Liberty

Like Malone, it's clear how important Druckenmiller's mariage is to him. Good lesson to remember there, for the young guys & gals watching this and just starting out in life.

More nonsense. It's not math. It's psychology. You're falling for a cognitive bias, a variant of the sunk cost fallacy: https://capital.com/breaking-down-trading-biases-sunk-cost-and-house-money The whole idea of public market investing is that at any moment, you can sell it all and the money's yours. The fun of investing might be the research and analysis, but the goal is always how much money you have at the end. It doesn't matter whether you put certain amounts of money in certain mental buckets in your head, the total dollar amount at the end won't be affected by whether you label something "house money" if you lose it. And if you treat it as "free money" with "zery cost basis", I guarantee you're more likely to lose it than if you feel it's just as yours as any money in your name. Maybe you've been watching too much Jim Cramer? https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140929154025-81453962-jim-cramer-and-the-fallacy-of-the-house-s-money/ When you're selling stuff, it just reduces your exposure to both downside and upside. It doesn't make your outlay zero, it just means you took some chips off the table. But the remaining chips are still your money, and if they fall to zero, you've lost that portion of the bet, you can't say "well, I had zero outlay based on my original cost so I lost nothing". That portion isn't any less real than if you actually make money on it -- in that case, you won't say that it's not real money because you had taken out your initial cost from it. And if you keep money invested in something rather than investing it in something else that might do better, that's a capital allocation choice and there's an opportunity cost. As I said, at the end when you look at your results, the dollar amount will be what it is and it won't care about how you label things. Either you'll have good CAGR, or you won't. An extreme scenario to illustrate: You go to the casino with $5 in your pocket. You play for 72 hours straight and somehow win $10 million dollars. You take a $5 chip off the table and keep playing with the rest. You lose it all. You come out with $5. Do you say "oh well, it was only house money, I didn't lose anything" or do you realize that you actually won something and then lost it and that the money was just as real and you could've walked off with it when you had it?

Seems to me like a levered bet on commodity prices (inherently speculative) with the added risk of provenly ineffective management and the headwind of debt and fixed costs that are eroding value, on top of the assets themselves being depleting (you have to keep drilling), etc. If you're just betting on the price of oil or gas with futures at the CBOE or whatever, at least you only have that variable to take into account, along with how levered you want to make your bet. Here, you have to take into account that the company couldn't even do well when the price of oil went up like 40-50% (before falling again) and time is working against you because at lower commodity prices they are destroying value (negative ROIC). Seems like a stressful position to be in, to be praying for higher oil prices (and I'm not saying it can't do well -- it could spike up tomorrow -- but for all that time that it is doing well, you never know when you'll wake up to the price of the commodity falling off a cliff like these past few weeks, or if management hedges, then maybe the price keeps going up...).

Here's another tip: There's no such thing as "house money". It's all money that you either have (or can sell stock for if it's liquid), or don't. The market doesn't care at what price you bought something. That's just your own anchoring. Once you bought it, all that matters is at what price you sell it and after how long (time value of money). You can sell half of something after it doubled to reduce your exposure or redeploy in a more attractive asset, but that doesn't make the remaining half somehow free money that doesn't count. At the end of, say, 10 years, your return on your starting base of capital will be a number. I guarantee that "house money" will change nothing about that number.

Didn't they just recently have a change of management and sell assets and apparently reboot things? How many times in a row can they do that? Seems to me like management and the BOD probably got many millions in compensation over the years and that's what they focused on rather than the equity.

Nice. He did a nice shoutout to his wife near the end. 60 years of mariage. "She's number one to me."

I've always found it interesting to look at predictions of solar growth vs actual, and how it's always under-estimated: https://steinbuch.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-growth-reality-versus-projections-of-the-international-energy-agency/

This also makes no sense. The share price or how many shares you can buy for a given amount has nothing to do with whether something is cheap or expensive at all. A Berkshire "A" can be cheaper than a penny stock even if the share prices are at extremes of the spectrum. The time comments makes no sense either. "Assume this thing quintuples in the next five years". Sure, anything else we need to assume? Did people assume it would go down 90%+ 5 years ago, or were they saying it was cheap back then too? Sometimes I think you're just trolling us to see who notices...

The equity of a company can be worth zero or less than zero even if there are assets that are worth something. If your ROIC is lower than your cost of capital, you are destroying value. A company can be badly managed, have negative margins, high fixed costs, too much debt, assets that aren't worth what they are on the books for, can be unlucky with commodity prices outside its control for long periods, can do bad deals, etc. As I said, this is trading lower than it was trading in the 1990s. That's pretty long-term.

55-min Malone interview from this morning with David Faber: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/11/14/watch-cnbcs-full-exclusive-interview-with-liberty-media-chairman-john-malone.html?&qsearchterm=john%20malone

5-min Malone interview about CHTR, CMCSA, Sky.. https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/11/14/liberty-media-john-malone-on-comcast-verizon-and-charter.html Here's the full 55-min thing: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/11/14/watch-cnbcs-full-exclusive-interview-with-liberty-media-chairman-john-malone.html

David Faber interview with Greg Maffei: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/11/14/liberty-media-ceo-greg-maffei-on-media-mergers.html

Which is also the reason why you put it in the sock drawer ..... At a per share cost that is < 1/2 the cost of a cup of coffee - it's not much of a risk. SD This makes no sense.

https://www.realvision.com/stanley-druckenmiller-interview It used to be behind a pay Wall, but they released it.

Eyeballing it, it's about as low as it's been since the early 1990s, but adjusted for inflation, it's probably all-time lows. That's the thing with commodity stocks. You can analyze and price it as much as you want based on some commodity price, or a probability distribution of prices, but you or management have no control over what the actual commodity price will actually be in the future (and for how long), and there's usually a bunch of operating leverage to it and fixed costs that have to be paid even when you're not making money, so the equity tranche can get squeezed pretty quickly.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-13/waymo-to-start-first-driverless-car-service-next-month

Revenues and EBITDA basically flat year-on-year (down a little actually).

HELOC changes: https://www.ratespy.com/got-a-heloc-your-mortgage-options-are-about-to-shrink-11067208

Clearly.

Sure. Also give me your numbers of those. I was just doing the math on the numbers you gave, I never said it was more than that. That 2.6% is actually a CAGR number, btw, so it assumes reinvestment. The simple interest number is conveniently 10%, showing that you just plugged 305m into a simple interest calculator set to 10% and 82 years to get that 2.5bn number. Complex analysis there.

So you expect the potash stream to go down over time and a lot of the amount to be upfront in coal? Doesn't that make the shortening of the coal royalty a big deal after all? Please show me your numbers, since I can't divine them based on the little that you said about them.

This is nice to see, good way to add bite to these human rights sanctions: Looks like this was an initiative by Kyle Bass. Good job.

$82,817,975. [i'm so bored waiting for BRK 2018Q3!] While we're doing the math: "From the C$240.9 million + C$65 million combined purchase I expect Altius to receive about C$2.5 billion in this century. And more in the next." $2.5bn from $305.9m over 82 years ("this century") is 2.6%/year CAGR.

TDG Q3 (fiscal Q4): https://www.transdigm.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Q4-FY18-Earnings-Call-Presentation-Final.pdf

He was still the company's largest shareholder and involved in it after the merger with X The point is that running a massive chemical experiment with our atmosphere is very risky, and the higher we bring the GHG concentration above recent levels, the more risk there is. It's a non-linear system, and if we start melting permafrost and releasing lots of methane or mess up agriculture on a large scale, it won't be pretty and things could possibly accelerate in the wrong direction. You don't play russian roulette with your only planet. Speeding things up when it comes to getting off oil for transportation can make a huge difference, especially considering how much inertia there is in the system. Nobody ever said it couldn't be done. It's about the pacing and how fast it gets to be done. Without Steve Jobs there would eventually have been touch-screen cellphones, but he made it happen faster and better than it otherwise would've happened, and forced the rest of the industry to fast-follow and scrap their roadmaps that probably had them doing Blackberry-like phones for many more years (look at Android phones before the iPhone). Tesla has done the same thing for BEVs, even Bob Lutz clearly said that the only reason he was able to convince the GM board to back the Volt was because of Tesla. Before Tesla, they were actually going backwards by recalling and destroying the EV1.