KinAlberta

My view is that the long term is ever present and ever elusive. We live in the short term. So the weighing machine concept is a fiction. Aggregate average and median market participant focus may tend to swing from short to long term but thoughts about today and tomorrow will forever dominate capital allocation decisions.

I’ve owned a few ETFs that have been liquidated or rolled into other ETFs. One was a Global 50 large cap ETF. Another was a value focused ETF that was liquidated when value was out of favour (the time when investors should be buying rather than following the herd). If i were buying an ETF today I’d avoid any and all specialty ETFs and only look at the largest, oldest most established products. Also, I’d never touch an ETN product.

Any thoughts on this? I’m always suspicious of pie in the sky innuendo. Overstock CEO says Coinbase, Robinhood are in its crosshairs as it builds out rival crypto trading venue - MarketWatch April 20, 2021 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/overstock-ceo-says-coinbase-robinhood-are-in-its-crosshairs-as-it-builds-out-rival-crypto-trading-venue-11618941930 - - -

An interesting read: The Bigger Short By: Jon Schwarz, Ryan Grim April 20 2021, 4:00 a.m https://theintercept.com/2021/04/20/wall-street-cmbs-dollar-general-ladder-capital/ Referred to in the above article: Is COVID Revealing a CMBS Virus? 23 Aug 2020 Last revised: 1 Dec 2020 John M. Griffin & Alex Priest University of Texas at Austin - Department of Finance https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3671162

Lovely sentiment - one to remember. I usually get tripped up this way when I try to be too clever. Ditto. I always treated LUK more like a hedge. They made bets off their forecasts of the future and got lucky a few times. Seemed that sometimes they believed too much in their ability to predict the future. I always try to maintain the view that no one can predict the future so I find FRMO rather refreshing in their rather explicit statements that they cannot predict the future so are endeavouring to make low cost bets on various possibilities. As for quotes on theory I like the tongue-in-cheek saying that goes like: It works in practice, but does it work in theory?

“ unfortunately ” ? “As I look at the after-hours price, BRK-B sits at $173.50 - so the recent record is within sight, unfortunately.“

A one man shop had overhead of more than $500,000 per year? I think I may see part of his problem. Postage and printing alone can be a killer.

I wonder if there shouldn’t be a cute phrase about the increasing discomfort with cash piling (up while investors increasingly view positive market returns as inevitable) to serve as s precursor to Buffett’s quip about being greedy when others are fearful. Warren Buffett's Cash "Problem" Just Got $2.4 Billion Worse -- The Motley Fool https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/06/08/warren-buffetts-cash-problem-just-got-24-billion-w.aspx

Benjamin Graham only wrote six books and one of them was: “On Storage and Stability, a Modern Ever-normal Granary”. So I bought it and even skimmed through it. I always find it fascinating to see where finance personalities find cause for market intervention, regulation, etc. It’s refreshing to see the rational pragmatic mind fending off and challenging what often tends towards impractical ideological or dogmatic thinking. Anyway, are there a lot of parallels here between Graham’s thinking on commodities, the Federal Reserve’s approach to stabilization, supply management (in the news because of free trade talks with Canada) and protectionism? Eg The US Federal Reserve massively expanded its balance sheet buy buying up a surplus commodity (crap worthless paper that no one wanted) and then either let it mature (kept it off the market) or will sell it back onto the market when prices have risen. They pumped money into the banking sector, established ZIRP, stabilized prices/interest rates, etc. Supply management (Canada) - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_management_(Canada)

Family farms one of many concerns in unified fight against Trump's trade threats: Don Pittis Abandoned farms are a symbol of the kind of market forces many rural (conservative) Canadians oppose Don Pittis - CBC News 7 Hours Ago http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/trump-tariffs-canada-1.4707631

Scott, here’s a tough question. What has been in your portfolio (key contributors) over say the past 15 years? I think it’s important to include the last downturn because if not for the good fortune of government bailouts and FedReserve market meddling portfolio design and cash on hand matters most in downturns. As for Gods. If I knew God existed and that it created the universe, I think I’d worship it even if it hadn’t done much since.

Paying taxes owing out of my salary for those reinvested dividends would be a struggle. ;-) It’s always easy to get very rich reinvesting everything in the stock market - when you do it on paper for propaganda purposes. It’s a bit tougher in the real world.

Thanks for posting. Interesting. So here's the first one with footnote links included. Any thoughts on his statements and the context of his discussion. Also posting an article about the lawsuit he's referencing. (All about something I don't want to have to follow.) Blockchain in Business: Overstock and TZero - Patrick Bryne

I'm not sure how this might fit into the scheme of things but it's interesting.