171–180 of 189 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He bought IBM in 2011. That was his first venture in tech companies. Apple came along in 2016.
So he probably lost money on that.
Curious that both Buffett and Bill Gates [0] are publicly criticizing Bitcoin right now. People make big dumb investments every day, and you don't see Buffett and Gates talking to the media about it. What's their objective? And why together? And why now? [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/07/bill-gates-i-would-short-bit...
Good question... Though likely the answer is pretty mundane: It's probably something they keep being asked about in interviews, and they feel some obligation to dampen the hype on cryptcurrency- Also, there's a "survivorship bias" issue, in that both guys got very successful using business strategies involving an unrelated domain, so of course they would say "If you want to build wealth, maybe instead focus on these…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He seems to understand intrinsic value pretty well.
If there's one thing I've learned in my 45 years, it's that actually no one has figured yet what the term "intrinsic value" really means. The more you dig into that term it just ends up meaning "what someone else is willing to pay for it" blended together with some fuzzy subjective notions of morality.
> In The Theory of Investment Value, written over 50 years ago, John Burr Williams set forth the equation for value, which we condense here: The value of any stock, bond or business today is determined by the cash inflows and outflows - discounted at an appropriate interest rate - that can be expected to occur during the remaining life of the asset.
- Buffett in http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1992.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I don't find it wise for anyone, Buffett or otherwise, to expound on things they don't know anything about." He's talking about investment vehicles. I would say he knows more about those than most of us here on this board.
Everyone that listened to him 20 years ago missed Amazon, Google, etc.
Indeed here's a quote from the 1998 letter
> Despite the pathetic technical skills of your Chairman, I'm delighted to report that GEICO, Borsheim's, See's, and The Buffalo News are now doing substantial business via the Internet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compare how liquid it is to real-estate. I'd say it is pretty liquid.
Wait, who considers real estate money? If the answer is no one, then this doesn’t seem like an interesting point of comparison for liquidity.
> Buffett said investors would instead be much better off investing in U.S. stocks, which in turn are also a far better investment than 10- or 30-year U.S. government bonds... He said he would much rather have Berkshire’s pile of cash and equivalents be $30 billion, rather than the $108.6 billion it was at the end of March, but good deals have not emerged. $100B is a colossal amount of money to have sitting around in…
S&P tracking ETFs are the most liquid equity instruments, but $100b is large even for them. The largest ETF by assets is SPY, with $250b. 'Liquid' for you or me or even Stevie Cohen isn't even close to the same thing as 'liquid' for Warren Buffett. http://etfdb.com/compare/market-cap/
Speaking of which, it's also common for acquisitions to be carried out using stock, instead of cash. Given that acquirees are open to getting paid in stock, I would have thought they would be open to getting paid in SPY.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4164368-spy-cost-liquidity
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/06/macashstockequit...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
" Bitcoin has produced a transaction processing infrastructure that looks a lot like Amazon Web Services (something I am sure Buffett would agree is extremely valuable). " How many transactions per minute can AWS do?
> How many transactions per minute can AWS do? How many transactions can the bitcoin network do if Amazon goes out of business or cancels AWS? (hypotheticals seem relevant here, to make the point) How many transactions can your business perform if AWS blocks you, or your transaction type?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electricity into security
In practice, it's not very secure because the difficulty mechanism ensures that hash power always centralizes. Any widespread commodity miner will automatically defeat itself -- that's why all of those early ASIC startups fizzled out. As soon as they shipped something, their value proposition was nullified. Add to this that the payout mechanics strongly incentivize pooled mining, even for people with powerful miners,…
Also "A small handful of men ultimately control the Bitcoin network because they have authority over 50%+ of the hash power"
I think that's a bit hyperbolic. A small handful of men control where the hashing power currently is. However, that can change very quickly. If you don't like what a pool is trying to use your hashing power for, leave that pool.