Jurgis

Can you elaborate on what you think the issues are? Thanks

Yeah, I agree, issue shares like crazy. Although there's always an argument from Internet Bubble days that the moment company does secondary, it crashes since the momo guys abandon it. I doubt it's true. So, yeah, secondary baby asap. 8)

Classy. 8)

I'm thinking: was Buffett whipsawed out of WMT? is he whipsawing out of IBM?

Yeah, I understand. Good luck. 8)

Bottom graph is pretty neat. Two comments: it might be nice if it was zoomable/resizeable; I think you should draw new positions differently. The most obvious is the AXP/KHC transition. IMO, you should go from 0% KHC in 2015Q2 to 18% KHC in 2015Q3 as a blue triangle. Right now you are drawing this as green AXP area which looks quite misleading and incorrect. The mouseovers show correct intervals, but the overall visual is quite broken. Anyway, just a comment. 8) Good luck. Yeah I agree. Unfortunately I'm somewhat beholden to how the tool I'm using formats it as there isn't a ton more I can do to adjust it—they only give you so much control. But there's definitely more that I can do to the graph to make it more easily readable, and I'll continue tinkering and improving it. Appreciate the feedback. Please keep it coming Would the tool work the way we want it if you put in 0% KHC in 2015Q2 into the data? I.e. explicit value of KHC 0 for that date? If exact 0 does not work, it might be possible to put in 0.0001% KHC in 2015Q2 (though exact 0 would be better/nicer). Yeah, both of these might require massaging a data a bit before passing to the tool. Anyway, just some thoughts how to get around the tool limitations. ;)

Bottom graph is pretty neat. Two comments: it might be nice if it was zoomable/resizeable; I think you should draw new positions differently. The most obvious is the AXP/KHC transition. IMO, you should go from 0% KHC in 2015Q2 to 18% KHC in 2015Q3 as a blue triangle. Right now you are drawing this as green AXP area which looks quite misleading and incorrect. The mouseovers show correct intervals, but the overall visual is quite broken. Anyway, just a comment. 8) Good luck.

Depends on the bond, the broker, your country, bond country (if different), your account size, etc. My guess is that you won't be able to. But it's a WAG without additional info. The best is to ask your broker rather than asking here. They should give you definitive answer. 8) Good luck.

I'd be interested in IAC and GRUB pitches. You or Sanjeev should move this thread to General Discussion category though. 8) Peace.

Just shut up and give da man da money! 8)

The thread name should be changed to CTEK, since they changed ticker and name. I agree with KJP: Mac McMillan did well for himself: first he sold CynergisTek to Auxilio and then became CEO of new Auxilio/CynergisTek. Maybe he can repeat this again (couple more times ::) )? Although I guess he'd need to get a bunch of options/shares for himself first. Looking at Q3/9mo results https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=1011432&accession_number=0001445866-17-001573&xbrl_type=v# , it's a mixed bag. Balance sheet levered with tons of goodwill and intangibles. Tangible book is negative. Earnings are hit by acquisition-related intangibles, but can we really discount this as non-cash when they paid a ton for CynergisTek? With that non-cash charge, you'd think they have great OCF, but OCF is negative... mostly due to AR increase? Maybe that AR is all nice and cool, IDK. It could do OK/well based on the security scare in healthcare especially. Also it could be bought (again) by some larger co. And it could run up tons on speculation, pump&pump, etc. even if does not do great on business side. So there are attractive sides possibly. I don't think they are attractive enough for me, but maybe I'm not looking at it in a right way. Overall, I'm not that interested. It was mentioned on SI, so I took another look. I don't own shares at this time.

Broker does not remove them. You still have them in your portfolio with zero or whatever price broker puts there. Then you go through BK and either get something or not. It may even happen that you get X (new shares, new bonds), sell them and then later get more because of some additional settlement or whatever. It's all electronically tracked.

Underground bunker with automatic defense perimeter. Mercenary or robot army if there's a lot of extra cash. This thread is going to dogs really fast.

It's interesting to see very little activity from T&T. They are usually more active.

I have Roku box. Never tried non-Roku boxes. There's definitely stickiness. OTOH, I only watch Netlix/Amazon on it and I don't know if they get money for this. (OT perhaps: all non-Ethernet boxes are automatically disqualified. I would not want/try to run video over WiFi.) No plans to invest.

I doubt SoftBank can pay in cash for Charter. It's not even clear if Malone would want cash - taxes?? So, yeah, majority of purchase would likely have to be Softbank shares, which Malone might not want either. IMO Masa should just buy DISCA, TRIP, EXPE, LGF... all my "crappy" Liberty universe companies. 8) ;D

I think Hielko and Sunrider capture two different and opposing forces that affect the final result: Let's simplify the example a bit first: Company A spins off a sub, 1:1, i.e. after spin there remains the same amount of A shares and Aspin shares. What would be the prices of A and Aspin and does the company influence them? Well, even at 1:1 spin we need to know how much ops (revenues/earnings/FCF) goes into A and Aspin. Also how much of balance sheet goes into A and Aspin. Here is where the situation becomes hairy. In super simple case both A and Aspin gets 50%/50% of everything. Then both will trade at 1/2 of the pre-spin A price (assuming the businesses A and Aspin gets are "the same"). But in reality this is not what happens. A might get 80% of revenues, 30% of earnings, 10% of FCF, 60% of cash, 20% of debt. Aspin gets the remainder. What now? That's where two factors come in: Company does indicate where it thinks A and Aspin should trade. Clearly, this is only a guess. It may or may not affect the tax side of equation (I am not sure, I am not expert, all that). OTOH, Hielko is right that once the trading starts, investors may decide that company's guess was total crap and the shares should trade at a very different price. You as investor may or may not be able to sell/buy at the company indicated price. It depends how fast the price moves and if it even starts at the company-indicated level. Edit: BTW, the 10:1 spin ratios is mostly a company trying to indicate that the spinoff is ~1/10 of the original company. In reality, every spinoff could be 1:1 in share count and the price would just be 10:1. But companies try to "lead" or "guess" or "indicate" the price by doing the 10:1 ratio and making investors think in terms of spinoff being 1/10 of original company that way.

Can I get $1 every time someone mentions flowers and weeds? Or just the weed... ::)

Yeah, great find LC - although it's quite a bit more depressing to me than it is to the author. Although probably that's the outcome of realization that "Science is hard — really fucking hard." or that humans are really not well prepared to do the research (or analysis of research) in areas with large complexities, numerous influencing factors and hard statistical analysis. Or like another quote from the article said: “There are so many potential biases and errors and issues that can interfere with getting a reliable, credible result.” Venturing a bit farther afield, I wonder how many people - both in research and outside - grok the statistics even if they were available and well calculated. Probably >99% of general population would not be able to deal even with rather simple probability caveats like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_of_the_inverse . But even taking the population of people who should know this, there's apparently high percentage who don't or at least don't grok it offhand (i.e. they would get correct result if they spent time on it, but usually they won't, so incorrect result becomes default "conventional wisdom"). Talking about p-values, I'd guess the percentage numbers are even worse both in general population and specialist population. And that's not even getting to p-hacking, etc. I am not optimistic that humans can learn to do much better even if everyone on the planet wanted to (which clearly isn't the case). It seems to be hard and our brains are not great in dealing with complex and non-intuitive information/data/models. I'll probably fall back on my default position that we need something like Elon Musk's Neuralink ( http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/27/15077864/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-computer-interface-ai-cyborgs ) so that a human could run (replicate) all the stats for claims/research/whatever with minimum effort and within seconds or less. Even then perhaps the brain would explode trying to make conclusion on the problems that have huge number of factors and possible methods to use. We might need not just an interface, but a wholesale integration with something that can handle all of this. 8)

When I looked at this, it seemed that a lot of news are from finance.yahoo.com which is itself a syndication of news sources, some of which are quite crappy. It's gonna be hard to achieve news quality if site points to finance.yahoo.com. Good luck

We seriously should invest in Space X, so we could conquer the stars and bring Facebook's network to the Galactic unwashed citizens.

Honestly, maybe it's just me, but I find the whole portfolio stats part pretty worthless. Yeah, I know you did this site partially because you wanted these stats... There's at least couple issues with it: 1. Why does anyone care about portfolio P/E, ROE, etc? These are company metrics and aggregating them into a portfolio metric is IMO close to meaningless. Assume my portfolio is a company X that currently loses money, GOOGL and FCAU. What is the portfolio P/E of this and is it meaningful in any way? Not to me really. 2. Related to above: how do you average P/E, ROE, across companies? Do you account for position size, market cap, what? Or do you just simply average? (Academic questions somewhat, since I still think 1.) 3. Sorry to say, but I don't trust FCF calculation of even Morningstar and they are probably the best in doing it. I would not trust FCF calculation of random website at all. Mostly because FCF calculation really depends on what you subtract to get FCF and there's no agreement on that. To say something positive: 8) - Holdings by Value is a nice visualization. Regarding paying for a site: sorry, Dataroma is free. Morningstar is free (with free US library card). So, no I would not pay for this... Same for the news/etc. Hope you wanted negative feedback. 8) All the best. You might find others who are more positive and would pay. :)

First, TRIP only has an EV of 3.8B. So, even a niche market can move the needle. 2nd, Trip will be able to monetize accommodations fairly well since they don't need to share commission with OTA. 3rd, attractions should be high margin since the customer acquisition cost for Trip is near zero. As for acquirers, Priceline would be obvious choice. But this would also be a cheap acquisition for Google, Amazon, Facebook, or an Asian internetco to support their travel businesses. This is a fantastic asset, great brand, with a large moat -- that just happens to have a weak business model. But its market cap is now about the same as Yelp, which is a much worse business in almost every way. Yes. 8)

Well, most of CEO presentation was about TV ads and how good they are. ;) I was not convinced. Maybe my attitude is simplistic, but if top well known travel (review) online brand needs to advertise itself on TV, then something is wrong. Yeah, yeah it's about attracting the people who never used the brand (percentages? ROI?) and about showing additional capabilities beyond reviews (just show these capabilities on website, no?). I changed my mind about Attractions a bit. I still think that the market is limited. I'd have to estimate how limited: the optimistic ceiling is probably something like 1/3 total hotel revenues (not TRIPs hotel revenues but total across platforms), but likely the real ceiling is much lower. Of course even if we are talking about 1/20 of total hotel revenues, but TRIP gets >80% of attraction marketshare (unlike their hotel marketshare), that's still a good contribution. And probably why a lot of people are gaga about TRIP Attractions segment. It's possible that it does not cost much (incrementally), and growth from near-zero would be high, and it might provide convenience especially in international markets. Though getting (smaller) merchants on platform might not be simple.

Yeah, buyout is possible, though it's not clear if anyone will offer enough to satisfy Liberty/Maffei. Unless it's buyout from Liberty universe, but then I'd be gaining from buyout, but losing from the buyer (whose stock would likely drop). I am not optimistic about non-hotel business. They are advertising it as a huge opportunity, but I'm really not sure it's gonna work out the way they expect. We'll have to see. Edit: I see that they include Vacation Rentals into non-hotel; I am most skeptical about Attractions, a bit less skeptical about Restaurants (depends on competition there though), probably less skeptical about Vacation Rentals (depends on competition too). Edit2: Yeah, I know that they say that Attractions are growing a lot. ;) I watched the TRIP CEO interview/speech at recent Skift Global Forum 2017 and he seemed weakest out of TRIP/EXPE/PCLN.