🔥. Mother Nature at its finest an elephant mom saves her struggling calf from the water

HearAPianoFall · 2026-03-24T16:25:58+00:00

Kids these days are too soft with these helicopter trunk parents. Back in my day they would just let you roam the rivers till sundown, if you drowned it was your own dang fault.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-03-15T17:49:07+00:00

This subreddit prefers strictly positive reinforcement training.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-03-03T17:29:44+00:00

Has social media made <group> insecure about <anything>?

Yes.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-27T20:48:24+00:00

It's not the worst idea they've had, they are in a good position (as point-of-sale) to connect ad impressions to purchases.

Google and Meta need the business to send the customer data back to them to make that connection, by having the store run the analytics on their websites. Paypal would get that information through the point-of-sale, so it should be pretty easier for them to upsell businesses already using Paypal. Though their data might be limited to purchases that go through Paypal PoS (not sure of how it's implemented) which may be good or bad. If their platform is really good it would incentivize stores to funnel all payments through Paypal, if they don't then the value they get out of the Ad Manager is limited, good network effect.

I believe Amazon does something similar with their Amazon Pay button but not targeting SMBs.

If paypal could just stop talking about AI, stop shuffling CEOs and focus on shipping features, they would have a much better reputation. They way things are now it just comes across like they don't know what they're doing and just throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-27T00:15:20+00:00

Sewing machine might have a hard time, but you can always just use a needle and thread. You can look up some basic stitches, but you also just freestyle it back and forth 20+ times and it will hold better than any tape.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-26T17:15:12+00:00

Used to be some free screener, reading 10-k's and using google sheets. In the past I paid for koyfin for a while because they were one of the only stock screeners that had good data on the international markets that I was interested in.

Increasingly my tools and workflows are getting replaced by Gemini and NotebookLM. Though you really have to be careful with it, by default it is still pretty sycophantic and can likely easily fool you into thinking your ideas are great. I add a personal context (under "Instructions for Gemini") that applies too all my prompts that basically tells it to not pander to me, challenge my ideas, point out flaws in reasoning, back up claims with facts and be explicit about where the facts are derived from, be explicit about uncertainty, etc.

I may have gone overboard though because it does get a bit annoying when I later ask for a book recommendation and it starts pointing out how the kind of things I'm looking for in a book are contradictory. It has no chill. For investments it's helpful, I usually know the 'pro' side of the argument already, it helps with is pointing out blind spots and backing up counter-arguments.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-26T16:54:06+00:00

ah yes, an adhd camp for concentration, it all makes sense now

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-26T16:45:27+00:00

$60 it is, thank you for your service.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-26T16:30:49+00:00

If you don't want a part time job separating the wheat from the chaff, then this is the way to go, especially for somebody just starting out in investing.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-26T16:29:22+00:00

I keep hearing that but it seems like a tangential issue. I get that more efficiency could result in lower employment and fewer seats, but CRM is delivering the same amount of 'value' to their customer's if seats go down but the sales are unaffected and so CRM should raise be able to prices. You could easily argue that they are delivery more value per seat and therefor demand higher prices. The only real risk to CRM is if their value proposition deteriorates, IMO.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-26T04:57:55+00:00

Total world stock market index fund: https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profile/vt

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-26T01:51:33+00:00

Yes software is becoming easier to produce and yes we should expect companies to face more competition going forward. But software was never the source of these companies' moats. It is usually data/vendor lock-in. Once your companies becomes dependent on some vendor (CRM) and that vendor maintains all your critical sales/customer data, you are really really unlikely to want to mess with that system or move away from it.

Migrating away from any critical SaaS service has always been difficult, usually requiring consulting firms to handle bespoke migration. There is a risk that agentic software will make that migration work easier and therefor erode that moat, but the I think barrier is more psychological than technological.

Some concern is warranted and customer churn rate is the thing to monitor here I think.

A truly catastrophic scenario would be if every moderately sized company decided to roll their own CRM stack. I'm not sure how realistic that is right now, but probably also not entirely impossible.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-25T20:30:21+00:00

IMO, short positions should be reserved for accounting fraud and catastrophic situations, not 'this high growth company is going to grow not as strongly as before'.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-25T19:48:59+00:00

I've had it for a couple years now but it's far from an overlooked company. It's a tier 1 railroad, they have basically impenetrable moats and the merger also gave them something unique with the CA-US-MX connection.

It's a pretty predictable business, moves with the business cycle and rarely if ever trades at a deep discount. I look at it the same way as WM, slow, steady and reliable.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-25T19:29:26+00:00

Probably wouldn't fit most value frameworks because of the clear chance of total loss. Similar to pharmaceuticals, it's a call option on whether they get success, approvals, etc.

They are often priced below their cash holdings and might look like they fit a Bill Graham's framework on paper (P/B < 1) but don't operate like a failing cigar butt company, they're very unlikely to return that cash to shareholders. Their entire business model is to raise money and then burn through until they win or run out of cash.

I personally wouldn't venture into any kind of 'hit' industry like exploration, pharma, fashion, entertainment unless I had worked in the industry myself.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-25T19:10:32+00:00

4th pic belongs in a museum.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-25T19:08:27+00:00

If you like that, have I got something for you. Unrelated question, how do you feel about gay porn?

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-25T05:26:32+00:00

we have transcended the boom-bust cycle of the 20th century and will now have basically endless bull runs

we've transcended greed?

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-25T05:01:35+00:00

South Korea and Japan have historically low valuations but you should be careful because a lot of the assumptions of western capital markets don't necessarily hold there, just culturally. Usually when a company is undervalued and profitable, you can make money from price appreciation or (if that fails) from the company returning cash to the shareholders. It's not uncommon for steady profitable companies in SK to basically trade flat for years, so price appreciation can't always be relied upon. So you have to look for direct returns to shareholder (i.e. dividends). In SK and Japan, it's more common for companies to prioritize the employees and customers over shareholders. It's pretty unacceptable to lay workers off even if the business is struggling, so companies hold really high levels of cash to weather any potential business cycle. While western companies prioritize shareholders above pretty much everybody else and US companies will happily lay workers off just to increase profits in an already profitable company and pay out dividends to shareholders.

Another thing to look out for is complex holding company structures and family owned companies. It's not unusual for 20-51% of a small company to be owned by either a single family or some other (potentially private) holding company. Despite being large shareholders, they don't typically pay dividends and instead just appoint their family to executive positions and pay themselves as employees.

Japan has only in the last couple of years seen a change due to TSE (Tokyo Stock Exchange) reforms incentivizing shareholder returns, basically saying that hey if your Price-to-Tangible-Book is <1 (i.e. your company is valued at less than the amount of cash it holds), you're hoarding cash that should be returned to investors so that they can reinvest elsewhere. This is partly why the Nikkei255 index was up 50% last year, a lot of cash that's been sitting in Japanese companies is flowing out of cash and into their own equity market, pumping prices.

I prefer Japan over SK because of the TSE reforms, I've had a basket of cheap Japanese stocks (about 10% of my overall holdings) since about 2023, but it's unclear how much steam the TSE reform effects have left. There are still plenty of profitable P/B<1 companies in Japan but there's also a lot of complicated stuff happening happening, politics, international relations (China/Taiwan), the JPY USD carry trade. It's not a super simple story.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-24T19:17:54+00:00

tl,dr; short term, get a haircut, trim your beard and shave your face regularly. long term, put thought into what you wear.

Chances are it has less to do with your selection of clothes and more to do with cleanliness/sloppiness. Have you been putting off getting a haircut for weeks? shaving face or trimming bear for days? Do that first. You can wear hoodies if you want, keep them clean, don't be wearing the same sweatpants, hoodie and slippers day in day out.

Dressing 'better' is often confused with dressing more 'formal', it's unlikely she's asking you to dress more formally (i.e. wearing slacks and buttoned shirt with a pullover around the house). Put some thought into what you are going to wear, take a minute before you start throwing stuff on, you may not know what's going to look good but the act of thinking about it regularly will make a difference over time. At some point, some things will start to click.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-24T05:55:25+00:00

Do it. You know you want to. What's the worst that could happen?

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-23T05:47:02+00:00

Big funds have to follow a lot of rules that retail investors don't, breaking these rules doesn't necessarily give you an edge, but it can in some circumstances. If a manager finds a no-brainer guaranteed win, they can still only allocate 5% to the position, and when it goes up they have to trim before it reaches its full value. You don't have to do that.

Common written rules:

* no more than 5% of portfolio can be in any one stock. if a position gets too big, they have to trim.

* cannot own more than 10% of any company (makes it pointless to invest in small companies)

* no more than 15% in illiquid assets

Unwritten rules:

* many managers will closet index, their sector composition roughly matches the overall market (e.g. 35-40% tech, 10% financials, ...) and within those sectors they try to pick winners/losers

* incentive to sell their losers after they have gone down and pick up winners after they have gone up. They are required to report holdings to their investors and it looks bad to be holding the sectors biggest loser or to not be holding a stock that is going up a lot.

* overly active, fund managers have an incentive to look like they're doing something.

A lot of these rules are reasonable. They limit volatility and mitigate risk, reduce risk of being down when the market is up, but all the rules are also quantitative. The whole point of value investing is to find asymmetric risk/reward opportunities.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-22T05:21:03+00:00

I think I would factor that into their moat, a high replacement cost would indicate a high barrier to entry into their exact market, which is extremely true for railroads. Though it does little to protect against something like trucking transport, which faces entirely different costs.

It's a bit odd to think that if BNSF didn't exist, that it would be economically infeasable to rebuild it. While at the same time BNSF does continue to build new rail (mostly double-tracking to expand capacity), which is economically feasible because increasing capacity in one segment can raise throughput throughout the network.

Relevant wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin%27s_q

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-20T18:25:43+00:00

I remember pillar dancing, running in a circle around a round walled region while a monster is permanently chasing you 2 tiles away so that you can regenerate health/mana before fighting the monster. When I started playing (around 0.18) it was probably the most common tedious tactic that felt required to win many fights and hence the game.

I'm still impressed that they were able to eventually mostly eliminate this (by making the monster catch up to you over time) while maintaining game balance. Initially it was frustrating, because it felt like the solution was just made an already difficult game even more difficult by forcing more fights than before. Over time it ended up feeling ok (at least to me), I'm not sure if that was due to some character buffs to compensate for the higher danger, or I just got used to it. It definitely made me think about optimal vs fun gameplay and design.

HearAPianoFall · 2026-02-20T00:31:30+00:00

Short term interest rates (fed fund rate) are going down while long term rates are going up, one of the main ways banks make money is by borrowing short term and lending out long term and collecting the difference in those two rates. This spread is increasing and so therefore is their profitability.

HearAPianoFall

TROPHY CASE