Jurgis

Yes. Also IMO Buffett undercounts (knowingly or not) what is essential. He says "rationality" and "temperament" (or some synonym of that). But IMO you have to have great memory, attention to details, attention/memory for numbers, possibly also business sense in various aspects. Some of which is likely not captured by 120 IQ and "rationality"/"temperament".

We love them all dearly... 8) No sexism, biases or prejudices towards hot girls or value investors were intended in my posts. I am aware that this is thin ice to tread and bow out of further comments. 8) Peace and love and lollipops 8)

Nah, I think your post had good and valid observations. Carry on. 8)

You sound incredibly naive. Hot girls don't like value investors. Yeah. Value investors are cheap bastards who eat dollar menus at McDs. No self respecting hot girl would be caught in such a company. 8) Although you can always mention your ... net worth. ::)

Cigarbutt, you raise some reasonable questions. Some of them are due to extreme overloading of the terms "passive"/"active": they are just used too much and for different things. E.g. does a person means passive == "market cap based", passive == "no human active manager", passive == "buy and hold and not sell"? And so on... There are yet other questions similar to yours that I am aware of, but I won't mention since they would muddy the water further. 8) I just think that people should be careful with their definitions and the products they discuss when they talk about passive/indexing and price discovery/price influence. Otherwise we get quite a few misleading and unsubstantiated claims. 8) Peace.

Because the market cap based index matches the market and does not influence relative security prices when people buy/hold or sell it. That's the definition of it. And that's the reason it's truly passive. Everything non-market-cap based does influence relative security prices when people buy or sell it. And by that fact it's an active fund. Active means that you are trying to get a different result than the market - and you get that with non-market-cap based weights. It does not matter whether your weights are fundamental (P/E, P/B whatever), technical, arbitrary (Scrabble), based on some manager's picks or whatever. In all these cases, you are taking an active position that your weights are different from the market's. Edit: to rephrase the above: if you buy/hold/sell anything that is not market cap based index, you are engaging in price discovery. Even if it's a Scrabble index. If you buy/hold/sell market cap based index, you are not engaging in price discovery. That's IMO very significant difference. I'm kind of surprised that some people do not realize that there is this difference between market cap based fund vs anything non-market-cap-based. And conversely that there is pretty much no difference between mechanical weight determination based on some factors and what people call "real active" stock picking. This is rather basic definitions + math... ::)

I have listened to him talk live. It was pretty good talk though very reminiscent and perhaps overlapping with Hans Rosling's presentations. He pretty much showed the graphs of progress in all areas of life through last centuries.

Non-market-cap weighted indexes are active strategies by definition since they do not track the market. There is no point to include them into passive-index total or consider them as passive for any other discussions.

Excellent point here. How can Markel at 1.7 X BVPS be a better bet than BRK sub 1.4X, given that BRK has much, much more earning power and liquidity? BRK is much larger than MKL which comes with its own set of issues. And BRK has a huge key man problem that is getting worse with every year. I'm not saying I prefer MKL at current prices. But it's not as clear cut as you say. ;)

I voted against, but then I vote against most pay packages. OTOH, this is one of the situations where probably keeping Iger is worth a lot... maybe even 100M. Although I still would not vote "for". 8)

I got what you said. Perhaps I was not clear in my post. But overall the answer is that purely passive (market cap index) investing cannot cause prices to go from 50/50 to 75/25. They cannot cause relative market cap change. In market with active investors, the active investors cause the price changes. It depends on what you mean with "reinforce" and "stabilize momentum", but you may be right that indexing supports or enlarges the influence of active investors. In a sense that $1 actively invested in a company with $99 index investment could drive up the price disproportionately, because indexers are not selling at any price and if they sell, they sell proportionately all stocks in index. Edit: Also active investor selling active positions and buying index causes the index skew towards the stocks they did not own. But it's their selling that's causing the skew. If they sold and went to cash they would still cause the same skew.

vinod1 and chrispy are correct. 8) When incremental money comes in, it will buy the percentages based on weight. But who does the selling? racemize argues that it is easier to encourage small percentage (25%) stock sellers to sell without price going up while the big percentage (75%) stock sellers will be less willing to sell, so price for that stock would have to go up more compared to the small stock. Which would result to big stock becoming 76% and small one becoming 24%. But this means that sellers are active investors choosing what to sell. If the sellers are index investors, then this does not happen. And even if sellers are active investors, racemize's argument is not very grounded. Why would the active seller choose to sell smaller company rather than bigger? Yeah, you can think of some anecdote like racemize did (smaller company had worse results...), but I can think of anecdote in the opposite direction (smaller company is cheaper based on some metric). 8)

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/chuck-feeney-the-billionaire-who-gave-it-all-away-1.3413084 New article, but not much new in it.

Bitcoin is better than sex: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/business/economy/bitcoin-electricity-productivity.html 8)

I would not invest in Uber/Lyft even though I posited that they might have some kind of moatiness. There's definitely a number of outcomes some of which are pretty disastrous for Uber/Lyft.

Autonomous cars will kill Uber/Lyft. Why wouldn't I take out a loan, have the car drive itself for the 22 hrs/day when I don't use it myself, and capture that $ myself? A company that owns a fleet and optimizes routing/scheduling will kill your one car operation. Although you could try to limit your car to profitable airport routes... but then everyone else will try this too. And if company optimizes to predict good locations for its cars, your car will always lose the pickups. Also, people will order through some portal, so you'll have to pay for your car to be included in one. So perhaps portal with no car fleet will win. Who knows.

But what is Uber’s edge running a large fleet of cars exactly? I would guess scheduling and routing algorithms are not trivial. Is that enough of a moat, I don't really know. 8)

Yeah, talk about a memorable flight! I'd imagine it would go down as something like this- Hey, I think I sat next to that guy on a flight once. But then all these old white guys look alike... 8)

Thanks for shout out. Bought it. 8)

Read history, philosophy, and theology. OK, since people are giving honest answers in this thread, I mostly watch porn too. Overwatch porn. 8) Beat that.

Browder saga is a great link to give to people who plan to invest in Russia. Though nowadays I usually don't bother. 8) Been there... no actually been there.

Not Europe or US, but we had the "spray tourist with ketchup and then rob them blind while pretending to clean your clothes" attempt in Buenos Aires. I knew about it, so I got away from the "good cleaning samaritan" asap. I've recently heard a colleague lost his backpack with laptop, documents, etc. like this. Italy is nice. Have fun. 8)

These kind of transactions are tough to pull off without leaving some kind of crappy taste afterwards. Is it really fair for both sides? How can you determine? OTOH, maybe its less fair for the LP investors and maybe BOMN shareholders can just be happy about it. 8)

People doing expensive remodeling are driving the economy. ;D So thank your wife for doing it for all of us. 8)

I guess I have to search on both even though they are owned by the same company. Which is a bit weird, though I understand some of the reasons. 8) (Actually, I just search on Orbitz and Priceline out of habit, but maybe I'll try Booking too if I don't forget next time...)