Jurgis

Ah, but the banks won't. Such a nice play. You make the classic mistake of equating a loan from person to person to Greece situation. It is not the same. A country is not a person. You cannot resolve recession with permanent austerity. You cannot take country's sovereignty just because it owes you (try it with Argentina or Venezuela, good luck). To get out of the perma depression, country has to default and devalue instead of extend and pretend. And BTW, if Eurocrats allowed Greece to default and then provided help to it, it might cost less than the whole extending and pretending charade. But actually even for person there are BK rules that might be less onerous than what Germany is trying to impose on Greece. And BTW, do you think that, for example, Detroit should have been cut off the USD when it said that it was BK? Perhaps that was the right thing to do, no? That would have taught it a lesson: "If you default, no dollars for you, make your Detroit-drachma currency!".

Ah, yes, the "productive / responsible" Germans who irresponsibly lent to Greece, but when the loans soured, they shifted them from German banks to EU taxpayers. Hey, that's really productive and responsible. NOT.

Right. This is sad.

Greece lost all the cards as soon as Eurocrats realized that Greece is not prepared to Grexit. They could only negotiate from position of strength if they were prepared to Grexit. Not that the winners will be happy for long. It a Pyrrhic victory.

Europeans (Germans really) are shooting themselves into a head. #ThisIsACoup http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/13/thisisacoup-germany-faces-backlash-over-tough-greece-bailout-demands

Voted "For"

IMO, we should make Chinese invest in Greece and we'd solve two issues at once. Never mind if they don't get their money back.

Cause Tesco and Posco were such bad shorts... ;) Edit: OK, I'll throw in KO in 1998 just for fun. ;) OK, I'll give you that 3G was not involved. ;)

until tomorrow 2pm local time. Not planning to go to Paris, but could if someone's around to get together. 8)

I doubt that you will learn how to be a better investor from Buffett vs. Singleton comparison. First of all, both of them invested by buying whole businesses and running them. Are you going to do this? If so, then, yeah, probably your question is valid. But for most here, we won't buy whole businesses and run them, which kills half of Buffett's performance and almost all of Singleton's. Also IMHO, Singleton was more looking at how to run a great successful business, even if he also did great financial engineering, instead of looking to invest/compound at the best rate for longest. Second, like others have said, both Buffett and Singleton are genius' level. This is something that you can't achieve by just doing something. Sorry to say, you either are or are not. You can get OK/great returns even if you're not, but you can't do things that are "obvious" to them, while they are not to us. There are other things that are mostly connected to the first two points. Like someone said: float (connected to point 1). Some points that might be possible to learn/replicate: networking. Of the top of my head, I think Buffett is better in networking than Singleton was. And focus on investments/return rather than on business. Though that should not be misconstrued as short term thinking or return chasing. (In other words: does it make sense to ask how Buffett outperformed Gates (which he might not ;)) and what can we learn from it. I think that would also be a wrong question to ask 8) ) Take care

OK, SharperDingaan is El Erian. Now we know. 8)

I believe Singleton's Teledyne had very similar performance to BRK - BRK just did it for longer time. See http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.com/2013/10/is-next-teledyne-old-teledyne.html for possible numbers. Though it's possible to cherry pick early BRK years and then it outperforms TDY. Munger might have been implying the longevity. I think you are asking bad question though. If you manage to find next Teledyne and invest into it, you'll become very rich. There is no need to find the next BRK even if it would make you super rich. 8) Especially, since it's quite likely that there are Teledynes around, but quite possibly there won't be another BRK (as Munger has implied couple times). ;)

Which is definitely illegal for foreigners and possibly illegal even for natives (depending on the company I guess).

The last quote in TheAiGuy's post is misattributed to me. portfolio14 said this, not me. 8)

Is there something there in particular that you find funny/objectionable/etc.?

Thanks, Scott.

ValueAct? But even that is not completely "Buy Good Business". MOAT is probably closest, though it also has dogs like WTW ::) if I remember correctly. Edit: They don't have WTW anymore. Looking at the holdings, I am not sure I can classify them all as having "moat". But probably it's as good as it gets in non-active portfolio. http://www.vaneck.com/market-vectors/equity-etfs/moat/Holdings/

It should be a sticky business. Changing core infrastructure in a company can be done, but its a pain in the ass and won't be done lightly. Note, I'm assuming that computing is a core business function to basically everyone. Right, I was thinking about cloud providers that provide commodity computing substrate (similar to domain providers (LAMP+)) vs. ones that provide custom solutions, guarantees, etc. Also something like Azure might not be easily provided by anyone else apart from Microsoft.

This has been predicted: http://www.paintinghere.com/UploadPic/Salvador%20Dali/big/clock%20melting%20clocks.jpg

They look like airlines, but they hope to be more sticky. Some of them might be.

He will only break your legs if you try to sell the stock. So if your holding period is forever, this is a great deal. ;D Sorry. ;D

This is one of the big benefits of Buffett style. You can sit in Hawaii Omaha and sip mai tais Crappy Cola instead of spending days and nights researching yet another company. 8) I'm trying to get there too. I still have a portion of portfolio in theme cheapo stocks (oil and MU) and lottery tickets (Fannie+). I'll see if I will keep doing these or whether I'll get out of these totally at some point. Research: - CoBF - Silicon Investor - Barron's - Some blogs I think international screeners are worthwhile since markets internationally are less efficient than US (IMO). But even after screening international research takes a lot of time, so I never did thorough DD on international screens. My biggest question now is sizing of the long-term holds. As theoretical example, I don't want to sell some BRK to buy some FFH - if I do, that's no longer long-term holding. On the other hand, if I don't, I might have not very good ratio of the two... :/ Ideas how to deal with this?

Nah, I got that. Although it's not clear what the agreement with Walgreens is, so we don't know if Walgreens are paid per test or per hour or nothing or whatever. That impacts your marginal cost. Also test sorting in the lab is not free in marginal POV either. But this is not very important, so I think we are fine. :)

ARTH http://archtherapeutics.blogspot.com - This looks hyped, possibly pump and dump. I have no idea if the claims are true. Might be interesting for someone who knows this field in depth. Disclosure: no position, no plans for position. Posting just because I'd be interested to hear opinion of someone knowledgeable.

People should stop equating EU with just Euro. You should realize that EU is much more than Euro.