Kennon-Green Family Christmas – The 2017 Edition

What a wonderful treat to visit your site and find this new posting. The new tree you have under construction looks fantastic. It is hard to pick a favorite ornament, although a strong case can be made for Mayor McCheese. Thank you for sharing!

I want to wish you and Aaron a very Merry Christmas. Enjoy this magical time of year. I also hope 2018 is kind to you both, and filled with many pleasant surprises. Merry Christmas!

Thank you for the kind words and I'm glad you like it! Merry Christmas to you, too!

I've got to say, I am partial to the box of Dunkin' Donuts! There isn't one near I live, so every time I go home for the holidays, I have to stop in for a bag of munchkins and coffee with cream!

What a great collection. I love the Wells Fargo and Jack Daniels decorations best myself.

I must say that I'm looking forward to seeing your Monopoly tree and other assorted accessories in the future!

May you and Aaron have a very Merry Christmas.

Thanks! And a Merry Christmas to you, too!

Ah, in case Disqus did not pick up my comment - here is my work email 🙂 [email protected]. This domain is only given out to Google employees as far as I know. Come by for a tour of Google sometime!

Amazing thanks for sharing Merry Christmas to yourself and Aaron!

Will be interested to know whats on the menu for the Christmas meal!

Merry Christmas to you, too! We haven't finalized the meal, yet, even though we're a few days away from Christmas. With all of the travel we've done lately, and our time being devoted to finishing year-end tasks for Kennon-Green & Co., we find ourselves finishing our Christmas shopping at the last minute for certain family members. We figured once we get that done, we'll turn our attention to food.

You and Aaron do such a wonderful job of Christmas decorating.

I hope you both and your families have a very Merry Christmas!

Thank you! Merry Christmas to you and your family, too!!!

Merry Christmas !!

Merry Christmas to you, too!

Merry Christmas to you all, can't wait to have a house of my own to do awesome themes with !!

It really is one of the best things about having a place that is your own - you get to decide what it looks like and, if it isn't working for you, can change it at any time. Aaron and I have talked about expanding the Christmas tree into different seasons, adapting it based on time of year. For example, for several years we've been discussing whether or not we want to create an all-black tree in October, especially if it were decorated in a Kingdom Hearts theme with little heartless ornaments hidden through it so you could only see their eyes unless you were looking closely, Keyblade ornaments ... maybe I can justify even more trees by letting each of our future kids pick a theme and decorating their own tree with them! We can have the main family Christmas tree then smaller Christmas trees around it.

It is absurd how excited and happy this makes me. I have no explanation. It's like I turn from a sober-minded businessman and investor into a little kid, again. The wonder and magic of it never left. I feel this way about autumn, too. The moment it's time to start baking pies ... I feel about decorative pie cutters like I do about ornaments. This year, we didn't have very much time to do anything other than work - which is fine because I've enjoyed ramping up the firm more than almost anything else I've ever done in my career - but I didn't get to tackle two of my goals in that department: I need to find the perfect recipes for 1.) blackberry pie and 2.) pecan pie.

Seeing all these beautiful pictures makes me happy! Beautiful and so inviting! Wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas!

I'm glad and the same to you! Merry Christmas!

I love the investment/case study themed tree!

I think I own stock in many of the companies represented on the tree outside of DNKN. I love their products but haven't done enough research on them as a company.

Thanks. It's a lot of fun putting these together not to mention surprisingly hard to find ornaments for some businesses; e.g., even huge blue chips like Johnson & Johnson or Procter & Gamble don't have a lot of licensed stuff that would work. In any event, it seems safe to say that if our office is big enough in another decade, we're going to need to have a seasonal Christmas tree forest to contain it all.

This may seem silly but watching the care and effort you put into your decorations really does make me happy! 🙂 Merry Christmas to you and Aaron!

Merry Christmas to you, too!

Merry Christmas! What type of ornament organizer are those? I'm unhappy with the ones I've got, as you have to unpack the entire crate to get at the ornaments on the bottom. Those look perfect for my needs.

They are the 120-piece Deluxe Rolling Ornament Chests from Balsam Hill, which you can find here. It looks like they are sold out at the moment but the normal price is $229 each. You have to assemble them, which is a bit of a pain, but they are great because you can pull each drawer out individually and move it around as you need before putting it back and zipping the storage unit closed like a giant protective bag.

That picture of a treeline with snow and a road behind it covered in ice is awesome. Don't know why I related to that one considering all the recognizable items in the pictures, but it is pretty cool. That Christmas tree picture looks straight out of a fantasy game. Happy holidays.

Happy holidays to you, too! What looks like a road is actually a creek covered in ice. When it rains, or the snow melts, it swells into a huge rush of water that sounds so cool and is a lot of fun to watch as it comes from upstream. The best thing about it, and one we will definitely miss if we decide not to keep the house when we move, is the migrating birds in those woods. Throughout the year, we see birds that we didn't even know existed. They return regularly over the years and it's incredible to watch them or listen to their calls. There is this black and white bird that is really cool. The bright red cardinals against the snow are also cool.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
Any chance you swung by the King of Prussia Mall to do some Christmas Shopping while you were on the East Coast?

The same to you, too! We didn't. As for King of Prussia Mall, I think we weren't far from it, briefly, when driving on the highway but we didn't stop there. We had to stay on schedule and make it through our trip. (I didn't pay a lot of attention to much of the scenery this time around because I was working from a MacBook Pro through a cellular connection in the car for a huge portion of the drive.)

Hmm, couldn't find this ornament on your tree...
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Bitcoin-Christmas-Tree-Ornament-Gold-Seasonal-Decoration-Collectible-BTC-ASIC/263347764099?hash=item3d50bffb83:g:78oAAOSwrhhaHD1a

Maybe that would be a good tree idea for a future year - Theme: Tree of Delusion. Subtitle: Human Stupidity and Denial. It might be a bit tricky visually pulling the elements together; Dutch tulip bulbs, miniature reproductions of old dot-com stock certificates, a tiny, laminated copy of the return assumptions the State of Illinois is using on its pensions (that's always fun reading - here is a copy of the annual report in PDF) if you find this sort of madness interesting) ...

The problem is that (often well-meaning) people behaving in an extraordinarily stupid way because they are ruled by their emotions not their intellect stumble into making obscene profits in a short period of time and mistake that for wisdom. There is nothing stopping BitCoin from trading at $1,000,000 or $0 tomorrow. There is no intrinsic value to it. None. It cannot function as a store of value - even those who claim it can and will demonstrate their double-think and denial by refusing to exchange it regularly for goods and services, largely hoarding it, instead, because they believe the price will continue to increase, meaning they are treating it as a de facto capital gain speculation. (Besides, as someone who founded and owned a successful retailer and wholesaler, no merchant in his or her right mind would be willing to transact a meaningful percentage of business in an exchange mechanism that fluctuated so violently that it made knowing costs, and profits, impossible.) Not to mention the foolishness of holding anything but spare transactional liquidity in a form that can be stolen without any recourse. If someone robs your bank, your nominal purchasing power is restored by FDIC insurance. If someone (like North Korea, to use one recent example) decides to steal your BitCoin wallet using the full power of the government's resources, you don't stand much of a chance of keeping it safe. Who wants to sit around guarding, or worrying about, his or her cache all day? What kind of life is that?

Governments largely look at BitCoin as if it were a cute distraction for people but if, in an extraordinarily unlikely scenario in which it became an acceptable exchange unit for buyers and sellers in the broader marketplace to the point it posed any reasonable competition to a government-backed currency, it would be destroyed swiftly and ruthlessly.

(P.S. If I'm being completely candid (and at the risk of offending a lot of people), I was in the car with Aaron during a Christmas shopping trip late last night when I saw your comment and my first, instantaneous reaction was to say out loud, "That's because I'm not stupid." BitCoin is one of those things that tends to tap into the imagination of a certain age male with a certain libertarian streak... something he believes will change the world and, by participating, makes him privy to information the masses do not, yet, realize. He feels a compulsive need to proselytize, reinforcing his conviction. In reality, it's mostly eye-roll inducing, "I am 14 and this is deep" logic that requires enough understanding of the topic to be dangerous but not enough to grasp how it all fits together. The last time you saw it arise was when the movie "Fight Club" became a hit in the late 1990s and a meaningful minority of young men didn't understand the irony of the message. This same - force, if you want to call it that - cycles back around every twenty or thirty years, manifesting itself in different ways. The people running the show, though, mostly understand what the game is about and will end up walking away with real wealth, in the real economy, having played everyone else for a sucker. These warnings won't mean anything until they do, though. Delusions can go on for a long, long time. If two years from now, BitCoin is at, again, $1,000,000, someone who bought today is going to gleefully exclaim, "Look what that idiot said - I'm glad I didn't listen to him!" In the end, intrinsic value is like gravity in cartoons. You can walk off the cliff and ignore it for a bit, but maintaining that ignorance doesn't work indefinitely.)

Of course, there is nothing immoral about gambling on this sort of thing if you 1.) enjoy it and 2.) it won't have any meaningful long-term financial consequences. The really smart ones were those who mined the cryptocurrencies in the first place without any large financial expenditure in the earliest days who, other than electricity and wear on existing equipment, effectively had a zero or near-zero cost basis so participation posed little initial downside.

None of this is investment advice, of course.

Agree on many of these points.

I asked one of my friends when we were talking about if they would take the same money they were looking to "invest into bitcoin", and instead go to Vegas and play with it there.

If the answer to that is yes, because it is fine if I lose this particular amount of money for my financial situation it doesn't matter, then OK fine, you've made the decision to potentially lose it all (not that I'd choose the same).

If the answer is no, then you now see that Bitcoin isn't for you 😀

Things Joshua Hates
1. Brutalist architecture
2. Debt
3. Irene Rosenfeld
4. Bitcoin

Strictly speaking, #4 should be "Greater Fool mentality" but this way it's funnier.

I don't hate debt per se. If I could issue $10 billion in bonds with semi-annual interest payments, a 100-year maturity, and no financial covenants requiring a minimum quoted net worth at any given moment (e.g., on mark-to-market securities), I'd gladly do it. Though, that gets into an ethical dilemma because I think whomever took the other side of that transaction was behaving very foolishly. If they were sophisticated and understood the risks, though, I could probably live with it. All else equal, you're right. I think one of the main reasons I have an aversion to leverage besides risk reduction - I like knowing even if the world went into a Great Depression, I'll still be wearing cashmere - is that I love freedom. When new cash arrives in our accounts, Aaron and I like to know we can use it for anything - to buy more investments, to spend, to give away to friends or family, to donate to charity ... when you pre-sell your cash flow through debt, you give up an element of that freedom. The joy is in the ability to wake up and say, "What are we going to do today?" If a major portion of your output and income are pre-determined, where is the fun? I don't like it.

I don't hate Irene Rosenfeld as a person, I hate how she manages businesses and what she does to consumer brands. In my opinion, her style ultimately consists of little more than extracting brand equity built up over generations by cheapening the product for temporary boosts in profit, ultimately causing more harm to consumers, shareholders, and employees. She might be a wonderful person and a lovely neighbor or friend but I don't want her in charge of Oreo or Cadbury.

I don't hate Bitcoin or greater fool theory, they make me sad and concerned for people who are manipulated by them. It is a feeling akin to someone watching children playing on train tracks and a few of them, bizarrely, insisting that it's the cool thing to do - that by not joining them, you're an idiot. They have no idea what they are doing or the level of danger to which they are exposing themselves.

Brutalist architecture? It should be cast back into the hell from which it emerged. It is a blight on civilization and a testament to human depravity.

Things Joshua Hates
1. Brutalist architecture

Things Joshua Feels Ambivalent About, but with a Generally Negative Undercurrent when the Thing Arises in Conversation.
1. Debt
2. Irene Rosenfeld
3. Bitcoin

Your emotions are much more sophisticated than mine. My response to these things would be to cross my arms, pout, and declare defiantly to no one in particular, "me no likey."

ಠ_ಠ

This set of comments has been one of the funniest things I’ve seen.

And here I was thinking I could enjoy a game of Cryptocoinopoly with Joshua.

I be going into 2018 with about 25k worth of GPU mining equipment I been building up this year and 30k worth mix of bitcoin/litecoin/eth/bitcoin cash. Mark my words Joshua I will come out of 2018 with at least 200k easy.

This is no greater fool theory. it's a social network.
As the social network grows, so does the value of said network. Cryptocurrency market are going to do amazingly well in 2018.

Also, for the record am not some libertarian or some idiot playing on the train tracks. I have Aspergers and emotional type trading is not the way my brain is wired. I simply think this is black swan event and a good time to make money.

And to copy Joshua, None of this is investment advice. Just consider me some kid that has lost his mind.

https://i.imgur.com/VBs1eAo.jpg

I can just quote intelligent investor "all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare "and the second quote is "even the intelligent investor is likely to need considerable willpower to keep from following the crowd."

I guess there's still 11 months left in the year for the crypto rocket ship to get to da moon...

I've been wrestling with if the greater fool theory is the quicker way to make enough money to gain control of my time.

Glad to see thought leaders opinions when they disagree with the bitcoin get rich quick thing, I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Feels bad man.

But the trains are no good unless you own all four on the board.

Hey Joshua, Merry Christmas!

Funny, I checked your site, just to see if you'd post something on Bitcoin

So... it's safe to say you don't think cryptocurrencies are the future and Bitcoin is only the beginning of a trend that will ultimately redefine money and other amazing advances like the collapse of the nation state?

Obviously, given I fall in that libertarian camp you mentioned, I disagree. Then again, I'm also not in a buying frenzy right now. I'm with Perry Marshall on this:

https://www.perrymarshall.com/48074/bitcoin-nuclear-winter/

and

https://www.perrymarshall.com/48232/bitcoin-bubble/

He's older than me, and you I imagine, so maybe he grew out of the "certain age" bracket you describe, but I imagine he's still pretty libertarian-leaning.

I'll go on record now saying Bitcoin is going to change the world. I am betting it (or some other crypto) will become the defacto reserve currency and, like you said, governments everywhere will try and destroy it. But... that's just not going to work at this point. All that said, I'm not QUITE as convinced as someone like John Mcaffee -- I don't have that type of swagger nor confidence: https://www.rt.com/news/411379-john-mcafee-bitcoin-prediction/

-- Caleb

P.S. If you approve comments before posting, please feel free to remove these links if you don't want links out to other comments. I want to respect your comment section.

Congratulations and Merry Christmas! Thanks for offering, that was a kind thought!

Joshua,
Merry christmas! Wish you and your family happiness, health, laughter and joy in 2018 and century beyond. On more selfish note and in the interest of honesty and full disclosure I asked santa to convince you write more in 2018 🙂

Merry Christmas and the same well-wishes to you and your family, too! I really do both want and intend to write more. So much is happening so quickly behind the scenes as things are taken off my plate in order for Aaron and I to refocus our lives that it's easy for us to forget little of it is visible publicly. We see the light at the end of the tunnel, though. As more and more things become routine, and we put systems and process in place, we're able to envision a point at which we have our personal time back; a moment at which the transition from one phase of our life to another is complete and we're off to the races.

It will help a lot, too, when the Kennon-Green & Co. website is completed because most of the time I spent writing for About.com / TheBalance.com will be devoted to releasing new investing and financial content there. A huge portion of it is built behind the sole holding page that is visible to everyone so when we are ready, we can take it live, which will occur sometime in 2018.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you and your family! I hope your day was fantastic. 🙂

Likewise and likewise!

Merry Christmas Guys !! Miss the posts , do write on non financial topics please 🙂 I am sure the next year will be great for you and all 🙂
Best Wishes

Merry Christmas to you, too, and I'll try! (I shared some more details about my writing plans for 2018 elsewhere in the comments section.)

What are the distinguishing characteristics of people you've observed that managed to make substantial changes to habits in their life, be it pursuant to a New Year's Resolution or otherwise?

Oh, and um...spoiler alert?

JAB announced its intention to eat DPS today. Do you have any DPS holdings from c. 2014 or so? I remember discussing it briefly around that time.

I'd be interested in seeing your thoughts on the Malcolm Gladwell book when you finish it! I am actually listening through season 2 of his podcast (Revisionist History) right now, which I highly recommend if you haven't heard it.