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LewisBraham
Hi Hank,
Your satire came across very well. Don't worry about the user name.
Best,
Lewis
@Old_Joe All true except Alzheimer's patients are not a small population. This is a widespread disease that affects a lot of people, and has been extremely difficult and expensive to treat. It will only get worse as our population ages. But a day of…
To me, the question isn't just of efficacy, but whether the government can force these pharamaceutical companies to lower their drug costs? Somehow I don't think a year's worth of this drug costs $25,000 to $58,000 to manufacture. I wonder what the …
@davidrmoran I haven’t read your link yet, but Succession is a great show, one I bet many readers of this board would enjoy. I hope they finished the final season’s scripts before the writers’ strike. I imagine they have, given they are already a go…
@Anna +1 Your story is also relevant today and in general if one thinks about how companies are also being subsidized by welfare and Medicaid while paying starvation wages. Anyone who invests in Walmart or McDonald's--probably almost everyone on thi…
Ah, the old "welfare queen" mythology. It never gets old for the GOP, does it? https://newrepublic.com/article/154404/myth-welfare-queen
Only now the focus is on kids in gender studies classes ostensibly smoking weed with their meager amount of dole…
The Kiplinger list in the initial post is an odd one to achieve this goal. The surprising thing is there aren't really any large bluechip gun companies, despite how much political influence they have in the U.S. Smith & Wesson SWBI is the larges…
For some folks the "theater" could cost them their lives if McCarthy et al have their way: https://newrepublic.com/post/172066/house-gops-debt-ceiling-plan-calls-medicaid-snap-work-requirements
On Medicaid, Republicans want recipients to fulfill cer…
Raiding has been going on for a long time. Firms have just increased in size and political/economic influence and have benefited from an utter lack of accountability and an uneven playing field. The 80s films Wall Street addressed raiding where a st…
This sort of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose capitalism where pe firms have structural advantages on the way up and are completely insulated from the legal and financial consequences on the way down is not what Adam Smith originally envisioned. The sad t…
Or they could hire CPA analysts who would know that a strong demographic customer base and conservative underwriting standards do not necessarily make a strong bank's balance sheet. Being too fixated on growth and not enough on balance sheet risk ca…
@msf Obviously, Nixon was a disaster in many ways, yet even the meager level of collaboration between parties that existed back then is astonishing compared to the completely disastrous tribal warfare that exists today if you read Richardson’s artic…
Difference between short and long-term thinking. Banks CEOs like most CEOs of publicly traded companies often only think from quarter to quarter. To accept zero yields in 2020 and 2021 as Buffett did would be unacceptable to such CEOs trying to hit …
I expect a bill drafted by the House GOP in response with the words “Energy Freedom” in it imminently, something like the Keeping Our Energy Freedom bill. There will be much usage of the word “woke” as well.
The crime that caught my eye recently was the heist of two million dimes in Philadelphia worth $200,000. It seems such a comical Philly kind of crime to steal dimes: https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/16/philadelphia-2-million-dimes-stolen…
@sma3 I know there is significant gerrymandering in certain districts, but the House is a cumulative game. If you lose the worst gerrymandered districts, you go for ones that are better. Never said it would be easy to do this, but it only takes a fe…
Interesting to compare these funds to the small-cap tech ETF: PSCT. And the small-cap healthcare ETF: PSCH. Or some combination thereof. My impression doing cursory initial research is the ETFs are better.
Some NPR analysis I've heard recently also interprets the settlement as a cost of doing business and that little will change at the network as a result. Fox has a particular brand, and it would be hard to change that brand, despite lawsuits like thi…
If Crow wanted to, he could've donated this historical hate material to Holocaust or American History museums where they could be shown in the proper historical context. The fact that he's keeping a signed copy of Mein Kampf in his home where most p…
I do think the debt ceiling’s worthy of discussion and I recall a rather lengthy discussion of it earlier this year. But I wonder if from an investor’s perspective it falls into the fat-tail category of an unlikely but extreme risk completely outsid…
@Crash Regarding consumption, there is something almost pathological in how our entire economy is dependent on the U.S. consumer consuming more, yet financial experts whose portfolios of company stocks benefit from that consumption are constantly ts…
@Old_Joe You're right. I think many Americans are too busy trying to get by than to think about things like net worth, but it would help those who have the means to save to learn. It's an interesting question what the percentage of people who have …
@sma3 I know this may sound surprising, but I don't think either lifestyle is necessarily wrong as life is short and we never know what tomorrow will bring. Eating at a Michelin rated restaurant if you truly love food could be a treasured memory or …
@rforno Ever hear about The Stanford Marshmallow Test? Worth reading. https://globalcitizen.org/en/content/marshmallow-test-rich-children/
People who've suffered deprivation much of their lives may not want to put off that vacation or put off eating…
I know. But it seems irrelevant to say Americans aren't saving enough when so many have nothing left over to save after paying their bills. I often think the constant complaints posed in the media over "financial illiteracy" are really just a coded …
Ah, ye olde personal responsibility mythology. Meanwhile: https://statista.com/statistics/261463/ceo-to-worker-compensation-ratio-of-top-firms-in-the-us/
If only America's young stopped eating all that avacado toast and listening to the rock n' roll…
@larryb You are correct. Yet here we are years later: https://morningstar.com/funds/xnas/lmopx/performance
What happened after that streak ended is more important as a lesson I think about active management than the streak itself. Admittedly, LMOPX …
Use the incessant annual/interim articles to help you identify which PMs/funds are the ones that consistently outperform their benchmarks.
That is the problem in a nutshell, though. There are virtually no funds--perhaps none at all--that consistent…
VPMCX and VWNDX are the ones that still look pretty good on that list and they have the requisite low expenses and patient skilled management teams to compete effectively with that tough bogey.
I’ll be honest. I don’t think anyone who posts on this active board could handle the boredom of owning an indexed asset allocation or target date fund for the entirety of their portfolio, even if it might be good for our investment health in the lon…
As more comes out, I realize it's not just that Crow is a billionaire influencing a justice--bad enough. It's the kind of billionaire he is, distinctly creepy:
https://newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/some-reasons-that-you-might-own-a-collection-o…
If one is concerned about the bubble factor in traditional market-cap weighted S&P 500/Total Market Indexes, it is easy today to have a value factor overlay to the index. VVIAX has beaten 74% of its peers in the past 15 years, 86% in the past te…
@Baseball_Fan I don’t really agree, but a lot depends on how you define the term indexing. If one thinks of tracking the S&P 500 as the only kind of indexing, you could draw a bubble conclusion. To me, an index is a passive rules-based machine …
Regarding psychology, I would say most people who look at their portfolio every day can’t help meddling with it. I actually think it’s harder sometimes to hold an activity managed stock fund than an index stock fund. How many folks have such a deep …
