Liberty

Yeah, I like his conversational/stream-of-consciousness style combined with his "let's reason about this from first principles" approach. One of my fave financial bloggers.

http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.ca/2017/11/is-buffett-bearish.html

Pricing is out on the Semi: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/24/16695926/tesla-electric-semi-truck-price 150k to 180k, when most seemed to expect 200k-250k.

I'm enjoying this Michael Mauboussin presentation (from 2014), thought others here might as well.

Ok, this is funny:

This year's holiday ad: https://youtu.be/1lGHZ5NMHRY I think 'Misunderstood' might still be my fave holiday one: https://youtu.be/v76f6KPSJ2w And of course the dead poets society one always struck a chord with me (now even moreso with Robin Williams, a personal friend of Steve Jobs, gone...):

Good luck avoiding discussions about politics at the dinner table. ;) Cheers!

What he explains starting at 13 minutes in the video is something worth understanding that I think many people are missing: ?t=13m

Missing my point. You're talking like what happened was the only thing that could have happened. That's hindsight bias. If things had turned out differently, you'd probably be saying that they were geniuses for holding on to the equity, or that they had made a huge mistake for cashing out of it early.

There was no crazy town. The price of ALS didn't move during that whole period. It's not like it ran up to 60 and then fell back down to 10-13. It just stayed there. And it hasn't moved since. It wasn't stupid to invest at the time because if commodity prices hadn't fallen off a cliff, the mine would've been built. But they fell, so nothing came out of it. That's what a probability distribution is. But with hindsight, you can now say that it was crazy (even if ALS price didn't move), but in fact, if things had unfolded otherwise, you wouldn't be saying this (but I'm sure you'd come up with another 'just so' story to explain why you were emailing them at the time). That's what I mean by hindsight bias. And why do you trust Dalton so much if you're saying that it was super obvious to you but not to him?

Famous last words. You're obviously the smartest guy in the room most of the time. I'm just very surprised you fell for the Alderon thing. Did you really think this sketchy Vancouver resource junior, named after a planet in Star Wars, was going to raise US$1 billion in capex? I suppose a lot of smart people fell for it. When Altius promotes these spinouts it's meant to excite and fool the market, not its own shareholders. The same process will repeat with Adventus and Zeus Copper. Altius will try to sell some dross as gold. Buyer beware. Dude, you're creating a narrative in your head, which is largely built in hindsight bias and on stuff you're projecting onto me despite not knowing me at all. I didn't fall for Alderon anymore than Brian Dalton and Chad Wells and all the other posters in this thread fell for it, so if you want to insult all of these people and then claim that it's easy to predict commodity cycles (insulting all the posters in other threads who got surprised by the oil and metals cycles), go for it, but it doesn't make you look better.

Famous last words.

Probably a liquidity discount. LILA and LILAK inverted for long periods too. Yesterday FWONK traded 1.44m shares and FWONA traded 188k shares.

Hindsight is 20/20. If by random luck iron ore had just stayed flat from that level and the mines had been built, you wouldn't be saying it was overvalued at the time. This is part of the problem, it relies on luck and commodity prices (which during bad times tend to all move in lockstep, negating a lot of the diversification).

What mania are you talking about? The stock has been bouncing between $10 and 14 for all those years. I bought most of my shares between 10-12 and my last sales were at 13.47.

Very nice way to change the topic, you just called almost everybody who's been contributing to this thread for a long time and is a long-term investor in ALS dumb, because they were buying around that time... Whatever fits your narrative, man. I'm not mad, just skeptical, something that had been missing in this thread. As for your anchoring, the market doesn't care for your cost basis. Sins of omission are just as real as sins of commission. If you buy something for $1, it runs up to $1000, and then falls back to $1, you can say "oh well, nothing bad happened, I didn't lose anything", but it still won't change that fact that someone was ready to pay you $1000 for it and you didn't take it and it's a missed opportunity.

Ha, nice try! The point is not materiality, the point is cherry picking. If the rest of CSU's investments had gone the way ALS's investments have gone in the past 5-10 years, then a few good 10m investments wouldn't be changing much. But look at CSU's FCF/share growth over the past 5-10 years and it's ROIC and I think you'll see that they've been doing quite well (when you look, don't forget the financials are in USD and the stock is priced in CAD). So once you know they have a good, repeatable process, you track how much capital they're deploying into it. Meanwhile, ALS's book value per share has been falling since 2011, large investments have been impaired, the stock has gone nowhere, and it's still just as dependent on the random fluctuations of commodity prices as ever. So while the recent upswing is producing all kinds of increases right now, a downturn in a couple years could undo it all, and you have to question their great early years as a company -- how much was skill and how much was riding the "commodity super-cycle". I've not been convinced that management has produced enough value in the past downturn to merit my capital, at least not at 1.65x book and the current multiple of free cash that they're selling at. But that's just my own opinion.

Please calculate the CAGR for the Champion debenture. Thanks in advance. Oh great, the $525m company has made a good $10m investment, hurray, this changes everything!

I've also donated to SENS multiple times, and sent some soil samples from a local graveyard to LysoSENS many years ago when they wanted to get some from around the world. http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research/intracellular-junk Another good way to help is to support computational protein design withy our spare CPU cycles (especially in winter when the dissipated heat just displaces heating from other sources). I prefer Rosetta@home: https://boinc.bakerlab.org But anyway, this is off-topic...

It actually seems to be one of Musk's blind spots (well, can't hold it against him -- one man can't do everything). I was in contact with Aubrey de Grey (of the SENS Research Foundation) a few years ago and was suggesting to him some wealthy people that I thought might be inclined to support him (like Felix Salmon, before he passed, as he wrote about this indirectly in his book, and Chuck Feeney's Atlantic Philanthropies), and suggested Musk. He said he got in touch but Musk preferred to invest in tech hardware than biomedical research (of the diseases of aging, in this case). At least another part of the Paypal Mafia, Peter Thiel, has made big investments in the area.

They're always late, but mostly because they self-impose impossible deadlines (which probably make them move faster than if they had more conservative deadlines, which might be all that matters to Musk). That's different from "not delivering". They still did something that everybody thought was impossible when they IPO'ed. The Model S is a beloved vehicle that has won tons of awards, smokes Ferraris while seating 7 and having a 5-star crash rating, and is changing an industry. Not bad for the first auto startup in the US in a while (which happens to not only have had to build a brand and vehicles from scratch, but is also doing it with a completely different technology platform than what was established -- that's way harder)... If Model 3 is late but helps make EVs a lot more mainstream, is that a win or a loss? I think Musk would be satisfied with that. Once Model 3 is ramped up, they won't have to invest billions in building out factories, right? Then we'll see what profitability looks like. But right now it's hard to tell because Model S/X might be profitable on their own, but they're not on their own, they're also investing billions for the next phase of the plan. Personally, I have no interest in Tesla as an investment. I've just been interested in EVs for about 20 years. I think they're doing great things for the industry, and like how the iPhone pushed everyone else to change and up their game, they're making all other automakers better by lighting a fire under their bottoms. That has a lot of leverage to make the world move faster in the right direction, which was Musk's initial goal.

I'm right here. My points still stand.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/20/justice-department-calls-att-deal-for-time-warner-illegal-and-harmful-to-consumers.html

What was the cost to borrow TSLA stock to short over that period? I imagine it must have been pretty material, since it's so heavily shorted?

Since you asked, me. AWS capital base is increasing just as fast if not more than its revenue and profit is growing. Its not a tech company, it gets the same margins and EBITDA with the same amount of PPE as a utility. Sounds like a great short, then, no? Guess he's just lucky to have gotten away with it for 20 years and personally made 95 billion in the process of not caring about returns on his invested capital... 20 years? AWS has only made a real impact on the company since 2012, and has since grown into a much larger piece. We were talking about Bezos and Amazon, not just AWS. In any case, I don't want to re-do this, we've already done it in the AMZN thread, this isn't the place.