You would still rely on social instincts, personal preference, et. al. I'm not entirely sure what that second sentence means, but it doesn't seem like you disagreed with anything I said. Maybe you are just emphasizing the second half of the conditional? Not at all. The existence/non-existence of a god has little to do with your interaction with "morality". You currently have a body, which experiences the world in a certain way. Now God exists. So what? What, specifically, are the factors that now make morality intrinsically anything? I don't know all of the factors, but here's one: God is a Necessary Being. So (i) if He is the individual paradigm of what is right, or (ii) if He is the knower of what is right, those moral truths are invariable. Like I said, here's one property that contributes: the fact that He is a Necessary Being. You mean what clarifies for me whether morality is subjective or not? Lots of things: thinking about it for a while, discussing it with others, maybe my biology informs it (ie maybe we are hard-wired to think that), etc. Thanks again for all this, but you still aren't denying my original conditional. Now I'm wondering - did you not intend to do so? I thought that I did respond, but there is still a miscommunication. Even if we hold the Necessary Being proposition to be true, it still contributes nothing to the "intrinsic" nature of morality. It simply supplies a tautology: God is a necessary being, and his knowing of right is by definition right. Let's agree to agree with the tautology. Why do we agree? You are still weighting that information with the tools you have. Your acceptance or rejection of the proposition is dependent upon the relative weights of various sensations that you experience when you consider it. To see why this remains a subjective experience, imagine that something is lost in translation between God's moral proclamations and your understanding. You are fully convinced that you are working in God's name, and, due to the misunderstanding, don't realize that you are doing something "immoral". What next? What happens that identifies the objective nature of morality, in the way that we identify objective nature in other matters?

The key word here is "unnecessary". That's not the same as claiming to have proven a negative. It just means that the models of reality work just fine without having to postulate for a god. This is worth emphasizing because the same miscommunications about logical reasoning keep reappearing throughout the thread.

Same way that I believe in atoms and radio waves; reproducible, conclusive and falsifiable evidence. So, you believe in value investing, although evidence is clearly against it? Most academics largely dismiss value investing, even saying that Buffett's streak was luck. Also, let's say you had a personal story like I discussed. Would that change anything? Where is evidence clearly against value investing? It's been a while since I check it out, but I think Burton Malkiel's Random Walk Down Wall Street has some information about it. I think someone posted a study on the board here a few months ago too about a new study. I haven't looked too much into the research since grad school or so. This is a fairly common miscommunication between atheists and theists that is little more than a language problem around the word "belief". If someone tells you that Santa Claus certainly exists but in a form that is undetectable to all human methods of investigation, you would likely think, "No. No he does not exist." Why? Because his existence is simply unnecessary to explain anything. "I believe that Santa Claus, as you describe him, does not exist", generally does not imply that such a thing is impossible. It simply is an unnecessary feature in your model of the world.

Even with God, the same would hold. God would simply overlay an additional punishment/reward scheme. You would still rely on social instincts, personal preference, et. al. I'm not entirely sure what that second sentence means, but it doesn't seem like you disagreed with anything I said. Maybe you are just emphasizing the second half of the conditional? Not at all. The existence/non-existence of a god has little to do with your interaction with "morality". You currently have a body, which experiences the world in a certain way. Now God exists. So what? What, specifically, are the factors that now make morality intrinsically anything? To clarify, let's say that God exists. Now let's say that aliens exist. There must be something unique about the existence of God that makes morality intrinsically right and wrong. Or perhaps the problem is with identifying what you mean by "intrinsically" right and wrong. Again, you have a body (and a soul? It doesn't make much difference), so you have constraints in your interaction with the universe. 1. What is the contribution of God's existence to intrinsic morality? 2. What effect on your tools (body, mind, soul(?)) clarifies "intrinsic" vs. subjective morality?

No, for me, I am going to view them as good or evil from the context of my social unit. Similarly, Bush is a good moral man to some Christians and to others (families of civilians bombed in Pakistan) he may be viewed as a cruel evil man. Yes I think this is the right way to think about it. If there is no God, morality amounts to nothing more than social instincts, personal preference, biological influence, and the like. There is nothing intrinsically right or wrong - it's all a matter of perspective. Even with God, the same would hold. God would simply overlay an additional punishment/reward scheme. You would still rely on social instincts, personal preference, et. al.

Maybe one way to weed out spammers is to ask for a stock thesis, with some plagiarism check.

It's not literally the same, and the literal differences can be very important. For example, in most cases, debt held in a portfolio company is non-recourse, and the relevant uncertainty is in the operating cash flows. If you hold debt in your account to hold an equivalent amount of stock, even if the debt is non-recourse, you have to consider uncertainty in market valuations.

I'm not sure that gold is best understood through cpi price movements, or even expectations. Look at gold in yen terms over the last two decades compared to inflation, or see gold in dollar terms relative to yield curve and tips implied inflation. Here are a couple of interesting conjectures about gold: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/treasuries-tips-and-gold-wonkish/ http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/08/27/1128691/china-dollars-gold-and-a-theory-of-relativity/

I found S&P's message to be difficult to discern. They seemed to be making a mathematical argument about America's capacity to service debt in nominal terms. But then they would say something like this: So the explanation is perhaps better understood as a statement on federal character. Why did S&P spend so much time on capacity arguments without explicitly contextualizing bearish scenarios with character arguments? It leaves too much ambiguity and allows for pundits to make silly arguments over which "side" caused the downgrade.

It would be better for investors to set up some sort of mandatory tender facility, where investors are compelled submit stock pro rata to some pre-set aggregrate $ amount. The company would then immediately effect a stock split, so that each investor holds the same number of shares as before. You get a "dividend", but only pay tax on the gain.

Winning article on gold from the Adonis team at FT Alphaville: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/08/27/1128691/china-dollars-gold-and-a-theory-of-relativity/

If the dividend doesn't reduce bond yields, and the marginal ROC is shrinking, then Dell would want the cost of equity to be as high as possible. What is the benefit of a cash flowing business with a high equity yield paying a dividend except to the extent that it hedges against investor mistakes?

Hah, well if your business strategy involves bargaining with the terminally ill and their loved ones in the months prior to expected death, then I think that you lose some rights to indignation.

Ackman makes it easy being such a powerpoint jockey. Via Marketfolly: http://www.marketfolly.com/2010/06/bill-ackmans-ira-sohn-presentation.html http://www.marketfolly.com/2009/06/pershing-squares-general-growth.html I also enjoyed the "debate" with Hovde Capital: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-16/wall_street/30090966_1_ggp-commercial-real-estate-gold-mine

These days, I've been finding good research ideas from strong analysts with mediocre results. For example, Tom Brown from Second Curve and Meryl Witmer from Eagle Capital are smart as mountain goats, but for various reasons didn't show good returns. Just try to skip those reasons.

^This is a particularly good exercise for exactly that reason. I read an analysis of RIMM where the author listed attractive financial data and then surprised the reader with the name. Yet, you could have done something very similar with LOJN prior to when you couldn't.

There are a few issues that cloud the analysis, though I don't know to what extent. For example, the Buffett portfolio is assembled from the 13f-hr, then treated as constant weights between reports. So if a company outperforms the rest of the portfolio, the excess weighting may be treated as "sold", and then "repurchased" when it shows up at a different weight in the next 13f. The authors also try to look past tax effects by comparing a pre-tax stylized portfolio to the "Buffett" portfolio mentioned above. Yet, taxes and fees are a large part of portfolio management. It's a comparison of a tax-efficient portfolio strategy to a tax-free strategy, before taxes. These issues aren't really criticisms of the study, but they complicate the authors' conclusions. What is the turnover on the stylized portfolios? Does size affect tahe monthly rebalancing as the portfolio grows?

I forgot about this clever goat, but Lou Simpson has been filing 13f-hrs for several quarters. http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1534380/000117266112000880/sqadvisors2q12.txt

He probably stress tested the banks to determine the likelihood of requiring further capital. The paper also provided a floor on the conversion price--very handy when the market price plunged the next month.

I've been selling my basket financials positions, and selling Jan calls on my WFC position. I entered August with almost no cash, but I don't really have a view on market direction.