Liberty

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/business/elon-musk-tesla.html

Acquisition at Harris: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180828005204/en/Harris-Healthcare-Group-Acquires-Iatric%C2%AE-Systems h/t

They get a pretty decent benefit from tax reform and that still hasn't made its way completely through the snake, so that helps with the fwd multiple, but yeah, def not as cheap as it was a couple years ago.

HEI Q2 (fiscal Q3): https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180827005565/en/ "Net Income up 47% on Operating Income Increase of 33% and Net Sales Increase of 19%" "consolidated operating margin improved to 21.8% in the third quarter of fiscal 2018, up from 19.4% ... Our net debt to EBITDA ratio improved to 1.27x as of July 31, 2018 compared to 1.67x... Cash flow provided by operating activities increased 34%" "During fiscal 2018, we have successfully completed three acquisitions and have completed four acquisitions over the past year... [guidance] 2018 YoY net sales +15%-16%, net income of +35%-37%, up from our prior growth estimates of 13%-14% and 33%-35%" Flight Support Group Q2 organic growth: 10% Electronic Technologies Group Q2 organic growth: 16%

I read the previous discussion - not much info regarding should I now use IEX. Also the discussion is 3+ years old.. so much could have changed since. I just like linking related threads so that people who stumble here first and want more can easily find the other. As for IEX, I'm on IB and I know that IEX is in the mix used by their trade execution algo, and I trust it to use it when it's most beneficial. How many trades are you doing that you think it's worth trying to micro-manage which exchange you're trading on rather than just trust IB to use what's best for you (IB is one of the ones that isn't selling trades to HFTs, afaik)? Seems like unless you have trading many millions frequently or are a day trader, the effort to do this might either provide returns too small to measure or might actually be counter-productive (ie. you restrict trades to IEX, but maybe some other exchange had a better price at the time that wasn't being spoofed). The simplest way is probably just to decide on the price you are ready to pay, put in a GTC limit order, and just let it fill or not whenever... I'm glad IEX exists and more traffic is going to it, but as a retail investor, I'm not really in a position to move the needle with my volume, so I'll let that to the big whales...

Previous discussion for reference: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/books/flash-boys-by-michael-lewis/

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/toronto/article-supreme-court-wont-hear-long-running-toronto-home-sale-data-case/

Maybe, but seems to me like these kinds of benefits would be pretty marginal for a company that isn't the kind that will lever up a lot and that was sitting on a lot of cash before these deals. Seems to me like what will determine the returns of the equity over the long term is ROIC on the deals that they do and whether their organic project generation can bring enough things of big enough size over the finish line at a decent cadence.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/24/waymo-opens-subsidiary-in-china/

My point was that to know if a deal is good or not, you have to look at the returns on the money invested, and by doing some back-of-the-envelope, the returns on that part of the deal don't seem that great so far (somewhere sub 10% after taking costs into account). My second point is that there's a difference between investing $X into something that will give you Y% back on an ongoing basis, or grow at Z%, and investing $X into something that depletes. In the first case, you can take all the cash that you receive out and reinvest into other things to compound the cash. In the latter case, you can't take all the cash and reinvest in incremental things, you have to take part of the cash and reinvest into a replacement asset (that might or might not be available at attractive valuation) to replace that depleting asset. So all else equal, a depleting asset is worth less than a growing or stable asset because you have a headwind that makes you have to run a bit faster just to avoid falling behind.

For those interested, there's this documentary that I saw a few years ago that I thought was informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B9SOJHvLSU It's not the best documentary on many levels, but on a few levels, I think it's very informative in helping us understand some of the traits of the dark triad first hand.

So assuming same rate going forward, that's payback after 7.3 years. That's not exactly correct since not 100% of the royalty goes directly to the bottom line -- they have paid some interest on debt in those years, have corporate costs, there's been costs to do the deal, opportunity cost in time and resources to find the deal and get it done, etc. But even if we optimistically assume 7.3 years payback, that's around a 10% CAGR. In other words, if you had invested $120.45m for 7.3 years at 10%, you'd have gotten a double. It's not bad, but it's less than the SP500 TR over the past 7 years, for example. But these coal royalties are declining assets that will someday (at an unknown date) go away, so their cashflows aren't entirely free cash flow that can be used for any incremental deployment. Large parts should be earmarked to find replacement cash-flowing assets just to maintain earning power over time, so actual payback is longer than appears, which is why the only real way to evaluate them is probably a DCF, but that's hard to do because there are many unknown (like the politics of coal in the coming years, etc).

I totally understand that position, and it's usually the right one. But the exception that confirms the rule is someone like Trump who has been so exactly textbook NPD in public view for decades and decades that his photo could basically be used in the DSM. If Trump was shown as a fictional character in a movie he'd seem like a caricature (in Back to the Future 2, the Biff in the dark future that runs the town is based on Trump, with his paintings of himself and his Trumpian office, and he seems way over the top), yet here we are in real life. A lot of other people have narcissistic tendencies in politics and hollywood and business, but it's usually kind of hard to tell or just partial or just kind of leaning that way on the spectrum. Usually we lack data (we see actors a lot, but rarely as themselves). In this case, I think it would be burying my head in the sand and irrational to pretend this isn't the case just because I don't have some official paper saying that's what he is. It's like if you've known someone for a long time who is clearly deeply autistic or has down syndrome or is dumb as a brick (IQ below 60). Do you tell yourself that you can't recognize what you're seeing because you don't have an official diagnosis and pretend nothing is going on, or do you trust your judgement? Well, in this case it's not just my judgement, it's basically almost everybody who's been around him who describes these traits (ie. he's not just playing a character on TV and then reverting to a more typical personality-type).

http://www.ropertech.com/roper-technologies-appoints-neil-hunn-president-and-chief-executive-officer-succeeds-brian-jellison Brian Jellison going to executive chairman because of health issue, Neil Hunn (COO) becoming CEO.

I don't think that's quite true. I don't think people understood. The whole Scott Adams argument that he's playing a role to get what he wants but he's actually not really like that and actually quite smart, etc.. No, he's actually that shallow and petty and thin skinned (spending years circling his small hands in gold marker on magazine covers and emailing it to a journalist who once mentioned he had small hands). But that's not even for most people. The Adams rationalizations worked well on the more intellectual bunch who needed a narrative to believe, but I think most people don't do research on forums and read long New Yorker profiles or whatever. They just think "he's a billionaire, so he must be a good businessman, right, and he constantly talks about all his successes, and most people aren't liars, so it's probably true that he's that smart and successful". The used car salesman tactics actually work if you do them long enough and consistently enough, and Trump's whole life has been that act. Damn, you've dragged me into it... Trolling successful I guess? Anyways.

I agree with a lot of that, I just think it's a different discussion.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/23/alphabet-chronicle-cybersecurity.html

Ah, so just trolling, my mistake...

They watched some promo videos from funds to determine this? Seems like a pretty weak study...

It's almost as if timely information was sometimes released in a timely manner to inform the public about timely things.... Almost the reverse of paying people off so that damaging information only comes out after an election...

I don't think that even requires any pathological condition. Just to be removed enough from the situation by distance (emotional and geographical). People do a lot of things indirectly that they wouldn't do directly. Drone operators blowing people up from halfway around the world, but they wouldn't knife them in the heart if the very same people were tied up on a chair in front of them. Doesn't make them psychopaths or NPDs, just human.

Yes, if they're causing harm, certainly. btw, I don't know how accurate these types of studies are and what the actual ratio is, but I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage was higher than in the general population. Not all psychopaths are antisocial. Interesting read: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscientist-who-discovered-he-was-a-psychopath-180947814/

I think on a collective level, just being aware of these things will help. We have certain expectations from "normal" people that fail with these types of personalities. Normal people can't help but show signs of shame in certain situations, and evolutionarily, it's a pretty good way to detect when someone has been caught. But the NPD might not show any and fool this "detector". Most normal people don't constantly lie without apparent motivation, so we don't constantly scrutinize everything they say, which means that the NPD's lies can be believed because "why would someone lie about this?", most people can't fake confidence that well while NPDs live in a state of perpetual over-confidence, etc. It's kind of like when you know what an abusive relationship looks like (or even the recent mainstreaming of discussing what sexual harassement is and what can be done about it), it's easier to recognize the signs and avoid it (not 100% of the time, but certainly easier than if you have no idea and can't do any pattern matching). I think maybe if knowledge about these types of personalities was more widespread, they'd have a harder time fooling people. I'm certainly surprised that there's no been more discussions of them in the media considering... Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part, though. The internet certainly gives a wider playground and more narcissistic supply to the NPD, but hopefully it also makes it easier to spread the information that will help counter him/her over time. In other words, maybe there will be a kind of immune reaction, antigens will be created, and over time, a societal adaptation will take place.

I feels like the whole planet has been getting a crash course in NPD these past couple years. I thought I'd link a few ressources here for those who have been learning along but didn't realize that this was a known pathology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder To understand the condition, the concept of "narcissistic supply" must be understood: https://www.healthyplace.com/personality-disorders/malignant-self-love/narcissists-narcissistic-supply-and-sources-of-supply https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-personality-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20366662 (I know some posters here will try to make this about politics, but I have no interest in discussing that here. I think the psychology itself is interesting and, if better understood by more people, maybe we wouldn't collectively fall as easily for the tricks employed by narcissists to gather their supply.)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/20/how-bill-browder-became-russias-most-wanted-man