KJP

Here's a recent Andrew Walker podcast with Andrew Carreon of Emeth Value about Black Stone: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/andrew-carreon-from-emeth-value-on-blackstone-minerals/id1526149547?i=1000524948149

Acquiring 395,000 sq ft Charlotte warehouse for $42 million; selling CT nursery for $10 million: https://indusrt.com/news/indus-announces-updates-to-acquisition-and-disposition-pipelines/#press

More broadly it doesn't take into account management's ability (Diller, Levin, etc.) to allocate capital. Historically, there have been times when investors could pay less than nothing for that and the other types of optionality you mentioned, and there are times like today when you appear to be paying something for it. Given IAC's track record, I think it makes sense that it trades above NAV, at least if you calculate NAV in the rather simplistic way I calculated it. But I'm cheap and want to get it appreciably below that NAV.

Re-running this post-Vimeo spin I get the following: Market Cap: $14.7 billion [89.1 million shares x $165/share] ANGI stake: $6 billion [424.5 million shares x $14.23/share] MGM stake: $2.5 billion [59 million shares x $42.52share] Net cash: $2.8 billion DotDash: $1.2 billion [15x LTM AEBITDA] Search: $250 million [5x EBITDA] Total of those parts: $12.75 billion Stub [Care.com, etc.]: ~$2 billion

I received the 2020 financials. Revenue of $11.8 million (up 3%), EBIT of $3.37 million (up 11%), net income from continuing operations of $2.7 million (up 11%). 5.763 million shares outstanding at $5.30/share = market cap of $31 million. The company has $10 million in cash and no debt, for an enterprise value of $21 million, an ex-cash p/e of ~8, and a dividend yield of 8%. It's not clear to me how the new SEC rules on quoting dark stocks is going to affect trading in the company's shares.

I hesitate to opine on why the market does what it does, but personally it's the potential loss of revenue from the slow (and perhaps accelerating) demise of the cable bundle combined with the leverage. Running constant leverage at rising OIBDA is great because buybacks = FCF + (leverage ratio * (change in OIBDA)). With falling OIBDA, that magic obviously reverses and true FCF starts to looks like reported FCF - (leverage ratio * (change in OIBDA)). That type of structure can go from a 10% cash return to shareholders to a 3-4% cash return to shareholders rather quickly. Whether it will or won't happen for Discovery is too hard for me to say.

Given its history, I hesitate to take any strategic lessons from AT&T, but its decision to separate WarnerMedia from its connectivity business (wireless and fiber broadband) seems to confirm what most have been saying for years and what Reed Hastings knew all along: It generally doesn't make sense to combine content assets, which benefit from being platform agnostic, with a broadband provider. So where does that leave Comcast? It appears to have the best broadband business in the US, but NBCUniversal + Sky are looking increasingly subscale. Comcast may also be running out of time as a third international-scale content company (Netflix, Disney, now Warner+Discovery) gets built out in front of them. I doubt merging Comcast's content assets with ViacomCBS makes sense and, in any event, couldn't be done in toto because US antitrust authorities almost certainly wouldn't permit the NBC and CBS networks to be owned by the same entity. I could see the new Warner/Discovery being a good home for Comcast's content assets because, among the IP of DC Comics, et al. On the other hand, would antitrust authorities in the US actually permit such a combination, which would merge, among other things, two major movie studios (Universal and Warner Brothers)? Are there other potential merger partners for NBCU/Sky? If not, what is the future of these businesses?

Fairly lengthy thoughts about Peloton: https://yetanothervalueblog.com/2021/05/talking-my-obsessions-1-pelotons-recall-pton.html

Some encouraging news on new development agreements, particularly in the Austin Chalk: https://investor.blackstoneminerals.com/news-releases/news-release-details/black-stone-minerals-lp-reports-first-quarter-results-and On the other hand, now that hydrocarbon prices are up, they bought some acreage after selling Permian acreage at the bottom last year. One would hope that the insider ownership here would lead to good capital allocation, but it's not clear that's happening.

Slide 9 in yesterday's Q1 earnings presentation contains some interesting disclosure about Altice's recent Service Electric and Morris Broadband acquisitions: https://s22.q4cdn.com/118672413/files/doc_presentations/2021/q1/ATUS-Q1-2021-Results-Presentation-vFINAL.pdf Going back to the initial Morris Broadband acquisition press release, Altice bought it for $310 million and it had 35% residential broadband penetration, LQA AEBITDA of $13 million, for a 24x EBITDA multiple and a 7.4x multiple of projected 2022 EBITDA, after accounting for the present value of the tax benefits from the transaction. It's hard to imagine that the PV of the tax benefits is more than $50 million (and that seems high to me), so Altice must have been projecting at least $35 million in AEBITDA for Morris in 2022 ((310-50)/7.4). In the presentation linked to above, Altice says Morris had a 28% full-year AEBITDA margin. Unfortunately, Altice hasn't disclosed (as far as I know) Morris's actual 2020 AEBITDA, only the Q4 annualized number of $13 million and that the company was "fast growing." If we assume actual 2020 EBITDA of $12 million, that implies Morris's 2020 revenue was $43 million (12/.28). The presentation projects 2022 AEBITDA margin of 60%, which, using the $35 million 2022 AEBITDA number estimated above, implies revenue of $58 million (35/.6). That would imply compound annual revenue growth from 2020 to 2022 of about 16% [43 * 1.16^2 = 57.8]. I believe that that revenue growth will disproportionately come from broadband rather than video, voice, etc., i.e., broadband will make up a bigger percentage of Morris revenue in 2022 than it does today. Thus broadband customers should increase by at least as much as revenue. [Price increases or uptiering would complicate this analysis.] In the acquisition press release, Altice said that Morris had 89,000 residential passings and a 35% penetration rate, which implies 31,150 residential customers [business customers presumably make up the rest of the 36,500 customers referred to in the press release]. Compounding the residential customer number at 16% (the implied revenue growth rate calculated above) over the next two years would produce 42,000 residential customers or a 47% penetration rate (this assumes no edge outs, which is probably incorrect, so may be a bit high). Earlier in the thread there was some discussion about the plausibility of going from 35% to 50% penetration in two years. Based on the the analysis above, it appears that Altice is projecting close to that kind of penetration growth rate, which would be consistent with Morris having relatively young passings and the penetration growth rates Altice has disclosed for its Suddenlink edgeouts. I think this analysis also highlights the value in new, underpenetrated passings that have low competition and relatively low present penetration, whether those passings come from organic edgeouts or M&A.

The research that I have seen to date suggests that at least Pfizer and Moderna significantly reduce asymptomatic cases, which ought to render fewer people infectious. See, e.g., https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3790399 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/pfizer-vaccine-shows-94-effectiveness-asymptomatic-transmission-covid/story?id=76389615&cid=social_twitter_abcn If that common-sense inference is correct, then there should be fewer cases among those exposed to vaccinated as opposed to unvaccinated people. Here's one study that produces that result: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.11.21253275v1.full-text

Here's a podcast specifically about this thread: https://focusedcompounding.libsyn.com/website/ep-304-thoughts-on-10-different-stocks-reits-msgmsgn-and-a-bull-case-for-amazons-stock

Here's an overview of T-Mobile's fixed wireless offering: https://www.lightreading.com/opticalip/four-questions-dogging-t-mobiles-5g-fixed-wireless-ambitions/a/d-id/768606?_mc=RSS_LR_EDT "The offering costs $60 per month, promises download speeds around 100Mbit/s and does not cap customers' monthly usage. The company said it is now offering the service across 30 million households. A third of those locations are in rural areas, and the rest are in suburban and urban areas. The company's target area represents around 24% of all US households." I agree with this take: "There won't be demand for the service in fiber and upgraded cable markets where the service is no better and the price is not meaningfully lower," argued the New Street analysts." It will be interesting to see whether Verizon can scale up a much more robust (in terms of speed) fixed wireless offering.

Since I've been bad-mouthing Stitch Fix, some balance may be in order. Here's a podcast discussing a bullish perspective: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/special-surviving-20-years-stitch-fix-deep-dive-mario/id1526125544?i=1000515864338 This particular bull case is based on changes to Stitch Fix's traditional business model (direct buy, previewing selections before they are mailed) and faith in the company's data science efforts. I'm not sure this particular bull disagrees with much of what I've noted, because he acknowledges that the bull case cannot be derived from historical financials.

In addition to the insurance coverage issue, your contract with your home inspector may have a limitation of liability clause that limits damages to a specific sum, often the amount you paid the inspector. Whether and to what extent those types of clauses are enforceable is a matter of state law. More broadly, those types of clauses can be found in many types of professional services contracts, such as IT support, architecture, etc. In some cases they are negotiable and in some cases not.