Jurgis

It's also a question that anyone who bought "right after the dip" in 2008-2009, then saw their holdings go down another 30-80%... and likely did not have cash to make a meaningful purchase after second and third leg down.

Buy Lithuanian RE. 8)

Well, don't shut the stores then. Get a retail person who can try to fix the retail side. Didn't JCP recover even after the near-brush due to questionable decisions? Wouldn't a good retail person have done something better than Sears is now?

$2.99 on Amazon today: https://smile.amazon.com/Chaos-Monkeys-Obscene-Fortune-Failure-ebook/dp/B019MMUAAQ?ie=UTF8&redirect=true&ref_=pe_2809830_220740320_pe_row2_b1_t Haven't read it yet.

Couple observations: - Stock is controlled by Craig McCaw and Bill Gates entities. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1359555/000119312516619097/d37907ddef14a.htm Not that Bill Gates cares probably and their returns on the stock have been abysmal in last 5+ years. - New CEO's history is not great, but probably to be expected. Drexel Burnham in 80's... https://www.bloomberg.com/profiles/people/1512781-lee-e-mikles http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/news/2015/01/23/mikles-president-of-novelly-s-futurefuel-resigns.html Anyway, it could probably work out well. Usually with patent trolls the key is to buy when good news are not expected and sell when they get a big court win and stock spikes 2x or something. I'd be doubtful that Mikles will purchase a good company at reasonable price for future business. He doesn't seem to be a great capital allocator ... and good companies are expensive nowadays. But positive surprises happen. And yeah it's under cash value now.

This would have taken a completely different strategy to pull off. Linux machines/servers come in all shapes and sizes. Many big companies build their own, but even those who don't are constantly upgrading them. Apple's "buy a beautiful box from us that you can't open or upgrade" philosophy just wouldn't work in the markets where Linux dominates. To have really taken over those markets they would have to have allowed MacOS be installed on any custom hardware the way Linux can be. This would have disrupted their entire Mac product line and philosophy. In the late 90s early 2000s I would build myself a new machine at home every 1.5 - 2 years and install Linux on it. I know that if I could have installed MacOS at any point I would have switched to that, and a lot of others would have as well I'm sure. Even for people who don't build their own hardware, it would be cheaper to buy a cheap Windows machine and install MacOS on it than it would be to buy a Mac from Apple, so many Windows users would probably buy the OS without the Mac hardware as well. Their OS would have dominated, but they would have lost their hardware market completely. I don't think Apple was willing to become a software company, Jobs was always about tight integration between software and specific Apple controlled hardware. Yep.

This board mostly acts as if this is a sure thing too. ::)

That's not true, you pay a one-time transaction-tax of around 5-6.5%, then there are quarterly RE-taxes based on the "value" of the house. These are relatively low because the relevant values-table is from 1935. I guess the interpretation was wrong, but numbers were kinda right. 5-6.5% transaction tax is pretty discouraging for flipping or even normal sale-to-buy-something-else after couple of years.

Couple caveats about direct ownership that I heard from a German friend of mine: If you buy anything that is not up to code, you have to bring it up to code immediately and from your pocket. No grandfathering like in US. Yeah, friends had to put in new pipes into brick/concrete walls. Have fun. ;) You have to pay RE taxes for ?? (20?) years at time of purchase. Other side of the coin is that you don't pay RE taxes afterwards. Anyway, both of these were told to me as reasons not to buy (or if you have bought to never sell and buy something else). YYMV, this is anecdotal, does not apply to REITs, do your own DD, etc.

IMO one mistake Apple has done in the last 10-15 years is that they did not push Mac OS into enterprise. Of course, this probably would have been anti-Steve thing to do, but IMO there was a time where Mac OS could have displaced Linux in the Linux'y enterprise ecosystem and this in turn could have made Mac OS make bigger inroads into desktop OS market and displace Windows. It could have made Apple more software company. Microsoft is now firing on all cylinders as enterprise/cloud company. Apple owns a huge chunk of mobile and a sliver of desktop, but it would be hard for them to push into desktops/enterprise now. Win/Lin duopoly is now much stronger in enterprise/cloud than it was 10 years ago notwithstanding BYOD and some Mac inroads. Just random musings.

Yeah my 2009 was close to triple digits return. Makes you feel like genius for a while... We have some real geniuses around us. 8)

John, sorry to hear about your MIL. It is nice that you have organized her finances and finances of your father in orderly and positive fashion. If only all families had such good financial organizers.

The evaluation is very hard now since unlike early 2000s the site does so much more than just search. And yeah, by now it is black box. IMO if you evaluate purely commercial sites, Bing is as good. If Google and Microsoft started from complete zero right now but with existing tech, I'm not sure which one would dominate. Possibly it would be equal race. The reason Google dominates is mindshare + adjacent products + ad business. I'm not saying they don't have a moat. They do. But the moat is no longer the search algo. Even if you don't like Bing and think it's inferior for some reason, the situation is very different from early 2000s when no other search engine could even compare to Google. Edit: there have been presumably superior search algos in last 5+ years, but most either sold out or gave up exactly because you can't compete with Google on just search algo. People just won't go to new search engine that might have 5% better results, but does not index as much of the web, or does not update search index fast enough for news breaking items or has slower performance because they don't have huge data centers, fat pipes, etc. Actually people won't go to new search engine even if it had 5% better results and did not have any drawbacks. Inertia and brand mindshare rules. Not that Google is standing in place - they now probably are ~5% better than they were couple years ago - depending on how you look at it too.

Not really. If you invest in Google now based on their "superior" search algorithms, you are making a big mistake. Google's search algorithms have not been superior for quite a while now. That's not the reason it dominates anymore - there are other reasons. It may have been in the beginning. But even then it wasn't black box and people in the field could explain easily why their algo was light years above competition. No opinion about Criteo.

The miss is due to the new autopilot hardware introduction and birthing pains with that. As a customer I would applaud the company introducing new HW for the customers even though it put the company's Q4 financial predictions at risk.

Yeah, Fido does not allow to buy new positions in grey/no info companies. Even if you already have a position. You can always sell though. Funny that if company goes reporting for a while, then you can buy again. Yeah, I think this could be exploited by people who can buy when the company is dark. OTOH, I did not see a jump in price when company went from dark to Fido-buyable. So maybe not so easy to exploit. Fido did not tell me to liquidate position or threaten to close account though. They would not budge on allowing to buy though. Not a big issue for me, but FYI.

I'll second what KJP said. Some of my thoughts about finding money managers: Read CoBF, note links that people put in their signatures or on the globe next to avatar. Some pro money managers have links to their business pages. If person uses their real name, you can google them too. Go to microcap conf maybe - there are some money managers going there. Or/and look for past microcap conf attendees and their presentations. Same for Fairfax meeting, though this is more Canadian-specific. There are usually US based people there too. Manager availability depend on country where you're in. I assume you're in US, but if not, then you should explicitly say so. There are managers here who can only take clients from US or Canada or Europe. Once you see someone you like and they may be taking new clients, ask for their past client letters/etc. and try to figure out if you like their style/etc. IMO, be careful about the high returns in concentrated portfolios without long history. They could blow up. It's nice to see 30-60% returns a year, but what if they rely on couple speculative stocks or something? Would you yourself hold such portfolio? If not, why would you go with a manager who does it? Even if they had a 40% return in 20XX? On the other hand, a manager who has a long history of good returns will have likely graduated to big league ... or is not really great... so it's a Catch-22... On yet another hand, a manager who runs non-concentrated portfolio may not be much better than index fund. Is it worth paying 2-and-?? for them? Maybe consider Sequoia? There are tons of other questions that may or may not matter to you: - If taxable account, does your manager generate short term gains ... or losses? - If SMA, how comfortable are you handling tax preparation based on your manager's trades (if they trade often/overseas, this might become complex)? - If hedge fund/partnership, how comfortable are you with filing K-1/etc. - Do you qualify for hedge fund/partnership? With that said, if there are US based managers who are interested in account that might be sized $XXK+, drop me PM too. ;) SMA preferred. Edit: Just to be clear, I personally hate to do K1s and I hate to do "am I qualified investor" crap, which is why I prefer SMA. Not that SMA is without issues. And yeah, bigger money managers won't do SMA if they already have hedge fund/partnership.

You'll get there Grasshoppers. 8)

You might get more answers if you'd mention what's the goal of this question. There's a number of professional money managers on this forum. They might not want to explicitly advertise themselves as you ask them to do. I'm not.

8)

Yeah, sure. More like self selection bias. CoBF members who don't do well, don't post, and come shouting to this thread about their returns. And even with that 35% of respondents trail the index. So no, not really.

negative is <2% Yeah, sure. So why not have an option <0%? What's so magical about 2%? Risk free yield? Even if you held bonds for risk free yield, you would not get 2% in year since you're not holding 1 year bonds...

Yeah, but if you look at 2016 results, everyone's beating SP500. Conclusions? - People don't post their best ideas? - People invest in ideas that were not best (but worked out like best) - People short term trade - It's easier to click a poll than to post an idea (guilty here too). 8)

So obviously nobody lost money this year, since the lowest option is <2%... ???

Since we already have the short-term 2016 result poll up, I'm posting more relevant 10 year poll. Maybe gonna add 5 year poll for fun too.