Sunday, April 5, 2015

TED Talk - Bill Gates: The next outbreak? We’re not ready

In 2014, the world avoided a global outbreak of Ebola, thanks to thousands of selfless health workers — plus, frankly, some very good luck. In hindsight, we know what we should have done better. So, now's the time, Bill Gates suggests, to put all our good ideas into practice, from scenario planning to vaccine research to health worker training. As he says, "There's no need to panic ... but we need to get going."


Link to video

Friday, April 3, 2015

Links

Evan Osnos on Charlie Rose discussing his latest article on Xi Jinping (video) (LINK)

A negative investigation into Berkshire's Clayton Homes [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Creighton to host Berkshire event (LINK)
Related book: Berkshire Beyond Buffett
Templeton & Stock Valuations (LINK)
Related book: Templeton's Way with Money
Negative CDS is within touching distance again [H/T @jasonzweigwsj] (LINK)

Book of the day [H/T Favio]: Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Links

For those interested, Matt and I at Boyles were included in the latest issue of Value Investor Confidential, a subscription newsletter that allows one to sign up for a 2 Week Free Trial to test the service. 

Jason Zweig reposts an old Ben Graham speech masterpiece (LINK)

Buffett: No stock market bubble, but few bargains (video) (LINK)

Farnam Street: Ray Dalio: Open-Mindedness And The Power of Not Knowing (LINK)
Related book: Learn or Die [This book was also released on Audible a couple of days ago.]
Howard Marks on Bloomberg TV, discussing the topic of his last memo (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Value Investing Podcast: Guy Spier on The Education of a Value Investor (LINK)

Tyler Cowen talks to Peter Thiel (video) (LINK)
Related book: Zero to One
Hayman Capital Targets Shire in Next Pharma Battle (LINK)

Bruce Berkowitz: Years after the global financial crisis, William Isaac and Senator Bob Kerrey address questions surrounding Fannie and Freddie's Conservatorship. (LINK)

The April issue of the Mutual Fund Observer (LINK)

Research paper: The mortality of companies (LINK)
The firm is a fundamental economic unit of contemporary human societies. Studies on the general quantitative and statistical character of firms have produced mixed results regarding their lifespans and mortality. We examine a comprehensive database of more than 25 000 publicly traded North American companies, from 1950 to 2009, to derive the statistics of firm lifespans. Based on detailed survival analysis, we show that the mortality of publicly traded companies manifests an approximately constant hazard rate over long periods of observation. This regularity indicates that mortality rates are independent of a company's age. We show that the typical half-life of a publicly traded company is about a decade, regardless of business sector. Our results shed new light on the dynamics of births and deaths of publicly traded companies and identify some of the necessary ingredients of a general theory of firms.
Can you win at anything if you practise hard enough? [H/T @tferriss] (LINK)
Related book: Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success
The Healing Power of Your Own Medical Records (LINK)

The latest Nature Podcast (LINK)

I Followed My Stolen iPhone Across The World, Became A Celebrity In China, And Found A Friend For Life [H/T Bill Bishop] (LINK)

I'm continuing to enjoy the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. While I had linked to this last month, I had forgotten to watch it, and now that I'm into the book I thought I'd link again to: Edge #437 - Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman: A Conversation
DANIEL KAHNEMAN: Before asking you what are the questions you are asking yourself, I want to say that I've now read your book Sapiens twice and in that book you do something that I found pretty extraordinary. You cover the history of mankind. It seems to be like an invitation for people to dismiss it as superficial, so I read it, and I read it again, because in fact, I found so many ideas that were enriching. I want to talk about just one or two of them as examples. 
Your chapter on science is one of my favorites and so is the title of that chapter, "The Discovery of Ignorance". It presents the idea that science began when people discovered that there was ignorance, and that they could do something about it, that this was really the beginning of science. I love that phrase. 
And in fact, I loved that phrase so much that I went and looked it up. Because I thought, where did he get it? My search of the phrase showed that all the references were to you. And there are many other things like that in the book.

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Links

Aznaur Midov's Daily Journal Annual Meeting Notes [H/T Whitney Tilson] (LINK) [For a more detailed set of notes, though not free, see HERE. For audio of the meeting, while it's available at least, see HERE.]

60 Minutes segments from this past Sunday, "Killing Cancer" (Part 1, Part 2)

Here's What '60 Minutes' Didn't Tell You About The 'Miracle' Glioblastoma Treatment (LINK)

Markets Change. So Should You. (LINK)

Andrew Smithers: Has labour lost out to capital? (LINK)

John Kay: Why our planes are growing safer and our finances are not (LINK)

Book of the day: Once an Eagle (a long book that is also available on Audible under a previous edition.)

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Links

Buffett: Tesla doesn't threaten me (videos and article) (LINK)

Evan Osnos on Xi Jinping (LINK)

James Surowiecki: The Puerto Rican Problem (LINK)

Toby Carlisle talks to the WMTW podcast (LINK)
Related book: Deep Value
Steve Keen: The Principal And Interest On Debt Myth (LINK)

Amazon starts selling repair, cleaning and assembly services online (LINK)

R.I.P. California (1850-2016): What We’ll Lose And Learn From The World’s First Major Water Collapse [H/T Matt] (LINK)

Tim Ferriss talks to Amanda Palmer (LINK)
Related book: The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
Book of the day [H/T @AlexRubalcava]: The Making of the Atomic Bomb

"One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations."

From Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind:
One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it. Let’s take another familiar example from our own time. Over the last few decades, we have invented countless time-saving devices that are supposed to make life more relaxed – washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, telephones, mobile phones, computers, email. Previously it took a lot of work to write a letter, address and stamp an envelope, and take it to the mailbox. It took days or weeks, maybe even months, to get a reply. Nowadays I can dash off an email, send it halfway around the globe, and (if my addressee is online) receive a reply a minute later. I’ve saved all that trouble and time, but do I live a more relaxed life? 
Sadly not. Back in the snail-mail era, people usually only wrote letters when they had something important to relate. Rather than writing the first thing that came into their heads, they considered carefully what they wanted to say and how to phrase it. They expected to receive a similarly considered answer. Most people wrote and received no more than a handful of letters a month and seldom felt compelled to reply immediately. Today I receive dozens of emails each day, all from people who expect a prompt reply. We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated. 

Monday, March 30, 2015

Links

My friend Lukas' book has officially been released: Value Investing: A Value Investor's Journey Through The Unknown...

Sanjay Bakshi and Vishal Khandelwal's email exchange about why the rules for buying vs. holding a stock are not the same (LINK)

Kyle Bass sits on a panel at The Buttonwood Gathering (video) [H/T Zero Hedge] (LINK)

Barry Ritholtz talks to Charley Ellis, Chair of the Yale Endowment, and author of Winning the Loser’s Game: Timeless Strategies for Successful Investing (LINK)

Steve Keen: The Fed Has Not Learnt From The Crisis (LINK)

Steve Keen on the PeakProsperity podcast (LINK)

Ben Bernanke is now blogging (LINK)

Hussman Weekly Market Comment: Eating Our Seed Corn: The causes of U.S. economic stagnation, and the way forward (LINK)
For practical purposes, the above identity reduces – from the standpoint of overall variability – to a straightforward statement: Unusually elevated corporate profits (a surplus) are largely a mirror image of unusually large deficits in the household and government sectors. Most of the variability in corporate profits over the business cycle is the mirror image of variability in the sum of household savings and government savings. If you examine the actual U.S. data, this is exactly what we observe. Because government and household savings (shown on an inverted scale below) have actually recovered in recent years from the depths of the financial crisis, we’re beginning to see a flattening of growth in U.S. profits. That flattening is likely to turn into outright contraction during the next couple of years.
Mark Buchanan: Common core and common rancor (LINK)
Learning how to distinguish between fact and opinion would seem to be a pretty fundamental piece of any education. In the bizarre world of U.S. public schools, though, it's proving to be controversial. For several years, schools across the U.S. -- with significant help from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation -- have been putting in place something called the Common Core, a set of standards on what students from kindergarten through 12th grade should learn on topics including English, mathematics, science and history. Along the way, they’ve faced ample criticism, some of it reasonable. Teachers, in particular, think they haven't had adequate preparation.
Inside Jeremy Lin's life after Linsanity and the New York Knicks [H/T Abnormal Returns] (LINK)

StarTalk Radio: The Future of Humanity with Elon Musk (LINK)

Book of the day [H/T Brad Feld]: The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company

Howard Marks talks to Google: The Most Important Thing - "Origins and Inspirations"


Link to video

..................

Related book: The Most Important Thing Illuminated


[H/T ValueWalk]

Sunday, March 29, 2015

Shane Parrish's 2015 Daily Journal Meeting Notes

Shane Parrish has finished his extensive notes from the 2015 Daily Journal Meeting. Shane is charging $33 for them. And while there are free notes from the meeting out there, these will be the best by a long shot. 

And it’s also a way to show your appreciation for the work Shane has done, not just on the notes, but also on Farnam Street. It’s always nice when someone leaves me a tip in the TIP JAR showing their appreciation for this blog, or uses the Amazon link on my site to make an Amazon purchase (which doesn’t cost the buyer anything extra), and here’s a way to both learn a little extra from Charlie Munger as well as show Shane appreciation for all of his work. I’ve already ordered my copy.


Friday, March 27, 2015

Links

Michael Lewis on Charlie Rose discussing Flash Boys, one year after publication (video) (LINK)

How to Succeed in Life, the Warren Buffett Way (LINK)

Things You Didn’t Know About Buffett’s Strategy (LINK)

Warren Buffett and 3G May Have One Barrier to Even Bigger Deals (LINK)

The Brooklyn Investor discusses the book, Double Your Profits: In Six Months or Less, that is essentially the playbook used by 3G (LINK)

TiE SoCal fireside chat between Mihir Worah (PIMCO), S. Pulavarti (UCLA Endow.) and Mohnish Pabrai  (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

How Chicago has used Financial Engineering to Paper over its Massive Budget Gap (LINK)

Apple's Tim Cook will give away all his money (LINK)

Amazon’s New Unlimited Cloud Storage Is Absurdly Cheap (LINK)

Gary Klein discussing his book, Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights (LINK)

Five Good Questions for Ron Fierstein about his book, A Triumph of Genius (LINK)

Book of the day: The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East