Jurgis

I think risk adjusted return is much more important for comparison than absolute return over one year. I could have levered up and gone 120% long SPY and sold puts on the SPY and generated "alpha" but I took on considerable risk. Maybe somebody generated 20% but had 30% in cash or hedged. You are right on the general level. But IMO apart from very clear situations of straight levering or holding cash it's pretty impossible to say how much risk someone is taking and how to adjust the return for that risk. Edit: Actually, I'd say that even in clear situation of holding cash, "risk adjusted return" is somewhat misleading. Ultimately, investor cannot eat "risk adjusted return". Whatever return they lost due to holding cash is lost. Yeah, they might have reasons to hold cash to improve future returns or to sleep well at night, but I think they have to careful not to think that high "risk adjusted return" is somehow real return.

For anyone with multiple accounts and a lot of adding/subtracting you pretty much have to use Quicken. But that's heavyweight and not worth it unless you use it to track all your finances. On the positive side though, you can have results for 10+ years and then do a lot of analyses (per account, per securities, etc.). I have ~25 years of financial info in Quicken. For people who don't do much adding/subtracting, you can do it by hand in Excel or Google Sheets or whatever spreadsheet you use. You can also do stuff in various programming languages/packages for programming inclined who might be slurping data in from some source.

I haven't read the article, but based on that quote, the premise seems to be false. This seems to equate engineering and innovation with big step changes. These are rare, and most of innovation and engineering has always been more iterative and incremental. Some look down on that, but that's where a lot of progress comes from, and the problems can be just as hard as anything out there even if the results aren't always as flashy. People overrated novelty, and underrate making stuff just better and cheaper and more efficient and scale... I think the point of the quote is that as management / ownership views engineering as more of a cost center and less of a source of revenue growth, they begin to minimize the importance and capital allocated to engineering, focusing instead on minimizing costs throughout the value chain to improve profitability. This. If that's what it is, then it's obviously a problem. But that's not quite what I got from the quote. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I think it's both this and what you got. ;) Depends on a company and management. I think in the case of Boeing it is a lot of this, but of course it's likely not 100%. Clearly Boeing has done some of what you talk about too. ;)

Who the heck discards a book worth >$1K? (I know it's not discarding, it's exchange, but still... ??? )

I wonder if this is going to close down without delivering much (or anything).

With Buffett's and Munger's views on healthcare in US, I would be surprised if they would buy anything healthcare related.

I think BRK should buy Canada. 8) There's definitely a match in terms of culture. ;)

Hilti used to be a public company and traded on the Swiss exchange. Trumpf is a Family owned business with a very long term focus. They developed their own photonics Technology for their lasers (the modules are build in NJ/US) in order to control the whole value chain. I don’t think they are likely to sell out. Well, BRK could buy IPGP. ;) Yes, that would be a great company for Buffet to look at. I am guessing there are folks within Berkshire’s operations that understand IPGP’s market position and moat. I have no idea if IPGP’s board would entertain a sale - the company is still founder driven to some extent. They won't sell at current valuation I'd think, while Buffett won't pay a large premium. And maybe the company is a bit too tech for Buffett.

I like his approach. I looked at his fund's portfolio after his talk at Fairfax event. And AMT looked expensive. And now it looks very expensive too. So I look at this and I think, would I really want 11+% of my portfolio be in AMT? Not really. (Although similar argument could have been made couple years ago and here we are with AMT and Akre performing well.) I guess that's the issue of buying even well performing funds.

I'd bet they gonna be acquired. But quite possibly way below current price. And possibly out of BK. So no investment angle.

Hilti used to be a public company and traded on the Swiss exchange. Trumpf is a Family owned business with a very long term focus. They developed their own photonics Technology for their lasers (the modules are build in NJ/US) in order to control the whole value chain. I don’t think they are likely to sell out. Well, BRK could buy IPGP. ;)

It looks like Akre did a clean transition from FBR to Akre: He left FBR fund in September 2009 ( https://www.marketwatch.com/story/top-manager-quits-mutual-fund-2009-08-05 ) and Akre fund was started in August 2009, so you can't blame him of hiding out without fund during crisis. FBR 2008 results are bad, but not horrible: https://archive.fortune.com/2009/05/13/pf/funds/fbr_focus_fund_akre.fortune/index.htm Interestingly, he owned AMT and ORLY for years before Akre Fund. So he has held AMT for ~17 years and ORLY for ~12 years now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_T._Akre answers some questions about pre-2009 history and performance. Not all questions though.

Akre Focus Fund ( https://www.akrefund.com/ ) has good returns. They also have good business selection and holding criteria. However, their inception date is 8/31/2009, so there is a question how they will perform through next serious crash/downturn. They answer this in the article 8) : Not that these criteria are easy to handle properly, as the discussion above regarding DIS shows. You could also put on an objective-backward-looking hat and wonder how this philosophy would have handled Microsoft (would Ballmer time be "adverse change in management"? would losing mobile phone market be "competitive advantage impaired"? was "Peak PC" indication of "no longer growing at an above-average rate"? Selling at the time when Microsoft was losing mobile, at Peak PC, before Ballmer left was the worst time to sell... Akre apparently managed to side-step Valeant disaster that killed Sequoia performance. They are quite concentrated in cell tower stocks. I wonder if that area could have some event that kills stocks across the bow before Akre gets out. Overall though, they have performed better than a lot of known investors. One could have done well buying the fund after Chuck's talk at Fairfax Lollapalooza couple years ago.

Was speaking to an executive at a major airline. He's convinced that the hold up is purely regulatory cover-your-a.. politics. The issue was fixed almost immediately, but nobody wants to sign-off. Boeing is a huge employer, politics will eventually shift. I love how human lives are treated as regulatory cover-your-a.. politics. Yeah, let's fly and kill some more people cause executives are missing their bonuses and investors are missing their stock pop. Cause clearly Boeing can do no wrong. Maybe that executive can sign a pledge to fly only 737 Max for all their trips for a year. 8)

You can start a 3/5/10 year return poll. ;) My previous simplified polls: https://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/performance-vs-index-5-years/msg260236/#msg260236 https://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/performance-vs-index/

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies Kindle Edition by Reid Hoffman (Author), Chris Yeh (Author), I haven't read the full book yet, though I bought it. The excerpt I read talks about some of the usual suspects: AirBnB, Rocket Internet, Kinnevik, etc., so the whole thing might be worth reading. On sale on Amazon for $2.99 today: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0791239V7/?coliid=I1T9ZLPJBAPAO5&colid=22BZEZ4H8JQEA&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

A friend recommended "Ultralearning" as having some practical ideas supplementing "Peak" "Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career" by Scott Young " is on sale for $2.99 at Amazon today: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07K6MF8MD/?coliid=I36OAZYU0ZXCRK&colid=22BZEZ4H8JQEA&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

Thanks! Bought it. Nice patience, just like a good value investor waiting for your price! I bought it two days ago :( LOL, thanks. I buy some books at full price too... ??? Got $5 for ebooks if you spend $20 on ebooks deal expiring tomorrow. Not sure if I'm gonna figure out another $15.01 to spend on something. ::)

Thanks! Bought it.

I actually tried searching before I created this post. Thanks! I wonder what went wrong. I just went to General Discussion page and searched for "10 year financials"... ::)

There's a search box at the top of the page accessible to everyone. https://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/10-year-financials/msg334575/#msg334575

I believe we are talking about different things. You are talking stat curve fitting. I am talking DNNs that can model and generalize real world info and deal with high number of factors influencing the corporate results going forward. Curve fitting is the reason why Wall Street analyst predictions are subpar and also why most investors underperform. Most of these expect the future to look like the past - which is what curve fitting is. People who outperform are: 1. People who have higher accuracy model (whether hand built or ML/automatic). 2. People who have longer term predictions than others If the future looks like the past, nobody can outperform simple curve fitting for 1. or 2. So people can outperform only if curve fitting is wrong. Determining that it is wrong can be based on real world knowledge, second order thinking, intuition, whatever. And these can be ML/DNNed if sufficient data were available. And sufficient data here is way larger than what's needed for curve fitting. I am not sure what you are talking about when you say "you can build a model with 500,000,000 datapoints" - no you cannot. There are not enough companies on Earth to have that many datapoints. You can do that for price data, but not for fundamental data like yearly sales/profits/etc. There's a reason people build DNNs based on data that's available daily or even better every (nano/micro/milli)second. But that excludes most fundamental data. * People can also outperform by choosing an area where competition is low and their models don't have to compete with competent curve fitters. ** People and algos can also outperform by exploiting (psychological/emotional/technical/etc.) drawbacks of other actors. I'm not talking about this now though, even though it's a fascinating area on its own. Edit: For fun and clarity, I'll classify how I see some investors: - Graham cigar butt investing: Mostly expecting future to differ from the past. - Growth investing: Mostly expecting company to grow longer than others. - Buffett: higher accuracy model and longer prediction than others. - Writser ;) : choose area where competition is low and you don't have to compete with ... All of the above (may) exploit the drawbacks of other actors: - Graham cigar butt investing: exploit others giving up on underperforming company. - Growth investing: exploit others undervaluing the growth company even when growth is known. - Buffett: exploits the heck of irrationality of other actors. - Writser ;) : exploits the behavior of limited set of actors in special situations.

LOL. I realized the same thing this guy did: that a lot of places use bad incorrectly simplified formula. There are some places that have correct one that I also used. I think I wrote about it on CoBF at some point. But not as nice an article as CFA institute did. At least I feel smart and corroborated. 8) And I now have a link to give anyone who uses wrong formula without writing an article myself. 8)

Would you mind sharing the idea? I am pretty sure he means the longest thread on CoBF: https://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/fnma-and-fmcc-preferreds-in-search-of-the-elusive-10-bagger/14520/ I've done Kelly on this couple years ago. The key part here is couple years ago. As you've observed: