Liberty

https://zackkanter.com/2019/03/13/what-is-amazon/ h/t Rishi G.

Apple announcing updated iPads via press release.. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/all-new-ipad-air-and-ipad-mini-deliver-dramatic-power-and-capability/ Guess their upcoming event is pretty packed if they don't have time to do the iPads then..

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2019/03/17/salesforce-com-20-secrets-to-its-125-billion-success/

Phil Schiller, one of the most influential Apple Executives, was a guest on this week's ATP podcast: http://atp.fm/episodes/317

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/aws-pilots-pro-rata-program-to-connect-investors-with-start-ups.html

I've copied the twitter thread here:

Good new privacy-focused ad, trying to lean on this differentiation: https://youtu.be/A_6uV9A12ok

Apple response to Spotify: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/03/addressing-spotifys-claims/

No Toyota Motors thread, so I'll put this here. Interesting read about a flexible line that Toyota built, goes over a lot of the challenges with car manufacturing and increasing throughput: http://www.thedrive.com/tech/26955/inside-toyotas-takaoka-2-line-the-most-flexible-line-in-the-world

2018 letter: http://www.markelcorp.com/-/media/investor-relations/letters-to-shareholders/2018.pdf

No worries. Text is inherently an ambiguous medium when it comes to irony ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That was a quip, Roger.

December 2018 was pretty bad timing for a capital raise, though. I wonder if they'd do better now that that moment of generalized panic is over. I don't know the answer, just asking the question.

Fun talk by Benchmark partner Bill Gurley (yes, he's 6'9"):

That's how some soldiers describe their life in the military too. A lot of waiting around and packing and unpacking gear and such... And then everything happens quickly.

COO Mark Miller doing something similar to what Mark Leonard did (but this one not over a year, just over a couple months, but with higher number of shares per month): https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/03/13/1752885/0/en/COO-of-Constellation-Software-Enters-into-Automatic-Share-Purchase-and-Disposition-Plan.html They really want to keep the price down. Which ironically is kind of a bullish signal, as you want management that focuses on talent retention and not the stock, and a stock that is high can be a problem for that. But at the same time, these guys (Leonard and Miller) are so financially conservative and probably have such high hurdles that what they consider fair value is probably lower than what most people would consider fair... We'll see how the market reacts and whether the gambit works or if the market sees things differently. The timing to May 31st makes me wonder if this is because employee bonus open-market stock purchases are mostly during this time of the year... Btw, the stock is going ex-dividend for the $20US special dividend today, so about $26CAD of the price move today is because of that.

https://theirrelevantinvestor.com/2019/03/13/the-twenty-craziest-investing-facts-ever/ These were fun trivia. A couple to whet your appetite:

???

https://ofdollarsanddata.com/nothing-happens-then-everything-happens/ I enjoyed this post. Original way to visualize market movements and to make the point about how unevenly moves take place.

The short argument is that they can't raise equity because there are SEC investigations going on behind the scenes. I don't know if it's the case. As someone who doesn't care about it as an investment and just wants to see dynamism in the EV market, I also wish they would raise a bunch of money to make the company more robust to shocks and get them through their fast-growth phase. I don't know why they haven't done that. Maybe it's indeed an issue of access to the market, maybe it's hubris from Musk, maybe there's another reason... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For those who liked the book, here's a long-form piece about the search for a lost WWII aircraft carrier: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/magazine/uss-wasp-lost-world-war-ii-aircraft-carrier.html

Interesting posts about the large impact that small differences in growth rates for slow-growers can have on intrinsic value (more than we might intuitively guess at): Part 1: https://intrinsicinvesting.com/2019/02/22/the-risk-of-low-growth-stocks/ Part 2: https://intrinsicinvesting.com/2019/02/27/the-risk-of-low-growth-stocks-part-2-prestige-brands-case-study/

Writeup on KKR: http://yetanothervalueblog.com/2019/03/kkr-is-too-cheap.html

A look at Apple's capex: https://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2019/3/12/apples-declining-capex

https://pathak22.github.io/large-scale-curiosity/resources/largeScaleCuriosity2018.pdf Fascinating machine learning paper on self-supervision and intrinsic motivation (aka "curiosity") for AI agents.