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Liberty

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Everything posted by Liberty

  1. Canada: https://www.cbc.ca/1.5054234 "Canada closes airspace to the #737MAX8, based on new information it received on Wednesday"
  2. That's what the "too hard" pile is for. It should be tall and used frequently.
  3. No interest in investing in the field. I just like the tech and am looking forward to the EV transition.
  4. Brookfield to Acquire 62% of Oaktree Capital Management https://bam.brookfield.com/press-releases/2019/03-13-2019-132118887
  5. Jonas acquisition (in Australia this time): https://www.jonassoftware.com/About_Us/Latest_News/Jonas_Software_Announces_the_Acquisition_of_Happen H/t @pearnick
  6. Yeah, he looks a bit like a guy who would get whacked on Boardwalk Empire...
  7. Sometimes I think SD is just trolling us.
  8. Have you guys read anything I've written, or you just reflexively oppose anything just because it comes from me? I keep talking about what I know and don't know about this story. You guys make a lot more leaps than I do. I instead focus on what we do know, and what is most likely based on the actual base rate of other investors we know about.
  9. Not every article has to be a tutorial. It's possible to just read about success stories and find them interesting. And even so, you don't seem to be learning too much, or in any case, you certainly don't share much that is useful, instead spending all your time trolling.
  10. https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-battery-prices/ Interesting look at li-ion batteries.
  11. Don't you know envy is one of the deadly sins? No need to be so jealous of him, not everybody can be a self-made billionaire.
  12. More groundings: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/12/uk-has-grounded-all-boeing-737-max-aircraft.html
  13. I generally agree. I've heard it described as the bundle being a rare case of "socialism that works". The biggest difference might be for people who don't want sports but are currently paying for them through a bundle, since sports are quite expensive. Also, crappy channels that don't have a very good value proposition but have been able to free-load on more popular channels will also have a hard time, and could help bring down costs a bit (or at least redirect it to more valuable content through VOD where explicit demand is more obvious). But I still think the bundle will fall and almost everything will move over to VOD over time, except for inherently live experiences (sports, some live shows and events).
  14. This could go into multiple threads (AMZN, FB, AAPL) but I'll put it here: https://stratechery.com/2019/where-warrens-wrong/ Ben Thompson on Elizabeth Warren's plan to break up big tech. If you're a subscriber, there's a follow-up here: https://stratechery.com/2019/where-warrens-wrong-follow-up-amazons-price-parity-provision-the-amazon-marketplace-question/ Update: Also, a Steven Sinofsky thread that is related: https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/1105546034996899840
  15. I've really been testing what's in this book in the past week. We've been sleep training our kid, and I'm the one who's been waking up between about 10 PM and 6 AM... Really hard to get into more complex reading and consolidate complex memories, which is why I've been watching videos of DeepMind AIs playing Starcraft II against pro-gamers* and reading lighter stuff today. Sleep is probably the most underrated way to boost someone's investment performance (as well as general life performance). *https://youtu.be/cUTMhmVh1qs
  16. No. It would just mean he made different trade-offs. Let's imagine a scenario: To me, someone who puts 90% of their wealth in T-Bills and does 20% CAGR for 20 years with the remaining 10% is still a great investor. They haven't created as much wealth as they could (which is one of the impressive things about Buffett, he's a top-tier wealth-maximizer, unlike Munger, f.ex., who spent a lot more of it along the way), but they still know damn well how to create value with stock-picking. A lot of money managers get measured on other people's money they manage, but we don't always know what percentage of their own net worth is invested. Jeff Bezos has made early investments in Google and other successful companies and would probably be a billionaire even without Amazon. But do you say that he only invested a smaller percentage of his money in non-controlled-by-him VC-type investments, so he's a bad VC investor? There's always luck involved with investing. Always. But over long periods, skill matters. It's like poker. Anyone can win a few rounds, but over long periods, the real pros come out on top. And when you are a concentrated active investor (as opposed to a passive, highly diversified one) over multiple-decades, skill matters most. You can look at cohorts born the same year as Buffett and the same year as this guy, and almost nobody ends up with similar outcomes. Lots of people go into investing, but there's very few with records like Buffett's. Lots of entrepreneurs make millions and decide to invest in the stock market, but very few end up with 800m single-stock-positions in their fidelity accounts and with 2.3bn in net worth. Of course, after the fact, people always try to explain these things are just being luck and survivorship bias. That's how the EMT people tried to explain away Buffett's success, to which Buffett responded with the Graham & Doddsville essay. I think the same kind of applies to this guy; he has non-random characteristics that make it less likely that he was just lucky as an investor (long-term orientation, doing fundamental and primary research, focusing on management and owner-operators/founders, concentration into industries he understands, focusing on industries with generally good economics and secular tailwinds (software, aerospace), etc). I don't know how good an investor he is, but under most realistic scenarios I can imagine, considering his starting point, portfolio composition, and current outcome, it seems highly likely that he's a quite good investor. Someone could've come out with some math and assumptions that could've convinced me otherwise, but so far the arguments I've seen haven't been convincing to me.
  17. As far as I know, yes. Matthew Walker runs what seems to be one of the leading sleep labs:
  18. We don't know #1. We don't know how much he put in stocks and how much he put in other things and what his allocation has been over time, whether as his equities went up he kept reducing his exposure, whether he changed his mind at various point and sometimes was 50/50, then 75-25, then 25-75, etc. We don't even know how much he really had at various points of his life except at the beginning and today. But #2 and #3 are impressive. In hindsight it seems like it was obvious, but the reason why P/E were so low back then is because everybody hated stocks after a decade of high inflation and high interest rates and crappy economy and various shocks, and assumed it would continue forward, and there certainly wasn't the info that we have today about stocks and investing back then, especially for someone who wasn't even working in the financial industry and approached investing as an amateur.
  19. I've said elsewhere that I don't care what the journalist calls him. I'm interested by the guy, not by how he's framed by someone else. I don't believe he's the best investor ever or whatever. But to go and say that he's an underperforming investor and that he did nothing special based on shaky guesses feels wrong. I disagree that you can automatically assume that he's fully invested and never withdraws amounts just because he has a preference for long-term holdings or because the journalist framed it that way. Buffett is also a "buy and hold forever" kind of guy and he sold IBM and many other things. It's not because something is your preferred outcome/style that you do it all the time. You also have no idea how he uses leverage. Is it just tactically once in a while for short bursts, is it over long periods, it is for special situation bets with more binary outcomes. Does he have 50% or 30% of his net worth in equities and the rest in real estate and bonds or cash? Did he give millions to charity 30-40 years ago? Did he invest a bunch back in a startup venture that didn't work? You don't know, and that makes a huge difference in the outcome. Net worth is a flawed proxy for investment performance. But the chances that he's been 100% equities and never withdrew significant amounts feel a lot less likely than the alternatives, which are a lot more common with wealthy people. Buffett is an exception because he's been fully invested all that time and so frugal with expenses and withdrawals, but that's a very very rare situation. What we know is the starting point, end point, and and that he almost half his net worth in a single position that he held for over 160x and probably a decent chunk of the rest in other hundred-baggers that he held for decades (when most investors here probably sell most of something when it doubles once), and that his company has stayed pretty small. Those are the facts, and they're pretty extraordinary in themselves.
  20. There are too many unknown factors to tell the exact thing you're pretending to know, and by giving him one or two conservative assumptions, you can pretend that you're lowballing things while in fact if some of the other unknown factors are different from your assumptions, the delta could dwarf the assumptions in his favor. You're basically saying: "Here, I'll give you 5 in your favor here, so that makes it a conservative assumption, and you're still not beating the SP500" while in fact there are these other 2-3 factors that could make a difference of 50 the other way (but can't make a difference against him because you've pegged them as far as they can go in that direction), but you won't even acknowledge them. It's either bad logic, or dishonest. Instead of trying to come up with conclusions based on unknown facts, I'd rather come to my conclusions based on known facts, and those facts are very impressive (his starting point and end point, the ratios of where his wealth is and likely came from, how he did things that almost no investor is capable of doing in practice, etc). Show me other self made billionaires that didn't have a fast-growing company that got huge and built most of their wealth by investing only their own money (not AUM gathering with fees) with long-term concentrated portfolios (his Heico position alone is almost half his net worth). I'll wait.
  21. Did you read the part where bullshit is called on that napkin math? Making assumptions like "guessed net worth from arbitrary point is good proxy for equity returns and let's assume there were no large withdrawals or exposure changes over time" don't sound very realistic to me. Not everybody is Buffett, living in the same house he bought in the 50s, driving hail-damaged cars, not giving money to family, and keeping equity exposure at 99.99% of net worth his whole life... Yes, I think most of us did read the "napkin math". You had a link to the article, after all! ;) Great investor (best we've never heard of!)..with no evidence. The evidence we do have leads us to reasonable doubt. The dude's a self-made billionaire with a small company and multiple hundred-baggers worth over a billion in his fidelity account, but yeah, there's no evidence because you've decided to assume 100% of his net worth has always been invested in equities, he's never withdrawn big amounts (especially early on, which would have a HUGE impact on your math), and that your guessed starting point (midway through his life, why not start earlier?) is correct. I'd rather say that what we do know is very impressive, and that we don't know his exact investing performance, but that the chances that all your assumptions are correct is pretty low, so he's likely outperformed the market with the money he's invested, and that holding on to multiple hundred-baggers is impressive in itself.
  22. That's not how probabilities work. It's not 50% because you can either be correct or incorrect. If I try to predict whether the sun will come up tomorrow, I'll either be correct or incorrect, but that doesn't mean that there's a 50% chance for each outcome. Known facts and data about a situation forms prior probabilities. In the case of the sun, we have thousands of years of recorded human history and a deep understanding of orbital mechanics and so we can be very precise about whether we'll see it rise tomorrow, so the priors might be 99.999999999%. In the case of this company, we can look at a lot of things to determine how likely they're to turn around and for the stock to do well (commodity price, management quality, the assets they have, balance sheet, income statement, cashflows, contracts, competition, what the market is pricing in (market isn't perfect, but it's decently efficient), etc). Just saying it's a coin toss, as if we had no information at all making one outcome more probable than the other, is either willful blindness or a misunderstanding of probabilities. I'm not sure which it is.
  23. Created, by evolution through natural selection. Low probability events can happen (possibly frequently) in universes that have billions of galaxies that each have billions of stars with multiple planets and moons, over billions of years (with the possibly of even multiple parallel universes) on planets will thousands of not millions of ecosystem niches with slightly different local conditions... You just need a few primordial animo acids to combine into a barely adequate RNA replicator once in the chemical soup that is an ocean for the process to get started and for time and iteration and selection pressures to do their work. And the very fact that we're here wondering about it shows it's possible, it's the anthropic principle (if it hadn't happened, we wouldn't be here talking about it). But yeah, let's move on!
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