Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT SED TE EDERE NON POSSUNT NEFAS EST.
-roughly translated: “They Can Kill You, But the Legalities of Eating You Are Quite a Bit Dicier”

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

Dear LoS,

All of which leads to my question. My fight is scheduled for the next bank holiday in Green Park. It will be a duel between a combatant who is completely blindfolded but has a dagger against a man who has full use of his vision, but has no weapon. He who lives, works. As a Senior VP I have the right to choose which combo I’d prefer. I know you have been going through something similar recently, what would you do here?
-Markus Orlyius

In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king. I’ve never had the opportunity to say that in context, so today is a good day amicus (gladiator for friend). A no-brainer — choose sight and then fight a battle of attrition. He can only use that dagger in close, and he cannot flail it around wildly without having to stop. Pick your spots — if you see an opening kick him in the balls, then retreat tactically. Is he crouched in a protective fetal crouch? Maneuver so you can kick him in the head, and again tactically retreat. Rinse. Lather. Repeat. Veni. Vidi. Vici. Just grind him down like this, until he gets sloppy and you can get a stomp in on his knife-arm, either getting him to drop the weapon or breaking the arm. Know that he will nick you during this fight, be prepared for that, but just avoid getting gored. You will prevail if you fight like you bank — smartly. Good luck.

Recommendation: If your wife or SO are at high-risk for Tiger Syndrome, it is advised you immediately stockpile tranquilizers, preferably of the fast-acting variety. Chloroform will do in a pinch (be sure to just use a pinch). These will be necessary to calm your wife or girlfriend when her symptoms flare up to the point that (your and) her own safety are jeopardized. A mutated form of this disease, the Uchitel Strain, has been spreading like herpes in a VIP room of a Las Vegas Club, but it focuses on women who resemble knock-off Barbie dolls, whose first name is the misspelled version of a common first name (e.g. Jenn vs Jen or Jammiee vs Jamie) and those who suffer from chronic duck lipitis; our research indicates that no on who has ever read this site is in the high risk group for the Uchitel Strain.

Marlo: That’s my money.
Omar: Man…money don’t have no owners. Only spenders.
-The Wire

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
-Cormac McCarthy

HT to The Paleolithic Fish

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

The most exciting returns are to be had from an asset class where those who know it best, love it least.
-Don Coxe

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

Steve Wynn & Sheldon Adelson
Wynn always provides great quotes on his conference calls. Whether he is telling investors that he will take advantage of their stupidity or directly confronting the administration for their suicidal policies. Thank you Steve.
And to Sheldon Adelson, thank you for all the amazing commentary you provide on your conference calls. Among the many quotes worth saving, my favorite was your joke that you may be cooking the books at your recently IPO’d Macau subsidiary.

Twitter
Thank you for creating an information firehose that distracts me from work and play. If only I could post half as often as I tweet.

China
Thank you for loaning our country so much money. And thank you for being such a fascinating place, a parallel universe where collusion is OK and business operates on the businessman’s terms. I am hopeful you avoid the credit growth and over-investment fueled crash towards which I fear you are headed.

Happy Thanksgiving to all. Please tell us what you are thankful for in the comments.

Here is the deal. Inside one of these boxes is a key. If your box has a key in it, you will be the last person today to get one of those cute little G6’s, ok. Who will it be? Are you ready? Hold on, JR is back in our audio booth, I want, y’know. this calls for a drum roll, cue the drum roll, alright open your boxes. Open your boxes 1 2 3, YOU GET A CAR, YOU GET A CAR, YOU GET A CAR, YOU GET A CAR, YOU GET A CAR, YOU GET A CAR, YOU GET A CAR, YOU GET A CAR, YOU GET A CAR, YOU GET A CAR!!!!
-Oprah Winfrey

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

I feel useless. Like a woman with a college degree.
-Kenneth on “30 Rock”

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

I’ve never taken the high road BUT I tell others to. Because it leaves more room for me on the low road. (Driving gesture)
-Tom Haverford on “Parks and Recreation”

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

I hereby launch my new fund Doomsday Device Partners Fund I LLC. This is a private equity-style product specifically focused on the acquisition and exploitation of doomsday devices. The fund will develop a diversified portfolio of doomsday devices, which may include particle accelerators, nuclear research and generation facilities, underground virus research laboratories and key religious artifacts. Nicolas Cage will be Chief Investment Officer and Milla Jovovich will be Chief Risk Officer.

Unfortunately for you, and really for all of us, Long or Short Capital already has a Doomsday Device fund, one which is itself a doomsday device. We designed it with an automatic trigger system, a sophisticated system of arrays and failsafes such that, if any competing doomsday fund were ever to be launched, we would be able to retaliate no matter what happened to the value of our assets.

And unfortunately for you, and really all of us, we may not have been entirely sober when we designed this system. We called it The AYFKM system, but we generally referred to is as “No Whammy.” Kaiser conceptualized the structure. The first part of the design is an array which monitors an assortment of global communication channels. There is also a direct line of communication from No Whammy to the Long or Short Capital bunker, which is not a euphemism for our moms’ basements.

The device can be activated in one of three ways:

1. If No Whammy’s array detects that any doomsday fund has started pitching investors, the No Whammy goes live.
2. If the Long or Short Capital bunker signals for The AYFKM device to go live, it goes live. An instance where the line of communication between the LoS bunker and The AYFKM device is severed or otherwise goes down, The AYFKM device goes live. Just in case.
3. If there is seismic activity in Manhattan greater than 0.7 on the Richter scale or an unusually large flock of Canadian geese, No Whammy Goes Live.

What does it mean for No Whammy to go live? It means that within 72 hours, thermonuclear missiles will be fired from silos we have across the globe, rendering the Earth uninhabitable. We did design a fail-safe in case of a mistaken triggering of No Whammy. We have a bunker with a single person in it who has access to a button that can stop the process, provided he first gives enters the correct password.

Unfortunately for you, and really all of us, that bunker is staffed by Yuri, a drunk and a loudmouth. And Dmitri absolutely HATES Yuri. Dmitri, you see, was the first button-pusher we hired. We had a following out over a heated game of Risk in which one party did not honor an agreed upon alliance, and in fact, exploited the truce that the illusory alliance provided in order to build up forces and launch an invasion from said party’s Kamchatka base. We immediately replaced Dmitri with Yuri, because we are a responsible firm, one who cares about things like not negligently letting our doomsday device render the Earth uninhabitable. But what we could not control was how many times Yuri had had sex with Dmitri’s wife Ludmilla. Or in how many different positions. Or on how many internet webcams. And when he learned of them, these numbers very much upset Dmitri and he refused to divulge the appropriate password to Yuri. Or to us. So if No Whammy goes live and at that time Yuri deems it appropriate to stop the launch of the missiles, it’s on Yuri to correctly guess the appropriate password.

And thus here we are. Not for long mind you, but here we are.

Recommendation: This is a clear demonstration of how important it is that when deploying an automatically triggered doomsday device, one must first SIGNAL that such a device is being deployed. That is really the whole value in the device in the first place. This is a mistake we won’t make again, we promise you. Amazingly, this has happened before.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then plagiarism is the sincerest form of imitation.
-Malcolm Gladwell plagiarizing from his friend Jacob

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

Rosanne Altshuler, co-director of the Tax Policy Center in Washington, says that the checks “seem to be pure pandering to seniors.”

Indeed, the politics are attractive. People over 65 vote in large numbers. Saying no to them is never easy.

This is demonstrably false. After reading this article, I immediately set out to the street. There I spotted a female senior citizen. Although I didn’t cut her in half and count the rings, which we all know is the only way to accurately tell a woman’s age (and much more polite than asking her), she was definitely over 45. I could tell because I had no manly desire for her. I snatched her purse from the clutches of her arthritic claws.

“Give it back!” she said.

I said NO. And boy was it easy. Her arms didn’t hold the strength to dissuade me, being as scrawny and infirm as they were.

I trotted at a medium gait towards the river. She followed me on her senior scooter device. By the way, she had a senior scooter device.

“Do not even think about throwing my purse into the river, you [handsome] young man,” she chided from her saddle.

My feet stopped, my cobalt eyes locked onto her gaze, and my lips let lose NO. And again, it was easy to say “NO” to not even thinking about throwing her purse into the river. What could she do? Her aged brain clearly lacked the telepathic abilities that could have forcibly compelled me.

As I cocked my arm and gazed upon the horizon, I thought about her life, who she was, and how much she had given this world. What wonders she must have experienced growing up in the 60’s or 70’s! All those changes and stuff!

“Sonny, don’t throw my purse into the river. I beg you, I’m just a poor old woman on social security and we only got a 5.9% cost of living adjustment last year.”

That old bat’s mutterings gave me pause. Was I wrong? Were the old “not so bad?” Did these leeching frauds who are destroying the young deserve a second chance? A scan of the contents of her purse caused me to unpause. Raising the bag over my head, I turned it on its end, disgorging it of its contents. First things to fly out were wads and wads of counterfeit $100 bills. Then a leather carrying case for a syringe and rubber hose, a baggy full of heroin, 106,328 metric tons of CO2 emissions, a heater with the serial filed off, Polaroids of various women in open-toed shoes, gold bullion cubes, a well-worn copy of Eat, Pray, Love and innumerable kitten heads.

“Listen you old broad, and listen good. No. NO, I will not not toss your bag into the river. NO, I will not consent to you mortgaging America’s future. NO, I will not be ok with giving you a check for $250 so you can proceed to either not spend it, or worse, use it to subsidize Steve the Senior Stud’s cialis purchases at the nursing home, or whatever frivolous way you will deploy this cash. Cash which you clearly don’t need based on 1) the way you have pilfered from America’s future your whole life and 2) the contents of your purse. No no no NO. Learn what that means because I am going to saying it to you a lot.”

And with that, her purse shot through the air, entering the fray of the choppy waters, scored only by a screechy dying old-ladyish “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.”

Full disclosure: Long or Short is Long Age Warfare.

HT to the love of my life, crampell.

In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Obviously, Science has a different definition of “all goes well” than I do. Things not on my “all goes well” list:

1. Dying in a fire
2. Getting punched in my mini-ballers by a midget (think of the devastating angle they have on you)
3. Being melted by toxic waste like that guy in Robocop
4. RECREATING THE BIGGEST UNIVERSAL EXPLOSION ON EARTH FOR KICKS WITH YOUR FINGERS CROSSED THAT IT WON’T END EXISTENCE AS WE KNOW IT

But that’s not even the part that really frustrates me. Previously there was a notion that Science had some measure of prudence and competency. But Science has evacuated its collective gourd. From the above linked article:

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Which is worse:

1. Science is speculating there are time-traveling protective fairy particles to save us from ourselves.
2. Science is willing to admit that there is a chance that a “Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature” that time-traveling protective fairy particles would come back to save us from ourselves.

Recommendation: Isn’t this the kind of thing that would give a reasonable person pause? Not Science dude, no Science just plans to plow through it and hope it all works out. Awesome. Science, before we get sucked into the vortex of unexistence, I’d like you to step into the ring with me, mano-a-scienco, I’m done with your shit man.

Math, you’re up next.

As an aside, we are still selling July 2008 End of the World Puts and September 2008 End of the World Puts. Although not technically in the money under conventional physics, with time-travel on the table they could still pay off.

A camel is a horse designed by committee.
-Various

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

According to the Commission’s complaint, issued in August 2009, The M Group, Inc., d/b/a Bamboosa, and its principals falsely claimed that the company’s products are “100% bamboo fiber,” when they are composed of rayon. Rayon is a man-made fiber created from the cellulose found in plants and trees and dissolved with a harsh chemical that releases hazardous air pollution. Any plant or tree could be used as the cellulose source – including bamboo – but the fiber that is created is rayon.

The complaint also charged Bamboosa with making a number of other deceptive “green” claims. Bamboosa claimed that its products retain bamboo’s antimicrobial properties. However, even if the rayon used in Bamboosa’s clothing and textile products is manufactured using bamboo as the cellulose source, the FTC contends, rayon does not retain any natural antimicrobial properties of the bamboo plant. The rayon manufacturing process eliminates any of these natural bamboo properties.

Recommendation: You may have read our initial diligence on Bamboosa called “Why I Do, and Why You SHOULD, Have a Bambooner” in which we erected a strong case for buying Bamboosa. The thrust of that piece lay in this quote: “There are two O’s and a BAM up in this piece, time to get long (I think I just did).” We were bamboozled, legitimately bamboozled, and we deserve a pass on this one, because really, that’s a cool way to lose millions for investors who depend on the legitimacy of our recommendations. I know you’d agree.

HT to Felix Salmon

Me: You and your competitors have very high margins, some are even higher than Catepillar (NYSE: CAT) which is the global leader. Is there any risk that as you all add capacity those margins decline?

Chinese CFO (through tanslator): Uh so he says that there is no risk of a pricing war.

Me: Ok can you tell me why that is?

Chinese CFO: Uh so he says China has 5 main wheel loader companies. And all are good companies and will not start a price war. Also he says the 5 CEOs of the companies meet every month for a dinner and they all agree not to make a price war against each other.

Me (to the translator): Did he really say that?

Translator: Yes.

Me: OK, moving right along.

Carson! I think Obamacare {QUICK DEEP BREATH} by Barrack Obama {QUICK DEEP BREATH}) should be the number 1 video because Barrack is soooooo hotttt and everyone should have should have rad healthcare and it should cost way less and Obama rocks my world!!!! WOOOOO!!!!!

If however you actually want to waste your time arguing about healthcare we thought we’d take a few things we commonly hear and give you some IN YOUR FACE FACTS to drop on your friends and make them hate you more than if you just make outrageous claims that you can’t back-up. Mostly what’s below is true, mostly, and if that standard is good enough for science and math, it’s good enough for us.

People say: For-profit health insurance companies are the devil and the reason we spend so much more on healthcare than other countries (Note: this is a recurring theme of the hot selling book “Healing of Amercia” by T.R. Reid, now available at your local grocery store).

IN YOUR FACE FACT: Healthcare insurance companies make between 5 and 10% profit margins (p.5). So even if you usurped all these profits (assuming you could run the companies just as efficiently) the most you could save is 5-10% of the cost. And by the way many states already have not-for-profit Blue Cross Blue Shield plans. If not making profits made insurance companies give you the same care at lower costs then these BCBS plans would be blowing up like a totally sweet Jenna Haze automatic blow-up doll. But they’re not, they’re slowly deflating like blow-up dolls tend to when you make them wear a spiked choker against their will. Mostly.

In a truly free market, the Invisble Hand has to give the Dollar a reach-around.
-Jon Stewart

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing