Liberty

I haven't read it yet, but comments from those that have read it have been pretty unanimously positive, and I expect that with all sagas of this type, there's probably a lot of detail and anecdote that never made it to regular articles (ie. Reading the Big Short is fun even if you lived through 2008-2009 and paid attention at the time). But that's just my guess...

Stocks with market caps under $50m CAD with a history of losing 95% of their value in 7 years tend to have low daily trading volume, in my experience.

I'd rather pay 15-20% rates for a few years, while wages are also inflating relatively rapidly, and then be left to pay the rest of the principal over a couple decades at much lower rates, than sign up for a gigantic amount of debt at almost zero interest rates, knowing that rates will likely rise over a couple decades and the principal will still have to be paid.

The Russian Mafia state strikes again: Update: He's ok, but it's the sixth interpol warrant against him from Russia...

I just finished watching the last episode of 'Waco', a 6-episode mini-series made by Paramount. I highly recommend it, I think it's pretty much a tour de force. It also makes me want to read the source materials on which the series is based (yeah yeah, it probably made the Branch Davidians look better than they were in reality, whatever, I'm not sure if the people claiming that really know since there was so much disinformation about them too--either way, they didn't deserve this). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6040674/ You can watch it from here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/waco/id1318849424

Q2: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180529006223/en/HEICO-Corporation-Reports-Record-Net-Sales-Operating

https://www.digitaltveurope.com/2018/05/29/virgin-media-buys-casey-cablevision/

Thank you.

Whatsapp payment service may launch in India soon: https://www.livemint.com/Industry/46X6nJ5X47gWryYKVGCLTO/WhatsApp-payment-service-may-launch-in-India-next-week.html (via @Bluegrasscap)

I enjoyed this podcast and thought some here might like it too: https://a16z.com/2018/05/16/network-effects-positive-feedbacks-increasing-returns-complexity-silicon-valley-history-innovation/

This is a book about the whole Theranos sage, form promising startup to all the lies and scandals, written by the journalist who afaik did the most to break this story: https://www.amazon.ca/Bad-Blood-Secrets-Silicon-Startup/dp/152473165X/

The book on this whole saga is out: https://www.amazon.ca/Bad-Blood-Secrets-Silicon-Startup/dp/152473165X/

Depends if the figures that were used were split-adjusted or not was my point. They usually are. A quick look at Yahoo Finance shows that the stock indeed split in March 2014, and that the $20 price in 2012 was split adjusted. Having a quick look at the past 10 years on RF, seems like between the summer of 2009 and the summer of 2015, the stock had a CAGR of 32%. Impressive. But from mid-2009 to today, the CAGR is 13%.

Isn't that a stock split?

I frequently see people complaining about Comcast's 1-terabyte/month caps, so some people use a lot of bandwidth. I'm guessing houses with parents and teenagers all streaming Netflix/Youtube/Amazon Video/Twitch every day, where everybody has multiple devices, game consoles and gaming PCs downloading large games and updates frequently, etc...

Well, my reply "I dont think this is the case" because not everybody understands this, and its possible that the writers of these articles misrepresent the word "percentile." That said, my explanation is consistent with the statistical definition of percentiles, and how academics have used the term in context of wealth/income. Well, there's probably other reasons to suspect that the original article is BS, but I didn't really focus on that in my post, so fair's fair.

Look at the game demo on the left side of the screen around 8:00min in that first video. Lots of compression artifacts, hiccups and lag, in a company demo.

The Roadster was their first car, not the Model S. I agree they could have done better. Buffett could've done better too. Easy to criticize these people when you don't know too much what went into what they did... You know finance a bit, I assume, so if someone criticize Buffett as not having done as well as he could've in a perfect world, you can see the flaw in that argument. Well, I know electric cars, and I can see that Tesla did WAY better than ever could have been expected from an electric car startup that began right before 2008-2009 in a world where the last successful car startup was probably 80 years ago and where creating a new brand that almost everybody recognizes happens rarely and usually requires billions in marketing (Tesla spends basically zero). Btw, the Model S that you like so much, people at the time it was starting to come out said the same things you're saying now about the other models. It's late, they don't know what they're doing, they can't ramp it up, it's a disaster, there are quality control issues, Elon Musk is inspecting each one by hand wtf, it's too expensive nobody will buy it, the Germans and Japanese will copy it quickly and do it better and Tesla will be left with no sales, they'll run out of cash, etc. That was in 2011-2012.

Thanks for explaining how I was wrong, guys. It's how we learn. I somehow got into my head that they just sliced the pie in 100 slices and then divided the sums in each by the numbers of individuals in each. Cheers!

Apple isn't a leader and outsized influencer in the smartphone industry because they don't have the biggest market share? I'm not sure where you got your 18% number and whether that includes PHEVs, but even if they had 18% market share with a $100k car, I'd say that's pretty damn impressive, especially since they have been basically supply constrained for years. And it doesn't change the fact that Tesla changed the game for everybody else and made everybody else go faster and spec things better than they otherwise would have. Just look at the Leaf: It screams "ok, but let's make it really niche so it doesn't cannibalize our other sales, make sure it looks weird and bad and has a short range". Thankfully the new Leaf is getting better, but that's assuredly because of competition, and even Ghosn who was the most bullish on EV among the legacy auto CEOs only could muster a half-measure and not really push EVs that much. They should've made electric Altimas and Infinis starting years ago... Musk has often said that he knew EVs would be better than ICEs so he just expected automakers to make them. And then he waited and waited. Then the GM EV1 came out, and it was kind of crap and weird, but he thought they'd keep iterating and over time the EV2 and EV3 and EV4 would come out and get good eventually and they'd drive down the cost of batteries and innovate on them, etc. Instead, as soon as California stopped forcing GM, they recalled the EV1s and destroyed them and never came out with an electric car again. That's why Musk decided he had to do it himself, and his stated goal was always to catalyze the industry (by doing his best, he could leverage a competitive response and get a huge impact). Even Toyota, a leader in hybrids (that they developed in good part for the California mandate) invested very little in BEVs and is now behind, instead wasting time with hydrogen concept cars for auto shows and stuff like that. Toyota actually sold a RAV4 EV for a while, and it had a powertrain made in partnership with Tesla.

I never said anything to the contrary. Buffett is looking for predictable, things that change slowly. Ideally things so easy to run that a ham sandwich could do it. Musk is trying to change things fast in some of the hardest and most entrenched industries. Totally different. But as I said, they have very different goals, and that's fine. I know that on a finance forum everyone looks at everything through a financial prism, but there are many other forums where people couldn't give a crap about the financial aspect of things (or at least, it's down the list). There's more to life than money.

What I'm saying is that within the first percentile, there's likely a wide distribution, and that since it's probably a power law, that can be skewed quite a bit by a bunch of billionaires. So if you compare that first percentile to the rest and say "to be in the first percentile you need X", you might not actually be accurately representing most of the individuals that compose that first percentile since 0.95 of it might have on average $1m (random number to make a point) and 0.05 of it at the top might have 500m on average. So you're taking the average of the sums in that first percentile rather than look at the median person in that first percentile, and that makes a difference.

I agree with Spekulatius. Verizon&co have incentive to advertise their best tests and fast rollout. In reality performance will likely be much worse and the rollout will likely be quite slow. How fast will they invest? Will the cut their dividends?

You are technically correct about statistical distortion within the group. But stahleyp's reference group is only the top 1%. :) Interesting link about those who feel relatively poor within the 1% (from 2014, so outdated but, if anything, the trend has accentuated): https://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/31/the-other-wealth-gapthe-1-vs-the-001.html I don't see how that's different, no? Take that top 1% of the general population and sub divide it into 100 parts. There's till going to be the 0.01% that might own a billion and skew what that 1% is vs the general pop. Or am I misunderstanding what you mean?