LC

Another shade to the industry http://m.spiegel.de/international/world/a-967198.html#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer=http://www.reddit.com/?count=25&after=t3_24okcb

Tobacco doesnt provide value for society? Humans have been smoking it for thousands of years. How is a business which supplies humans with a thousand year old desire not valuable?

I don't like his business. Fashion is fashion...coach is fashion on a large scale which provides spectacular results or spectacular failure. Very risky

Ran into it a few months ago but I put it in the too hard pile due to the lack of info and ignorance on my part of the farm industry.

I am curious about this as well. Does anyone know where foreign insider ownership is filed? The closest I've found is this article: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-25/lukoil-ceo-alekperov-buys-77-million-of-company-shares-in-2014.html But I cannot find a source to the original filings.

I also looked at both and ended up going with just VRX because I liked the assets and management better (or at least, I had a higher level of certainty with them). That might change over time as ENDP proves itself. To link this with the UU thread, do you think by the time ENDP proves itself, the possibility of outsized returns will have gone?

Smaller also means that missteps can do a lot more damage. The mesh lawsuit is more of a concern to me than management...

That was so freaking cool!

So one thing about insider trading is that, apparently, if an executive walks up to a random person on the street and screams, "My company XYZ inc is going to buy ABC inc!", and those random strangers trade on that information, that is not insider trading? This is my understanding after Mark Cuban made this point on his blog about a month ago.

I'm not sure how cheap this looks to me. In USD, they have about 600m of cash on the b/s, they earned around 400m in 2013 and trade at about 4bln. About 10x earnings. Verizon trades at 11-12x earnings and doesn't have any of the risks of operating in Argentina. Is it the fact that they are overcapitalized and can optimize their capital structure?

I like this question.

Fidelity, TRP, TD Bank, JPM all own some Valeant, and I believe Vanguard and SS own some of Allergan, although I agree that this deal puts them in a bigger league and they will get a more serious look from these firms.

Interesting idea. I imagine it shouldn't be too difficult to create some serious voting power with the purchase power of this forum, especially with those microcap or nanocap. However, how do you define a "group". Will people communicate with each other through an internet forum loosely be viewed legally as a group? Any lawyers here? I don't see how it's any different from 20 partners having a conference call or meeting at a restaurant, yet for some reason I feel the SEC or whomever may not feel the same way.

I feel like these guys are the Walmart of pharma. Assemble a varied stable of product and wring every cost out of the system that is possible.

Thanks for posting, Ross.

From what limited information we have...looks like another shrewd deal from Mr. Pearson. He is leveraging the activist section of the investment field to do bigger deals on his behalf. Does anyone expect anything other than cost-cutting here? I expect a lot of costs to be "synergized": R&D accounts for 16% of Allergan's revenue. Expect that to go down once Valeant reigns that in. Same with SG&A, which accounts for 41% of sales.

This is what attracts me to GNCMA. Relatively it has performed quite well. In your opinion, how do you think they were able to grow sales so consistently over the past 10 years? As far as I've seen, they were market leader back in 2004 as well. So I don't think it was just as a result of expanding their network. Do you know if there has been a gradual consolidation of smaller players into the current market oligopoly? I don't see much evidence of this but it makes sense that this would have occurred. I think the real advantage here, and the reason that a decent operator such as GNCMA can earn good returns in this industry is due to a very specific form of customer captivity. The threat of new entrants is very low, and the customer is very much dependent on having service. For example, from the 2004 AR: ConnectMD Services Expansion. We have developed an agreement with Alaska Psychiatric Institute to expand our ConnectMD service to provide tele-psychiatry services to health clinics across the state of Alaska. This new service will triple the number of communities that have access to clinical staff via a video link and we believe it will allow for better and more cost-efficient care for patients. With this service, behavioral health patients in remote areas of Alaska can now be treated in their own environment, instead of having to travel to Anchorage for treatment. Most urban and suburban environments would never even think of having this problem. Alaska is a totally different beast in this respect. The "need" for connectivity and the advantages of this network are both magnified. I believe this is a very strong contributor to past 10 years of successful sales growth of GNCMA. Packer, I would love to hear your thoughts on the above.

"growth" capex scares me in this industry. either way you slice it, you're selling data delivery to a certain sales territory. the only way growth capex actually causes "growth" is if it can convince the same customer to spend more on data delivery.

You can find the debt here: http://finra-markets.morningstar.com/BondCenter/Default.jsp just search using the symbol/cusip: BAC I checked the 10K and realized they didn't have much detail. I also checked the website and not much detail their either Many thanks!

I checked the 10K, it does not break out each individual issue as far as I can tell. It gives two pieces of information. Per Eric's example above it listed subordinated notes characteristics: -Fixed, with a weighted-average rate of 5.83%, ranging from 2.40% to 10.20%, due 2014 to 2038 - $22,379 -The second piece of information is the maturity schedule of this tranche. However the crucial pieces of information as mentioned, is missing. I.e. when does the 10.2% debt come due?

For education purposes, does anyone know what filing a complete breakdown of a banks debt schedule would be in? Would it be somewhere in one of the call reports or something else filed with the SEC?

Poor baby :/

I have to come next year just to catch a glimpse of you characters. Hilarious :)

xerodex, I agree with you. I don't like companies showing high ROIC unless the underlying industry has characteristics which would lead to high ROICs (exception: structural differences apart from other industry participants). Otherwise, I think more often than not the company is experiencing a temporary boon which will ultimately revert to the mean of the industry's characteristics, and I cannot time when that will happen.

The banks get better interest rate spreads when rates are somewhat higher than they are now. Instead of borrowing at 1% and lending at 3%, they can borrow at 2% and loan at 4.3%. The 0.3% over a trillion dollars becomes significant. At a certain point rates go too high and people stop borrowing as much. Dimon is talking about hitting a sweet spot where soreads and volumes are both good. Historically banks didn't do as well in rising rate environments but most of the bigger banks now hedge off possible interest rate risk. It also has to do with the speed of a rise. That good? My fear is that increased rates will reduce the overall demand for loans. I read somewhere that banks actually do better in a lower interest rate environment because of the higher volume of new/refinancing loans, which also come with transaction fees, etc