Liberty

Can you provide a link to where it says that you get 0% financing on household gross income please? Because it seems to be what you said in your previous post. ???

Ackman up 31.9% so far this year. WSJ piece about him: https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-suffering-bruising-losses-ackman-pursues-quiet-recovery-11553176760

Did you just count their entire combined gross income as available to spend on a house (somehow being "0% financing")? ??? I won't get into the assumptions for how many "1st time buyers" have full TFSAs and 35k per person in their RRSPs..

Q4: http://www.tencent.com/attachments/ResultsPresentation4Q18.pdf http://www.tencent.com/en-us/articles/15000761553167321.pdf

I doubt that this is the impact that it'll have on the system. Those who were going to buy houses that don't qualify will still buy them, I doubt this is a big enough factor to make people pick a whole different house. As for those that buy houses that qualify, at the margin they'll be more inclined to buy and/or pay more. It's basically just adding liquidity and loosening credit in an already very very hot market. I don't see how it can cool things down.

https://redef.com/original/nine-reasons-why-disney-will-succeed-and-why-four-criticisms-are-overhyped

ACCEO news: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/citcon-and-acceo-partner-to-enable-alipay-and-wechat-pay-acceptance-for-more-north-american-retailers-300814643.html

Google will put the hardware running this on a distributed CDN that will probably be embedded at the ISPs or very close. That traffic won't be routed all over the internet, it'll be pretty close to the player (both geographically and in number of hops), I'd expect.

New Airpods announced by press release again: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/airpods-the-worlds-most-popular-wireless-headphones-are-getting-even-better/ Guess their upcoming events are packed if they have no time for iPads, iMacs and AirPods..

Partnership with Nvidia on ML: https://www.hpcwire.com/2019/03/19/aws-upgrades-its-gpu-backed-ai-inference-platform/

Complete insanity and totally irresponsible IMO. Pretty bonkers. Clearly one of those desperate electoral moves.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/20/lion-air-boeing-737-saved-by-off-duty-pilot-a-day-before-crash-report.html Yikes

Another EU fine: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/20/eu-vestager-hits-google-with-fine-for.html

Wired piece on the Stadia announcement: https://wired.trib.al/AyWYNtB

Sully op-ed: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/capt-sully-sullenberger-where-boeing-and-the-faa-went-wrong-in-this-ugly-saga-2019-03-19

There's a line in 'Bridges of Spies' that I still think about once in a while. A soviet spy and his lawyer, telling him about the possibility of the electric chair. Spy doesn't react. Lawyer says: "You don't seem alarmed." He replies... "Would it help?"

That new $15,000 iMac looks quick You're thinking of the iMac Pro. That thing is a beast.

I recommend the 'Eleven Madison Park' episode (#2) of the documentary series '7 Days Out' on Netflix. I thought it was really good, showing some of what it takes to be the best; the attention to detail, going above and beyond, and constantly solving unexpected problems. https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/80207124 Update: great podcast interview with the restaurant's owner: https://overcast.fm/+BgXD0aAaA

Recent podcast interview with Marc Andreessen: https://overcast.fm/+BgXAjz54o

How many people do you think took the time to really study them, read all the letters, etc? I don't think most market participants have done that. I think the market just likes fat dividend cheques and that the recent quarter was so good that the momentum is hard to counter, even with the stock-sale plans.

You should be skeptical, it's the right posture. I think the return of excess cash is both a sign that there probably aren't huge deals in the near term, but it's also a good sign on discipline. As they often said, it's easy to deploy capital. They could deploy all they had and more if they wanted to, could probably lever up to 5x and deploy all of that on top of it. What's hard is deploying capital at their high hurdles, and the fact that they'd rather return the cash than lower their standards (which the market would reward in the short term because revenue growth would be huge and it would take a while for the ROIC to come down and for people to realize what's going on) to me shows that they are sticking to the plan. That's pretty rare to see.

Just updated the iMacs with a press release: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/imac-gets-a-2x-performance-boost/

With the caveat that this is all just my opinion... I think there's a little more context needed to understand all these things. I'm pretty sure that both Mark Leonard and Mark Miller are most worried about long-term talent retention. When you have managers and operators able to deploy capital at 30% ROIC and have a proven acquisition track record and proven operator track record, they don't have to work for you. They could leave and go do their thing. If the CSU stock price gets too high for too long, there might be a temptation for some of these people to sell and maybe try to go build wealth in a different vehicle. That's why Mark has often talked down the price of the stock and would probably want to to be perennially trading around fair-to-undervalued. In that context, I see the recent stock sale plans as just a signal to try to make the stock drop a bit. It recently shot up, right around the period of the year when managers buy stock in the open market with part of their bonus (as per their incentive plans), and they probably worry a bit about that. But what must also be known is that both Marks are no doubt very financially conservative and have very high hurdle rates. You don't get their track record without that. So when they're saying they'd buy at 800 and sell at 1000, it probably means that fair value for most people would be a fair amount above that. I don't think they're judging CSU on a P/sales basis. I think it's probably on cashflows. They can rule-of-thumb a small VMS on price/sales because they know they'll restructure them and change the margin profile, so looking at those on EV/EBITDA only wouldn't make sense (their actual acquisition models are no doubt very detailed and take into account many metrics). Also, a company can be expensive at 6x sales because it has no reinvestment opportunities, like most niche VMS, but another can be cheap at 6x sales if it has lots of high-ROIC re-investment opportunities and a long runway, like maybe CSU. I think Mark is very truthful when he writes these things, but I think sometimes his readers extrapolate what he says to things that he didn't quite say, or they don't calibrate for just how conservative and "under-promise/over-deliver" he is.

New acquisition: http://www.ropertech.com/sites/default/files/190318_Foundry%20Announcement_Final.pdf Buying Foundry for £410 million (all-cash), "Foundry is a leading provider of software technologies used to deliver award-winning visual effects and 3D content for the digital design, visualization, entertainment industries." (that's a new niche for them) https://www.foundry.com By my math they paid 7.13x revenue for it. "Clients and partners include major feature film studios and post-production houses such as Pixar, ILM, MPC, Walt Disney Animation, Weta Digital, DNEG, and Framestore as well as automotive, footwear, apparel, and technology companies such as Mercedes, New Balance, Adidas, and Google."

I think another lesson is that many value investors didn't have the tools to evaluate the value of a SaaS company where there are high upfront customer acquisition costs but the recurring lifetime value of customers is positive for each cohort (but new cohorts hide current profitability, since as much as possible is re-invested in growth).