Liberty

Jonas acquisition : https://www.jonassoftware.com/About_Us/Latest_News/Jonas_Software_Announces_the_Acquisition_of_TechMa

Bill Gates might not actually have said it, but the idea of "640K ought to be enough for anybody" repeats itself every few years. It's a chicken and egg thing; once people have huge bandwidth/a new capability, new services tend to be created that use that bandwidth/capability and that couldn't have existed before. I think there's currently a bunch of headroom in bandwidth for most people, but who knows where we'll be on that pendulum swing in a few years? And have people ever been rational about getting only what they need? How many people buy SUVs because "maybe someday I'll want to go off road or tow something" and they basically never do?

1-hour Bezos interview:

New Mauboussin paper (Sept 13, 2018): https://www.bluemountaincapital.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/What-Does-an-EV-EBITDA-Multiple-Mean.pdf

I've finished the book. Quite clear that John Dowd also spoke to Woodward, tons of details there. The overarching feeling that I'm left with on trade is that all of Trump's instincts are the opposite of free-trade. He used to be counter-balanced mostly by Cohn and Porter and these guys, but they're gone and now there's just Miller and Navarro adding fuel to the fire. From things he's said and done, it's quite clear that he thinks trade accounts are actually profit & loss statements (as in, "we have a trade deficit with country X, we're losing money to them, they're stealing from us"). Doesn't understand how trade can be win-win because of comparative advantage, or that trade figures are basically revenue, and that if you import a bunch of low margin t-shirts and TVs and export a bunch of high-margin airplanes and softwares you can be making a lot more money per dollar even with a trade deficit, or that something "made in country x" doesn't mean that the value is staying there, ie. Apple products final assembly in China but most of the value going to the US, Japan, South-Korea, etc... His solution seems to be that the US should just make everything it needs and why do we need these other countries at all? Really superficial understanding of economics.

Others focus on creating the best list of specs on paper. Apple focus on creating the best products in actual use.

Good presentation, I agree. I tweeted some highlights in a thread here if anyone wants to see more:

Volaris buysa business from Nokia: https://www.telecomlead.com/telecom-equipment/nokia-sells-ip-video-business-to-software-firm-volaris-86386 https://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/nokia-agrees-with-volaris-group-on-sale-of-ip-video-business-and-creation-of-velocix-a-pure-play-20180913-00105 Nokia's keeping a minority interest.

The improvement between X and Xs is underwhelming. But the difference between the 8 and Xr is massive. Well worth the modest bump in price versus iPhone 8 launch pricing. Coming from 8, 7 and lower, the updates are pretty major. Depends on how you cycle your smartphone. We do it based on necessity or overwhelming feature improvements ... that's usually a 2 -3 cycle. Almost nobody upgrades every year, so the improvements should be looked at over 2-3-4 years. Apple just heavily changed their smartphone format last year with the X, and people were expecting them to do it again this year? What matters is that the things that people do constantly, all day long, are getting better pretty fast. Not some esoteric new "wow" feature in a presentation that people rarely use. The CPU/GPU were already way ahead of the competition in speed and power efficiency, got even better. Camera was great, got even better. Speakers got better. Battery life got better (and it was already great on the X, I usually go to bed with 50%+). Screen got better. FaceID got better. All stuff that people deal with all day long. Also, laying groundwork for future things... Anyone paid attention to the increase in machine-learning performance on the new A12? Like 9x using less power than before. Crazy stuff, like a mini TPU in each phone. And they didn't even mention iOS 12, but at WWDC last summer it was clear that they focused on speed, latency, battery life, etc. All stuff that will make all existing devices better. All this makes for a better actual use experience, regardless of the fact that there's not a huge surprise there -- people get addicted to big reveals, but in the end, they aren't what drives customer satisfaction.

Based on the ANH filing, it looks like CHTR bought back a little less than 1% of shares outstanding during the past month. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/914545/000089924318024245/xslF345X03/doc4.xml

https://stratechery.com/2018/the-iphone-franchise/

Quite an interesting book. I'm almost done with it (got the audio book, and it's only something like 11-12 hours, so at 2x speed it's quick) and it's a fascinating look into the White House and Trump, and how he thinks and makes decisions. We've seen a lot of events from the outside, but it's really something else to discover what was going on behind the scenes at the time. How the sausage is made, so to speak... Woodward has obviously been talking for a couple years, as things happened, with something like 1/4 of the white house staff. It was clear for a long time that this is a super leaky ship and that everybody was talking to the media, but this shows that it's even more than that. You can kind of triangulate his sources by who was present during things... Pretty sure he has hundreds of hours of tapes with Bannon, Lindsey Graham, Cohn, Tillerson, maybe some with Kushner, Kelly, Matthis, McMaster (?), surely some staffers under them, etc. From a purely investor point of view, it gives some insights into how Trump thinks about trade and the economy (service economy vs tangibles, etc) and the power struggles within the white house between various factions, and how the balance of power might have changed now because of the high turnover. I highly recommend it. It's rare to get such an in-depth book about something almost as it's still going on rather than years later. https://www.amazon.ca/Fear-Trump-White-Bob-Woodward/dp/1501175513/ https://www.audible.ca/pd/Fear-Audiobook/1508240108 And please, no complaints from those who haven't read it yet... That's just fake news if you haven't read it.

If the market is beginning to digest this threat and price it into assets, wouldn’t the market also price the good news of Verizon/AT&T/Sprint-T Mobile gaining share from cable into their stock prices? Where is the evidence of that? Well it likely will increase volatility (as broadband is also trying to get in mobile) so it could put downward pressure on telecoms as well. If the telecoms are getting terrible ROIC on their plans to overbuild the whole country to compete with cable, pressure on their stocks might be the expected response.

Nice new lineup from Apple today. I'm liking their strategy and iteration pacing. The A12 looks like a real monster, and I think the new Apple Watch will be a big hit.

This guy spoke with JD IR:

Bill Nygren on intangible assets and GAAP: https://www.oakmark.com/News/The-Importance-of-Intangible-Assets.htm

Profile of Zuckerberg in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy?currentPage=all

That you point to this as a source says more about you than about anything else.

I saw this about Sept 11, 2001, and thought it was a great example of what a classic narcissist would do about such an event, which is to try to make it about himself:

Interesting. The data seems to show that money has been going out of equities funds: Why do you think it started in 2009? You don't usually calculate from the bottom, rather from when you reach the previous peak... and in between we've had lots of rough markets with lots of things down 10-20%+ (2011, 2015-2016, etc), has had people worry all the way up, with the bulls rarely being really in control (maybe part of last year when volatility was super low, until the market fell 10% in a few days in February). "They need to stop w the false narratives (see article). 2015-2016 was a bear market! Biotech -35% Jul 2015 - Jul 2016 $XBI Consumer Good -21% Jul 2015 - Feb 2016 $IYK Energy -64% Jun 2014 - Feb 2016 $XLE Financials -22% Jul 2015 - Feb 2016 $XLF Healthcare -18% Jul 2015 - Feb 2016 $XLV Industrials -29% Jul 2015 - Feb 2016 $XLI Materials -27% Jul 2014 - Feb 2016 $XLB Technology -26% Jun 2015 - Feb 2016 $XLK Russell 2000 -26% Jun 2015 – Feb 2016 $IWM NYSE -20% May 2015 - Feb 2016 Globally... Australia -20% in 10 months $EWA Brazil -50% in 6 YEARS $EWZ Canada -22% in 1.5 YEARS $EWC China -50% in 10 months $FXI France -25% in 10 months $EWQ Germany -28% in 10 months $EWG Hong Kong -35% in 10 months $EWH India -24% in 1.2 YEARS $INDA Italy -50% in 5 YEARS $EWI Japan -28% in 10 months $EWJ Mexico -45% in 4 YEARS $EWW Russia -74% in 8 YEARS $RSX South Korea -17% in 6 YEARS $EWY Spain -36% in 10 months $EWP You know what's interesting? Almost every single market we track bottomed simultaneously in February 2016. This could mark a generational significant low. $SPX $SPY $EEM $VEU $VT $FDN $SMH" And things aren't so rosy around the world: Not saying I know what tomorrow brings, but I keep hearing a revisionist narrative about the past few years having been smooth sailing and straight up, but all along I've seen people hand wringing and calling the last inning (since 2011)...

Yeah, "Jesse Livermore" (obviously a pseudonym, for those not familiar with the historical figure..) is a tremendously smart guy. He deals in aspects of finance that I usually don't worry too much about (macro stuff), but he does it with such insight that he's a pleasure to read.

On V, Visa Europe is still underearning...

More detail: http://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/2163376/jack-ma-remain-alibabas-chairman-succession-plan-younger-talent

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/technology/alibaba-jack-ma-retiring.html

https://www.multichannel.com/news/charters-winfrey-5g-not-comparable-to-docsis-3-1