Jurgis

Vinod1, Glad to hear that you are using deliberate practice and you are getting good results with it. I see that you are handling some of the difficulties with deliberate practice application in investing: 1. The important part of deliberate practice is frequent factual feedback. Your approach gives you factual feedback even if it's not frequent. You got it on the spot by using business results for predictions instead of stock price. So you can avoid resulting. I am not sure if there is a way to get more frequent feedback in investing. It might be possible to do more analyses and then get more feedback coming in 2-3 years. But feedback after shorter timeframe is probably difficult to come by. Unless we invest in special situations like writser. 2. Ericsson places a large value on a teacher or coach. This is difficult to get in investing because of couple of reasons: (a) determining who are world class performers is difficult by itself - it only appears in long term and even that might be not very objective (b) even assuming we know great performers, most of them are self-taught © because of (a) and (b) it is near-impossible to find a teacher who has a history of teaching world-class performers. I see you are avoiding this area altogether which is probably a way to go. Some people might be able to apprentice to exceptional performers but that is likely an exception rather than possibility. Maybe another possibility is to learn from Damodaran, though I am not sure if we know whether what he teaches makes people great investors. I had one question to you. Ericsson also emphasizes the pain part of deliberate practice: "Deliberate practice takes place outside one’s comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities.". In other words, if one is not doing something outside their comfort zone, they are not getting better. Do you have any comments on this? Or do you feel that this does not apply to investing and it's enough to find your area/niche and just keep at it inside the niche? Or perhaps you have a different interpretation of constantly stepping outside comfort zone in the area of investing? Another more wide topic: perhaps "investing" per ce is too wide an area and the deliberate practice should concentrate on smaller area. In some sense you are doing that by saying "I'll practice business result prediction" and get feedback on that. This then excludes a lot of other parts of investing like position sizing, buy/sell decisions, etc. Would be interesting to hear what other smaller parts of investing might be amenable to deliberate practice. 8) For example, something like position sizing seems to be difficult to get factual feedback on. Similar issue with buy/sell decisions. Anyway, it was great to hear about your experience. 8)

I am reading through this and I think this is one of the best books about how to become world-class performer in (any) field. Having said that (to wet people's appetite :P ), there's a number of difficulties in applying deliberate practice to investing. Author acknowledges as much for investing and some other fields, though he still thinks it's possible to benefit by getting as close to deliberate practice as possible in given field. I'd be interested to talk to people who have applied deliberate practice to investing or other fields and have achieved positive results. Can do it on this thread or PM me directly. I'd be also interested to talk to people who have read the book and are looking to apply deliberate practice to investing or other fields. Same as above.

If anyone is considering D+, here's the presumed list of all movies: https://www.wildaboutmovies.com/features/disney-plus-complete-list-of-movies/ Not sure if it's 100% correct, but FYI. Edit: So far I saw about 5 titles that I'd wanna watch and haven't seen before. And this section: Disney Original Movies (Straight to TV or DVD) - I did not realize Disney made so much crap... ::)

So ~7M FCF x 4 / 606M Market cap ~= 4.6% FCF yield. Assuming I did not mix up US$ with CAD$ somewhere. ::)

Disney+ what? ... /yawn ???

The structure and format is worse than before. Loads slower and takes more time to navigate. But it is free through the library, so I'm gonna continue using it. And previously library version did not include analyst reports. Now it does - though they may change that again.

I took a two-minute look at BKNG and it seems to be trading a 16x FCF/EV. I'm sure I'm missing something. What are your EV and FCF numbers? I think you meant 16x EV/FCF, which corresponds to 6.25% FCF/EV. And I meant 5.x% FCF/EV. It's a bit lower than your 6.25% FCF/EV. Chalk that to my conservatism and spending two minutes on calculating FCF/EV.

Looks like nobody cares about EXPE - I did not find the thread. Anyway, EXPE is down 25%+ today on increased GOOGL competition and fewer free/organic search links to EXPE pages in Google search results. Trading at ~6.x% FCF/EV. BKNG down 7% reporting results soon. Trading at ~5.x% FCF/EV. TRIP is down 20%+. I own positions in BKNG and EXPE. I'll probably add to EXPE and wait for results from BKNG possibly expecting additional drop. If anyone wants to dump/hedge now, go ahead.

https://smile.amazon.com/Pixar-Beyond-Unlikely-Journey-Entertainment-ebook/dp/B01912OSA0/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1UYGFE37O0NZI&keywords=to+pixar+and+beyond&qid=1573141811&s=books&smid=A1KUURLZXZKET0&sprefix=to+pixar%2Cstripbooks%2C136&sr=1-1 To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History by Lawrence Levy On sale at Amazon today $2.99

This conclusion is not straightforward and depends (among other things) on your portfolio performance vs SP during the put position, cost, sizing, and scenarios considered. While cost, sizing, and scenarios is mostly math, I'd say the expectation that your portfolio will outperform SP during the put position is of (most) concern. Isn't that how Fairfax (among others) screwed up their returns? A lot of people don't outperform SP. Even more don't outperform SP during relatively short time periods that put holding would imply.

Was just curious what the return would've been if someone had bought when this first post was posted. About 1,615% in about 8 years, or 41.59% CAGR. Bought 10/11/2012, cost basis per share $9.44, +2,938.40% return. On a beer size position. :'(

stupid comment. if you have single class shares and pick the right guy, he stays and we all make money. if you have a single class shares and you pick the wrong guy, you can fire him and stop losing money. either way dual class shares is stupid for shareholders. I totally agree. Right guy or wrong, guy, the dual class shares make no sense. I disagree. You get a cyclical downturn or some external event, shares crash, activists raise ruckus, kick out your good guy, and screw up business. Or old huge co buys your growing co for cheap and your returns are gone.

The stock is more expensive than the book. :'(

I see the site switched to https. It seems like comment editing is broken though. I can post comment. But when I try to post edited comment, "Save" button throws up warning and pressing "Continue" does not post the edited changes.

She references Kahneman a little. It is absolutely approachable and there isn't much science to the text itself. It is not a "dense" read, so you can think about the concepts she introduces during the plethora of anecdotes subsequently put forth. One detracting item is that the book felt repetitive to me (but I am no expert in cognitive psychology and maybe I just missed the difference between some concepts). I read the book on a flight. It felt like a short book. I wonder if it would look short if I had a paper copy. I think e-book publishing encourages writing shortish lightweight books and charging full price for them. And even with that it felt repetitive. On the positive side, there are couple insights usable in life. If you want to use "thinking in bets" in investing, I think you are better off with Kelly's, since it's essentially the same thing and yet more quantitative. (If you don't quantify, then your "bet" is not really a bet 8) ). The other insights are not really her's, but I'm fine with her providing them even if they did not originate from her. Overall, the endnotes and bibliography is very extensive, which is a plus if you want to follow up on something she wrote. I'd say it's 6/10. Probably worth getting on a cheap and going through fast.

Just for fun - why? Right now there is only one company offering a product at grossly inflated (prepaid?) price. It's possible that there will be one (Blue Origin?) or two (Space X??? Any others?) more competitors sometime in next 5 years. Even that is not given. I don't think there's an easy way for competition in space tourism that is comparable to airlines. Of course, if you are talking 100 years, then sure. It's not a 100 year hold. But nothing is. 8) The biggest risk is a catastrophic failure in first flights. That would cool the space tourism for years if not decades. Second biggest risk is delays delays and more delays that have plagued everyone in this space ( ;) ). Disclosure: I sold IPOAU and bought tiny amount of warrants. The warrants are up 80%+. I can buy a beer with the profits. I am definitely not objective here. I have not looked at valuation. The thread should be renamed to SPCE.

I ordered a number of 6-bottle (glass bottle) juice packs from Amazon. Shipped by UPS. Four shipments broken-in-shipment-returned-to-sender-didn't-even-get-to-my-door. One shipment broken at my door. Two shipments delivered fine. I'm pretty sure UPS hates me by now. Some Amazon third party merchants probably hate me too (unless they get more for insurance from UPS than they have to reimburse me). I've got another shipment of tonic water in glass bottles coming next month. 8)

;D Keep those zingers coming.

If the price got low enough, they might try. Maybe buy some stock if the company isn't open to a sale of the whole thing. But the price would have to be right... Best chance is if it gets really distressed, scaring away most other bidders. But that's a long shot. If I had to guess, it's not very likely to get way more distressed unless the business becomes broken. Or Canadian market has a meltdown. It's not cheap enough for me maybe, but if you look at 6% FCF with stable revenues during a downcycle, there's likely enough investors to buy it and hold just for that plus eventual upcycle. But who knows, everything's possible. 8)

Spek - you should probably start NOW thread. What I don't like about NOW is 0% insider holdings. Which makes it difficult to decide if leadership is gonna be any good going forward - and possibly explains why CEO jumped the ship. With all the issues of insider control ( We know what We mean ), I'd still rather invest in a company with insider holdings or control. Also it's difficult to decide what high-growth, but no/low earnings companies to buy. NOW? WDAY? ZEN? HUBS? PCTY? CRM? VEEV? TEAM? (I have a smattering of tiny positions in some of these).

Would/could Constellation buy CMG? I relooked at this again, but my perception did not change from the May 2019 discussion on this thread. In short: might be a big winner if/when cycle turns, and it has OKish FCF in meantime, but who knows when/if cycle will turn. Might be a buy if you're fine with ~6% FCF while waiting...

Great analysis, pardner. I'll eat crow here. Total company gross margin increased in a big way Q/Q -- up something like 440 basis points Q/Q despite declining auto ASPs. Analyst consensus was something like 15.6% and it came in at 18.9%. Gross margin in the energy segment went from 11.6% to 21.9% Q/Q, an improvement so large that it's baffling. Energy segment revenue was UP by over 9% Q/Q, but cost of revenue was DOWN by 3.5%. I'm not the only one wondering how gross margins turned around so quickly. JP Morgan note says they would have asked for the impact of "non-recurring items" to be quantified if given the opportunity to ask a question. Bernstein's "guesstimate" is that "one-time items could've represented a 100+ bps sequential help from Q2 to Q3." No one seems to know with any degree of certainty. To be clear, I am not complaining about any in-depth analysis that may have predicted loss for Q3. I myself have expected lower shipments of Model 3 through this year, so I acknowledge that predicting is hard and predicting the future is even harder ;) . My reaction was purely to what seemed an irrational attempt to infer something from a tweet. Even if you had a legit model predicting Q3 loss, IMO it was a mistake to read Elon's tweet through the confirmation bias lens instead of taking it as a simple reply to the guy who asked for discounts/rebates. Perhaps I should have expressed my reservations less curtly. 8) Take care

Once someone reaches an emergency room, a formal triage process is performed (trial based on guidelines and historical performance). For reasons that remain unclear, a void remains to help people self-triage before making the decision to go to an emergency room or a medical clinic. It turns out (for various subjective reasons and info asymmetry) that people, in general, a very poor at deciding where and when to consult. A relatively rare occurrence is that some people don't consult when they should. More often, many people need simple reassurance or a simple way to deal with the issue. Well-built and often incredibly simple protocols and algorithms (which can take the form of telephone assistance and soon smartphone application with some kind of AI) can make a huge difference. When introducing such tools, three questions need to be asked: 1-Does it work?, 2-Is it safe? and 3-Is it an efficient way to allocate capital. There is a huge void to fill and it seems that Health Navigator is on the right track. Interestingly, there is another huge void to be filled from the supply chain point of view. Even once people enter the 'system', there is large variability in clinical pathways, with many pathways being idiosyncratic and deviating from established guidelines without rational justification. I like the idea that AMZN will try first with pilot projects before expanding into widening circles. Great observations. 8)

Great analysis, pardner.

https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1335201&_mc=RSS_EET_EDT&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=link&utm_medium=EETimesDaily-20191015 - Brain Implant Enables Thought Control, Mobilizes Tetraplegic My other body is an exoskeleton! 8)