Liberty

Good thread by Michael Mauboussin about his 27th year teaching an investing class. He links off to a lot of interesting things, talks about what he's learned, etc.

I watched the interview again, and I got the impression Malone has quite some criticism on Rutledge. cfr. min 43:00 where he makes the story about the 2 cookies and concludes : spending all your cash on supporting your stock is eating that cookie. Anyone agrees with this, or did I misinterpret what I heard? Actually if I remember correctly, Malone was encouraging Rutledge to go to a higher gearing with CHTR, I think Rutledge was more comfortable around 4, Malone wanted maybe 4.5x... If you don't buy back stock, you're basically reducing leverage, and that's not what Malone wants. The criticism was more about the timing of the buybacks than about the buybacks per se, IMO, but hindsight is always 20/20.

Q4 results (their fiscal Q1): https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/apple-reports-first-quarter-results/

Transcript of a talk titled “An Investor’s Odyssey: The Search for Outstanding Investments” that he gave in 2011 (sorry if it's a repost): http://www.valueinvestorconference.com/text/transcripts/Chuck%20Akre%20Transcript%20VIC%202011.pdf

Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.

I thought it was quite a good speech: https://microcapclub.com/2018/01/morgan-housel-industries-teach-us-investing/ Trancsript is here: https://microcapclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Morgan-Housel-on-What-Other-Industries-Teach-Us-About-Investing.pdf

Season 1 of this is one of the best comedies series I've seen. Up there with Freaks and Geeks.

Season 1 of the Expanse really impressed me. It felt on par with the best sci-fi ever (early Battlestar Galactica reboot). But I think after season 1 the writing quality goes down a lot and many characters suddenly become quite different from what they were early on, and more 2D.

The Wintel duopoly was very strong, one of the best money-making enterprise ever, but Windows isn't exactly what it was either, right? Things stay the same until they aren't. That's why this job is hard, you have to made judgement calls about uncertain things. But a lot should go into the too-hard pile... If you look at it one way, you could say that Intel lost a ton of market share in the past decade. Smartphones and tablets are computers, regardless of what we call them. Basically none of them run on intel CPUs...

Do they have a monopoly, though? Other fabs seem to have passed them in process. Other architectures are getting close in their main market (and are better for certain application -- ie. ARM already better for mobile, and getting better on performance/watt for PC/datacenter, Google's TPU already better for machine learning), and the hyperscale cloud players have the resources to design their own CPUs and outsource fabbing and keep the margin that Intel would make for themselves. They certainly have a monopoly-like market share, but that's backwards-looking. Looking forward, it seems to me like there are cracks in their moat. Maybe they can fix them, but maybe not and over time their operating leverage starts biting the wrong way. I don't know, it's not a situation I follow too closely, but that would be my quick hypothesis to attack if I want starting work on it.

Zuckerberg WSJ op-ed: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facts-about-facebook-11548374613 Also: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-messenger.html

Did anyone watch this? Haven't heard much about it anywhere...

Yeah, Intel has been a SNAFU after the other lately... Missed all their roadmaps, lots of process trouble. Most of Apple's Mac troubles in recent years have been because of Intel, pushing Apple faster torward making its own ARM desktop and laptop chips, which won't be good for Intel..

Not what I meant. I meant that value investors don't seem to look much at the stock, possibly because it's tech, and value investors have a cultural baggage that makes them less interested in tech (that's been changing a bit in recent years).

Probably because "Buffett doesn't like tech" is so ingrained.

New acquisition at Volaris (in the craft beverage industry!): https://www.volarisgroup.com/news/article/five-x-5-solutions-joins-volaris-group h/t @Pearnick

Congrats to those who made a killing on this trade, I'm happy for you. Always nice to see it work out (well, for now -- don't know what tomorrow will bring).

Somehow we've watched none of the same Amazon Prime Video shows. My faves are Sneaky Pete S1 (kind of a mix between Justified and some Breaking Bad elements (produced by Brian Cranston and some Justified guys), Patriot S1 (LOVED this one, couldn't get into S2 yet), and Marvellous Mrs. Maisel (don't let the flowery title scare you, I really enjoyed S1 and can't wait to check out S2 -- it's written by Amy Sherman Palladino, of Gilmore Girls fame, but this is more adult and kind of Mad Men vibe in production level).

INTC Q4: https://s21.q4cdn.com/600692695/files/doc_financials/2018/Q4/Q4'18-Earnings-Release_final.pdf

I highlights parts of the last Comcast call in this thread, for those interested:

Wilbur dubbed over Mr Burns: https://twitter.com/skolanach/status/1088486734608838656?s=21 "To Wilbur Ross, saving 3,000 coal jobs is essential — but 800,000 government workers are a blip"

That's correct. I was also surprised (I didn't know much about it going on), but it actually increased my enjoyment because I think it's important that we get reminders once in a while of just how vile these regimes were. Historical distance and the death of first-hand victims is making it all more fuzzy over time...

Reporter: "What's the newest thing in science?" Scientist, feigning surprise: "Oh, so you already know all the old science?"

In the interview I link, the writer/director says that they didn't want to make fun of any of the real atrocities, since this is based on true events, so every time there's killing and torture and such, they play it straight. But once it's behind closed doors with the politicians, then the farce takes over.

I've enjoyed this recent podcast interview with Josh Wolfe: https://fs.blog/josh-wolfe/ And this previous one was also quite good, for those who missed it back then: http://investorfieldguide.com/wolfe/