Jurgis

I don't think that's what they are doing.

My Brier score just hit the dust: https://www.gjopen.com/questions/47-will-apple-sell-more-than-75-million-iphones-in-its-december-quarter :'( :'( :'( ;)

No. This http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-16/how-an-exclusive-hedge-fund-turbocharged-retirement-plan claims it's the fund that had 71% annual return. Not the asset management firm. (I don't know where they got the numbers from though).

Hmm, yeah, something like "market making" might explain it. I am not sure if that's what they do and if it really explains it. I'm not an expert in "market making", so I'll let it go at that. :) I don't think the "costs of the machines, hiring people" are really relevant. You don't include them into the returns of regular fund either. I also doubt that it would subtract more than 1% of total per year. So 69% vs. 70%? Even if it's 5% (which I really really doubt is the cost) does it matter? Edit: Reported AUM is 65B. Reported employees are 290. 1% of 65B*.70 is 455M. Assuming $1M per employee, this still leaves 165M for machines per year. I doubt they spend that, but I might be wrong. I did not account for taxes/RE/etc, but if we go with 2%, that should cover everything. ;)

I can't say that I understand your comparison to car dealer. :-\ Let me try to comment on things I do understand: I don't think Medallion did HFT. However, I might be wrong. Algorithmic trading is not the same as HFT. Question still remains why others can't repeat what they did? IMHO there are no supergeniuses that create algorithms that others can't replicate. I somewhat know the machine learning community. There are bright people there but mostly not 70%+ for 20 years outperformance level brighter than others. ;) 50% performance fee and large management fee do not matter for 70%+ annual return. Sure, for outside investors, this makes Medallion crappy investment (mostly). Simons actually instituted the outrageous fees as a way to close Medallion implicitly before he closed it explicitly. But this even more underscores that someone else with comparable algorithms could steal most of Ren market and possibly remove the inefficiencies that lead to outperformance. Edit: I think you are also saying that returns are not measured based on assets invested in the fund. I am not sure this is true. I am pretty sure their returns are calculated the same way other funds do it. I'd have to dig though to see if that's right. Thanks for commenting though.

Somewhat OT. Yes, I am mostly in the same boat. I am thinking what you are thinking (and, no, I'm not an alien who can read your mind :P). However: 1. SP500 is expensive right now. It might be really bad time to switch. 2. BRK is really (ok, "rather") cheap right now. Why not switch to BRK? There are other "good" forever hold stocks to switch to that are somewhat cheap right now. But yeah, switching to them relies on their future performance that might not be great. 3. turar is right also: SP500 is not ideal. Of course, you can buy VTSMX ( https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0085&FundIntExt=INT ) or some equivalent. This would resolve the US market coverage. It still does not give you exposure to international markets. If you buy >30% international though, you probably should measure your past performance against that. You may have outperformed 70% US/30% international for last 5+ years, since international has performed really crappily. Not sure about 10 years. 4. If you held cash/bonds, you may need to adjust your performance to account for that percentage of cash/bonds. Don't do it though if you consciously kept that as a "dry powder to buy stocks", not as a "X% in cash/bonds no matter what" allocation. 5. Random thoughts: maybe buying RSP or PRF makes some sense... but who knows. My personal solution so far: I am trying to switch to forever-hold stocks not counting my 2015 excursion into oil land. If we ignore the oil land excursion, I want to see if I can manage to hold the forever-hold stocks. If SP500 crashes, I may switch to it. Not guaranteed though. I wonder if 70%US/30% international would outperform from here. BTW, international indexes suck IMO, so that's another issue. If there is interest perhaps we should start a "Switching from active investing to indexing/delegating/whatever" thread. 8)

I've seen the interview. It does not answer any of my questions. It pretty much says what I said in the beginning of this thread: we were first and we crunch a lot of data and test a lot of algos. Ah, yes he also says that he hires the best (and possibly at some time in the past nobody else did - but now that's definitely not true). IMHO none of these are insurmountable for competition. I did not know that other funds had much lower returns than Medallion. I wonder why. I guess we won't know. :)

I don't know if crowd here has insights into this. Possibly wrong crowd to ask. :) Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies Recent performance is unknown, but known outperformance to 2013 is huge. Why is there no competition that have ground the quant analysis advantage to dust? OK, so Renaissance has a big advantage that they have been collecting data (and algorithms) for ages and they have size advantage to purchase huge data centers to crunch the data and squeeze actionable strategies. They also possibly hire the best and the brightest. However, all of these advantages are also disadvantages. Huge outperformance should have attracted copycats. Although nobody knows Renaissance algorithms, you'd think other shops would have tried to replicate or do something similar. Cost of computers is not very huge nowadays (you can pop analysis into AWS even). They are not doing HFT, so you don't need millisecond decisions (but even HFT is full of competitive shops). It's always possible to find young bright kids who want to do a killing instead of going to "stodgy" Renaissance. And smaller shops could outperform in less liquid and less efficient markets, where Renaissance can't hunt. Is James Simons just so much better? Do they really have so much first-mover advantage? Any other ideas? So why this hasn't been competed into oblivion? Sorry, this is not an actionable topic and possibly way OT in value investing forum. Just another technologists wondering rant. 8)

AFAIK, it does not take outside money, probably does not publish results, etc. To be more precise, they have some offshoots that are still open to outside investors, but these might not have long record - who knows.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-26/bridgewater-s-dalio-trumps-soros-as-most-profitable-hedge-fund ? on these net gain numbers. Bridgewater for example, $45B on how much capital? If someone invested $10,000 in 1975 and left it there, what would it be now? Yeah, these numbers don't seem to be useful to determine (out)performance.

Another good reason.

Why not? I've been harping about famous managers underperforming in various places for quite a time. Einhorn. Loeb. Ackman. So Uccmal opened a thread based on Pabrai, but really that's just yet another example . Edit: if you are looking something to blame for the thread, blame SP500 runup from 2009. :P

OT, but I'll answer: 1. Fear. Fear that the index will go sideways or down for a long time and you actually won't reach your targets before retirement. 2. Time. Reaching your goal @50 is better than reaching your goal @70. 3. Goal inflation. I know you said vague "multi-millionaire", but it does matter if you have $1M or $2M or $10M @70. With $1M there is a risk that it won't be enough if you calculate medical expenses and long term care and longevity. Even more so if your portfolio gives crap returns from there. 4. Convenience. Like Buffett, I believe that private jet travel is great. This won't work if you have $1M, but will work if you have >$10M. (Yes, like Buffett, I'll call this "Indefensible". But you asked for reasons and it's a reason 8) ).

So PCP arbitrage was available up to yesterday @$231.XX. Deal closing Friday, $234.83 today. I had only small amount in it.

So some people gave examples of companies, hedge funds, etc. that outperformed for 15 years. Not a huge list, but still not bad. But let's ask two more difficult questions: 1. Who has invested majority of their money 10 or 15 years ago into a company/fund that has outperformed? (Yeah, I know we have some BRK and FFH long term holders here, you can jump up and down, good job). 2. Who has conviction enough to invest majority of their money into a company/fund today and hold it for next 10 or 15 years. Which company would that be? (This would exclude hypotheticals such as Renaissance - whom I respect deeply, but nobody's gonna get their money there). Edit: just to be clear: Uccmal might be looking for pure "funds". I am fine if you give an example of "not really fund" company like FFH/BRK/BAM/FRMO/whatever.

FYI Jeffrey Gundlach pitched NLY again in second part of Barron's roundtable. I have no holdings in this space.

My understanding is that TurboTax online does not import from IBKR but TurboTax standalone (for PC) does. However, I'm still waiting to see if anyone can confirm this. Edit: Interactive Brokers is not part of TT partner list, which means that you cannot import IB forms through TT import interface. You can save IB information from IB in TXF format and import that into TT - https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=tax&p=us2 . However, this only works with PC product (standalone). It does not work with TT Online. Since I've been using TT Online up to now, this sucks. I have to either switch to TT standalone or type a lot. Switching to standalone sucks since TT Online has all my info from previous years, which saves a lot of time. Using online and typing sucks since there's tons of IB transactions. :( GRRRR. Another reason to hate IB. Edit2: Directions how to switch from TT Online to TT standalone: https://ttlc.intuit.com/questions/1901476-move-your-2013-online-return-to-the-2013-turbotax-cd-download-software

This seems to be occurring pretty much everyday around midnight EST: Is CoBF running bitcoin mining around midnight? NSA hacking? DDoS'ing Vladimir Putin or ISIS? Technical minds want to know. :)

Adesigar probably posted this for fun, but I'll try to relate it to Mephistopheles' question: Is the price really the decisive factor for choosing tax filing software? Isn't correctness, convenience, speed to complete the process, clarity of instructions, etc. much more important? For anyone on CoBF, IMHO, the most important feature is the capability to painlessly and correctly slurp in your stock investment transactions from your financial providers. If I were you, I'd base my decision on this rather than on other things (like price). Although if you're a buy-and-hold-forever investor or invest only in tax deferred accounts, then perhaps this is not important to you. I've only done taxes by hand and via Turbo Tax Online. I think TTO is OK with some caveats. You should specify your concrete situation if you want more precise suggestions. E.g.: are you self-employed, are you getting stock options, ESPP at work, are you investing in MLPs and need to file K1s, and so on. ---------------------------- Potentially off-topic: this year will be yet another step up for me in terms of tax filing complexity. Last year the biggest hurdle was ESPP filing - TurboTax online does not provide good explanations on how to fill this. I had to Bing/Google for suggestions. I found http://thefinancebuff.com/ and I very strongly recommend the site for various topics including tax related ( I have no affiliation with the author except for getting help from him for my questions ). This year, I have IB account - and I seem to have heard that TurboTax Online does not import IB transactions - can anyone confirm or deny this? This would be very helpful. Also I have Husband-and-Wife Sole Proprietorship to report this year. Presumably Turbo Tax handles this. I wonder how much longer I can get through without a CPA. :) (Not that CPA guarantees great filling. My mother had someone fill her trivial 1040EZ and they messed it up. I had to redo it with TT instead...)

Won't stop me from investing in the company. It's par for the course for tech companies as you observed. Just ignore their non-GAAP make-believe earnings and stock "buybacks". Same with overpaid CEOs. It's an issue, I vote against it, but I ignore it in buy/sell decisions. ;)

If you guys are talking about bear case for Apple, then moving into cars is a great bear case. Low margin, capital intensive business with no guarantee of success. They could spend just couple $B on this as a vanity project though.

You can try to calculate this you know... Really rough calc (I am sure resident experts will correct me): 350 mln users x $600 selling price x 1/2 ( two year replacement cycle ) = $105B yearly revenue. Compare that to 2015 revenue of $155B for iPhones. You have to assume ~515 mln users at this price point and 2 year replacement to get flat $155B revenue. I used 350 mln users based on (oldish) number of 700 mln iPhones sold to date and assuming that half of them are dead. I did not find number of iPhone users in 2 minutes of Bing&Google-fu. And now I have to get to bed and let others narrow it down.

That's a great question, Palantir. I should ask fellow Bostonites if anyone there plays bridge. Might be fun get together ... instead of yet another discussion about value investing... 8) ... or at least interspersed with some fun 8)

PRXI is a great example of a broken company existing for years and drawing in a new set of patsies investors every year. I paid for my lesson in 2008 or thereabouts.

Anyone has access to PWE bond quotes? Not looking to buy, since they are not US accessible, but wonder what they are trading at. Or are they totally illiquid and no quote at all?