Jurgis

USA! USA! USA! Make Covid Great Again!

Let's all go to Vegas:

A poll on Covid behaviors. May repeat it later to compare.

If person X is on your side of the book, they are genius. If person Y is on the other side of your book, they are sh*t actor.

I somewhat agree with TwoCitiesCapital thoughts. There is also the following: FANMG (A is Amazon, not Apple) are doing good to great and they dominate the indexes. So they keep rising at least somewhat. Covid-affected companies are not doing great, but they also fell much more than FANMG in March. So arguably they were cheap and may still be somewhat cheap (assuming V recovery). So it might be somewhat rational that both parts of the market (FANMG + any Covid-positively-affected companies and cheap(er) Covid-negatively-affected companies) are going up and carrying indexes to ATH. Plus low rates, plus easy money (refi, loans), plus stealth tax cuts (yeah that part where companies get back taxes), plus unemployment stimulus, plus free money ($1200 checks). What's not to like? Counterpoint is that valuations for a lot of companies are (very) high. But valuations by themselves may not be enough to precipitate drop/crash/etc. We'll see.

Well, at least Buffett sold at bottom too. Disclosure: Total holdings close to ATH. 25%+ in cash and bonds.

You don't understand. The fact that revenues are down 20% means that the stock should be flat or up. Since the revenue growth will be 25%+ just to get back to the old revenues! Market is forward looking, duh! Not happy to admit it, but I very clearly do not understand! It was a joke, just in case you took it seriously. Good luck.

Market cannot drop! Everybody buy, buy, BUY! Maybe I misread but did he actually say the market couldn't drop or he doesn't see it dropping 30%? I think there's a bit of a distinction there. Thanks for correction. For a moment there I thought that I could buy everything in sight. Now you destroyed my enthusiasm and I am lost again. Gonna go to RobinHood message boards to recover.

You don't understand. The fact that revenues are down 20% means that the stock should be flat or up. Since the revenue growth will be 25%+ just to get back to the old revenues! Market is forward looking, duh!

So I just had this crazy thought in the shower after reading this: What if the real reason stocks were going up despite all the seemingly bad news is that they all improve the chances of Trump being replaced by someone better suited for the job? That is a bull case I can actually buy. Throughout 2019 and beginning of 2020 majority of money managers polled by Barron's expected Trump to win and considered his expected win to be bullish. I doubt (m)any of them changed their minds on Trump.

Market cannot drop! Everybody buy, buy, BUY!

Who cares about the protests, the real action is in Las Vegas casinos: https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2020/06/04/las-vegas-reopening-casinos-downtown-open-coronavirus-measures/3133863001/ If you gamble with your life, gamble for money homies!

BRANDING! BOOTY! SPREADSHEETS! AAARGHH! The pirate's life for me!

Ohhh, I think you're very smart. These babies hold tons of fuel. So really you're positioning yourself to buy that negative-cost WTI and have it stored on the yacht. How are you gonna get the yacht to Cushing is the only question... 8)

That's targeted specifically at you. :P When are we doing that Ferrari race? 8)

Well, it's a great business to issue shares at 1.5-2xbook and then buy back these shares at 1xbook. Ten roundtrips or so and you're talking real money. Where can I sign up for this?

They should have robots building submarines, aircraft carriers and fighter jets with automatic weapon systems. What could go wrong.

Becoming an expert in a field X to overcome incentives of the salesperson in field X is a possible solution, but it's also a costly solution. To take the OP example, you'll never be a real dentist (unless you go to dentist school ;)). You might be able to bullshit a level-1 dental procedure salesperson, but you won't be able to bullshit level-2 one. Also there is a risk: what if they agree with you that procedure is unnecessary (because they are level-1 in sales or because they don't want to argue), but then you discover in couple months that instead of a cheaper filling you now have to do a root canal or crown? Are you gonna seek second opinion? Are you gonna read dental x-rays yourself? Ultimately, this is IMO not an easily resolvable problem apart from simple or (obviously) scammy situations. It is tough to know if: 1. The salesperson is just pushing unneeded product/service because of incentives. 2. They really think you need this product/service 3. They are misinformed and think that you need this product/service and on your side 4. You really don't need this product/service 5. You are misinformed and need this product/service ------------------------------------- Another subtopic is self-incentives or pros/cons for decisions (this goes a bit above just incentives). There's a popular advice to write pros/cons for some decision (financial or not) to ease making the decision. The issue there is that sometimes the pros/cons are difficult to measure, evaluate, and compare. To take LC's example, moving to Denver from NYC would probably fill pages of pros and cons on a paper. How would one evaluate and weigh each of these? Even in a simpler case, how much one would value extra half hour commute vs. $XX cheaper or YY-sqft bigger house? People make these decisions, but I'd say they are mostly hand-waved even if they try to make a rational weighted decision. And BTW hand-waved or emotional decisions might be better than 10-spreadsheet ones... ::)

Incentives are incredibly complex topic (as LC has observed) and probably deserve a thread for themselves. Overall, I think that a thread per bias would work better than single thread for multiple biases.

Works just fine. Not sure why you are so negative about other people. I haven't seen this happen through X number of distributed teams. None of this is an issue. Yeah, sure people send emails and messages at weird times. And other people answer them when they can. It's not an issue unless you make it one. In good distributed team nobody makes it into an issue. Not an issue. Actually possibly positive since hiring then is done on merits and not based on (unconscious) biases.

This thread and people in it are just rehashing the same arguments again and again that were already rehashed in other threads. Not to (particularly) pick on you: I know two people in tech company who did the fastest career advances while working completely remotely. Closest office within maybe 100 miles or so. And yeah they learn, mentor, lead, etc. And they went up the career ladder way faster than people in the office who can schmooze, etc. So perhaps you should be more open minded. Although I mostly agree that offices will survive.

If Nasdaq 100 actual return is 12.5%, then BRK did not outperform. Assuming 22.5K share price in 1/1/1995 and 340K share price in 12/31/2019, BRK return is ~11.9%.

They never learn, do they. ::)

(and the first comment: "But he's a cunning old sod, and he sends a project manager down... and it all turns to shit and the engineer begs for release .") All the project managers were down there already, so really none of the improvements happened, engineer immediately sent SOS to God, got uplifted, and lived happily every after.

Look who wrote this: Any true red blooded Americans in this list? Clearly fake news from illegal immigrant liberals.