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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4775 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 7, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I’m on Hülsmann’s Abundance, Generosity and the State, an attempt to understand gifts in the framework of Austrian economics. It was apparently inspired by Benedict XVI’s Caritas in veritate.

I just started into Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. So far, so good. We had to learn about his OODA loop at The Naval Academy, and I knew he was responsible for other parts of air combat strategy, so it's nice to get more details.

Boyd was born in 1927. The descriptions of his early life during the Great Depression made me happy to be alive now, and the descriptions of his positive male role models who emphasized accomplishment, integrity, and hard work made me long for days gone by.

About halfway through The City and the City by China Miéville. As I mentioned last week the comparisons to Kafka seem well-earned. Also reminds me of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy a smidge.

I got about 30% into Iron Gold and dropped it. I quickly caught on to some of Pierce Brown's writing quirks, many of which are bad, and couldn't continue.

Now, I'm starting Christopher Roucchio's Empire of Silence, the first book in The Sun Eater series. I read the first book is the weakest and the rest of the series improves with each book.

I'm sorry to hear that, but I understand. Brown is not the best writer in the world.

I wish I could tell you it's all worth it, and I almost believe that myself. Dark Age is better, and Lightbringer was also quite enjoyable, but they're not going to be much different in style than Dark Age.

At the risk of ruining the books for myself in the future, what writing quirks did you notice?

Reading two books simultaneously, Woke Up This Morning, which is the oral history (in book form) of The Sopranos. My fanaticism for The Sopranos borders on obsession; there is nothing (except The Wire) that comes close to its level of writing and it remains the benchmark by which I judge all shows. Watching House of the Dragon after having just rewatched The Sopranos is a joke. HOTD is nowhere near the same level of quality.

I’m also reading Ordinary People. Just a few chapters in and it’s nice and depressing. So far so good.

Mad Men is outstanding though I admit it falls short of Sopranos and the GOAT of all GOATS, The Wire.

A lot of the writers / producers / show runner people from Sopranos were on Mad Men as well which makes sense.

For whatever reason, I could not get into Mad Men. I tried twice, got through Season 3 on both attempts, and I just...lost interest.

I felt similar about Deadwood which many people have said to be in the same quality ballpark as The Sopranos. For Deadwood I watched seasons 1 and 2, and while I thought it was good, it also wasn't compelling enough for me to continue.

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are both outstanding, but don't have nearly the rewatchability of The Sopranos and The Wire. True Detective season 1 is also a considerable force, and I would rank it alongside with any individual season of The Sopranos.

Switching gears, have you read either of David Simon's books? Both Homicide and The Corner are two of the best nonfiction books I've ever read. I highly recommend both of them (in that order).

Mad Men hits its stride in Seasons 3 and 4. I implore you, try again.

Agree about David Simon's books. George Pelecanos (who has a bunch of writing credits from The Wire) has a whole D.C. quartet which really feel like The Wire set 1 hour south on I-95. Supreme Tier beach books.

David Simon is an interesting person to me in how he, unfortunately, followed the bad path of the mainstream / Hollywood adjacent Liberal. The Wire is amazing in large part because there are no clean answers. With maybe one or two exceptions, every character and every institution (the police, the schools, the labor unions, hell, the criminals) are shown to be complex systems wherein individual interest, political pressure, and system wide breakdowns conspire to make The Right Thing hard to do. I always loved that Simon's writing and direction did this when it's a lot easier for show runners to pick easy "good guy vs bad guy" narratives.

But, if you watch We Own This City, which is a "spiritual successor" to The Wire, it seems to have pretty clear cashed in for "Cops-R-Bad" tropes. Paired with some of Simon's personal comments on a variety of issues, you can tell where he lines up today.

Sad, but, all in the game though, right?

Peter Lynch's One Up on Wall Street. It's pretty good. Earnestly informative and funny too. I think someone here recommended it. :)

Peter Lynch is the GOAT. I found One Up to be the best book on investing I’ve ever read.

It's a bit old though. Have you found anything more recent, of similar quality?

I have, for the most part, given up on individual stock picking and activist investing. When I was younger, I read such things as The Intelligent Investor, A Random Walk Down Wallstreet, Get Rich Carefully, among others, but I’ve since become a FIRE follower and Boglehead. I have a small portfolio of individually picked stocks, but 90% of my net worth is tied up in index funds, mostly S&P 500 and target retirement funds. I still dabble with stock picking (and even options trading during the COVID insanity) but for the most part I just do boring, automated ETF purchases.

I won’t get rich fast, but ideally I will get rich eventually. I also don’t have to worry about picking stocks, beating the market, or questioning where I should invest my money. I simply transfer it to Vanguard and call it good.

ThisIsTheWay.jpeg

Can you pick individual stocks and beat the market? Yes. What is required? Something close to a full time job of research and modeling to do it. If you're comfortable making investing your full time job, go for it! Most people are not because it is heinously boring.

You exaggerate. It does not require several hours each day, from what I've learned. You should do a couple hours of research into a company and learn a little about its industry before you make the first purchase. And you should know what category of company it is. A cyclical would have to be watched more closely, but no one is forcing you to buy cyclicals. After the buy-in you don't need to watch it like a hawk or do "modeling". The same principle of patience applies to individual stocks as it does to index funds. Just leave it for several years while ignoring short term swings. If it's a great company like Berkshire Hathaway, or Microsoft or Apple, you can leave it for a decade or two. Follow the news about the companies/industries from time to time, and read the quarterly and annual reports of the companies you own. But that does not take huge amounts of time, and it's not like you'll be owning 20 companies if you know what you are doing. A handful is enough to mitigate risk.

This reads a lot like "It isn't that hard to win the Super Bowl if you're really good at football."

How do I get good at football?

How do I become good enough to do this low time consumption research and investing? 10Ks and 10Qs are dozens to over a hundred pages of dense language, how do I know what to pick out of them so I don't have to scrutinize every word? How do I know when I know enough about an industry? How do even define "risk" so that I can "mitigate" it (the use of the word "mitigate" really makes me suspicious. Risk cannot be "mitigated" in the sense that it can be fundamentally reduced. Risk can only be transferred. Whatever else you might think of him, this was the highly accurate central point of N.N. Taleb's Black Swan series).

More systemically, are you really going to say that with a few hours here and there of cursory research, one can assemble a portfolio that truly generates long term alpha? It's easy to delude yourself into thinking you're a genius for riding beta and then, when a drawdown happens, to pat yourself on the back for "being patient" and maybe even "buying the dip." But let's not peek at the Sharpe ratio and discover our portfolio is actually just a volatility monster over exposed to a few factors that would be laughed out of any actively managed fund's investment committee.

I'm still on And the Band Played On. It is such an engaging, well written book, that among other things it is making me think of how much I hate writers who make everything depressing and grimdark all the god damn time. Shilts wrote ATBPO, about AIDS, while dying of AIDS, after most of his friends died of AIDS, and it is filled with humor, irony, wry observations and satires. It's hardly ligthhearted, but it maintains a lighthearted degree of readability.

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