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When there are multiple solutions to a problem, choose the simplest one.
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John C. Bogle (The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns (Little Books. Big Profits 21))
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I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway.
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Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)
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Look for growth situations with low price-earnings multiples. If the growth takes place, there’s often a double bonus—both the earnings and the multiple rise, producing large gains. Beware of very high multiple stocks in which future growth is already discounted. If growth doesn’t materialize, losses are doubly heavy—both the earnings and the multiples drop.
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Burton G. Malkiel (A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing)
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Having DID is, for many people, a very lonely thing. If this book reaches some people whose experiences resonate with mine and gives them a sense that they aren't alone, that there is hope, then I will have achieved one of my goals.
A sad fact is that people with DID spend an average of almost seven years in the mental health system before being properly diagnosed and receiving the specific help they need. During that repeatedly misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated, simply because clinicians fail to recognize the symptoms. If this book provides practicing and future clinicians certain insight into DID, then I will have accomplished another goal.
Clinicians, and all others whose lives are touched by DID, need to grasp the fundamentally illusive nature of memory, because memory, or the lack of it, is an integral component of this condition. Our minds are stock pots which are continuously fed ingredients from many cooks: parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors, teachers, schoolmates, strangers, acquaintances, radio, television, movies, and books. These are the fixings of learning and memory, which are stirred with a spoon that changes form over time as it is shaped by our experiences. In this incredibly amorphous neurological stew, it is impossible for all memories to be exact.
But even as we accept the complex of impressionistic nature of memory, it is equally essential to recognize that people who experience persistent and intrusive memories that disrupt their sense of well-being and ability to function, have some real basis distress, regardless of the degree of clarity or feasibility of their recollections.
We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories or focusing on the content of traumatic material. It is not enough to just remember. Nor is achieving a sense of wholeness and peace necessarily accomplished by either placing blame on others or by forgiving those we perceive as having wronged us. It is achieved through understanding, acceptance, and reinvention of the self.
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Cameron West (First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple)
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In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases--reason, science, law.
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Roland Barthes (Image - Music - Text)
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Proper diversification means investing in uncorrelated assets, and investing in multiple assets needs multiple sets of knowledge, more hours of research, and more market
following. It is definitely more work for an investor.
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Naved Abdali
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A stock selling at $100 per share with earnings of $10 per share would have the same P/E multiple (10) as a stock selling at $40 with earnings of $4 per share. It is the P/E multiple, not the price, that really tells you how a stock is valued in the market.
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Burton G. Malkiel (A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing)
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Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile. Like the Warby Parker crew, the entrepreneurs whose companies topped Fast Company’s recent most innovative lists typically stayed in their day jobs even after they launched. Former track star Phil Knight started selling running shoes out of the trunk of his car in 1964, yet kept working as an accountant until 1969. After inventing the original Apple I computer, Steve Wozniak started the company with Steve Jobs in 1976 but continued working full time in his engineering job at Hewlett-Packard until 1977. And although Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured out how to dramatically improve internet searches in 1996, they didn’t go on leave from their graduate studies at Stanford until 1998. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page says, because we “were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program.” In 1997, concerned that their fledgling search engine was distracting them from their research, they tried to sell Google for less than $2 million in cash and stock. Luckily for them, the potential buyer rejected the offer. This habit of keeping one’s day job isn’t limited to successful entrepreneurs. Many influential creative minds have stayed in full-time employment or education even after earning income from major projects. Selma director Ava DuVernay made her first three films while working in her day job as a publicist, only pursuing filmmaking full time after working at it for four years and winning multiple awards. Brian May was in the middle of doctoral studies in astrophysics when he started playing guitar in a new band, but he didn’t drop out until several years later to go all in with Queen. Soon thereafter he wrote “We Will Rock You.” Grammy winner John Legend released his first album in 2000 but kept working as a management consultant until 2002, preparing PowerPoint presentations by day while performing at night. Thriller master Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, and gas station attendant for seven years after writing his first story, only quitting a year after his first novel, Carrie, was published. Dilbert author Scott Adams worked at Pacific Bell for seven years after his first comic strip hit newspapers. Why did all these originals play it safe instead of risking it all?
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Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
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From an asset-allocation perspective, when we talk about diversification, we're talking about investing in multiple asset classes. There are six that I think are really important and they are US stocks, US Treasury bonds, US Treasure inflation-protected securities [TIPS], foreign developed equities, foreign emerging-market equities and real estate investment trusts [REITS]. p473
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Tony Robbins (MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (Tony Robbins Financial Freedom Series))
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Ian Brady was born Ian Duncan Stewart on 2 January 1938 in Glasgow, Scotland, he’s responsible for a series of murders that took place from 1962 until 1965 in Greater Manchester. Brady and Myra Hindley met in 1961, she was a 19-year-old typist, he was a 23-year-old stock clerk. By 1966, both were tried at Chester Assizes for multiple murder. The trial lasted 15 days; Brady and Hindley were convicted on 6 May 1966, sentenced to life imprisonment.
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Stephen Richards (Scottish Hard Bastards)
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How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.
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Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
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Shareholders have a residual claim on a firm’s assets and earnings, meaning they get what’s left after all other claimants—employees and their pension funds, suppliers, tax-collecting governments, debt holders, and preferred shareholders (if any exist)—are paid. The value of their shares, therefore, is the discounted value of all future cash flows minus those payments. Since the future is unknowable, potential shareholders must estimate what that cash flow will be; their collective expectations about the future determine the stock price. Any shareholders who expect that the discounted value of future equity earnings of the company will be less than the current price will sell their stock. Any potential shareholders who expect that the discounted future value will exceed the current price will buy stock. This means that shareholder value has almost nothing to do with the present. Indeed, present earnings tend to be a small fraction of the value of common shares. Over the past decade, the average yearly price-earnings multiple for the S&P 500 has been 22x, meaning that current earnings represent less than 5 percent of stock prices.
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Roger L. Martin (A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness)
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With our desire to have more, we find ourselves spending more and more time and energy to manage and maintain everything we have. We try so hard to do this that the things that were supposed to help us end up ruling us.
We eventually get used to the new state where our wishes have been fulfilled. We start taking those things for granted and there comes a time when we start getting tired of what we have.
We're desperate to convey our own worth, our own value to others. We use objects to tell people just how valuable we are. The objects that are supposed to represent our qualities become our qualities themselves.
There are more things to gain from eliminating excess than you might imagine: time, space, freedom and energy.
When people say something is impossible, they have already decided that they don't want to do it.
Differentiate between things you want and things you need.
Leave your unused space empty. These open areas are incredibly useful. They bring us a sense of freedom and keep our minds open to the more important things in life.
Memories are wonderful but you won't have room to develop if your attachment to the past is too strong. It's better to cut some of those ties so you can focus on what's important today.
Don't get creative when you are trying to discard things.
There's no need to stock up.
An item chosen with passion represents perfection to us. Things we just happen to pick up, however, are easy candidates for disposal or replacement.
As long as we stick to owning things that we really love, we aren't likely to want more.
Our homes aren't museum, they don't need collections.
When you aren't sure that you really want to part with something, try stowing it away for a while.
Larger furniture items with bold colors will in time trigger visual fatigue and then boredom.
Discarding things can be wasteful. But the guilt that keeps you from minimizing is the true waste. The real waste is the psychological damage that you accrue from hanging on to things you don't use or need.
We find our originality when we own less.
When you think about it, it's experience that builds our unique characteristics, not material objects.
I've lowered my bar for happiness simply by switching to a tenugui. When even a regular bath towel can make you happy, you'll be able to find happiness almost everywhere.
For the minimalist, the objective isn't to reduce, it's to eliminate distractions so they can focus on the things that are truly important. Minimalism is just the beginning. It's a tool. Once you've gone ahead and minimized, it's time to find out what those important things are.
Minimalism is built around the idea that there's nothing that you're lacking. You'll spend less time being pushed around by something that you think may be missing.
The qualities I look for in the things that I buy are:
- the item has a minimalistic kind of shape and is easy to clean
- it's color isn't too loud
- I'll be able to use it for a long time
- it has a simple structure
- it's lightweight and compact
- it has multiple uses
A relaxed moment is not without meaning, it's an important time for reflection.
It wasn't the fallen leaves that the lady had been tidying up, it was her own laziness that she had been sweeping away.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
With daily cleaning, the reward may be the sense of accomplishment and calmness we feel afterward.
Cleaning your house is like polishing yourself.
Simply by living an organized life, you'll be more invigorated, more confident and like yourself better.
Having parted with the bulk of my belongings, I feel true contentment with my day-to-day life. The very act of living brings me joy.
When you become a minimalist, you free yourself from all the materialist messages that surround us. All the creative marketing and annoying ads no longer have an effect on you.
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Fumio Sasaki (Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism)
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Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.
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Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
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Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.” Amelia blushes, though she is angry more than embarrassed. She agrees with some of what A.J. has said, but his manner is unnecessarily insulting. Knightley Press doesn’t even sell half of that stuff anyway. She studies him. He is older than Amelia but not by much, not by more than ten years. He is too young to like so little. “What do you like?” she asks. “Everything else,” he says. “I will also admit to an occasional weakness for short-story collections. Customers never want to buy them though.” There is only one short-story collection on Amelia’s list, a debut. Amelia hasn’t read the whole thing, and time dictates that she probably won’t, but she liked the first story. An American sixth-grade class and an Indian sixth-grade class participate in an international pen pal program. The narrator is an Indian kid in the American class who keeps feeding comical misinformation about Indian culture to the Americans. She clears her throat, which is still terribly dry. “The Year Bombay Became Mumbai. I think it will have special int—” “No,” he says. “I haven’t even told you what it’s about yet.” “Just no.” “But why?” “If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re only telling me about it because I’m partially Indian and you think this will be my special interest. Am I right?” Amelia imagines smashing the ancient computer over his head. “I’m telling you about this because you said you liked short stories! And it’s the only one on my list. And for the record”—here, she lies—“it’s completely wonderful from start to finish. Even if it is a debut. “And do you know what else? I love debuts. I love discovering something new. It’s part of the whole reason I do this job.” Amelia rises. Her head is pounding. Maybe she does drink too much? Her head is pounding and her heart is, too. “Do you want my opinion?” “Not particularly,” he says. “What are you, twenty-five?” “Mr. Fikry, this is a lovely store, but if you continue in this this this”—as a child, she stuttered and it occasionally returns when she is upset; she clears her throat—“this backward way of thinking, there won’t be an Island Books before too long.
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Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
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We frequently hear “stocks typically return between eight and ten percent a year.” Well, over multiple decades, you could say they'll compound at between 8 and 10%, but the last time the Dow returned between 8 and 10% was 1952. There is a lot of space between what you expect the market to do and what it actually does, and this is where unforced errors lurk. Stocks tend to swing in a wide range, spending a lot of time at the fringe and little time near the average, delivering maximum frustration. This sort of erratic behavior transfers money from the amateur's pocket and into the professional's.
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Michael Batnick (Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments (Bloomberg))
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For the investor, a too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent company can undo the effects of a subsequent decade of favorable business developments.
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Tobias Carlisle (The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market)
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Oppenheimer’s second finding is his most interesting one. He split the stocks into two groups. One had only profitable stocks, and the other, only loss makers. Oppenheimer found the loss makers beat the profitable group.
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Tobias Carlisle (The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market)
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If you want the market return, buy the market. If you want to beat the market, you must do something different. That means buying only undervalued stocks, or concentrating.
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Tobias Carlisle (The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market)
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Highly profitable stocks only beat the market if Buffett’s moat protects the profits. Without the moat, highly profitable stocks will get beaten up by the competition. Mean reversion acts on profits to drag down winners and push up losers. Investors should use some common sense and natural skepticism about profit charts that march all the way to heaven.
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Tobias Carlisle (The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market)
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Once the shopper has been frustrated by three or four out-of-stock products, store loyalty may be insufficient to prevent a trip to another supermarket. If multiple stock-outs occur on the same shopping trip, the retailer faces Armageddon. This becomes apparent when a chain suffers a poor implementation of a new distribution system.
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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You pay a very high price in the stock market
for a cheery consensus.
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Tobias Carlisle (The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market)
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Yes, the January activities of the WSB participants were nihilist, but this nihilism is immanent to the stock exchange itself; it is already at work in Wall Street. To overcome this nihilism, we will have to somehow move out of the stock-exchange game. The moment of socialism is lurking in the background, waiting to be seized, as cracks appear in the very center of global capitalism. Will this happen? Almost certainly not, but what should concern us is that the WSB crisis is another unexpected threat to a system already under attack from multiple sides (the pandemic, global warming, social protests . . . ), and this threat comes from the very heart of the system, not from outside. An explosive mixture is in the making, and the longer the explosion is postponed, the more devastating it could be.
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Slavoj Žižek (Heaven in Disorder)
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Near the end of a momentum stock’s long uptrend, it will frequently be trading at a truly irrational P/E multiple. No amount of business success or growth will ever be able to justify such a multiple.
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Matthew R. Kratter (The Little Black Book of Stock Market Secrets)
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The criteria that I found most valuable when making my decisions were the following: What is the size of the investor community invested in other offerings on the platform to-date? Does the platform accept investments via credit card? For example, about 40% of my crowdfunding investors invested with a credit card. Does the platform allow for campaign extensions (if you fall short of your goal within your campaign period, can you extend the campaign until you reach your goal)? I’ve extended my campaigns multiple times. Does the platform allow for multiple disbursements? I prefer to disburse money from my campaign once a month. However, many platforms don’t allow you to disburse the funds until after the campaign is over What are the fees? Platforms can charge between 5-20% of your raise as fees, with some platforms having complicated fee structures that involve taking some of your Securities as part of the offering. Some platforms require you to pay them cash upfront before launching an offering. Does the platform allow you to set your own terms? For example, some platforms don’t allow you to sell convertible notes. Some others don’t allow you to sell non-voting common stock. Some platforms insist that they set the valuation for your startup in order to launch—the logic being that they know their investors, and they want to provide them with a “good deal.” For many reasons, you want to sell the Security that’s right for your startup. Does the platform allow you to have design freedom on the campaign page? You want to make sure that your brand is well represented. The aesthetics and optimization of the page are highly correlated with conversion (how many people invest after visiting your page). Does the platform support analytics? You need advanced analytics to market your offering. Some platforms, for example, allow you to enter a Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics code into the campaign page, while others do not. Does the platform have a good reputation? You will be driving a lot of potential investors and media folks to this platform, and you want to be sure that your platform of choice hasn’t been involved in anything shady in the past. Does the platform allow you to update your investors and prospective investors with campaign notifications? Some platforms have a built-in functionality where you can post updates right on the campaign, download email, and mailing contact lists of your investors (allowing you to contact them by email and allowing you to build Facebook “lookalike audiences”). Whereas, other platforms don’t even share the email addresses of the folks who have already invested in your startup. Does the platform support or plan to support secondary trading for the Securities that it sells on its platform? Will your investors be able to sell the Securities that they buy from you? The ability to sell Securities in a marketplace brings a lot of liquidity and increases its value significantly. In order to allow for secondary trading, the platform needs to obtain an Alternative Trading System (ATS) approval from FINRA.
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Michael Burtov (The Evergreen Startup: The Entrepreneur's Playbook For Everything From Venture Capital To Equity Crowdfunding)
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The data bears this out. In addition to a “persistence scorecard,” S&P Dow Jones Indices publishes snapshots of how many mutual funds beat their benchmarks. Most years, a majority underperform their indices, whatever the market. Over multiple years, the data becomes progressively grimmer. As of June 2020, only 15 percent of US stock-pickers had cumulatively managed to surpass their benchmark over the last decade. In bond markets, it is a similar tale, albeit varying depending on the flavor of fixed income. The data is more favorable for fund managers in more exotic, less efficient asset classes, such as emerging markets, but on the whole the data is clear that in the longer run most fund managers still underperform their passive rivals after fees.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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Buffett’s thesis on Cleveland Worsted Mills was straightforward. The stock sold for below its net current asset value and at a bargain P/E multiple. The worsted manufacturer was consistently profitable and paid a fat dividend. By 1952, having graduated from Columbia and now an employee at Buffett-Falk, Buffett liked the stock enough to write a brief report on it, stating, “The $8 dividend provides a well-protected 7% yield on the current price of approximately $115.”86 The stock had been cheap for some time. Buffett, in fact, had held the stock in 1951, selling at a slight loss as he invested his capital in companies like GEICO and Timely Clothes. Ben Graham also liked the stock, having made the Cleveland firm a 1.5% position in the Graham-Newman fund and including the company in the 1951 edition of Security Analysis in a table titled “Six Common Stocks Undervalued in 1949,” along with Marshall-Wells.87
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Brett Gardner (Buffett's Early Investments: A new investigation into the decades when Warren Buffett earned his best returns)
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The right price: Great growth companies can be bad investments at the wrong price. While multiples such as PEG ratios have their limitations, use them (low PEG ratios) to screen for companies that are cheap.
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Aswath Damodaran (The Little Book of Valuation: How to Value a Company, Pick a Stock and Profit (Little Books. Big Profits))
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Le premier point à prendre en compte est le fait que la production globale actuelle est quantitativement suffisante pour assurer l'alimentation de l'ensemble de la population mondiale. La disponibilité alimentaire mondiale est de 2 790 calories par jour et par personne (données de 2001-2003), ce qui pourrait être suffisant. La sous-alimentation qui affecte aujourd'hui un milliard d'individus pourrait être éradiquée par ure réorganisation de la production, notamment avec une réorientation vers la multiplicité des cultures vivrières et par un rééquilibrage du stock calorique, fort mal distribué (3 490 calories par jour et par personne dans les pays développés, contre 2 254 en Afrique subsaharienne). Quant à la malnutrition (carences en vitamines et minéraux) et à son envers, l'obésité et le surpoids (provoqués essentiellement par la diffusion des habitudes alimentaires promues par le secteur agroalimentaire et la grande distribution), qui affectent chacune un milliard d'individus, ils pourraient être résorbés, sans augmentation quantitative globale, par une réorientation vers une agriculture paysanne développant des pratiques agro-écologiques. Si l'agriculture industrielle actuelle fait valoir de manière tronquée sa supériorité, notamment en termes de productivité par hectare, une évaluation plus globale, incluant l'ensemble des coûts directs et indirects (notamment écologiques), invite à faire pencher la balance de l'efficacité du côté de l'agriculture paysanne. De fait, l'agriculture industrialisée est entraînée dans un cercle vicieux, marqué notamment par l'épuisement et la salinisation des sols, la multiplication des insectes résistant aux pesticides, la hausse des pathologies du bétail ; en outre, elle provoque une baisse du pouvoir nutritif des produits, notamment des fruits et légumes à croissance rapide. Enfin, il faut indiquer que les surfaces agricoles consacrées à des cultures non alimentaires (agrocarburants notamment) doivent être restituées à leur vocation initiale, ce qui offre une marge de manœuvre importante pour assurer à l'ensemble de l'humanité une alimentation quantitativement et qualitativement satisfaisante. On dispose également de deux leviers importants pour atteindre et maintenir cet impératif élémentaire : d'une part, une limitation de l'élevage, particulièrement glouton en énergie et en surfaces (40 % des grains actuellement produits sont destinés à l'alimentation animale) et écologiquement dangereux (importantes émissions de gaz à effet de serre) ; d'autre part, une élimination du gâchis alimentaire (évalué à 30 % au moins dans le système alimentaire industriel mondial, et à 100 milliards de dollars par an uniquement aux États-Unis). (p. 190-192)
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Jérôme Baschet (Adiós al Capitalismo: Autonomía, sociedad del buen vivir y multiplicidad de mundos)
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the joint-stock, limited-liability corporation: joint-stock because the company’s capital was jointly owned by multiple investors; limited-liability because the separate existence of the company as a legal ‘person’ protected the investors from losing all their wealth if the venture failed.
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Niall Ferguson (The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World: 10th Anniversary Edition)
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By spring of ’98, each company’s stock had more than quadrupled. Skeptics questioned earnings and revenue multiples higher than those for any non-internet company. It was easy to conclude that the market had gone crazy.
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Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
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Reading Group Guide 1. The river town of Hobnob, Mississippi, is in danger of flooding. To offset the risk, the townspeople were offered the chance to relocate in exchange for money. Some people jumped at the opportunity (the Flooders); others (the Stickers) refused to leave, so the deal fell through. If you lived in Hobnob, which choice would you make and why? If you’d lived in New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina, would you have fled the storm or stayed to protect your house? Did the two floods remind you of each other in terms of official government response or media coverage? 2. How are the circumstances during the Prohibition era (laws against consuming or selling alcohol, underground businesses that make and sell booze on the black market, corruption in the government and in law enforcement) similar to what’s happening today (the fight to legalize and tax marijuana, the fallout of the drug war in countries like Mexico and Colombia, jails filled with drug abusers)? How are the circumstances different? Do you identify with the bootleggers or the prohibitionists in the novel? What is your stance on the issue today? 3. The novel is written in third person from two different perspectives—Ingersoll’s and Dixie Clay’s—in alternating chapters. How do you think this approach adds to or detracts from the story? Are you a fan of books written from multiple perspectives, or do you prefer one character to tell his/her side of the story? 4. The Tilted World is written by two authors. Do you think it reads differently than a book written by only one? Do you think you could coauthor a novel with a loved one? Did you try to guess which author wrote different passages? 5. Language and dialect play an important role in the book. Do you think the southern dialect is rendered successfully? How about the authors’ use of similes (“wet towels hanging out of the upstairs windows like tongues”; “Her nylon stockings sagged around her ankles like shedding snakeskin.”). Do they provide necessary context or flavor? 6. At the end of Chapter 5, when Jesse, Ham, and Ingersoll first meet, Ingersoll realizes that Jesse has been drinking water the entire time they’ve been at dinner. Of course, Ham and Ingersoll are both drunk from all the moonshine. How does this discovery set the stage for what happens in the latter half of the book? 7. Ingersoll grew up an orphan. In what ways do you think that independence informed his character? His choices throughout the novel? Dixie Clay also became independent, after marrying Jesse and becoming ostracized from friends and family. Later, after Ingersoll rescues her, she reflects, “For so long she’d relied only on herself. She’d needed to. . . . But now she’d let someone in. It should have felt like weakness, but it didn’t.” Are love and independence mutually exclusive? How did the arrival of Willy prepare these characters for the changes they’d have to undergo to be ready for each other? 8. Dixie Clay becomes a bootlegger not because she loves booze or money but because she needs something to occupy her time. It’s true, however, that she’s not only breaking the law but participating in a system that perpetrates violence. Do you think there were better choices she could have made? Consider the scene at the beginning of the novel, when there’s a showdown between Jesse and two revenuers interested in making an arrest. Dixie Clay intercepts the arrest, pretending to be a posse of gunslingers protecting Jesse and the still. Given what you find out about Jesse—his dishonesty, his drunkenness, his womanizing—do you think she made the right choice? If you were in Dixie Clay’s shoes, what would you have done? 9. When Ham learns that Ingersoll abandoned his post at the levee to help Dixie Clay, he feels not only that Ingersoll acted
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Tom Franklin (The Tilted World)
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It is by owning multiple asset classes - foreign stocks, bonds, TIPS, real estate, commodities, etc. - that we can truly consume the "free lunch" of diversification
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Alex Frey (A Beginner's Guide to Investing: How to Grow Your Money the Smart and Easy Way)
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When a grocery shop owner can obtain multiple bogus ration card with the support of government authorities, it is also possible for a smart person to open huge number of bogus demat accounts with the help of official responsible for opening such accounts. Unlike
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Chellamuthu Kuppusamy (The Science of Stock Market Investment - Practical Guide to Intelligent Investors)
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When you are a private enterprise, savings on expenses go to the bottom line. When you are owned by the public, savings still go to the bottom line, but they are in turn magnified by the multiple the stock carries.
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Alan C. Greenberg (Memos from the Chairman)
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Our statistical screens are merely exploiting a group of undervalued stocks that are easily identified and are further protected by strong balance sheets and large asset values.
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Tobias Carlisle (The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market)
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It’s easy to see why the undervalued stocks were undervalued. Profits fell 30 percent in three years before they were picked. Investors expected those profits to keep falling.
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Tobias Carlisle (The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market)
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Multiple Companion variable Mismatch indicator for undervalued company PE ratio Expected growth Low PE ratio with high expected growth rate in earnings per share P/BV ratio ROE Low P/BV ratio with high ROE P/S ratio Net margin Low P/S ratio with high net profit margin EV/EBITDA Reinvestment rate Low EV/EBITDA ratio with low reinvestment needs EV/Capital Return on capital Low EV/Capital ratio with high return on capital EV/Sales After-tax operating margin Low EV/Sales ratio with high after-tax operating margin
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Aswath Damodaran (The Little Book of Valuation: How to Value a Company, Pick a Stock, and Profit (Little Books. Big Profits))
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Did I fuck and bewitch multiple finance guys to get where I am today? Sure. Did they deserve to lose their own stocks and bonds in the process? Undoubtedly. I wouldn’t choose a human man who didn’t deserve it.
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Sarah Blue (Charming Your Dad (Charming, #1))
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Even the simplest multiples are defined and computed differently by different analysts. A PE ratio for a company can be computed using earnings from the last fiscal year (current PE), the last four quarters (trailing PE), or the next four quarters (forward), yielding very different estimates. It can also vary depending on whether you use diluted or primary earnings. The first test to run on a multiple is to examine whether the numerator and denominator are defined consistently. If the numerator is an equity value, then the denominator should be an equity value as well. If the numerator is a firm value, then the denominator should be a firm value as well. To illustrate, the PE ratio is a consistently defined multiple since the numerator is the price per share (which is an equity value) and the denominator is earnings per share (which is also an equity value). So is the enterprise value to EBITDA multiple since the numerator and denominator are both measures of operating assets; the enterprise value measures the market value of the operating assets of a company, and the EBITDA is the cash flow generated by the operating assets. In contrast, the price-to-sales ratio and price to EBITDA are not consistently defined since they divide the market value of equity by an operating measure. Using these multiples will lead you to finding any firm with a significant debt burden to be cheap.
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Aswath Damodaran (The Little Book of Valuation: How to Value a Company, Pick a Stock, and Profit (Little Books. Big Profits))
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Water. Drinking water, water purification system (or tablets), and a water bottle or canteen. Food. Anything that is long lasting, lightweight, and nutritious such as protein bars, dehydrated meals, MREs24, certain canned goods, rice, and beans. Clothing. Assure it’s appropriate to a wide range of temperatures and environments, including gloves, raingear, and multiple layers that can be taken on or off as needed. Shelter. This may include a tarp or tent, sleeping bag or survival blanket, and ground pad or yoga mat. A camper or trailer is a fantastic, portable shelter, with many of the comforts of home. If you own one keep it stocked with supplies to facilitate leaving in a hurry, as it can take several hours load up and move out if you’re not ready. In certain circumstances that might mean having to leave it behind. Heat source. Lighter or other reliable ignition source (e.g., magnesium striker), tinder, and waterproof storage. Include a rocket stove or biomass burner if possible, they’re inexpensive, take very little fuel, and incredibly useful in an emergency. Self-defense/hunting gear. Firearm(s) and ammunition, fishing gear, multi-tool/knife, maps, and compass, and GPS (it’s not a good idea to rely solely on a GPS as you may find yourself operating without a battery or charger). First aid. First aid kit, first aid book, insect repellant, suntan lotion, and any needed medicines you have been prescribed. If possible add potassium iodide (for radiation emergencies) and antibiotics (for bio attacks) to your kit. Hygiene. Hand soap, sanitizer, toilet paper, towel, toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, and garbage bags. Tools. Hatchet (preferably) or machete, can opener, cooking tools (e.g., portable stove, pot, frying pan, utensils, and fuel), rope, duct tape, sunglasses, rubber tubing, and sewing kit. Lighting and communications. LED headlamp, glow sticks, candles, cell phone, charger (preferably hand crank or solar), emergency radio (preferably with hand crank that covers AM, FM, and Marine frequencies) and extra batteries, writing implements, and paper. Cash or barter. You never know how long an emergency will last. Extensive power outages mean no cash machines, so keep a few hundred dollars in small bills, gold or silver coins, or other valuables on hand.
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Kris Wilder (The Big Bloody Book of Violence: The Smart Person's Guide for Surviving Dangerous Times: What Every Person Must Know About Self-Defense)
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Focused on Princeton Newport, I lost track of Warren after 1969. Then in 1983, I heard about the remarkable growth of a company called Berkshire Hathaway. Not knowing it was to become Warren’s investment vehicle, I had stopped paying attention to it back in 1969. The stock price then was $42 a share, if you could find anyone to trade with. It was now publicly trading at over $900. I knew at once what this meant. The “cigar butt” had become a humidor of Havanas. Despite its having increased by a multiple of more than 23 in fourteen years, I made my first purchase at $982.50 a share and continued to accumulate stock.
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Edward O. Thorp (A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market)
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Under Duke’s leadership, Walmart’s stock price did increase . . . for a while. However, focusing on numbers before people comes at a cost. The once beloved brand also found itself embroiled in multiple scandals over the treatment of their people and their customers.
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Simon Sinek (The Infinite Game)
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Although the first stars of the Universe could not have formed planetary systems, the process did not take long to get underway. Because massive stars are short-lived, the first billion years of the Universe already had time for 1,000 generations of production of the heavier elements. Observations show that the early universe was already a quite dusty place. Although massive stars do not live long enough to host planetary systems where life is likely to emerge, they are essential to producing the elements that lower-mass systems use to build habitable worlds. The Milky Way galaxy, our home, formed not long after the Big Bang, and has been building its stock of heavy elements ever since. Most of this galactic chemical evolution remains internal to the galaxy, although galaxies do sometimes collide and exchange material. Over the past thirteen billion years of nucleosynthesis in the Milky Way, there has been ample time for thorough mixing across the galaxy. Thus, our Solar System incorporates ingredients from a mix of myriad expired stars, most of which have been processed multiple times through short-lived stars. Every breath you take includes oxygen atoms from thousands of different stars that have lived and died in our galaxy over the past thirteen billion years.
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Raymond T. Pierrehumbert (Planetary Systems: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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Since I entered the business world, conglomerates have enjoyed several periods of extreme popularity, the silliest of which occurred in the late 1960s. The drill for conglomerate CEOs then was simple: By personality, promotion or dubious accounting — and often by all three — these managers drove a fledgling conglomerate’s stock to, say, 20 times earnings and then issued shares as fast as possible to acquire another business selling at ten-or-so times earnings. They immediately applied “pooling” accounting to the acquisition, which — with not a dime’s worth of change in the underlying businesses — automatically increased per-share earnings, and used the rise as proof of managerial genius. They next explained to investors that this sort of talent justified the maintenance, or even the enhancement, of the acquirer’s p/e multiple. And, finally, they promised to endlessly repeat this procedure and thereby create ever-increasing per-share earnings.
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Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders, 2023)
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Six key themes The real reset has gone much deeper and encompasses six key themes, all of which are linked: 1) The shift from a push system, based on producer dominance, oligopolistic competition, limited supply and restricted access, to a pull system driven by consumer dominance, near-perfect competition, perfect knowledge and ubiquitous access to goods. 2) The change from mass marketing, based on a few research and segmentation studies, to personalized marketing, based on individual customer data. 3) The realization that the e-commerce revolution and the communications revolution (social media, user reviews, influencers, etc.) has broken the traditional supply chain, with its multiple players – manufacturers, branded wholesalers and retailers – all supping from the margin cup and adding their mark-ups to prices, and replaced it with a shorter and more direct route to market. 5) The realization that the stores channel was not the only, or even best, way of moving goods from factories to consumers. Indeed, that it was inferior to the e-commerce channel in many respects as a pure goods-transmission mechanism. 6) That putting the consumer at the heart of the business model required seeing the different channels as the consumer saw them – not competing, but complementary to each other. 7) That based on this, the traditional model of the store, as a ‘warehouse’ piled high with stock and with just a narrow fringe of branding and customer service on top, was obsolete and that only a ruthless attention to the remaining added value of physical stores could ensure their continued relevance and survival.
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Mark Pilkington (Retail Recovery: How Creative Retailers Are Winning in their Post-Apocalyptic World)
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Why invest in Stocks? Answer: 1) You can ‘own’ multiple businesses 2) Working hours are defined 3) No retirement age 4) Work from Anywhere 5) No organisation required 6) Fully scaleable - can buy 1 or 1 million shares at the same price 7) Quickest Liquidity 8) You can ‘bunk your ‘business days’ at your will, for as long as you wish, and get back as conveniently 9) All the ‘compliances’ headache is minus 10) Payments headaches are Zero. 11) Can make money on both side. 12) Get to know ‘Like Minded’ people without meeting them. 13) The kick of ‘identifying’ some businesses ahead of ‘The Aces’ is impeccably fulfilling.
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Sandeep Sahajpal (The Twelfth Preamble: To all the authors to be! (Short Stories Book 1))
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An advise call generates trade rules in C code; Detrend = SHUFFLE tests a strategy with a random price curve; NumTotalCycles can generate statistics from multiple simulation runs; plotHistogram plots histograms.
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Johann Christian Lotter (The Black Book of Financial Hacking: Developing Algorithmic Strategies for Forex, Options, Stocks)
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Despite its having increased by a multiple of more than 23 in fourteen years, I made my first purchase at $982.50 a share and continued to accumulate stock. By contrast, in 2004 I was talking to a bank president in San Francisco when he mentioned that his mother had been a limited partner in Buffett Partnership, Ltd., and received some Berkshire stock as part of her distribution when the partnership closed. “That’s wonderful,” I said. “At today’s prices [then $80,000 a share or so] she must be very rich.” “Sadly,” he said, “she sold at $79 for a several hundred percent profit.” If asked for advice, I recommended the stock to family, friends, and associates with the understanding that it was a long-term holding with a possibly volatile future. I didn’t suggest it to those who couldn’t understand the reasoning behind the purchase and who would be scared by a big drop in price. The response was sometimes frustrating.
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Edward O. Thorp (A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market)
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We don’t sell when stock prices rise suddenly. These nonactions during market euphoria have been as important as—actually, more important than—our acts of buying during market panics. As I wrote earlier, as of June 2022, out of our portfolio of twenty-four businesses (excluding the ones bought during the previous two years), we had multiplied our money by more than ten times in INR in nine (of these, the largest multiple, 82×, was for Page, and the smallest, 13×, was for Info Edge). In five of these nine, our holding period had been more than eleven years, and we had held the remaining ten-baggers for more than eight years. Why do we not sell when stock prices rise dramatically
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Pulak Prasad (What I Learned About Investing from Darwin)
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Strategy parameters must be trained individually for any asset. It is rare that multiple assets share the same parameters.
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Johann Christian Lotter (The Black Book of Financial Hacking: Developing Algorithmic Strategies for Forex, Options, Stocks)
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As a value investor, what really scares me away is that if investors believe the hype, a stock will be overpriced. Nearly all of the companies on lists of major accounting debacles had stocks trading at demanding multiples
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Joel Tillinghast (Big Money Thinks Small: Biases, Blind Spots, and Smarter Investing (Columbia Business School Publishing))
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Simply estimate where earnings per share (EPS) will be in 5 years from now. Slap a 15 multiple (P/E) on that number and you have a reasonable price target for the stock. Warren Buffett uses a similar trick all the time.
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Matthew R. Kratter (The Little Black Book of Stock Market Secrets)
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All forms of complex causation, and especially nonlinear transformations, admittedly stack the deck against prediction. Linear describes an outcome produced by one or more variables where the effect is additive. Any other interaction is nonlinear. This would include outcomes that involve step functions or phase transitions. The hard sciences routinely describe nonlinear phenomena. Making predictions about them becomes increasingly problematic when multiple variables are involved that have complex interactions. Some simple nonlinear systems can quickly become unpredictable when small variations in their inputs are introduced.23 As so much of the social world is nonlinear, fifty plus years of behavioral research and theory building have not led to any noticeable improvement in our ability to predict events. This is most evident in the case of transformative events like the social-political revolution of the 1960s, the end of the Cold War, and the rise and growing political influence of
fundamentalist religious groups.
Radical skepticism about prediction of any but the most short-term outcomes is fully warranted. This does not mean that we can throw our hands up in the face of uncertainty, contingency, and unpredictability. In a complex society, individuals, organizations, and states require a high degree of confidence—even if it is misplaced—in the short-term future and a reasonable degree of confidence about the longer term. In its absence they could not commit themselves to decisions, investments, and policies.
Like nudging the frame of a pinball machine to influence the path of the ball, we cope with the dilemma of uncertainty by doing what we can to make our expectations of the future self-fulfilling. We seek to control the social and physical worlds not only to make them more predictable but to reduce the likelihood of disruptive and damaging shocks (e.g., floods, epidemics, stock market crashes, foreign attacks). Our fallback strategy is denial.
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Richard Ned Lebow (Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations)
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The core of the fragrance Hayama is trying to build...
... is Jeneverbes."
"Jene... verbes?"
"That means juniper berries!"
JENEVERBES (JUNIPER BERRIES)
Perhaps the only spice derived from a conifer, juniper berries have been used as a spice as far back as ancient Egypt. They have been found in multiple pharaohs' tombs, including King Tut's.
In the Middle Ages, juniper berries were added to distilled malt wine to make Jenever,
the direct predecessor to gin.
The berries have a piney tang that, as they mature, gains citrusy sweet notes and a fresh herby scent, making it a spice with a complex and layered aroma.
"Add milk and flour to bear stock to make a thick and creamy roux, and then let it simmer.
When it has turned fragrant and golden brown, add the seasonings and spices...
... to make a perfect, fragrant gravy to adorn my fried bear!
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Yūto Tsukuda (食戟のソーマ 22 [Shokugeki no Souma 22] (Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma, #22))
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percent return, but international stocks returned 187 percent. The very fact that the returns differentials could be this large between U.S. and international stocks shows that you don’t get enough international exposure by just buying U.S. stocks. Faulty argument #2: One should overweight international stocks, because most of the world’s economic growth will come from overseas. I certainly agree with this argument, but that does not translate into international stocks outpacing U.S. stocks. That’s because it’s not exactly a secret that countries like China and India are growing faster than the United States, and this knowledge is already priced into the market. This is the same phenomenon as Google being priced at much higher multiples than Ford, because we know Google has better economic prospects. Remember that beaten-up value stocks tend to make better investments than the star growth stocks. The same may be true in that the fastest-
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Allan S. Roth (How a Second Grader Beats Wall Street: Golden Rules Any Investor Can Learn)
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In Schwarz and Clore’s seminal study on the phenomenon they term “mood as information,” they called people in various zip codes to ask them how satisfied they were with their life—a simple question rather than an elaborate decision task. The zip codes were chosen alongside weather reports. Some people were experiencing a sunny day, and others a rainy day. On average, people expressed higher life satisfaction when the sun was out. But the effect disappeared when the experimenter drew their attention to the weather, by asking, “How’s the weather down there?” In other words, if our attention is drawn to the actual cause of our mood, it stops having an effect. Schwarz and Clore’s findings have been replicated in multiple settings. Stock market returns have been found to be lower on days with greater cloud cover—and higher when a favorite sports team wins. Over and over, incidental events affect decisions they shouldn’t actually influence, simply because they affect how we’re feeling. Tell people what’s going on, though, and they can often overcome it. Which is great news for dealing with tilt
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Maria Konnikova (The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win)
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Questions to ask when analyzing a business Business - How does the company make money? - Does it seem like it should be a good business? Is it competitive? Do suppliers have too much power? Do customers value the product? Are there substitutes? - Without looking at financials, how does the company seem like it has done against competitors in its industry in terms of executing on its vision? - What reputation does the management team have? Do they seem honest? Straightforward? Valuation - What is the company's P/E multiple? Is it high or low for its industry? For the overall market right now? Why might the stock be trading at this valuation? - What is the company's free-cash flow yield? Is this a relevant metric given the stage the company is in? How does it compare to similar companies? - Is the company growing faster or more slowly than other companies with similar multiples? - Based on the number alone, does the company seem to have a rich valuation or a cheap valuation? Why might this be the case? Financials - What has been the trajectory of revenue growth over the past ten years? Why? What is it expected to do in the future? - How has the company's industry been growing? Is the company gaining or losing share in its industry? - What is the company’s level of profit margins? How does it compare to other companies in its industry? - How have margins varied over the past ten years? Why? - What percentage of the company's costs are fixed costs versus variable costs? - What is the company's historical return on capital? Why is it high/low? What does this say about the quality of the business? - What is the trend in returns on capital? Why? What does this say about the returns the company will have to make on its future investments? - What is the company's dividend policy? Why? If they are paying no dividend or a small dividend, is there a danger that the company's management will waste shareholder's money? Technical - How have the company's shares performed against the overall market and its industry over the past twelve months? - What seems to be driving this under/over performance? - What key news events are likely to impact the stock in the future? - Do mutual funds and other large institutional investors seem to be buying or selling the shares? Sentiment and Expectations - What are the consensus earnings estimates for the next quarter and year? Do they seem aggressive or conservative? - Does consensus opinion seem overly bullish or bearish about the company's future prospects? - What insight do you have that the market might be missing that will cause the shares to appreciate?
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Ex (Simple Stock Trading Formulas: How to Make Money Trading Stocks)
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corporations routinely and unabashedly smooth their earnings. That is, they create the illusion that their profits rise at a consistent rate from year to year. Corporations engage in this behavior, with the blessing of their auditors, because the appearance of smooth growth receives a higher price-earnings multiple from stock market investors than the jagged reality underlying the numbers.
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Martin S. Fridson (Financial Statement Analysis: A Practitioner's Guide (Wiley Finance Book 597))
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While Immelt said that he encouraged debate, meetings often lacked rigorous questioning. One executive recalled being in a board meeting in which Keith Sherin was presenting the quarterly financial results to the group. The Power business had missed badly, but little specific detail was provided on what went wrong. This executive braced for the reaction from the directors, but it never came—none of them asked what went wrong. When Flannery committed to renewing and shrinking the board of directors, it included half a dozen current or former CEOs, the former head of mutual fund giant Vanguard Group, the dean of New York University’s business school, as well as a former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The seventeen independent directors got a mix of cash, stock, and other perks worth more than $300,000 a year. The terms had been even more generous when GE still made appliances; the company allowed directors to take home up to $30,000 worth of GE products in any three-year period. The company matched the directors’ gifts to charity, and upon leaving the board, a director could send $1 million in GE money to a charity. Some directors admitted to having been sold by Immelt’s sweeping optimism, even if they knew he wasn’t the best deal-maker. But they knew he had a hard job, was playing with a tough hand, and had survived multiple major crises. Plus, they liked him. Immelt said that he did his best to keep directors informed, noting that he required them to make trips to GE divisions on their own, but he also knew that the complexity of the business limited their input. As they’d done under Welch, the board usually tended to approve his recommendations and follow his lead. Some felt that Immelt manipulated the board, and it was whispered that members were chosen and educated to see the company through his visionary eyes. There was concern that the board didn’t entirely understand how GE worked, and that Immelt was just fine with that. Like many CEOs who are also their company’s chairman, he made sure that his board was aligned with him.
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Thomas Gryta (Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric)
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On December 7, 1999, Kevin Landis, portfolio manager of the Firsthand mutual funds, appeared on CNN’s Moneyline telecast. Asked if wireless telecommunication stocks were overvalued—with many trading at infinite multiples of their earnings—Landis had a ready answer. “It’s not a mania,” he shot back. “Look at the outright growth, the absolute value of the growth. It’s big.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Carnival Cruise Lines has its own successful way of doing things, which in this case involved creating a musical group called “The Hot Shots!” The word “Fantastic” comes to mind when thinking of this musical group! Each member auditioned separately at the Carnival rehearsal facility in Miami and then rehearsed as a group until they were ready for the big leagues aboard ship. Fortunately for me and my team, which includes Jorge Fernandez, a former guitar player from Cuba and now a top flight structural engineer in the Tampa Bay area, who helps me with much of my technical work; Lucy Shaw, Chief Copy Editor; Ursula Bracker, Proofer, and lucky me Captain Hank Bracker, award winning author (including multiple gold medals), were aboard the Carnival Legend and were privileged to listen to and enjoy, quite by chance, music that covered everything from Classical Rock, to Disco, to Mo Town and the years in between. Talented Judith Mullally, Carnival’s Entertainment Director, was on hand to encourage and partake in the music with her outstanding voice and, not to be left out, were members of the ship’s repertory cast, as well as the ship’s Cruise Director.
The popular Red Frog lounge on the Carnival Legend was packed to the point that one of the performances had to be held on the expansive Lido deck. However, for the rest of the nights, the lounge was packed with young and old, singing and dancing to “The Hot Shots!” - a musical group that would totally pack any venue in Florida.
Pheona Baranda, from the Philippines, is cute as a button and is the lead female singer, with a pitch-perfect soprano voice. Lucas Pedreira, from Argentina, is the lead male singer and guitar player who displayed endless energy and the ability to keep the audience hopping! Paulo Baranda, Pheona’s younger brother, plays the lead guitar to perfection and behind the scenes is the band’s musical director and of course is also from the Philippines. Ygor, from Israel, is the “on the money” drummer who puts so much into what he is doing, that at one point he hurt his hand, but refused to slow down. Nick is the bass guitar player, from down under New Zealand, and Marina, the piano and keyboard player, hails from the Ukraine.
As a disclaimer I admit that I hold shares in Carnival stock but there is nothing in it for me other than the pleasure of listening to this ultra-talented group which cannot and should not be denied. They were and still are the very best! However, I am sorry that just as a “Super Nova” they unfortunately can’t last. Their bright shining light is presently flaring, but this will only be for a fleeting moment and then will permanently go to black next year on January 2, 2020. That’s just the way it is, but my crew and I, as well as the many guests aboard the Carnival Legend, experienced music seldom heard anywhere, any longer…. It was a treat we will remember for years to come and we hope to see them again, as individual musical artists, or as perhaps with a new group sometime in the near future!
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Hank Bracker
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Table 4.1 Equities Generate Superior Returns in the Long Run Wealth Multiples for U.S. Asset Classes and Inflation December 1925–December 2005 Asset Class Multiple Inflation 11 times Treasury bills 18 times Treasury bonds 71 times Corporate bonds 100 times Large-capitalization stocks 2,658 times Small-capitalization stocks 13,706 times Source: Ibbotson Associates, Stocks, Bonds, Bills and Inflation, 2006 Year Book.
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David F. Swensen (Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment, Fully Revised and Updated)
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With an extensive range of second hand cars featuring all makes and models, Worcester Used Car Centre can provide the right car at the right price. With so much choice on second hand cars why go anywhere else? Get the best prices and widest choice on quality used cars in Worcester! Contact us today! Our online showroom houses quality used cars with multiple photos and a full description so you can take a good look at our stock before coming to see us. The stocklist is updated constantly so the cars you are seeing are the ones for sale now so you don’t miss out.
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Worcester Used Car Centre
“
Why invest in Stocks? Answer: 1) You can own multiple businesses 2) Working hours are defined 3) No retirement age 4) Work from Anywhere 5) No organisation required 6) Fully scaleable - can buy 1 or 1 million shares at the same price 7) Quickest Liquidity 8) You can ‘bunk’ your ‘business’ days at your will, for as long as you wish, and get back as conveniently.
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Sandeep Sahajpal (The Twelfth Preamble: To all the authors to be! (Short Stories Book 1))
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Management and chairman of the Santa Fe Institute: “Buffett’s advice is so good but so hard. The point when there’s a valuation extreme is precisely the point when the emotional pull—in the wrong direction—is strongest.”11 Adds James Montier, portfolio manager at GMO: “People love extrapolation and forget that cycles exist. The good news is that you get paid for doing uncomfortable things, when stocks are at trough earnings and low multiples their implied return is high, in contrast you don’t get paid for
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John Mihaljevic (The Manual of Ideas: The Proven Framework for Finding the Best Value Investments)
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This is a simple method for investing systematically: Research: Ignore any stocks you do not want to own for any reason. Hold at least twenty stocks for diversification. Buy: It’s best to buy all your stocks at once. But it’s fine to scale in—make regular portfolio purchases over twelve months. One way to do it is to buy two or three stocks each month. Sell: For taxable accounts, hold winners for one year plus one day. Then sell. That maximizes after-tax returns. If a stock is up and still in the screener after one year and one day, hold until it leaves the screener. If a stock is down and in the screener, hold. If a stock is down and leaves the screener, sell. You should check your stocks at least quarterly to see if you need to buy or sell. Rebalance: Once you sell a stock, buy the next best stock in the screener you don’t already hold. The website acquirersmultiple.com has a screener for deep-value stocks listed in the United States and Canada. Sign up with the coupon “ZIG
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Tobias Carlisle (The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market)
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One simple rule for beating the market is to buy a portfolio of undervalued stocks. The acquirersmulitple.com website is a good source of ideas. The most undervalued names in the biggest one thousand stocks are available in the Large Cap Screener for free forever.
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Tobias Carlisle (The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market)
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The most common of these is the price to earnings ratio, or PE (commonly said "P" to "E," "PE Multiple," or just "Multiple"). To calculate this important ratio, simply find the price per share of a stock and divide it by its earnings per share (which you can find from the bottom line of the income statement or from just about any financial website). This ratio is of limited use on its own, but it can be very useful when compared to: 1. The average multiple the company has traded at in its past 2. The average multiple for stocks in the overall market 3. The average multiple for companies in its industry.
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Ex (Simple Stock Trading Formulas: How to Make Money Trading Stocks)
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the company should own a real business. The business should have strong operating earnings with matching cash flow. Matching cash flows ensures the accounting earnings are real and not merely the figment of a clever embezzler’s mind. We look for signs of earnings manipulation. Companies that own science experiments or toys in search of a business model are for speculators. But weak current profits in a stock with a good past record offers a good chance for mean reversion in those profits.
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Tobias Carlisle (The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market)