Liberty

Another hour-long interview with Druckenmiller: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-12-18/druckenmiller-on-economy-stocks-bonds-trump-fed-full-interview-video

Things going so badly that the government is offering bailouts to the oil sector now? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-18/canada-said-to-offer-1-1-billion-in-loan-support-for-oil-sector

It's a form of CAC. Get them in, cross-sell them on other stuff, get the big customers to go over the limit or upgrade, gather assets now that rates aren't zero, etc. But also increasing competition forcing lower fees, like in the indexing world (some ETFs now have zero fees if you buy them through certain brokers, etc).

Q3 results: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181217005813/en/HEICO-Corporation-Reports-Record-Net-Sales-Operating

Interview with Woodward about the book: https://overcast.fm/+C_1833--s

Haven't people been saying this since basically 2011? Why this time? The recovery has been extremely slow and shallow, unlike traditional recoveries, and we've had a bunch of corrections and sector bear markets since (I was just noticing today that the DJ Diversified Industrials is down over 33% from peak) and international markets are already in bear declines, yet everybody seems to talk like it's been only up and to the right since 2009 so we must be getting close to some big thing... You could be right, but it seems hard to time the market like that. I'd rather own good companies that can benefit from dislocation and let them cleverly deploy capital if things go south, and otherwise keep creating value if they don't. But that's just what I'm comfortable with.

Wow, Bitcoin Cash went from a peak of $3500 less than a year ago to $79 now. It would need to be a 44-bagger to get back to its peak.

I find the Isaacson bio is deeply flawed, mostly because Isaacson didn't understand most of the things that Jobs spent his life obsessed about (design, computers), but yeah, I didn't say he never stormed out of a meeting or wasn't opiniated. I'm talking about the stuff of legends from when he was younger (and a lot of the stuff about that in the Isaacson book is about his earlier years). Agreed about the latter. To get extreme results, you tend to need an extreme personality. Someone obsessed about learning about one thing and getting one thing done at the cost of everything else (personal life, relationships, etc) is harder to compete with.

A lot of stories about Steve Jobs are about him when he was quite young. He got a lot better with age, but then also got a lot more private, so when the media didn't have much new to report, they kept going back to these anecdote about the young "difficult" jobs. Not that he was a totally mellow dude in his older years, but much more calm and mature, as far as a I can tell from people who worked at Apple in those years.. If the stories on Musk are accurate, that's really too bad. No excuse to being a dick, people like Jobs succeeded despite that, not because of it. But it's really hard to know if anything reported about Musk is accurate these days...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ge-powered-the-american-centurythen-it-burned-out-11544796010 "GE Powered the American Century—Then It Burned Out: How the company that was once America’s biggest, the maker of power turbines, the seller of insurance, the broadcaster of ‘Seinfeld,’ became a shadow of its former self"

https://twitter.com/alex_macdonald/status/1072951898569752577

Acquisition at Harris: https://www.harriscomputer.com/en/news/?data-ipsquote-timestamp=1543986000&article=harris-rsquo-us-healthcare-group-acquires-psytech-solutions-inc-

Episode two is out (stock discussed: DWDP and RCKY: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/scuttleblurb/id1443244539?mt=2&i=1000425486506

https://www.wsj.com/articles/prosecutors-to-decide-soon-whether-to-charge-chinese-billionaire-over-rape-allegations-1544437831

One person's commentary on what happened at CASP with AlphaFold: https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened/

Award for smartest crypto guy goes to: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/12/20/litecoin-founder-charlie-lee-sells-his-holdings-in-the-cryptocurrency.html

Writeup by Scuttleblurb (subscription required): https://www.scuttleblurb.com/csu/

Do you want it to be short, or a short?

No, it's a fun novel, it's funny, it's kind of sci-fi. It's a fun ride, and pretty short. It's not Serious Literature.

I think you misunderstood what Slaughterhouse 5 is. Read it. You'll be entertained.

https://electrek.co/2018/12/06/tesla-battery-report/ $40m saved in a year for a project that cost $66m. That's some pretty good ROI! And li-ion battery prices keep fallling... Guess we'll see a lot more of these, starting with places where there are large swings in power costs between peak and off-peak and where power costs the most, and over time to other places down the curve...

Guns, Germs and Steel was a good read. Makes you think about humans from a macro perspective. Sapiens was like that too.

Today it's probably because they're getting margin-called because of other positions blowing up. Over the past few weeks, probably because their main thesis hasn't played out with the latest Q's results.

I haven't really looked at this in years (one of my early mistakes, learned a lot), but at a glance: 12% Gross margins, negative EBITDA, EBIT margins, negative ROIC and ROE, negative FCF, capex consistently higher than depreciation, decreasing cash on the balance sheet, most of book value is in PP&E that isn't worth much if they can't make money from it (the debt is real, though), always at the mercy of commodity price swings, of a plant breaking, labor issues, or unexpected tariffs, etc... Seems like one of those melting ice cubes in a bad industry where you have to work really hard just to stay in the same place. It's volatile and there's operating leverage (which we must remember, cuts both ways), so it could double tomorrow, but time is not on your side, as the past few years have shown. But that's just at a glance, I could be missing something that makes the situation otherwise.

Thanks, Pau_