Jurgis

Your wife understands banks and MLPs? :o ::) I know I know. On surface, these might look simple. In reality, I don't think so. You might understand a bank. I'm sure majority of people don't really. Even a community bank. Same for MLPs.

boilermaker75: I think randomep is saying that it's possible to push bad solutions in engineering. Not necessarily fraudulent or broken solutions, rather crappy ones that make the chip/program/widget/gadget less effective, harder to maintain, prone to failures, etc. And some of these bad solutions may earn their authors acclaim in the company while someone else who proposed better solutions may be pushed out or just get no money/acclaim. Sure this happens. Sometimes it happens because of politics, sometimes it happens because the person with bad solutions is great at promoting them, sometimes it happens just because people don't see some issues that come up in the future, sometimes it happens because of (faulty or not) cost/benefit analysis. I think investing looks better than engineering to randomep because you can fly solo and that means there's no politics and accountability for good and bad is just on you. However, I think this is unfair comparison. You can't compare working in large company in engineering vs. solo investing. You probably should compare working in large company in engineering vs working in large company in investing and compare solo engineering vs. solo investing. And I realize that you probably can't do solo engineering in chip design, but that's separate issue.

I don't read and understand legalese and the risk might be close to zero in FNMA/FMCC case as the resident lawyers explain, but it's not true in general. There are numerous class action lawsuits against companies where only people who owned it at the time of fraud/misrepresentation/whatever get compensated. So when you buy shares you may get economic rights, but you don't get the litigation result rights if the litigation is based on ownership at specific period of time in the past.

Doesn't work for me - I have tons of links and journals from couple years ago. Still seem interesting. Sometimes even more than when they were current. Fair point. Maybe. Hasn't worked in the areas where I do have limited time allocated - I still don't necessarily choose the "true preferences". But perhaps gotta try. :) Possible aside (?) : It's fricking tough to be a renaissance person in current age. Concentration is rewarded so much. I'm sure I'd have much better standing in various areas I participate in (work/investing/leisure activities A/B/C) if I concentrated on 1-2 instead of spreading out on 5-8. At some point you try to accept this as a fact with all the consequences. But sometimes it still hurts. :) Edit: hmm yeah, about 1000 movies in Netflix queue; about 1000 books unread; 50+ computer games that would be fun to play; and that's just the couch-potato side of things. Gotta clone myself asap. Immortality might help, but not a lot. ;D Edit 2: The suggestions are great. Thanks for all posts here. :)

Good one. ;D

Thanks oddball. Mostly agree. :) audio/video is much worse for me than reading. Seems to take much more time and most of the time I try to multitask, so I don't get much. Audio also seems like much lower bandwidth - i.e. you can get through the interview/presentation/Q&A in less than half time by reading transcript than it takes to listen. Also for non-native English speaker like me, listening is much more effort and I still may miss some things. Also I don't listen while driving - well, I don't drive too much and I prefer silence when I do :). The issue is that I do want to read them. Like oddball says, it's like junk food. Maybe not addiction, but something similar. Can't throw away old Economists, can't go away from Bloomberg - lots of interesting stuff. I'll have to figure out some way to ration. ;)

Get them before they are removed...

OK, so we've had a number of threads on how to read more (500 pages per day! 1000 pages per day!). And we have a number of great suggestions every day on what to read - both online and offline (books). So I have a question: how do I read less? Ideas, thoughts, suggestions on how to read less and how to balance on things that are attractive-but-possibly-not-useful (infoporn) vs. possibly-boring-but-maybe-more-useful? Some random thoughts: Like mentioned in Soros thread, I can go on Bloomberg news and spend 2+ hours a day just reading articles there. There's a lot of stuff and it's interesting. Possibly infoporn though. Articles/newsletters/blogs linked in CoBF tend to just accumulate. I probably have over 50 if not 100 articles that look interesting, but haven't had time to read. This includes things like Columbia Business School Graham & Doddsville newsletter, blog posts, etc. Compilations are bad shizz. I'm thankful for whoever collects everything-Munger or everything-Buffett or whatever, but these are books and ... no time to get through them. Videos are really bad - or at least it seems so. You get something like 5 hour Liberty meeting or even 1 hour talks/interviews/lectures and it eats the time like heck. And we haven't gotten to the 10Ks/10Qs yet. :'( These are possibly less of an issue, since they mostly are less reading-candy and you can focus on the companies you invest into and skip others mostly. And we haven't gotten to the books yet. :'( Stuck on Jobs' biography for 6+ months because of lack of time. Read through most of Howard Marks' book only because of the trip to Fairfax Toronto - 4+ hours in airports/planes - and the rest of the book is going to be finished who-knows-when. I guess the answer is to schedule, prioritize and aggressively cut. But how? Sometimes you read something that you think is not going to be useful - and it is - and vice versa. Pushing things into a semi-priority-based queue might work somewhat, but then it doesn't when your queue is hundreds of items long. I was elected to lead not to read.

I want to know what they are smoking when they say $86 is a break-even oil price for Saudi Arabia. Perhaps this includes one-palace-per-prince overhead. Edit: ah, they say: I don't think the "break-even price" means what they say it means.

Oh well. Let's sue WSJ for ... http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/super-villain/images/9/91/3998596-dr-evil.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140805055410 $9 billion dollars baby!

I would add: please don't encourage this foolishness by reposting said stories on this forum. Thanks so much. I clicked your link... and then clicked another 10 links in the Bloomberg link list. :-\ Another hour wasted... :'( Why did you do it? :'( ;)

Terminator 2 is Goldman. 8) Oh wait, that's probably not what you meant... I'll be back.

FYI, a number of PC laptops don't allow to replace a battery anymore either. Check before you buy. It is partly annoying, though in most cases batteries of my PCs/phones outlive the item itself (something else dies before battery dies). But then I usually don't need long battery times on laptops and I've been lucky so far with the phone. Some of my friends had worse experiences where the battery goes in 1-2 years and you have to replace a perfectly good phone. I Mr. Money Mustache and keep my phone for 4 years+, so there. And BTW a phone costs as much if not more than laptop, so arguing that it's OK for phone to be replaced when battery goes is silly.

The more you buy, the more you save. 8) I'm actually a bit afraid to think of how much you buy if you save 30K. ;) Thanks for the links guys.

Just an update: got couple TJX cards from Raise. Worked fine so far. One caveat: they guarantee the value when card arrives, but the card has the "confidential" numbers/pin open before it arrives. So one risk is that if you don't use the card quickly while it's covered by guarantee, the seller could potentially use the numbers/pin online and empty the card. Possibly not a big risk. Also likely not worth buying if you go to specific store only once a year and don't spend much. There might not be inactivity fees, but also possibly no recourse if you find out that the card is not working for whatever reason two years later.

Like what? He does eat like it's described in Snowball all the time. He may work out and use personal trainer, but that's separate from diet.

OK, so you now qualified with "in investing your own money". That's the first part. In investing other people's money 90% if not more is sales. And Burry, sure, it sounds good in the movie when Christian Bale says that phrase with the puppy eyes of his. But I knew Mike in real life and yeah that man actually could sell like shiz. No, he got the capital not just because people were agog about his numbers. It was in large part because he wrote the columns and participated in the new-at-the-time Internet investing forums and people knew of him. So sales. But let's get back to "in investing your own money". So if I do some programming, I create something useful. Maybe not a lot of people use it, but it's still useful. And 99%+ of engineers create something useful every day. Something that makes this world a better place, that advances the civilization. Investors? OK, you are right "In investing your own money: you get paid if your bet is right ". But in general this creates pretty much zero value. Actually, it's likely that some crappy investors create more value than good investors. I.e. people who put money into biotech stocks and lose most of it, but doing so advances drug research. Good investors mostly just make money. So, OK, if money is your yardstick, maybe that's more fulfilling than engineering. And sure, it also promotes your ego and individualistic tendencies. I get it. Investing is the perfect occupation where you don't have to deal with others (if you don't want it), nobody can tell you what to do, you don't have to compromise or reach consensus with a team - and it rains money (if you're good). But I still object to it being called "truthful". Even successful, numbers-based investing is way less truthful than most of engineering. For your result you're depending on companies to do the right things, you are dependent on markets to do the right things, you are dependent on the politics and economy and country and so on. It's actually really much more society dependent than any engineering and much less dependent on you. And to call the results based on what thousands of people involved in companies you invest are going to do "truthful" - well I don't see that at all. And I also disagree with "in engineering you make money convincing others you are right". I actually make money by creating something. What you say only applies once you go up the management ladder. And then it's no longer engineering. It's management, leadership, sales, advertising, entrepreneurship. Not engineering. All of this IMO and whatever. Have fun being an investor. Peace.

ROFL. ;D ::) :D ;D OK, sorry man. You want the truth? Investing is way way way way way more away from truth than engineering is, was or will ever be. Engineering is at least measurable and actually measured in good organizations. Investing? Well, 99% if not more investors don't add any value. Even on this forum, I'd guess more than 50% of already 1%'ers don't add any value. Discussions here? The truth? LOL. It's all agendas and biases and p3n15 size and all that. Even the best investors just push their agenda and run their book.

Exor should switch listing asap.

I guess my concern is similar to ebdem's in the German forum: Bollore's campaign and lawsuits against journalists portraying him negatively and suppression of journalists from Bollore-owned publications. Unwillingness to handle criticism in press may mean that he does not tolerate differing views overall and may lead to narrow views and mistakes in business. I think I'll skip.

I think that's one of the best and least biased descriptions of what happened. :) So I'll +1 on it even if nobody else does. :)

OT. I don't know if I should be concerned or proud or both that my portfolio has large overlap with the above. I don't have PFE/JNJ and have only token amount of AMZN and GOOG. I don't think PFE/JNJ has great management, but they might have better longevity than some of the others.

"Rosy past" bias. ;) No, seriously. There's a lot of that going on. ----------------------------- The fact that people don't give crap about emissions sucks. Especially since we are not talking just CO2 here, but particulates and compounds that cause health damage. But, yeah, it is a fact: people still buy and drive the polluting VWs.

So bad news is that Buffett was wrong in both points 1 and 2. Why bad news? Because that might have juiced the returns of last 17 years a bit, but looking forward we have to look at points 1 and 2 again and likely to come to Buffett's conclusion again: rates won't fall further from here and corporate profitability won't rise. Assuming we stay with Buffett's prediction on GDP growth, we are pretty much back to his 1999 prediction: pretty subpar general market growth. Yeah, I know, valuations are lower and we still can try to outperform the market. But general returns are unlikely to be great. (Some people will argue that this means we need to short, whatever, but unlike 1999 market may not have a predictable crash. It may just meander like it did for 2015 and so far this year).

OT Apart from Chinese reverse mergers, which pretty much all had no debt.