Jurgis

I've only bought used in the past (not as good as some pros on this board), but with the great new safety, automatic/self driving features coming up, the target now is to wait as long as possible and to buy as new as possible. The features are just exploding.

~20% drop today on results https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=1526520&accession_number=0001564590-17-021789&xbrl_type=v# All the hedge funds that promoted this as great position bailing out?

http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/current-economy/80/

This is funny. Zero posts on INTC since 2013... OK, so this is companion post to AMD: INTC: Positives: - CPU sales in PC/servers doing well. Still market leader (but not in mobile). - Mobileye may finally provide a business outside PC/server CPUs where Intel is a leader. If integrated well. - Altera for custom chips for Bitcoin mining/AI - a stretch likely. - At forefront with fabs and feature sizes. - Still pretty cheap. Negatives: - PC slowdown/downturn may reappear sometime soon again. Remember when INTC/MSFT were "sell at any price, PCs are dead"? - Intel lost most of mobile area in the past, it's not clear they gonna do better now. - Bullet above applied to Mobileye. - No GPU solution for AI/etc. - Large rather bureaucratic organization. Not clear if leadership is good/great. I looked at INTC from the NVDA (I have some, sold some, very expensive) -> AMD -> INTC chain. INTC is more attractive than AMD from profitability standpoint and leadership in CPUs, but less attractive from size/past-crappy-performance-in-mobile/no-GPUs. Probably also skip... Thoughts?

I've been looking at this and INTC recently trying to figure out if it would be worthwhile to invest. I might post some thoughts on INTC board too. AMD: Positives: - Sales growth, marginally profitable quarter - Lots of sales into the bitcoin mania mining. - Consolidation ongoing: this could be nice snack for someone to acquire. - New competitive (?) CPUs. Negatives: - Even with increased sales, the profit is minimal, FCF is minimal. - They got rid of fabs. As fabless they should have huge margins. They don't. - CPU fight is still very tough. Intel can just bury them with price war. - GPU fight is still very tough. Nvidia can just bury them with price war. - AI/GPU is Nvidia's domain so far. I don't see AMD making big inroads. - Bitcoin mining sales can dive if mining dives or goes spec-chips (I thought it already went spec in the past, maybe it's just new maniars who use AMD GPUs...) - If there's PC/server downturn, AMD will lose CPU sales and go to losses again. In general, I still think negatives outweigh the positives. OTOH, it's still quite cheap on P/S basis vs INTC and especially NVDA. Theoretically, if someone could drive AMD to take a chunk of AI/GPU space, they could explode up. That's before or after being acquired... Thoughts?

A friend of mine works at Google and he only charges during the day, since they get free charging in Google parking lots. They have to fight for charger spaces though... 8)

Thank you, rukawa.

Not much of hurricane season left: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Atlantic_hurricane_season But who knows... 8)

FB ads from today's browsing (on PC): Netflix PetMD Fios Xbox X Lovepop Cards ??? Cat Lovers MIT Sloan Executive Education Shopiflyzon ??? I wasn't interested in any of these, though potentially I could be. So not very bad targeting. This https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/?entry_product=ad_settings_screen allows you to see and edit your FB ad categories/etc. Found some real fun there for myself. Including a category that Russians definitely target. 8) I'm sure Russians bought the Cat Lovers ad. ;D

Have you guys tried/used SMF addin? http://ogres-crypt.com/SMF/Install-the-addin.html Yeah, bunch of services are killing their APIs lately (Microsoft, Yahoo), but I believe this still has a ton of functioning sources. Especially for something as trivial as last price. I need a market cap and that's getting tough. There was time where there was no market cap data anymore through SMF. There's one functioning now, but not sure for how long.

Not necessarily. I am pretty sure I buy some products from flippers on Amazon. Sometimes you can feel that as a customer.

Interesting. I've done all of this in online games for virtual currencies. Same flipping principles and opportunities. Have not done it IRL though. I can see how it works on Amazon where some products that are not available through Amazon directly sell by third party merchants for 2x-3x the prices on Walmart.com or local store. If I had time, I'd probably try it. ;) Good luck 8)

I don't use FB often. Can't remember recent ads much, but will post when I go on FB next time (sometime in next couple weeks 8) ). At the beginning of the year, they had NYT and WP sales ads and I subscribed to one of them through FB sale/ad. From what I remember it was a better deal than what the newspaper had on their site (which was also a "sale" price). I'm sure the ad was paid by Russians. ;D

HJ, yeah, I think that's the ticket

Belongs to a separate thread. Please start one. 8)

HJ, with Alibaba aren't you afraid that they might do something similar to Alipay transfer that screwed shareholders out of its ownership? Regarding Tencent, I've invested into it around 2007 or so. If only I had bought more and held... Sold for a double maybe... :'( I have some NPSNY now.

Maybe it's bull market, but Schwab711 had a good call on EA so far. I still think the following: But OMG it's hard to stick to this when stocks of my examples - and not only of my examples - have moved another 50-100% up. :-\

Some reasons why we don't do grocery delivery to home yet: - Novelty factor. I.e. we don't know how good/bad experience is and some of the issues below; also this means take some issues below with caveat that we have not tried it, so perhaps the issue does not exist/is not bad. But see below my attempts to look at Peapod. - Discounts: does the store apply discounts/coupons to online orders. Peapod says yes, but not clear how it works in practice. - Vegetables/fruits ripeness. We buy a lot of fruits/vegetables. Not sure how good the ordering of these is and how to deal with ripeness/quality. At store you can touch/select. Online, not really. I've heard some online ordering allow you to specify ripeness, but I'm skeptical. Also, will the online store have all veggies available or only the prepackaged expensive ones? Peapod seems to carry both packaged and regular, but I'm still not 100% convinced they have all we buy. - Availability of specific products/brands. Also in general: will online store have all the brands/SKUs the store has? Only some? I just tried to look up 1 quart whole milk on Peapod - not available. Romano cheese - the one we are buying not available. "Fruits of the Nile" juice - not available. These are all things that we buy at Stop&Shop that is Peapod parent (?). I think this is pretty much a deal killer. (Could stop here, but for completeness sake gonna continue). - Frozen/perishable item delivery. I guess this is handled somehow. Not sure how well. - Costs. Are online prices the same as in store? Higher? Do they apply same discounts as in store? What are the delivery/overhead/etc costs? I just looked up Peapod and they charge $10 for $60-100 orders. That's a lot (although I understand that my time possibly costs more). There is a minimum $60 order - we sometimes buy less than that at the store, but perhaps it's not a big deal... - UI: how good is the search/cart/selection UI online. Especially if the service is through something like 3rd party service like Instacart. Peapod UI/search seem to be good/OK. - Some personal reasons skipped. So pretty much no deal for us right now. YMMV. Edit: Sorry if this is OT a bit. Edit2. I could not experiment with Amazon for this, since Amazon Fresh product selection is even worse than Peapod. Not quite true. Amazon is weird. There's more product availability for some categories, but with various restrictions and quirks. E.g. Romano cheese is "Amazon Fresh" only. Fruit of the Nile juice is only 6-pack and only regular Amazon. I think I'll chalk this to crappy UI and stay with: It's way more "no go" than Peapod for us.

Walmart is aggressively rolling out order-and-pickup services. Loblaws (biggest grocer in Toronto) is too. I don't see how Amazon and Whole Foods can possibly compete in grocery, especially if Walmart uses Uber-like service for last mile. I've said this before, but IMO order-and-pickup is mostly idiocy (not a critique to you, but rather to the model 8)). It mixes the worst parts of online and physical: you have to online-pick the product which is worse than physical since you can't really see it and touch it; and then you have to go to the store to pickup which is bad since the whole point of online ordering is avoiding going to the store. I've maybe done order-and-pickup once in my life and only because it was expensive purchase with large discount was not available otherwise (they just forced me to use it). But then there are people who do order-and-pickup from restaurants which I never understood either (why just not order for delivery? unless restaurant does not deliver...), so apparently there's some subset of population who'd do it. Now, I know you said "if Walmart uses Uber-like service for last mile", so you seem to not really talk about order-and-pickup, but rather real deliver. From what I know bigger local stores (Wegman's, Stop&Shop in our area) do that already via Instacart, Peapod, whatever. I can't really say much about how useful this is or going to be. As I've said, we are still 100% physical stores for groceries (also near 100% physical for clothes/shoes for similar reasons). Maybe this will change for us at some point, but I really don't know. Maybe we are just laggards in this area and at some point when everyone does it, we'll start doing it too. Not sure. So I can't really comment about who will win grocery delivery. I'd say it's early innings and neither Amazon, nor Walmart IMO are guaranteed to win. Walmart does have the store penetration and large number of SKUs and that helps I'd say. Amazon has the non-grocery delivery infra + 1st online destination capture, but they may have issues with grocery SKUs and geo penetration. If I was forced to buy groceries via delivery, I don't really know what I would use. It would depend a lot on website convenience, on specific brand/product availability, potentially on prices (especially if we talk huge markups), potentially on delivery costs. So, sorry, but probably not much of a conclusion. Take care.

Anecdotally, WalMart online is for me 2nd or 3rd destination to check prices if I decide to do price check vs Amazon. I've mentioned before that Amazon had some stuff (specific coffee, specific granola) at way inflated 3rd party prices and then I bought them from Walmart online. Amazon has gotten these items at better prices since then so Walmart online purchases are gone. For groceries physical stores are still the go-to place for us. So no comment on grocery purchases from Amazon/Walmart online. We don't visit Walmart or Whole Foods stores, but that's mainly since they are not close by. And they are not "important"/"distinctive" enough for us to drive to them (unlike Trader Joes or H-mart or Russian grocery store or Wegman's). Disclaimer: None of this is significant from investing standpoint I think.

I don't think the exchange of old CHTR shares for new was a taxable event, so I am not sure what you are trying to say. In general, the words "Malone or Liberty" and "taxes" are mutually exclusive. skanjete is in some European country (Sweden?). Unless you are familiar with tax laws of that country, you probably should not give tax advice. ;) From what I have seen different countries tax very different events/things/whatever. Assuming that country X tax laws are same/similar to US/Canadian laws is a recipe for pain. @skanjete: I think your question is tough, since you really need someone who knows your local tax laws and also knows the Liberty spinoff from tracker stock from legal standpoint. I doubt that there's someone who is qualified to give that kind of legal advice here. Though perhaps I am wrong...

A guy told me to sell Internet stocks and buy fruit companies. I googled him and it seems he's a bit bananas. ;D

Yeah, I was thinking I could send it to them. There's a ton of really cool stuff that could be done, but it requires a lot of decent web programming. Of course, then I'm just handing it to them, but oh well. Well, if you think that it's something you can make money off, you can do what oddball did and roll out your service. Or just talk to oddball and make him roll it out and you get percentage. ;) (and you guys can send me a beer for getting you together ;D ). (Edit: there might be other guys here who would be interested to try to roll out a service. oddball just seems like top choice since he kinda knows the market, possible business size, probably has a lot of software that can be reused from his other project, etc.) If you are not gonna do it commercial, then IMO making it public and promoting it to Morningstar or whoever (Bloomberg?) is a way to go. They'll probably not gonna do anything about it, but c'est la vie. If they do, then good free publicity to you and some benefit for investors. 8) Take care.

Nice essay. Perhaps you should persuade someone like Morningstar to adopt this methodology for performance evaluation. ;) Edit: I probably should look at my own performance based your methodology. It's just seems like a lot of work. Plus looking at rolling window returns in private account will probably raise up the issues of capital inflows/outflows even more than looking at a (single) very long term IRR number. Also in my particular case at least, I used quite different investment approaches 5-10-15 years ago than I do now. So the data is dirty, the older data is not so useful and therefore there's not much of 10-y rolling windows overall. So, not sure I'm gonna do it. It seems interesting though.

I took a look at Honda Sensing and Toyota equivalent. Wow, this is spreading fast. Here is my prediction from 2015: It looks like we gonna have >50% new cars with forward collision avoidance (FCA) before 2020. I'd have to dig harder if this is going to happen in 2018 (let's talk US, since worldwide is likely gonna lag). Assuming I meant level 4 self driving for the second part of prediction, this is still gonna be seen. Currently looks a bit less likely. 8)