Jurgis

Quite a few examples are semi-monopolies that you can't escape unfortunately. I told myself that I will never get Verizon after having DSL from the nightmare street. I still don't, but that limits my choices to Comcast (which most people hate - I had OK experience with it) and RCN (which I currently have and fingers crossed, good so far). Other people are not so lucky and have to stay with semi monopoly even though it sucks. Some (most?) examples are also very personal. I've had friends who will never use Chase (bad CC experience), Bank of America (bad banking experience), etc. But these are still huge companies that many people use. I use them too and have not had any problems... Wholesale brand implosions are more rare I guess...

Pretty sure people who have lived through real communism might want to disagree with you... I have nothing to add. ;)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peterschwartz/reconceiving-the-idea-of-_b_7927220.html I don't think anyone on this thread claimed that all businessmen are evil. Actually I'll go on the record stating that I believe in moral business practices and I believe that sometimes moral business practices may even be the best for both the owners/shareholders and the employees and the customers and any other parties (like environment). However, just as we should not say that all businessmen are evil, we should not say that all businessmen are moral paragons just because they create jobs for people and drive economy. There have been numerous examples of business owners that exploited workers, produced substandard products, and engaged in other practices that harm a lot of people in the past and there are such examples right now - mostly in corrupt countries without sufficient laws and protections. Also we should not dismiss people working or volunteering for non-profits or government agencies as non-productive or not contributing to the benefit of humanity. As with the capitalists, not all of them are doing things that are positive, but there are non-profits and, yes, there are governmental organizations too who do great things. Let's evaluate both sides on the concrete results they achieve and not on some simplistic separation. Edit: regarding the article: it's a tricky subject and I think the author does not do it justice. Yes, doing things that may look selfish might be good, and even altruists have to do things for themselves or risk a burn out, but there are selfish things and selfish things... (let's open new thread if there's interest in more discussion)

Anecdotally: not really. We prefer Wegmans.

LOL. Quite true though. There is zero need for a pilot anymore. Planes can take off, fly, land and handle unexpected situations better than pilots. It's just human prejudice that pilots can fly better than machines...

Donald Trump won. ... oh you meant different election...

There are companies/games that do the microtxns the user friendly way and there are ones that completely piss off their user base. I don't know in which camp EA is, since I don't play their games at the moment. (I don't play sports games at all and I play very few other games nowadays).

Looks pretty ugly. Son digs in, gonna invest in the leasing companies. Hopefully that's gonna end up better than his S investment so far...

Would be funny, since the previous article claimed its own factories are also automated. But I don't see any reference to "high personnel costs" in the article you linked. Any other reference?

Nobody's blaming capitalism. You guys are taking my posts out of context. :) I was answering to: Emphasis mine. Yes, Liberty, you are totally right. Capitalism is the best system we know. But that does not mean that "greedy capitalists" are better than people who try to help the people in poverty. Here is another self-righteous libertarian moralist: Yeah, right. Who talked about spending someone else's money? If people donate to charities like Doctors Without Borders or Seva, if they volunteer for charities, clearly they are "being popular by spending someone else's money". And actually: Right. But ask rkbabang and wachtwoord and they'll probably tell you that US and Western Europe are socialist. Cause they clearly limit the ability of greedy capitalists to do what they would want to do. There are labor laws, safety laws, environmental laws, etc. Let's ask our libertarian friends if they would keep any of these laws. So perhaps Rainforesthiker answered it the best: people vote with their feet. And they vote for capitalist societies that also have great social safety nets and limit the power of "greedy capitalists".

Where they worked voluntarily. ... as it was their only alternative to starving to death in the streets in a cold, capitalist world where they lost the genetic lottery. (No idea if this is true or not. I just like "build the sentence" games.) I'll just +1 this one. ;)

Yeah, sure. Tell this to all the people who died in the capitalist mines, factories and farmfields.

F**k Donville. Waste of time. :)

I am aware about the criticism of Mother Teresa. Your post implies that everyone who tries to be Mother Teresa is going to do the same things she is criticized for. That's very unlikely.

The devil is in the details. Great business and jockey investing is based on belief that past results will continue. Risks: - The past results won't continue because business, market, something else changes. - You pay too high price for great business and your stock results are crappy even though business results continue just fine. Underpriced netnet, cigar butt investing is based mostly on belief that past results won't continue or they won't catch up with you fast. Risks: - The past results continue and stock drops even more - You pay cheap price, but not cheap enough, so even though business results change/improve, you don't get good results. Edit: Glitch investing: investing based on belief that current bad results are a glitch and will go back to good results soon. Risks: - The bad results continue - Price... again. :)

What a nice mischaracterization of someone trying to be Mother Theresa. No, it's not about "enjoying the fact that people are sick and starving so that you can feel virtuous taking care of them". It is actually about helping people who are sick and starving.

CoBF investors might trade a lot less. Value investors "by definition" do not trade "a lot less". Value investor can buy undervalued stock and sell it in 2 weeks if it appreciates above the intrinsic value. Same with netnet investors. You might as well say that growth investors "by definition" trade a lot less: they should only sell when company stops growing, no? ;)

SPE has gone nowhere for the last 5 years. Did they pay out a lot of gains? How do you measure their performance?

Like Palantir's, most of my portfolio is in tax advantaged accounts. I trade more there than in taxable account but partly because I don't buy anything that is short term in taxable accounts. If I had to have all my money in taxable accounts, I'd probably buy hold-forever positions pretty much. It's very hard to outperform if you lose 25%+ of a gain during the sale. Also I donate some appreciated taxable shares to charities avoiding taxation if I plan to sell them anyway.

Schwab711, the following is not pointed at you personally. :) It might be just the situation with market being high, hitting tops. But there is a trend where people propose ideas and nicely justify moats and high valuations. And then you look at the last 10+ years and realize that the company has traded much lower while having all the same qualities they have now. There were times when ADBE, EA, etc. traded much lower, were on sale because Mr. Market and everyone did not believe they had the moat and good business. (There are other examples, but I don't want to turn this thread into "why company X is cheap now even though the multiple is high"). I would rather buy a business when it's not loved than when everyone thinks it's the greatest and can do no wrong. Like others above said, the valuations are stretched and might not work out well for current buyers. That's true not just for EA, but for a lot of companies discussed on this site. I don't find much that is cheap right now. Perhaps I am too cheap though. :) Also, when companies fall temporarily, it is hard to buy them then. I am sure people had great reasons not to buy EA when it was really cheap ("PC gaming is passe, sport franchises are tired, no hits, etc"). That's the tough part of investing... Sorry for general and not stock specific comment. :)

It's not about being harsh or not. It's about calling spade a spade. :) I'm fine if people say: "OK, this amount of capex/acquisitions is growth capex and I will measure the company by not subtracting it from OCF to produce FCF-plus-growth". I'm not very happy when people just define this as FCF. Perhaps I should just define RFCF (Real FCF) as the cash that really goes to the bank and is not spent on capex or acquisitions. One of the dangers of defining FCF as being the same as FCF-plus-growth is double counting. I.e. "we are getting 10% yield now and company is growing at 15%" (percentages a bit fake). Not really. If company is buying growth and you are counting that growth, then you should only count RFCF as current yield, which might be only 1-2%. Edit: "we are getting 10% yield now and company is growing at 15%" is also misleading when compared to a company B that is "getting 10% RFCF yield now and company is growing at 15%" Take care

This analysis might be useful for a no-growth company but not terribly relevant for a company growing 20% per year. You can do whatever analysis you want, but calling a spoon a spade won't help it. Acquisitions and capex are the same. Both can be growth capex. Also both can be maintenance capex (if you acquire companies to replace factories that are falling apart). In either case, cash spent on them is not FCF. FCF is what goes into the bank after your capex and acquisitions. At least call it FCF-before-growth-expenditures. ;)

People here are way overpositive. There is no FCF. They had 228M OCF and they spent 217M. Ah, yes, acquisition spending does not count. Prevalent opinion through most of CoBF during the 7th year of bull market.

There were no businesses in the town I grew up in. 8) Welcome to Soviet Russia Union, tovarishch. ;) Edit: the very interesting mental exercise would be, why the heck some shops/cafes/factories/etc. were still 10 times better than others. Clearly it was not the monetary business ownership motivation. Sometimes pure-capitalist models forget that other motivations exist and might be quite powerful. Edit 2: Ah, what the heck. The best thing was still to be a monopolist for attractive product. If you were the manager of chocolate shop that was the only one that got chocolate allocation, you were fricking rich. Just give some bribes, sell the allocation on black market, voila. Yep, there was shortage of everything including chocolate and toilet paper and your choice was either to know someone who knows someone who would sell you stuff for inflated prices or to stand in multihour long lines hoping that you get some of the allocation that was not stolen/backdoored. Moral: being monopolist pays even in Soviet Russia.

That's probably true. The concern would be competition with someone like Wegmans and maybe Trader Joe's (though TJ does not cover everything WF/supermarkets cover). Anecdotally, we don't shop at Walmart because of historic reasons perhaps. We buy most groceries at Stop&Shop, which is generic grocery supermarket, nothing to write home about, because it is closest to our place and takes least time to get to. When we drive farther, we go to Trader Joe's, we go to new Wegmans that opened last year, we go to HMart (Korean supermarket), and Russian store. We went to WFM couple times, we like Wegmans more. Edit: out of the above in terms of crowds, TJs doing great, HMart doing great partially because of being Asian specialty supermarket. I think it's early to tell how Wegmans will do when novelty wears off. But then we are usually not trendsetters or trendfollowers, so things we like don't necessarily do well (apart from TJs which did great so far, but not investable). Edit2: If WFM was close, we probably would go there (more?), but even now we go farther to Wegmans/TJs than the distance to WFM, so it's not purely distance.