Liberty

A thread asking people about their misses for the past year is by definition about hindsight. That's the point. My biggest miss of the past year is probably premature accumulation in a very illiquid OTC microcap. I thought it was very cheap, and it then proceeded to get much cheaper (volatility is pretty crazy, there's almost no float and the bid/ask is often 10%+). I think it's only a temporary loss, with fast-growing IV being much higher than the quoted price, and I'm comfortable holding it for the long-term, but I do wish I had been able to buy more at lower prices before getting to a full position.

No problem with writing to the audience, and I wasn't trying to claim street cred or anything. I just thought it was weird calling those "just [...] normal jobs" (the "just" made it even worse) when they are in fact pretty much what most people would think of if you asked them to list really good, high-paying jobs. IMO you could have used the same jobs as examples without calling them that and it would have been fine.

Thanks Sanjeev! :)

Expected, but still good news:

Am I the only one who raised an eyebrow reading that line? Guess we don't come from the same background. If being a doctor or an engineer is merely normal, what's a good job? Does that start at the C-suite level?

Thank you for the recommendation, I added it to the list. Cheers! :)

Welcome! :)

http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.ca/2014/12/the-oil-price-shock-primary-secondary.html

Unspectacular year? Just to put your "unspectacular year" in perspective. If you start with 100k with those results you'll be a billionaire in a little over 37 years and if you have 1M then in just 28 years. I already have 37 years, so what do you think about that! Nice to dream, but size becomes an anchor rapidly, an multiply any number by zero just once and...

Thanks Jawn, added it to the list.

That would make me very suspicious of any numbers about how well online is doing, if they're blatantly juking the stats like that. And HQ might not even be aware of this practice. People are probably doing this to save their asses because higher ups told them "we're going to judge you on metrics XYZ" and so people optimize for those metrics. (I bet that SYW accounts are associated with the stores where they were created, and HQ has asked stores to encourage shoppers to also shop online and reward them for it - their thinking must be that if they don't reward it, stores won't encourage online shopping because it lowers their numbers. But the incentive can misfire...) Reminds me of an anecdote about the early days of communist china when they had a problem with rats eating food from the fields. The government decided to give a reward of X money for each dead rat that people brought in. What happened is people started to breed rats, and then kill them for the reward.

Thanks for sharing. I might need to try something like that at some point.

Just eyeballing it, I'd say up around 40% so far (in CAD, part of that is currency gains in USD vs CAD). I dodged a few bullets this year. I sold my CFX and ALS positions for strategic reasons, and immediately after that they tanked. I don't expect to be lucky like that very often.

Thanks for sharing JoelS. Must've been quite the trip! If there's one person I'd like to know more about how their thought process worked, it's Singleton.

Nice attempt at channeling Buffett, but he's not saying he wants to sell because it's the end of the year, he's just looking for feedback on what he owns, and the end of the year is as good a time as any for that.

Thanks. Have a good one everybody! :)

Recent stock peak was market by publication of this very bullish story, which made it known to many people: http://www.businessinsider.com/texas-pacific-land-trust-2014-8 Of course, soon after publication it fell almost 40%, but that's how this goes...

Got this one in the mail today.

Good post.

Energy investors are getting coal in their stocking this year.

Via @Crowdturtle: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/downloads/CCB1988-07-11-SearsWhyTheLastBigStorePt1.pdf

Thanks for the links, West. I knew some of those but not all, so I appreciate it very much.

Thanks leftcoast. I'll add that one to the list :) One that I heard about via a recommendation is: http://www.amazon.com/Flight-Titans-Boeing-Airbus-Battle/dp/0753510146 But the reviews make it sound like it's ok, not great.

Transdigm (TDG) has a wide moat. Sole source supplier of most of the relatively low-cost (compared to the price of a plane) but critical parts that they make, regulatory barriers and low absolute market per single part make it not worth even trying to compete, airframes stick around for decades and need aftermarket parts rain or shine (annuity-like characteristics), and they're supplying parts for pretty much everything that flies, civilian and military, so very well diversified. Mastercard/Visa, for reasons that have been explained frequently.

Any recommendations? (Can be civilian or defense or both) Thank you in advance! :)