Jurgis

Apparently your 1.2% does not an affiliate make. Now, you own ~0.6%, have a nice day. OK, I got it. They needed to sell shares, they wanted something for their efforts that took bunch of time and work, they did the deal to sell shares to themselves. It doesn't make it any nicer, but that's par for the course. Disclosure: I am a spectator at this time. Just learning not to get into nanocap bandwagons with "good guys" by assuming things will work great when they take the helm. (Imagine the fury if former CEO had sold 50% shares of the company to himself under market price just before the "good guys" showed up.)

Right, so when the "good guys" buy half of the company under the table for lower than market price it's OK, because they are the "good guys" . They did it for the benefit of all shareholders. Showed character too. 8)

On the third hand, maybe I should buy Picasso. People say that art is ass appraised which would make it interesting. ;D

You can still access old Yahoo format on https://ca.finance.yahoo.com But it will have Canadian news and such

So, they doubled shares, sold way below market, and didn't offer existing shareholders a chance to participate. Classy. This also seems par for the course for these "good guys" taken-over nanocaps. :-\

I vote for Picasso to buy PIR. :)

OT. The issue with reducing fossil fuel consumption is that a lot of solutions have high costs and/or NIMBY issues. E.g. building fast rail infrastructure (costs + some NIMBY), nuclear (costs and NIMBY), etc. They might be good long term in terms of costs. They might be very good if climate change risks are really nonlinear and catastrophic. Unfortunately, it is very hard to convince people that climate change risks are nonlinear and catastrophic. Even people who agree that climate change is happening and is going to cause issues are not very likely to support large very costly projects. OTOH, the "feel good" solutions mostly have very limited impact and/or don't solve the problems. E.g. more efficient cars drop the fuel consumption few percent (that gets immediately reversed by China/India/etc. energy consumption growth). Issues with solar/wind are necessity to maintain the gas/coal generation for peak usage (or develop very-large-scale energy storage that is not there yet even with Tesla's powerpacks) and new costly/NIMBY transmission lines. Not saying we shouldn't do this, but these will unlikely reduce emissions to prevent the climate change. I've just finished watching one of Vaclav Smil's lectures ( ) and even though I find him a bit too pessimistic about technological solutions, he has a lot of good arguments why change is tough and will be slow even if people supported it (which they mostly don't - and mostly for cost reasons). But this probably should be split into another thread for any detailed discussions.

Picasso, you are right. :)

Yawn, I've heard that "buying what no one will own" story 10+ years ago. Yeah, sometimes it works - when someone like Picasso does really deep DD and buys a special situation. And then sometimes it works crap. Buying industries in secular decline, good for you if you really buy it supercheap and get out of the way of the steamroller before it flattens you. Or turnarounds that usually don't turn. The fact that nobody else is touching some stocks or industries does not make them wrong and you right. Contrarianism only works if you have a variant perception. LOL. I said it. ;D Good luck, have fun. :)

Picasso, your spiel is making me seriously consider buying AXP... ::)

Haha lol just saw this: http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.com/2016/07/record-valuation-spreads.html Timely for this discussion, no? ;D

More like "screw that! I'm gonna crap on neighbor's doorstep".

I think I mentioned Wegmans in one of the past threads. Yeah, mostly love it. :) I'll be grumpy old man and complain about some things: (here you go Schwab711 :)) - Their prepared food buffet selections went downhill since the store opened. :'( Indian food disappeared. Fewer veggie options. :( (This might be based on demand - I know I usually like items that are not popular - a bunch of food items that I like have been discontinued in various food stores ... and restaurants :'( ) - Wife buys fruit tarts - more expensive than in small (chain?) bakery... - Pretty far away from us (haha, we still go there once a month or so). - Cheese selection is large, but Romano that we buy elsewhere is either not available or quite expensive. - They don't stock mini bananas - Frozen vegetarian dinner selection is not that great. Whole Foods has better though expensive, Trader Joes has better and cheaper, normal supermarkets had pretty good selection in the past but nowadays it's crap here in MA. - Fever Tree Lemon Bitter was not stocked last time we were there. The guy was helpful, but could not find any. QQ. (BTW, anyone for great and expensive upcoming drinks company: buy FEVR London ... I managed to miss it even though we were drinking the fricking tonic for last 3 years or so... crap). On recent positive notes Wegman's brand sorbet was good. Trader Joes is still great too, although their limited selection means that you have to go elsewhere for a lot of items. And then we have HMart - Korean supermarket - oh la la. :) Plus Russian food store down in Boston for Easter European food... but that's OT. :)

I've seen couple of these on the road. I'm very surprised that this is legal (IIRC they did have local MA license plates).

Unless your inflows/outflows are a large chunk of your portfolio ( either because your portfolio is small or you are getting huge chunks of money from Don Vito 8) ), it's likely that dollar-vs.-time average will be close.

But, I agree it would be interesting to get Allan's thoughts on this. RIP Harambe They shot the wrong ape. :'( RIP.

Looks pretty bleh from the first glance, although I guess the question is how the underlying values of investments listed at cost have changed. I guess people will say that FRMO is all about optionality, but some of these nickel-and-dime investments look too small to matter. Perhaps they are waiting for crash and good opportunities. :-\

Cromwell Coulson talks good talk, but I'm somewhat concerned about the numbers in Table 1 on page 11 of the quarterly. Pretty much everything is down Y-over-Y. OTCQX number of securities is the only one number up significantly y-o-y. I guess it's possible to argue that OTCQB and Pinks will continue to convert to OTCQX at rapid clip, but it's not necessarily the consistent direction. And unlike See's candies OTCM can't raise prices without limit (well, See's can't either): they will start losing companies to national exchanges if they double the prices again. I guess the Blue Sky future is the optionality of this company. Without it, it seems to be a cash cow that could get squeezed. Disclosure: I own some OTCM.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-me-pol-ca-motor-voter-law-20151016-html-htmlstory.html It seems the only difference is that for citizens the default is registration while in other states the default is non-registration. The whole eligibility check is likely the same (how do all other states check eligibility of someone who wants to register to vote? isn't it the same as above?) It's not even clear whether this will be set up before 2016 election. Right now, I did not find any official documents confirming when it will be up.

@Picasso: contrarianism by itself doesn't work. But it might be a place where to start looking. AXP. ;) It got everything: brand, moat (?), growth (??), Buffett, value, temporary (?) issues, tailwinds, headwinds, some hate.

OT? The author makes linear extrapolation mistake which he of all people shouldn't make. He assumes machine learning will stay the same in the future as it has been now. The problem with this assumption is that if you looked at ML 10-15 years ago and made linear prediction, you would not have predicted pretty much anything that happened in last couple of years. Sure, the "dealing with new situation in novel way" is tough for machines. But there are tons of assumptions in this phrase. I.e. that the situation is really "new" and there is nothing in it that can be extracted into features that already exist the machine's training space. Also that it has to be dealt in "novel" way. IMO, the biggest obstacle for machines taking most of human jobs is the large bandwidth interaction with real world needed for a lot of jobs. I.e. the issue is not the machine analyzing med results or legal case, but rather interacting with the patients, nurses, staff, analog medical devices, bureaucratic apparatus, etc. And it's not even that seeing a patient is "new situation", but rather that seeing a patient is multidimensional problem in ways that machines are not ready for. Though machines have pieces of dealing with that, they are still pieces and not integrated solutions. Self driving cars are probably the area where machines are now coming really close to dealing with the multitudinous real world parts/inputs/situations/etc. But overall that will be the biggest issue to overcome. Once (if) we get to machines that can tackle the real world as input/output, human jobs are gone. Period. Returning back to investing, IMO most of people who invest shouldn't (myself included 8) ). I've talked about this in past, but investing is interesting area. On one hand, the baseline (index) is so good as to beat 9X% of investors. On the other hand, because businesses (and market) in general have positive return and humans are not good in dealing with variability and statistics, a lot of people can make money in investing even if they underperform baseline and even though their clients would be better taking money elsewhere. So (Value/whatever) investing is alive, though most of the people who do it are just deluding themselves (or having good time in rather unproductive way ;)).

@Picasso: OK, gotcha, thanks. 8)

OT: So you guys don't like Tom Gayner either? http://www.dataroma.com/m/holdings.php?m=MKL Bonus question for Picasso: so money managers should be YOLO like Bill Ackman: 5 ~20% positions where one of them blows up and their results go to crap? ;) http://www.dataroma.com/m/holdings.php?m=psc Disclosure: I am crappy investor with a lot of <1% positions. This probably should be moved out of GILD thread.

Biotech “A” is pretty definitely GILD.

Yes. IMHO, this should be moderated, but that's Parsad's choice. Other than that, you can only call it out or ignore. Neither of these choices are perfect. :(