Liberty

Someone has a defective inner scorecard: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2017/11/07/the-case-of-wilbur-ross-phantom-2-billion/

I suppose they could try again... https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/14/amazon-shuts-down-its-hotel-booking-site-amazon-destinations/

Looking more closely at things, it seems like the weaker guidance is in good part caused by the YoY comp (Q4 2016 was +31%) and by the fact that they're investing more in branded advertising to get more direct business and temporarily growing opex faster than revenues right now (hence the deleverage). This seems like a good way to invest in the future, because margins on direct should be much higher than if you get it through other channels. They also tend to beat their own guidance, so we'll see next Q how they do... Properties still growing nicely: Though the mix is shifting to more vacation rentals with fewer rooms per property. YTD: In Q4 last year they had about 1.05bn of FCF, so at current price, PCLN is selling for around 19x FCF without adjusting for cash or anything else.

I've been noticing the same thing with many of the names I follow. Seem to want to lower expectations, which is rarely a bad thing.

Q3: http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/PCLN/2920502728x0x962889/085B23FA-7D11-46BA-85FC-DA6991036641/PCLN_Group_Earnings_Release_Q317.pdf Stock down after hour on Q4 guidance which is a bit soft.

Q3: http://www.haydencapital.com/wp-content/uploads/Hayden-Capital-Quarterly-Letter-2017-Q3.pdf I thought there were some interesting ideas in there. Fred also links this presentation on calculating incremental ROIC: http://www.haydencapital.com/wp-content/uploads/COBF_Incremental-ROIC.pdf

MIDD is one of my sins of omission. I looked at it pretty closely after seeing it mentioned in a report about high CRI/ROIC companies... Probably around 2012..? Not sure. Saw promising numbers, but had a few reservations about the CEO and too many things I didn't understand about the industry, so I passed.

Thanks MrHolty. I had even read about that, but they have so many programs and initiatives that I had forgotten about it. Another way to allow third parties to plug into the Amazon API. Makes all the sense in the world.

That's interesting scuttlebutt... They come in the large envelopes that 3P sellers often use or something else? Where do you think they get them from? Could it just be that they come form within the Amazon logistics system but use smaller packaging because they're air-shipping them from farther away to get them in 2-days? Another benefit of leasing your own planes once you're at scale, you can do more of this just-in-time inventory juggling at lower cost than if you had to use Fedex and UPS.

Ben Thompson on Apple and the iPhone X: https://stratechery.com/2017/apple-at-its-best/ Also, just received my protective case for my X. The UPS guy remembered delivering my iPhone X last week and asked about it, said he went to the store to play with it, so I showed him mine. He asked about the home button a bit and when I showed how it worked, he was like "oh, that makes sense". He said the next time I see him he'll probably have bought one too. FWIW.

Down around 14% on what looks at first glance to be a rough quarter: http://globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/11/06/1174987/0/en/Mesa-Labs-Reports-Second-Quarter-Results.html

Another acquisition, the 4th one this year so far: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171106005696/en/HEICO-Corporation-Subsidiary-Acquires-Interface-Displays-Controls Probably not very big since the price wasn't disclosed. Looks like a bolt-on for the Radiant Power Corp subsidiary, part of the ETG.

That's a good question. Negative working capital certainly is nice when you can get it too.. A warehouse can be optimized very differently than a store. Seems to me like there are so many kinds of "buffers" built-in a store's inventory because things have to be there for people to look at pick up, you can't have near empty shelves or quick-order from a different store even if that would be the most efficient inventory for certain SKUs. But with warehouses/fulfilment centers, you should be able to optimize inventory better for maximum turnover per sq/ft. And if you have decades of sales data and thousands of machine-learning and logistics engineers, I suspect you should be able to get pretty good at this kind of inventory management.

Doesn't that sort of imply that Amazon isn't providing the lowest price. They definitely don't have the lowest prices on everything. It's very hard for any retailer to do that unless you have a very limited number of SKUs and mostly focus on bulk (f.ex. the Costco model, which can't handle millions of SKUs, at least not as efficiently. I've seen estimates that Amazon has over 400 million SKUs. A Costco has about 4,000 SKUs according to the company: https://www.costco.com/about.html). But they're certainly making an effort to keep the value proposition high for customers (convenience, breadth, speed, customer service, flat fee & extras with Prime, price-matching, etc) so that they're less tempted to even look elsewhere (become the starting point for all product searches, which has been trending that way). Or even be ready to pay a bit more because they're getting a known experience that they trust (I know I've sometimes avoided ordering things from other online stores because I had no idea how things would go, and whether they would make it right if I had any problems).

You're post was good, Cameron. I just happened to disagree with parts of it and pointed out some of the reasons why. AJC's post on the other hand was just a way for him to insult me because I've disagreed with him in other threads and he obviously holds a grudge.

Original valuation work is looking at a bunch of revenue multiples from things that are kinda vaguely comparable in different industries? Wow. I guess I should start doing that then... I'm sure that with this methodology you could have shorted Amazon and Google and Facebook and Netflix and Visa and Mastercard right form their IPOs... ::) Thanks for the thinly veiled insults. I like you too.

Yeah, I think the GPUs are mostly for Ethereum and its variants now. Bitcoin is on ASICs.

Yep, I did try that one. Another one if you want to kill an app quickly for whatever reason, you go in the switcher (slide up and hold), and then hold on the app until the red circles appear, but then you don't even have to tap the circle, you can just swipe the cards up.

Another killer gesture is this one: You swipe right or left on the "home bar". You don't have to do the exaggerated circular motion that is in this video, much faster to just do it in a straight line. Smooth as butter.

More deal speculation. It's déjà vu all over again.. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/06/softbank-willing-to-reengage-charter-communications-on-deal-sources-say.html

And at the keynote Apple explained how they worked with professional hollywood mask makers to try to make 3D masks to fool FaceID and then used machine-learning to train the system not to be fooled by even extremely realistic masks. Seems to me like FaceID is as secure as most people can ask for, especially since no info about your face leaves the secure enclave on the phone (doesn't go to cloud, can't be accessed by apps.. They just get a biometric "OK" or "not OK" signal back when asked to ID).

You seem to be saying above that you almost never go on FB, so I suspect targeting is better when they have a lot of signal to use (lots of likes, pages followed, active with friends, following brand pages, etc)

He has said before he will be selling $1b/yr of stock to fund Blue Origin https://twitter.com/arjunsethi/status/735275067722997761

Many of those duplicate accounts are not frauds. But this is a problem everywhere online. Google has a lot of click fraud, SEO spammers and bot farms trying to game the system too. Twitter has spam bots... As long as the advertisers are seeing the sales coming in, this is a cost of doing business, and arms race between the platforms and spammers. It's easier to discover very active spam accounts than inactive ones, so I suspect a lot of those don't do much.

I know it doesn't fit all of those criteria but Facebook seems to be a lot cheaper than 40x. Yeah, and I don't think it's expensive at all...