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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Warren Buffet is stepping down as head honcho of Hathaway Doodad, so I have been listening to talking heads explaining his monumental success. They all said it was down to him reading company's published accounts with an eagle eye, spotting the best investment opportunities and 'sticking with them'.
| I can assure one and all this is not the case. |
The stock market price already factors all this in. It is not possible for one individual to know more than the sum total of world knowledge, which is essentially what the stock market price represents. It's the same reason you should never make any prediction on a sporting event other than the bookies' favourite.
So Buffet was either a crook or he had spotted some factor that he hasn't revealed in his many books telling everyone how he did it.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You've all see those pictures of Africans digging up minerals in unregistered, unsafe and not very profitable mines. Often not much more than holes in the grounds. It would be illegal to do anything like that in Britain where everything under the ground belongs to 'the Crown'.
Unless you were born in the Forest of Dean where you have carte blanche (apparently for undermining the walls of Berwick Castle for one of the early Edwards) to dig coal where e'er thou willst. And they do. "We got nine tons out one afternoon." What exactly you do with nine tons of coal was left unexplained.
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Grant
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Buffett was probably just fortunate. Back in the fifties there were hundreds of fund managers picking stocks. He was the luckiest.
Proof of this is that he held his biggest positions for years, even decades. I can imagine an investing genius seeing a few weeks further into the future than his peers, but not decades ahead.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Normally I would accept this. It's like the fortune teller who predicted the assassination of Kennedy. Someone had to do it. In fact investment funds -- unit trusts as we used to call them -- use this as a business model:
| Launch multiple schemes with different desiderata and whichever one proves to be the most successful gets the publicity. |
When it comes to individual investment managers, it is usually the case that the 'best' ones got lucky that one time and parleyed it. George Soros is of this type. If they get lucky more than once they are Michael Milken.
But there was also the case of Jim Slater. He got lucky more than once. But he had hit on 'an idea'. Take over companies selling products going out of fashion--and therefore dirt cheap on the go-go stock market--and take over their pension fund which had more money (acquired in the great days) than future pensioners (now they weren't).
So where does that leave Warren Buffet? If he was just the luckiest of the fund managers in the nineteen fifties, he can't have
| held his biggest positions for years, even decades. | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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These extraordinary revelations about the state President Biden was in during his last year in office tells us a lot about the liberal cast of mind. It is one thing covering it all up temporarily to keep the ship of state afloat, but that is not what they were doing.
| They were trying to get him re-elected for four more years! |
Their distaste for Donald Trump was so strong they figured we would be better off with a permanently doolally leader of the free world (doolally with a degenerative disease, gawd help us). And they say it's the Trump people that are irresponsible.
Talking of whom, and on a related subject, Trump's stamina in this whistle-stop Middle Eastern tour, where one gold-plated shindig follows another with dizzying speed, is seriously breathtaking. Say what you like about this corrupt, lying, looney-tune aresehole, he's a remarkable septuagenarian.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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You may recall the British tech billionaire who drowned when his superyacht sank in a Sicilian anchorage, and which I wrote about here and on Medium at the time. Well, the official enquiry has now reported.
| 'The cause of the sinking was a freak wind.' |
Of course it was a freak wind, what did they think it was, a the tentacles of a giant octopus? But that kind of freak wind is not so uncommon in the central Mediterranean and that particular freak wind didn't sink any of the other yachts in the anchorage that night.
| So they're talking bollocks. |
It was because that particular yacht had the tallest mast ever fitted to a yacht. Yes, sirree, it was the old AE Curse of the World Record wot dunnit. Since that is obvious to a six year-old (to use the AE benchmark) you have to ask why the enquiry couldn't bring itself to say so. Rank incompetence is always a possibility but my money would be on there not being any expert available to say so, so the judicial enquiry couldn't say so.
| And why is that, Mr AE-ist? |
Well, every yacht expert on earth signed off on the mast size (in the sense that none of them knew it wouldn't be safe, otherwise they would have said so) so nobody was prepared to come into court and say, "Well, I thought it might not be safe but, soddit, I said to myself, let's find out the hard way."
| And now we officially haven't found out. |
But you can bet your billion bottom dollars it won't be tried again.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I have been giving solemn thought to these weird appointments of Trump's. It occurs to me that what we think of as non-weird office-holders, blokes with grey hair and grey suits, are just that. Office-holders. Is that what high office requires? Right now. Even presidents.
And prime ministers. We all despise Boris and we all tolerate Keir but when all's said and done, which one of them gets the job done? Johnson, like Trump, seems totally maladroit but, at the end of the day (I'm using cliches deliberately), things seemed to change when they're in charge, not when Keir and Theresa and Joe and Barack are.
Sure, there are doubts about whether it's a change for the better but there aren't many doubts that they needed changing. Here doesn't endeth the lesson.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Deadly Silence in China. Cities are Empty. China's real population is 300M. |
How would you react to such a YouTube if it was offered to you first up on your feed? If you are anything like me, you'll say, 'This I must see. I love a fruitcake theory first thing in the morning. Sets me up nicely for the day.'
And you'd surprise yourself. It wasn't fruitcake at all. Very sober. Sure, it didn't endorse the 300M claim, but it sure as hell persuaded me the true figure for China's population is way, way short of the 1.4 billion claimed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEfjdntFK54
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Deadly Silence in China. Cities are Empty. China's real population is 300M. |
I saw the same vid. Algorithm seems to be promoting it.
Her claims about Covid are the weakest part of her case. Covid killed very few in the West. I refuse to believe the Chinese experience was special.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Yes, you are quite right. It jarred badly and was quite unnecessary. It comes from giving into the temptation to gild the lily when advancing a case you know to be radically revisionist.
A lesson for us all.
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Grant
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Don't know about China, but I suspect most third-world population stats are lies, specially in Africa. After all, the bigger the population the higher the subsidies and charitable donations. Why wouldn't they lie?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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That is pure racism, Grant. First World charities and governments know how to estimate populations better than Third World countries.
N.B. They routinely underestimate their own to hide the scale of immigration from the Third World.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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I've been off-and-on living in Tanzania for the past three years.
THERE IS NOBODY HERE!
This country is incredibly underpopulated. It's nothing but wide open spaces and the city (there is only one, really) barely has a third storey (slight exaggeration).
Anyone claiming that any part of Africa is "stolen land" must answer the big question; "Stolen from whom exactly?"
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I read this after posting up the end of Chapter Two in the Books Section and an afterthought about the Masai Mara.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Denmark regularly tops the charts as the happiest nation so note should be taken that it is raising the retirement age to seventy, making Denmark's the highest in the world.
| This supports my contention that the pension age should be strictly actuarial. |
It is ridiculous that it stays the same, decade after decade, while life expectancy goes up and up, requiring fewer and fewer people of working age to pay for more and more old age pensioners. Who are often wealthier than they are!
However, since everyone is both a worker and a pensioner at some time in their life, any demands that the retirement age go up (or down, as happened in France) excites unfeasible protest. That's why it has to be actuarial. Nobody can argue with the Grim Reaper.
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