Jurgis

There was a newer (2016) long thread on this which I cannot find (crappy search or crappy searcher). People also asked Munger what Buffett meant and Munger confirmed that he indeed meant that he could do 50% annual with ~100M sums. Can't find that either offhand. At the end of the day, if you cannot do 50% per year, find another job... Just kidding. ;D Actually, git good or find another job. 8) Or just charge 2/20 and sell dreams to suckers investors. Still kidding. Mostly. 8)

Yeah, that's one thing I am afraid of when looking at MCO - expensive/dilutive acquisitions and diworsefication. This might work out, but in general I don't think management are great capital allocators. MCO is a great business, but it's not run by great management.

Sanjeev, With all respect "averaging into" argument does not hold water for two reasons at least. First, a fund is not a company. You cannot "value" a fund and buy when it's "cheap" and sell when it's "expensive". Yeah, you could try to do some kind of valuation on its holdings, but that's just second guessing the manager and I am sure you don't want anyone doing that to any managers you listed. Second, if you average without valuation (e.g. just from outside cash flows), then you should be compare to averaging into indexes. And the underperformance remains the same if not worse. Edit: In general, it is painful when highly ethical managers underperform. It is a decision for individual investor whether to stick with them or not. Best luck.

Company-specific analyses are posted on respective stock threads. You are welcome to discuss your assumptions and challenge models by others there. I don't think this thread should engage in specific stock valuations and predictions. I am quite conservative in my models and I don't see a point of posting optimistic predictions, so personally I'm not gonna try to persuade you or anyone else about "greater than single digits going forward". But then I would not do that even for BAC @ $12 or BRK at 1.2 book or any other situation that you might think is very cheap. Take care.

Totally not fair. PEs and P/FCFs are not even comparable to the top of tech bubble. (Oh, yeah, AMZN... one out of five... is that your example of the bubble?) The problem with 17 year bets is that even tech giants may not survive 17 years of creative destruction. But then KO and BRK might not survive it either. So... I won't take a bet on 17 years. But I would take a bet for 10 years and against practically any company you choose (including BRK) if I can choose any subset of the five. 8) I would not take 10 or 17 year bet against index though.

What are good (best?) posts from the blog that you would recommend reading? Please post feedback about the book when you get it and read it. Tanks. 8)

So the summary is: Pretty much nobody on CoBF cares about FB. Apple fans would drop MSFT close to first. Microsoft users would drop Apple close to first. Most people think AMZN and GOOGL are close to irreplaceable.

Who? ::) 8)

About 5-7 years ago I've invested in a bunch of Chinese gaming companies. I did not know China, local gaming or other info, so I invested on valuation into what appears 2nd/3rd rate companies. KONG (bought out or went private), PWRD (went private?), CYOU (went nowhere I see), SNDA/GAME (split then bought out/ went private), etc. IIRC, NTES was expensive back then since people were running up the price because of their WoW license. So I never bought it. Even if I had, I'd probably have had difficult time holding on to it without knowing the things abyli described. I'm afraid that's the same situation now. Clearly they have done well, but without knowing Chinese gaming / music / etc. landscape and its future, it's hard to buy and hold. Good luck to people who know this better and invest into it. 8)

Although I somewhat agree with "I can't find anything to buy" crowd, I still wonder why not: BRK FFH BAC/JPM AAPL Some Liberties (but need DD) None of these are supercheap, but all probably can provide ~10% return long term. My "I can't find anything to buy" is that very few stocks seem to be better risk/reward than the ones above. And very few (almost none) offer 15%+ long term return. (This possibly needs to be moved to a new thread).

I think there is some confusion here between personal/user view and investor view. Some people distinguished the two, some did not. FB is very sticky across huge population - but that is investor point of view. From personal/user point of view, if it disappeared, some of us would not notice. 8) One can argue that this is true for other companies mentioned. E.g. Apple users would not notice if MSFT disappeared. MSFT users would not notice if Apple disappeared. Bing/DuckGoGo/Apple users would not notice if Google disappeared (except Youtube perhaps - Youtube is right now quite unique although some weak competitors exist). Walmart.com/Jet users would not notice if AMZN disappeared. So perhaps personal/user point of view is not very useful. 8)

Unfortunately I redid the roof 5 years ago. So another ~20 years to wait for the Elon tech to mature. If it goes parabolic, I might reroof earlier... 8)

I believe this is also true with Fidelity alerts.

Did you guys read the question in the article? 8) Here's the order I clicked to drop them: 1. FB 2. AAPL 3. GOOGL 4. AMZN 5. MSFT First two are easy. Last three are difficult and tomorrow I might have answered completely differently. So perhaps 3-5: GOOGL/AMZN/MSFT BTW, this is the user/person point of view. It's not investor point of view. From investor point of view I don't own MSFT, own very little FB, AMZN, GOOGL, bunch of AAPL. If these stocks were "equally" ::) cheap, I'd buy tons of FB and GOOGL.

Why does moderator start political topic with rather incendiary post and then ... surprise, surprise ... has to lock it? Sorry, Sanjeev, I get it and may even support what you wrote, but still... ::) We had pretty nice and quiet couple months. For which I am grateful. :-* Peace. ;D Edit: just to be clear, I support any action/decision by Sanjeev. Not that he needs my support. Peace^2. :-*

Da fin e print sez: From https://www.tesla.com/solarroof Perhaps buyers can play frisbee with the tiles after 30 years.

CoBF is the reason we have no market crash in last 7 years! 8) Sanjeev did it.

That would be my recommendation. I don't know why people feel compelled to discuss politics here - this is and investment board. Granted, politics and investment mix to some extend, but much less than generally presumed. Even Munger said, that politics don't matter much for BRK's business, I don't know why it should matter for us here. +1 all the politics discussions here add zero value for me Agreed. As a temporary solution I have added the 'General Discussion' subforum to my ignore board list (I think this is a nice new feature). That way all the nonsense doesn't flood the 'Recent Posts' section. However, there are some interesting posts in there so a split between 'General Investing' (that could include the 'Strategies' subforum, not much happening there anyway) and 'Off-topic, Politics and Religion' would be my preferred option. But whatever suits you Parsad. Your forum. Just a minor issue. IMO, "Strategies" should just be renamed "General Investing". I never understood what should go there anyway. "General Discussion" is pretty much "Off-topic" and perhaps should be renamed as such. Not sure this will resolve the politics issue, since people may pollute other subforums anyway ( just look at "Fannie and Freddie" board - edit: dang I forgot that F&F board was already in this subforum 8) ) and IMO the issue is not that politics is off-topic in "General Discussion" but that it degenerates into flame wars and has to be locked. I

Yeah, somebody should probably notify social services. Or at least inform the police if he starts buying assault rifles. Might be too late? ::) @anyonehumorimpaired: dis iz black humor

Could be called "Corner of Red Square and Pennsylvania" 8)

Wow, that does sound like a stupid soundbyte. Were they really pushing the millions of fake accounts because of some shareholder-focus? Not their own bonus-focus? Really?

It could. But it's so much easier and fun to talk about something when you know the outcome. With Amazon we do. With Premier we don't. 8) I'd be interested what stocks people hold that they need to consider whether they would hold through thick and thin. Let's say thin is stock 50% decline or more or fundamentally business crash 20-30% of revenues and/or very significant drop of income/CF (tough to specify exactly - for some companies 20% income drop is dramatic, for others 100% drop/losses isn't). I'd rather not comment on Premier. FRMO? 8) The answer for that is that I won't hold it through thick and thin. TSLA? I might, but it's not a real investment more like Elon support project. Very small position. FFH? I am holding but sold some and shifted into BRK. Might not hold it through thick and thin. BRK? I think I might - but not through Buffett's death. Liberties? I think I might - but not through Malone's death. These will be tougher to hold than BRK if e.g. we have huge spike in rates, recession and they have trouble refinancing. GOOGL? Tough to imagine what would cause significant stock/business crash. If one came, it might be hard to hold... or not. Not sure. Enough of a list for now maybe. 8)

Companies deal with crooks and take their risks. Read up on company investments (factories/etc.) in Venezuela. ::) Who knows, maybe in 1974 this did not look such a bad deal though... ........ There was a recent (last 2 years) article about outsourcing IT work to North Korea. This is illegal in US and ??? countries. What companies do, they outsource to a company in 3rd country (some European country IIRC) which then outsources to N. Korea. So ... a bunch of US electronic info potentially is being processed in N. Korea. ::) 8) ........ I had some shirts made in North Korea - bought them in Soviet Union in 1980s. I wonder if I committed a crime bringing them into US... ::)

Not being Chinese, I've looked at cloning BRK/Munger on BYD but even with them being invested I could not make myself trust that the company won't kick minority shareholders in the nuts some way. Also I don't think (electric) car business is great even in China and I don't think BYD has a lot of magic sauce (or moat). But I can concede that I might not know enough for very informed opinion. ------------------------- In the past Tencent was a great investment. I've done 2x or 3x when I bought it in ~2005 or so and sold later. Missed huge 100x bagger. It was always expensive. BIDU and BABA are probably the well known moaty companies. BABA seems to be run for Jack and whatever, not really for shareholders. They already screwed shareholders once with AliPay. I don't know much about BIDU's governance. --------------------------- With big China cos there's always a risk that Party will ask them to bail out a failing bank or something. Like CHL had to invest into some bank because Party said so. ----------------------- If I had Li Lu's number, I'd just give my money to him. 8) Anyway, like Charlie said, it's not supposed to be easy. Just buy FAA(N)G and be done with it! 8)

Should we buy tons of DISH now? I don't know how comparable spectrum is. And DISH market cap is much higher for any deal. But is it likely to spill off? Hasn't spilled off yet... ::)