Liberty

Looks like the Watch is selling better than even Apple expected, and they sounded very bullish on it. http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/04/16/apple-watch-wont-be-available-in-apples-retail-stores-until-june-at-the-earliest

Have fun everyone! Maybe I'll make it next year.

meiroy, you misunderstood me. Read what I wrote earlier in the thread; what benefits kids most is to be with their parents, and to have happy and stress free parents. Buying a BMW or a granite countertop doesn't help your kids, yet most people spend most of their money on crap, and they work all the time to afford all that crap, rarely seeing their kids who end up being raised by strangers. That's when money problems and stress don't strain the relationship of parents. Education isn't just in school. I intend to teach my son all kinds of stuff that I never learned in school, and to build a strong relationship with him, and I wish my father had done the same with me, but he was always working. And I wasn't talking about sending them to a crappy school or whatever to save a few bucks. The whole idea is to figure out what really matters and what doesn't, and most people fail miserably at that. The example of my grandmother was just to show that she didn't have any margin of safety. She had the bare essentials (though a medieval peasant might have found her life luxurious, it's all relative). But today, we do have a surplus, except we just spend it all on unnecessary crap rather than buying our freedom and independence, things that I find a lot more valuable than what most people around me spend their money on. I don't know if you deleted your post because you changed your mind or not, but that's my reply.

Video of the 40 minute interview with Druckenmiller: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-04-15/stan-druckenmiller-zero-interest-rates-unnecessary-now

We don't have a budget, but we track expenses, and looking at the graph of the past few years, I don't see a noticeable jump since my son was born. The "kids are super expensive" is one of those things like "life's so expensive these days, who can put money aside?" that just isn't true for most but the very poorest, but is quite convenient for people who want to sell you things or convince you that you need a gold-plated everything to be happy. My grandmother had 12 kids. She raised them by herself since my grandfather was out doing mineral exploration up north most of the year. They lived on a farm without electricity for a while when my mother was young. We're so fricking rich these days, we don't even realize, or truly enjoy it, because people make the unconscious choice of massive lifestyle inflation rather than keeping a solid margin of safety and letting that compound over time.

We have a 1-year-old son. Over the past year, and the years before as we observed the many people around us who had kids, it became quite clear that kids can be as expensive or inexpensive as you want. And a lot of what people spend on kids isn't actually things that make them happier and better people. In fact, the best thing for most kids would be to spend more time with their parents, and to see those parents be stress-free and happy. Most people spend all their time away from their kids to earn enough to buy a bunch of crap that the kids don't even notice and that they would gladly trade for more time with their parents (do they care if you drive a BMW instead of a Honda or that you have granite countertops instead of wood?).

I think you'll find the writings of MMM thought-provoking, if nothing else. He addresses all the usual fears about high-cost-of-living cities and college tuition for kids, etc.

Hi Jay, My personal details are not very useful to anyone but myself, but Dshachory is right. Go read the MMM blog starting with the #1 post chronologically and make your way to the present. After that, either you'll get it (it's like Buffett's value investing) or you won't. But chances are, you don't need as much as you think, and you're probably spending a lot more than you need to be happy. I'm 32 years old. You probably make more money than I do. You should be able to retire before you're 60. Here you go: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/04/06/meet-mr-money-mustache/ There's a button at the bottom to go to the next post. It takes some posts for him to hit his stride, so make sure you don't give up before you've read 10-15. For older school materials on the same topics, check out: http://www.amazon.ca/Your-Money-Life-Transforming-Relationship/dp/0143115766 This is a book that I read in my early 20s and that helped set me on the right path. https://www.createspace.com/3457832 There's also this book, which is a bit more philosophical and abstract. I suggest you start out with the MMM blog.

Writeup on Sirius XM: https://punchcardblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/10/sirius-xm-holdings-the-subscription-media-business/

Uccmal, this is nice, and congratulations also. Is the dividend yield on your portfolio comparable to what you could get with a passive approach, say with like VIG, VYM, VTV from Vanguard; or with a near-passive approach like a Dogs of the Dow strategy? Could you see yourself going this passive route? I've toyed with this idea myself (but decided not to until I get too bored or demented to pick stocks actively, like maybe when I'm over 90?) Way better - 5.0 - 6.0% on cost . I am already going the passive route in some sense. I have set up enough dividend payers to cover living expenses. Any dividend growth or good deals I get from here are gravy. I have to get my Wife retired now (if thats possible - she loves her job - it's a sickness....) I'm thinking of retiring in the relatively near future too, so I've been thinking more about getting cash out of my investments. Still not sure if looking for dividend payers is the way that I'll decide to go, but I'm looking at all options including that one. Right now I'm more thinking about keeping a few years of expenses in cash, and periodically replenishing that pile when something is fairly valued or more. If there's a big downturn, I can simply live through it on the cash pile and not have to sell anything at the bottom (and let the businesses that I invest in deploy capital on my behalf). That's a fine theory, but I'll admit that it would probably feel better to have the certainty of a bunch of dividend cheques coming in every 3 months. One the other hand, most of the businesses that I feel most comfortable with don't pay dividends, mostly because they have a good capital allocator at the helm that tends to get good returns on incremental capital invested. Maybe I can take care of this at the portfolio level, and still invest that way with part of the money and put another piece of it in some dividend ETF or whatever (btw uccmal, what do you think of those? any obvious flaw or downside that I should be aware of). Thanks.

http://www.asymco.com/2015/04/14/the-watch/

The $74 Million Stock Award That Jarden’s Board Values at Zero http://bloom.bg/1aZ5zsM

http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.ca/2015/04/jpm-annual-report-2014.html

That's a good trick. Another one is to hit preview as you write. Each time you hit the server resets your timer, so if you hit preview in between each paragraph or whatever you should be ok.

I think we need to rename this forum to the 'Corner of Berkshire and INTJ'.

Did the Keirsey test a few years ago, got INTJ.

Context matters. Obviously I didn't mean a 2015-era supercomputer. But compared to the tech from just a few years ago, it is. Try running a modern OS and browser on a supercomputer from the 90s... Good luck with your Nexus.

They did doubly so, with the new memory tiers. Almost nobody will go for the 16gb when you can get 64b for $100 more (the 16 to 32gb upgrade was a harder upsell, and if they had made the minimum 32gb, that would've been saner in a way, but would've made many people not upgrade, so it's a tradeoff). Yes quite a racket, $100 for 48GB of flash memory when you can buy a 128GB memory stick for less than half of that, and now they've got people paying between $349 - $17000 for an iPhone accessory! I don't think there is another company on Earth that could get away with that. I love it. Yes, this goes back to what I was saying before. People shouldn't confuse the price of the components with the value of the product. A 64gb iPhone is more than $100 more valuable than a 16gb iPhone for sure, so why only charge the cost of the component when you are differentiated (someone else can't sell a 64gb iPhone for just $20 more than a 16gb iPhone..) and can capture more of the actual value? Another cool thing I saw on Twitter, how the Watch tables open up when employees use their devices:

They did doubly so, with the new memory tiers. Almost nobody will go for the 16gb when you can get 64b for $100 more (the 16 to 32gb upgrade was a harder upsell, and if they had made the minimum 32gb, that would've been saner in a way, but would've made many people not upgrade, so it's a tradeoff).

Ok, more like a Tom Gayner tracking position then? That makes sense.

You're thinking of Vertu (inferior product but very exclusive and all about appearances). Anything that is owned by 40% of US smartphone users can't exactly be called exclusive... Snobs and hipsters probably have HTC or Nexus phones. As for overpriced, well, they don't seem to have a problem selling them, so lowering prices wouldn't exactly be a smart move. Anyway, thanks for showing us your level of understanding of the situation.

Exactly, Nate, and the gigaflops are the least interesting part of it. For $3.5m in 1994 you would have had a dos prompt on a 320x pixel screen. The software, the interface, the net connection, the cameras and other integrated sensors add a tremendous amount of utility and value. I remember when I upgraded to 8 megs of RAM to better play Doom and Comanche. I often had to delete games to make room on my 200 megs hard drive, loading them back from stacks of floppies when I wanted to play again. Techies confuse the price of the components and the value of a finished product (which is an ironic mistake to make for people who call themselves value investors). If you're a business, the goal is to capture some of that extra value that you create when you put it all together (hardware-software-services). Many companies can't do that.

What do you mean "just a phone"? It's not because it's called a "phone" that it's actually a phone. It's a network-connected pocket supercomputer with an intuitive interface. Basically the kind of stuff that Asimov dreamed of. Even Apple's most expensive iPhone is a bargain. People have their whole lives on these things, they check them tens of times a day. It replaces cameras, video cameras, calculators, computers (email, browsing, messaging, games, etc), does fitness stuff, calendars, all kinds of apps, GPS directions, alarm clocks, etc. It keeps you in touch with your friends, your family, work. It's peace of mind when traveling or in case of emergency. Etc etc etc. You get so much value out of an iPhone... I'm sure that a lot of people would give up their cars before their phones. A decade or two ago you could have sold one for millions to the billionaire crowd, and the average person would have had to buy thousands of dollars of bulky equipment to reproduce just part of the functionality at none of the convenience (you certainly could never carry it all with you everywhere you go and stay constantly connected to the net). If price is what you pay and value is what you get, most smartphones are a great bargain, and for just a little bit more money (which is amortized in monthly payments anyway), you can get the best one, with software that is unique to it. A lot of people seem to find that worth it. Absolute numbers matter too: The best cars vs merely good cars are tens of thousands of dollars apart, but the best phones vs merely good ones are maybe a hundred or two apart. That's not much over the couple years that people keep their phones when you think about how much use they get out of them.

Maybe the hubris is on the side of those who have been consistently wrong about Apple for years.

I like this comment seen on an Apple news site: