Jurgis

Kids, don't do this at home. 8) ;D

This is really funny. It appears I should have posted http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/books/red-notice-bill-browder/ here instead of in http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/investment-ideas/sbrcy-sberbank/10/ thread... 8)

Are you in Europe? It's common to talk to pharmacists (and use that word) in Europe. I don't think it's common in US. I maybe wrong but AFAIK they can't give you medical opinion in US or suggest alternatives etc. Although there's the minute clinics in CVS. Never used one. Maybe someone else can comment.

That's fair if you buy for reversion to higher mean and sell then. I personally want to buy and hold for long time. So the reversion is good, but if the company is going to struggle going 5 years forward, then the reversion won't cover it. I don't want to end up in business where the management team is good, but the underlying pulls the carpet from their feet. 8) But as I said it's fair enough. 8) And you are right that I will likely miss some opportunities this way... although I try to buy some and adjust based on confidence/outlook/whatever. 8) Best

To incense anti-AMZN crowd, I should bring up the AMZN specter: they are trying to build out both long-haul and last mile delivery. How much this can hit FDX? 8)

Of course! And if AMZN starts building cars, every car company on the world will be toast, too! And if they start industrial distribution every industrial distributor is toast! And if they start food delivery WMT and TGT are toast! ..... And don`t forget about all these retail locations that are toast! I am actually looking for pushback on what I wrote. But your pushback IMO is not useful or productive. Amazon is working on delivering drugs to their customers. A hyperbole about cars is just that: a hyperbole that is not useful. You may have points about distributors and food delivery, but IMO drug delivery is way closer to what Amazon does well already. It would be much more interesting if you provided reasons why a customer will go to physical pharmacies even when good easy-to-use internet pharmacies with fast delivery exist. (I know some reasons, but I'll let others push back ;) )

Reading http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/books/bad-blood-(theranos-story)-john-carreyrou/10/ - how much do we discount WBA for their involvement with Theranos? Or is it enough to write it off as CVS-competition-FOMO folly?

I agree with this comment. We don't buy prescription meds pretty much and so we haven't been to Walgreens/CVS in ages. There's no point going there unless you need drugs. Well, sometimes they have a bigger selection of non-prescription meds ( anti-fever/anti-histamine ) than grocery supermarket. But that's pretty much it. There are probably people who go to Walgreens/CVS for non-pharma, but I don't know if front store is gonna continue to be a margin-positive business.

Dissolving the Fermi Paradox: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 An interesting stats based paper on why there is no Fermi paradox and why we may the only civilization in our galaxy or even observable universe. Actually authors' conclusions are pretty much based on broadness of uncertainty in one of the parameters in Drake equation. But I won't spoil it fully... you have to read the paper. 8) Conclusions are a bit depressing. Especially if we manage to blow ourselves up. ::) It's a bit surprising that no one until now approached this question in the way authors did. Maybe it shows how tough it is to think differently. Should we evaluate our investments the way the authors evaluated Drake equation? I think this is somewhat related to what racemize tried to do in one of his articles and to what Damodaran does. 8)

OK, I'm gonna be idiosyncratic again, but I never stayed at AirBnB and likely won't unless there's no other choice. I use Uber and Lyft all the time, but staying night at someone's house for me is really way more awkward than staying at a hotel. I've done BnBs in Scotland some time ago just because there were no hotels. It was OK, but I'd still choose hotel anytime. And I'd never never send AirBnB my passport/IDs/etc as they require right now. This is totally screwed up. No hotels require it, but somehow AirBnB gets away with it. Good luck/have fun when all this gets hacked from their servers. I guess maybe I'm not the target market for AirBnB. 8) It's one of those things that you have to get over once and then it doesn't matter any more but options are typically decently cheaper than comperable or even less ocmperable hotels. Thanks but no thanks. 8) Edit: although honestly the requirement to send passport/ID is the real deal breaker for me. If not for it, I might be willing to try - though unlikely to actually do it.

Does anyone know how GDPR affects EU startups? Are there any exceptions for very small cos? Extended implementation deadline? Anybody's knowledgeable on this on the board? I guess similar question can be asked about US startups, since you mostly can't block EU users. But I guess the risk of adverse enforcement might be lower. Edit: from short Bing/Google-fu, there are no exceptions and there is no extended timeline. If this was enforced on everything, it would be death to startups. Of course, it's likely not going to be enforced on tiny cos though it might depend on the aggressiveness of the member-country enforcement organizations. Let me know if you know this in more depth and disagree or have further thoughts. 8)

I sold this for a wash, but unlike multibaggers that I sold on valuation I don't regret the sale. IMO it was far from clear that there was no fraud going on. And longs are celebrating post factum where the story could have easily gone the other way.

Yeah, I thought I remembered pension liability being an issue to me and saw lowish number and was like "do I remember this wrong". I should take more notes. 8) Edit2: pension liability cleanup is a positive in my view. So I guess the consensus is that reinvesting into business is justified although I'm not sure it's showing up in revenues numbers. Anyone wants to give opinion FDX or UHAL? 8) (Maybe apples to oranges, but 8))

OK, I'm gonna be idiosyncratic again, but I never stayed at AirBnB and likely won't unless there's no other choice. I use Uber and Lyft all the time, but staying night at someone's house for me is really way more awkward than staying at a hotel. I've done BnBs in Scotland some time ago just because there were no hotels. It was OK, but I'd still choose hotel anytime. And I'd never never send AirBnB my passport/IDs/etc as they require right now. This is totally screwed up. No hotels require it, but somehow AirBnB gets away with it. Good luck/have fun when all this gets hacked from their servers. I guess maybe I'm not the target market for AirBnB. 8)

Maybe that's another reason I never bought MAR - I really don't see a big attraction/brand/moat for myself. (Note: my tastes are very idiosyncratic, so it's completely anecdotal--; also I sometimes invest against my tastes since I know that they are idiosyncratic 8)). I don't remember if I stayed at Marriott anytime recently, but we have one (couple?) nearby and it's pretty shabby. Though I am sure if you look at prized locations they are good. But nothing different from any other hotel. I don't travel much, so I don't get back much or at all from hotel loyalty programs. I'd rather book a cheap or nice hotel (or cheap and nice if possible ;)) rather than go with brand. Or if I go to conferences I book conference hotel, since I hate walking 5-10 minutes from my room to the conference talks/etc - I'd rather be onsite. And yeah, I hate how "upper" end hotels don't give free breakfast and overcharge for any breakfast that you can buy. It's like "you paid through the nose for the hotel, pay more for breakfast sucker". There are (mostly Scandinavian) hotels for which I gladly pay the price they charge. Marriott has not made impression on me really so far. Edit: possibly less anecdotal, from what I read there was/is shortage of hotel rooms with the rising economy and increased travel in US (and across the world?). Presumably there is a hotel buildout happening. This may lead to deeper cyclical downturn if the travel crashes on recession/whatever. I don't have numbers on this though and perhaps Marriott is somewhat insulated like Scott said.

Sorry, Viking, but I'm gonna bump the old Fedex thread. Probably Sanjeev should just merge the two threads. I've looked at FDX on and off. It's been almost perpetual member of Barron's "World's Best CEOs" list. It is interesting and attractive somewhat, but I'm not comfortable with the debt and lack of FCF. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1048911/000156459018006410/fdx-10q_20180228.htm Maybe it's similar to my reservations about UHAL: I'm not sure if the cash is spent wisely.

Dang, Scott. MAR was one company that I was thinking of looking at more and maybe buying from 2018 Barron's "World's Best CEOs" list. I just feel that I'm too late to the party. Expensive and cyclical. But then that's true with most good/moaty businesses in 2018.

http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/books/red-notice-bill-browder/ But then what's the point... ::)

This tool is very commonly used in dictatorships. Just read Orwell. Those who grew up behind the Iron curtain know this very well. Happens in investment discussions too... Not always consciously ...

You could try a reinforcement learning approach rather than just a supervised learning approach. The upside here is the algorithm could learn to deal with risks and optimize a portfolio. The methods discussed in the openai post TRPO and PPO are very powerful both theoretically and practically and PPO is really easy to implement. I don't know reinforcement learning in depth. I wonder if there's enough data to run RL on stock prices. Unless you do it on intraday pricing, which I don't really want to do. I think it's the same issue as with supervised learning: 10 years of daily data is only 3500 data points or so. With only 2-3 crashes in data set. But I'd have to read up on RL to see if there's a way to apply it. If/when I have time. Thanks for bringing it up. 8) The best returns come from intraday data algorithms. Not the fundemental type analysis we are all used to. The reason is these algorithms may be able to average like 10 basis points after costs (just an example your algos probably arent that good). But if your holding periods are a couple of hours or even minutes, you can make 100%+ in a year which is just not attainable with any longer horizon algorithm. Thanks for comments. You are likely right, but I have very little interest in intraday-based algos for variety of reasons. 8)

Even if the last post was in 2013, I'd rather you continued old thread than started a new one.

Echo chamber thread for 7 years and 1000 pages. Or at least since merkhet left.

You could try a reinforcement learning approach rather than just a supervised learning approach. The upside here is the algorithm could learn to deal with risks and optimize a portfolio. The methods discussed in the openai post TRPO and PPO are very powerful both theoretically and practically and PPO is really easy to implement. I don't know reinforcement learning in depth. I wonder if there's enough data to run RL on stock prices. Unless you do it on intraday pricing, which I don't really want to do. I think it's the same issue as with supervised learning: 10 years of daily data is only 3500 data points or so. With only 2-3 crashes in data set. But I'd have to read up on RL to see if there's a way to apply it. If/when I have time. Thanks for bringing it up. 8)

+1

Just cross validation during bull market years? I've played around with it a bit but never been comfortable enough with the algo [even worst with NNs]. I'm very scared of blowing up with these over-fitted models that have only seen rising markets... I think the main criticism against these "paper" strategies is you have 1000s of academics looking for signals and the winners publish a paper. The signals they find basically are the result of survivor bias. Do you guys have slack? Maybe its time we start a CoBF slack group So I spent a bunch of time reimplementing what these guys presumably implemented. I do not get their results. My results are pretty much at level of random guessing. It's quite possible I am not doing something the same way they did. As I said before, I'll link to their paper once it's publicly available and someone else might be able to replicate their results ... or not. I may also post or send my implementation to anyone interested after the paper is publicly available so people can shoot holes in what I did... Although I don't promise to clean up the code hugely... Right now it's a prototype-level mess. 8) The dirty secret in AI research is everyone is secretly overfitting their ANNs by by fiddling with the archtecture of the model and peaking at test set results. Only the papers with actual impressive results get published so you have a publication bias. Doesn't mean a lot of techniques don't work but they likely don't work as well as the paper would lead you to believe. This was brought up upthread. In general it is true. I don't think this is what's happening in this case though, but I'd rather not get into abstract discussions of why I don't think that's the case. OTOH, I can't really explain their results either, so who knows. Let's push out this discussion until you guys have the paper. ;)