Liberty

Lately I've been listening chronologically through the archives of Jocko Willink's podcast. He's a former Navy SEALs, interesting guy. Not related (directly) to finance/investing, but certainly a lot of interest life lessons in there, as well as lots of cool historical anecdotes (most of the early episodes are him going through a book and then doing a Q&A). http://jockopodcast.com I discovered him through interviews he did with Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan (he also did one with Sam Harris), if you want a good starting point. https://tim.blog/2015/09/25/jocko-willink/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/the-logic-of-violence/

Out of curiosity, what did you end up buying?

My understanding is that it's the employees themselves that are buying and not the company, but I could be mistaken about that. They probably have a certain time window (buy within X months, must hold for Y years..?), but I don't know the details of the plan.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-from-the-ground-up/

This is surprisingly irrational for Leonard. He's usually pretty open-minded but he has a very rigid view on buybacks. It's not irrational, it's just more strict ethically than almost everyone else out there, which isn't the worst thing to have a CEO be... He sees this as an insider buying shares from an outsider with a potentially large informational asymmetry, and like Buffett (especially in the early days of BRK), he's cultivated a shareholder culture that is idiosyncratic and more partnership-like than most companies. A lot of employees are shareholders and while they might be sophisticated at doing VMS software, they might not be sophisticated market participants and he feels very protective of them, as he's made clear at both AGMs that I've been to. In my follow-up question, I ask about potential ways to mitigate this, for example Buffett who has bought large blocks of stocks directly from shareholders (going through succession planning or whatever -- he could make it known that the company is interested in buying large blocks under certain parameters, as a kind of open-ended tender), and his approach of making it clear ahead of time that there's a point at which he'd consider the stock a good value and would buy back (1.3x of book or whatever). There's also the Singleton approach of doing public tender offers where everybody knows ahead of time and can decide to participate or not. There's more in my follow-up, but I guess we'll see if they answer my follow up the next time they do these... I just don't think he likes the idea of the company going in the open market and buying when others don't know that they're buying (I don't just mean the usual repurchase authorization). It's not because everybody else does it they should do it if they feel uncomfortable with it, I like that they're independent thinkers.

CSU shareholder Q&A (I asked the single question): http://www.csisoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/QA-June-2018-Final.pdf

http://www.ropertech.com/sites/default/files/180628_%20Thermo%20Fisher%20Scientific%20Signs%20Agreement%20to%20Acquire%20Gatan%20from%20Roper%20Technologies.pdf Looks like $ROP sold about 0.54% of its revenues for 3.3% of its market cap in cash. At a run-rate of 150m in FY18, Gatan sold for 6.16x sales and I’m estimating between 18-20x EBITDA. And it was one of their more cyclical businesses.

https://variety.com/2018/film/news/pixar-boys-club-john-lasseter-cassandra-smolcic-1202858982 This is pretty sad. I liked Ed Catmull's book about shaping the creative culture at Pixar. Seems like he should have focused on other parts of the culture too...

WSJ interview with Musk: https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-races-to-exit-teslas-production-hell-1530149814

https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/the-thought-father-nobel-prize-winning-psychologist-daniel-kahneman-on-luck-9199162.html

Profile of PillPack from last year: https://www.wired.com/story/pillpack-pharmacy-of-the-future-is-ready-for-your-bathroom/

Agreed.

LBTYA is trading at levels last seen in 2012... Anybody left to capitulate?

Looks like they are pretty small - about $100M in revenue. Yeah, they're def not buying revenue. One easy way to get more scale is to use it internally with Amazon's employees, and use it with the JPM-BRK health partnership too. They're positioning themselves for the long-term, and this is one more piece of the puzzle, IMO.

For those who, like me, weren't familiar with PillPack, here's what they do: Pretty clever. And licensed in 49 states. Video found via @bluff_capital on Twitter.

Innovative last mile: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2356310 Also, they bought PillPack pharmacy: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2356401 "PillPack is licensed in 49 states by the way."

Vela acquisition: http://virtual-strategy.com/2018/06/27/fog-software-group-acquires-pace-software-inc/

This feature exists in effectively any commodity business. Not only that, but crypto-mining equipment probably has a rather short useful life and needs to be replaced at frequent intervals to keep up. That's if it doesn't become worthless at some point because of proof-of-stake becoming more popular.

https://blog.openai.com/openai-five/

Good read: https://stratechery.com/2018/intel-and-the-danger-of-integration/

Thanks for the recommendation, looks interesting.

http://theirrelevantinvestor.com/2018/06/22/pop/

Fishy story.

Depends how long they keep it up. If they do this all year, then they're raising leverage some, which was what Malone/Maffei called for but Rutledge seemed reluctant to do. EBITDA growth should also absorb part of it.

Russia and FIFA: https://overcast.fm/+LHyfMQLpg