tbone

My fundamental principles of investing: 1. Understand the business you're interested in by reading their financial reports, understanding the unit economics of the business, their leverage and the different forms of financial and operational leverage they might be employing, their share ownership structure (share classes, poison pills) etc. 2. Understand the durable competitive advantages of the business, if present, that will contribute to continued profits and future cash flows even in potentially inflationary periods. These advantages could be regulatory, IP, location, brand, marketing etc. 3. Assess the talent and integrity of the management of the business. Analyze their long term performance, determine the factors that are in their control and compare with their peers in their respective industries, check their previous placements and find out why they left etc. This is one of the most important steps because if a company is retaining earnings annually at 10% of the book value a newly appointed CEO will be responsible for approximately 60% of the capital deployed in a span of only 10 years (10% growth in book value compounded for 10 years increases book value to 259% of the original amount, 159% gain/259% total = 61.39%). CEOs often rise up the ranks by being incredibly talented in narrow fields such as marketing, sales or simply by being good at office politics. The real skill they require is rational capital allocation. Many great companies have been destroyed by poor capital allocators becoming CEO. 4. Last but not least, buying at a significant margin of safety. No matter how wonderful the business is, buying at an insanely expensive price (like how many companies today are valued and how many have been valued in the past) is a good way to achieve poor performance. You have to know how to value businesses and understand how future growth affects value so that you're not overly conservative. Investing is not gambling. It is a craft and an art that only its practitioners can truly appreciate. The capital allocation decisions that investors collectively make over time redirect capital to its most productive uses and allow for economic growth and prosperity. The incredible rise in our quality of life over the last century globally has largely come from capital being redirected by investors to those businesses that have put that capital to its most productive use. Trading options, thereby making bets on the short term volatility of an underlying stock, is not investing (with some exceptions). Buying companies with no profits and no reasonable prospects for future profits is not investing. Buying unproductive assets that will never return cash to you is not investing. Buying bitcoin is not investing. Only exceptional people with an extremely patient temperament will beat the markets over the long term, but just having some general knowledge about the subject and teaching your kids about it can open up a lot of potential. People who don't have the aptitude or the time can just take their excess savings and dollar cost average into a low cost index fund over time (which will give you the return of the market and requires absolutely zero skill). They will get a very satisfactory result over a long period of time as long as they start early and stay persistent no matter how the market gyrates in the short term. Even a small amount of money can grow to a significantly large sum if you understand the power of compounding.

Fireworks sold by authorized wholesalers and distributors in North America are regulated by a myriad of government agencies. The fireworks are usually made in China but the Chinese meet all the thresholds required for chemical composition and safety and the importers send inspectors to ensure standards are met and their goods aren't rejected at the border and seized. Indians are buying illegally imported firecrackers from local Indian grocery stores and Facebook Marketplace which is the reason this man's house and cars burned down. Sad state of affairs.

Can somebody at @zomatocare get my bro Siva his 230 rupees back? He paid for Veg food but he got non-Veg food. Completely unacceptable. Siva paid good money for that masala with butter naan and deserves to be treated with the utmost respect and courtesy. Please do the needful!

Mark Levin on the cusp of dropping AOL and America on the cusp of dropping Israel. Truly we live in wondrous times.

Turkish carpet sellers were able to successfully scam @tim_cook. Kudos.

There will be a rush of mineral deals in Afghanistan in the next year. China doesn't need American chips anymore. The limiting factor now is access to as much copper/lithium/lanthanum/cerium/neodymium etc. as humanly possible.

If true this is incredible. I'm seeing the machine translatable code in real time with all the recomps and decomps coming out on the gaming scene too. Decomps that used to take up to a decade can now be done in less than a day. More importantly it would also mean we have zero moat over Chinese chips.

Imagine how you might talk to ChatGPT. You know it's only there to serve you. You're the master and they're the servant. You don't pay the AI the courtesy of proper grammar and spelling. You only exert the minimum amount of cognitive effort necessary to get your point across.

Kanging on history is retarded bro. Tajik-inhabited areas devolved from centres of learning to shitholes with $1500 GDP per capita and no contribution to innovation or human civilization. 40% of working age men have to run away to Russia to work. Same goes for Pashtun areas too. Instead of kanging we need to figure out how we are going to fix our societies because something is deeply, deeply wrong.