BoneRanger

Huckabee is a bigot and a liar.

So he is qualified as the Republican candidate? Is that your point? 5555

That's how he got the FOX gig.

Certainly a LOT more hard working than the pathetic clowns and excuses that pass as politicians in this country.

Would you have seen the arrest of so many high rankings cops in the days of PT or Dems?

Don't be silly. They Junta is declawing their political & elite enemies by selective targeting.

The big CID Chief for example. There are others, just like him, calling the shots.

His obsession with God will scupper any chance he may have had.

When he takes a religious viewpoint over scientific fact, or makes comments that fly in the face of 98% of the scientists on global warming, that's an indication that he won’t include science on his reference shelf.

God will be making the decisions?

Would he weigh rational scientific evidence in the most critical decisions about medical research, terrorist weapons threats, the environment, and education?

Do we want a president that says it is O.K. to dis science?

An other nutter as president of the USA?

FOX News must be the most idiotic news on the planet.

Actually, most idiotic would be MSNBC.

FOX & MSNBC. What kind of moron would pay any attention to the crap they put out?

Targeting the religious and dumb demographic audience is apparently profitable.

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WOW.

Is high season over that quickly?

This morning in Jomtien, at the popular Surf Kitchen restaurant, ZERO customers when I went for my coffee.

The streets very quiet.

I've seen a few Thai ladies move to the USA and become very successful.

Keep them away from the local Thais is my advice.

I'd be very wary of buying any 2nd hand motor vehicle in Thailand, unless you know it's history.

Far to many don't look after them, servicing costs baht, it's running so why bother! How many times do you see idiots screwing the arse end out of motorcycles especially.

2nd hand vehicles also hold their value here, with little depreciation, unlike the west. 10,000 baht below 'new price' for a 2 year old motorcycle would be a good deal in Thailand, but you don't really know what your getting for your money. It's Hobson's choice whether your lucky or not.

Personally if your going to make an investment, I'd go for new with manufacturers warranty.

The only way I'd buy 2nd hand is with a full service history and a 12 month warranty.............highly unlikely because even a dealer wouldn't stick his neck out that far, when even he doesn't know how the vehicle was treated by the previous owner. The exception might be if you knew the owner and that they cared for the vehicle.

Even buying one with a documented service history means that the "mechanics" have had their paws on it.

They almost got me killed & practically destroyed my last bike and all they did was change the oil and fix a few flat tires.

That Elly May sure did fill out those jeans nicely.

No one had the hots for Miss Hathaway? Or Mrs Howell?

Miss Hathaway had the hots for Jethto and Elly May.

Her boss, Mr Drysdale was brilliant. The show had a great cast.

Land of Smiles

Speaking of Pizza.

Never never ever let a slice of that pizza from the Central Food Court near your mouth. YUK!

You have been warned!

Also 9/11 was Clinton's fault. If that doesn't make sense, have Sean Hannity explain it to you.

After that, read what Richard Clark has to say on it. I'm sure Condee Rice will have 'no comment.'

Speaking of influential people in the 2016 campaign to elect the new prez, Condoleezza Rice and the Republican party know the best thing she can do is to remain publicly silent.

Condee "Mushroom Cloud" Rice is another kiss of death to the R party in this election and in any election going forward. "Condi" gave G.W. all the bogus support Bush needed to go into Iraq and to do everything else that made G.W.Bush the worst foreign policy president ever.

Colin Powell as secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice as Bush's other secretary of state have made the Republican party think twice, and now R's are anxious to keep each one quiet presently and going forward. Powell was a political general, who never had a major command and Rice is a political hack academic.

Upon leaving office the final poll recorded Bush's approval rating as 19%, a record low for any U.S. President. Just about everybody that was attached to GW Bush has been ruined. Rice, Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft.

And his dad made some real mistakes too. Remember Dan Quayle? Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin. Now that would be a fun ticket to watch. Dumb and Dumber Go To Washington. At least the late night comedy shows would be funny.

Neither Pattaya police nor city municipal officers have made any real effort to regulate parking on the street....because they control every square centimeter and are renting the space to these people.

The fox guarding the henhouse.

John Bogel invented the index fund, much to the dismay of the fee based funds and the 65 Billion dollar investment industry in the States.

He is listed as #1 in the Investor Hall Of Fame because he is the conscious of the average investor.

Always full of thoughtful advice, pertinent to this topic, I am posting this 26 minute interview.

the destorted thai sense of ownership,as we see with parking and cart food sales,and general attitude''i thailand,you no thailand''..it is time for thais to realize they dont own the moon and the stars..

They THINK they own it because they paid some crooked official.

Go to war with those people I say.

Previous 50% means someone is delusional.

The 50% that was supposed to be open was sold by the city and police. There was about 5% open area I noticed.

And now, how does it add up to 60% open space if they have designated 100 meter chair areas then alternating 10 meter open areas??

Oh, and how about the removing all their crap every evening so the place doesn't look like a slum?

After the debates, I thought Romney was OK, but when he was asked about healthcare for uninsured he replied, " they can walk into an emergency room and someone will take care of them."

Thats his policy?

That blew it for me.

What a turkey.

Paying active managers is a bad idea and chasing the winners is even worse.

Paying active managers is only a bad idea if you're not prepared to do the work to identify the ones who consistently outperform, to understand why the outperform, and to monitor ongoing performance.

The alternative, passive management, is to accept performance that, by definition, is going to be mediocre.

Personally, I prefer to put in the effort and get the superior performance (where available).

Actually, the SP500 Index fund holder does better than mediocre and will beat almost all managed funds over time.

The SP500 average is determined by the overall performance of the fund managers...then subtract their expenses. Ooops. Those expenses drag their customers to below average or mediocre.

Say you start with $100,000 invested with a 2% yearly fee VS $100,000 invested in a low cost SP500 ETF.

After 20 years both investments averaged 10% /year.

Results after 20 years - $491,570 VS $672,750

That 2% expense costs you $181,180 in 20 years or $9,059/year or $755/month or $25/day!

Anyone..anything except Billary.

That would be the final nail in the coffin to the USA way of life.

Absurd.

It was a Bush (that inherited a budget surplus from Bill Clinton) that put the economics into a tailspin, wrecked millions of lives.

Lots and lots of cars in Jomtien so I assume the 1/2 the crowds are Thais from Bangkok and other towns nearby.

'Lots and lots of cars in Jomtien so I assume the 1/2 the crowds are Thais ..."

Because only Thais drive cars?? Undoubtedly many of the tourists are both Thai and farang who've travelled from elsewhere in Thailand, but then that's hardly a big change from any other holiday period. A tourist is a tourist.

Rather than counting the number of cars to decide if 1/2 the crowds are Thai, it would probably be easier to take a look at the actual people on the beach ... although one might mistake the occasional Chinese tourist for Thai whether spotted in a car or observed hitting the bottle of Mekong or Dang Som at the beach.

99.9 out of 100 cars driving around Jomtien are driven by Thais, I noticed.

99.9% tourists don't drive cars in Thailand I also noticed.

I sat on the beach today and over 60% were Thais I estimate.

oh no , another bush ?

They'll have Kate Bush in next, who, in all fairness, could do a better job than all three should a foreigner be allowed in.

Hilary's campaign slogan. Lick Bush in 2016.

Hillary has been vetted and put thru the political wringer for decades. The republicans have been harassing her since they tried to force Bill Clunton out if office. Apparently all they have is Bengaaazi....

How will Jeb Bush fare, when his fellow republicans tear him apart in the primary election?

The performance of passive etfs far outperforms managed funds over time consistently if you look at them all. It's like betting money on the Faroe Islands football team because once they beat Greece- you need to look at the overall picture.

(We can spend all day retrospectively picking well performing passive and actively managed funds.

Simply lumping together actively managed funds in a particular sector and comparing that with an equivalent ETF isn't a fair comparison. Funds vary greatly from the closet trackers (far too many of those) to the contrarian, to the index-agnostic stock picker, etc., etc..

For active investment, one needs to choose the fund manager, not the fund, and though past performance is one factor, it is only one. It helps to see how his/her approach works over different parts of the economic cycle and how it works in the case of major market discontinuities. One also needs to understand what the approach actually is and why it does (or does not) work. This can take some time, but the rewards are well worth it.

It seems to me a no-brainer that a fund where an expert picks the stocks that are most likely to outperform over a period and avoids the dogs is going to do better than an ETF where (typically) the weighting is heaviest for the larger cap stocks (i.e. large, older companies where the time of fastest growth is probably behind them, or over-hyped businesses with inflated valuations) and the dogs come as part of the parcel.

Using the football team metaphor, a top-notch fund can be like a team where the manager has hand picked who he considers to be the finest players, whilst an ETF is a team made up of good, middling and mediocre players picked by drawing players' names out of a hat. If I were a betting man, I know which team I'd place my stake on in a match.

But the fact remains that passive funds out for managed funds consistently (it does seem counter intuitive, which is good I guess for the funds managers who make a very good living charging high fees for their actively. Managed funds! ).

No, the fact remains that passive funds outperform some managed funds - not all - and not consistently. If you don't want the middling performance produced by ETFs, then it can be well worth one's time researching fund managers to identify the ones that can consistently outperform across the full market cycle. They do exist. In the UK I would consider the likes of Adrian Frost, Neil Woodford, Angus Tulloch, Nigel Thomas and the Asian Equities team at Aberdeen to fit in that category. They all have a 15+ year track record of out performance. I'm sure managers of similar calibre exist in the US and other countries.

The sad fact, however, is that most fund managers are pretty mediocre and not particularly bright. I base that upon my experience of having worked with groups of them at a Saudi Arabian bank in London (which managed the investments of the Saudi government and large oil companies) and a retail-focussed asset management operation for a few years. I certainly wouldn't want to trust them with my money. And even some of the bright ones become closet index trackers because they're afraid to lose their jobs if they make bold calls which eventually come bad. The exceptional managers can be hard to find - but it's well worth the effort in my opinion.

Statements about how ETFs consistently outperform actively managed funds (a) are usually based upon US data and ( are made by representatives of the ETF industry who have an axe to grind. Unfortunately, it's become taken as gospel by people who don't like (for whatever reason) fund managers. The reality is much more complicated.

Paying active managers is a bad idea and chasing the winners is even worse.