In my view, as an investor in Japan, these firms are the best entry points to getting access to business relationships (and key projects) across Asia. One can imagine these to be huge aggregators of business relationships and as central points (besides the banks which are getting away from cross-shareholder relationships) into the major _keiretsus_. This is the entry fee for being really in the know in corporate Japan.
And, as another commenter mentioned, getting a sweet arbitrage on the low borrowing rate and earning a nice dividend yield doesn't hurt.
I don't think he ever did it with the intention of being around to spend the money. He lives off his modest salary, drives an old vehicle, and still is in the same normal house as decades ago.
The money is more like points in a game to him I think, he just loves the game.
> In reality the man has multi million dollar vacation houses
Source?
He had a vacation home that he bought in 1971 for $150k, but sold it a few years ago. So far haven't seen anything that would suggest he's not as frugal as advertised.
Yeah, but if I had the kind of money he had, I would build a money bin on a hill and put 3 cubic acres of cash in it. Offshore accounts are just boring in comparison.
Some people suffer a purpose crisis when they retire. Some people just enjoy what they do. Some people enjoy being at the top of an organizational hierarchy. Whatever the reason is, it's legitimate for a person to not retire if they choose not to do so.
I am curious if he will really honor The Giving Pledge upon death.
I guess he's one of those people that have spent so much time working on their business that he won't really retire until he's passed away.
Also, I suppose he has a whole team of people helping him make those kind of decisions, so perhaps this just reflects the company's strategy instead of a personal one? (as much as they can be treated separately, which they may not)
Buffett likes to tell the story of Rose Blumkin, who founded Nebraska Furniture Mart, and worked until she was 103. Once she retired, she was dead within a year. This is meant to serve as a warning to other Berkshire managers thinking of retiring.
Even if you're looking for causation, detrending is usually necessary to obtain consistent estimators (in statistical terms). For example, Granger causality works with two stationary timeseries:
Adding a common deterministic trend to two random time series does not make them correlated. Intuitively, you still cannot predict the deviation from the trend of one timeseries using the deviation from the trend of the other timeseries.
His statement (after adding the constant trend) is misleading:
"Now let’s repeat the same tests on these new series. We get surprising results: the correlation coefficient is 0.96 — a very strong unmistakable correlation"
What he's calculated is the correlation between a set of points from y_1 and y_2 - and that will be large, of course - their (deterministically increasing) means have correlation 1.
The quantity that qualifies as correlation for predictability purposes is actually the correlation between the deviations from mean.
This is all fairly clear if you use the actual formula (Pearson correlation):
E[(y_1 - mu * t)(y_2 - mu * t)] / (sigma_y1 * sigma_y2)
Great article, thanks very much for posting it. Nobody else seems to have captured the relevant terminology: "cointegration" and "stationarity". Those perfectly captured it for me.
Using a cluster of Owin (self-hosted) servers with NancyFx on Mono to host REST APIs behind nginx for a distributed-computing solution on AWS. Also use EntityFramework on Npgsql+postgres - experience has been positive.
Only downside is that for something like a customer-facing portal, the identity-management is tied to Windows-specific features, for now - so have had to build a custom solution for this that runs on Linux. Waiting for ASP .NET vNext and its Identity solution when it becomes slightly more mature.
EDIT: Also evaluating a move to Azure. Primary driver (for choosing the .net stack) has been prior experience with C#, .NET and Visual Studio
English as the primary language (great learning resources available for it all across the globe).
Real economic mobility - you can really make it big if you're smart, persevering and slightly lucky. Who you know matters to a certain extent in all countries, but the significance of that factor is less in the US as compared to the other countries, in my opinion (others may disagree, of course).
No you can just download the free isolated/integrated Visual Studio shells - PTVS works just fine. And, imho, it's the best Python IDE I've worked with (I mostly use pandas/numpy/scipy)
And, as another commenter mentioned, getting a sweet arbitrage on the low borrowing rate and earning a nice dividend yield doesn't hurt.