Liberty

Down to $25 on CEO being fired. Marc Cohodes (who's short HCG and has been for a while) talked about it here: http://www.bnn.ca/home-capital-shares-fall-after-ceo-martin-reid-fired-1.707687

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-27/tesla-model-3-ramp-up-aims-to-crush-bmw-and-mercedes

achievement unlocked:

A little too rustic for my taste..

Thanks for sharing, TBW.

The real danger is the debt. If margins were to contract severely because of action by the government, they'd still have to service a pretty large debt. If the debt is, say, 6-6.5x at current EBITDA, what is it at 30% EBITDA margins? At 20% EBITDA margins? What if the aero cycle rolls over during that time? Manufacturing these airplane parts will always be a viable business, but there could be some serious pain if they had to transition to a different model. I'm not anything will happen, but the high debt and some unanswered questions about pricing and how much EBITDA comes from which part of the business were part of my reasons for selling a little while ago around $250. Maybe I'm being overly cautious...

https://khanna.house.gov/media/press-releases/release-rep-khanna-calls-investigation-aerospace-defense-contractor-business

BAC down 5.44% right now, if anyone hadn't noticed.

I enjoyed it too. Not the best ever, but worth reading, especially if you haven't read all the other accounts of Thorp (if you have, it's still good, but some parts will be less surprising).

Finally getting around to reading this, a year after getting it! :P

5-for-4 stock split on April 18: http://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/heico-corporation-declares-5for4-stock-split-20170320-00494 Wonder what's the point of these. Why not 101 for 100 while at it? If you're going to split, at least make it so you won't have to do these all the time and do a 2:1.

Thanks for taking one for the team, this is great entertainment. Like a scene straight out of The Big Short.

This feels toppy: http://m.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Was-last-weekend-s-Real-Estate-Wealth-Expo-the-2538443.php#photo-2669675

From what I've been told, it's about 2 hours, from maybe 10:30 AM.

I really enjoyed the dinner when I went in 2013, thank you for your hard work organizing it. I'm not really the traveling type, unlike many others, though, and with a young kid, I haven't been able to make in the past few years. This year I was hesitating between it and CSU agm. I ended up deciding on CSU because I've never been before, but I'd be sad if the dinner disappeared because I'm definitely considering going in coming years and it's a quality event and a good chance to meet some of the great people from this community you've built.

https://medium.com/@mrtsta/walking-on-thin-ice-time-for-torontos-real-estate-bubble-to-pop-62f7456821b8#.8epwriz42 http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/toronto-housing-bmo-td-1.4028032

Marc Cohodes interview on Vancouver and HCG:

Here we are again, new rumors that LBTYA and VOD are back at the negotiation table: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/15/vodafone_liberty/

Via @ac_eco: http://www.ryerson.ca/content/dam/citybuilding/pdfs/2017/CBI%20POLICY%20PAPER-In%20High%20Demand-March20171.pdf

Many places have it. It's called "Moral hazard".

? this reminds me of something... Ah yes! http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2011/02/17/mozilo-on-countrywide-better-performance-than-warren-buffett/

http://www.antimoneylaunderinglaw.com/2017/03/us-rates-canada-once-again-as-a-major-money-laundering-country-in-annual-report.html

While we're publishing old private messages, here's my response to Scott from back then (this is an old opinion, so it doesn't necessarily reflect what I think now): ---- Thank you for sharing your thesis, Scott. It makes a lot of sense to me. I agree that Facebook has incredibly strong network effects that make it very hard, if not impossible unless FB kills itself by making big errors, for any competition to gain critical mass. The main reason why I'm not that interested in FB are more qualitative. I see FB keep doing things that benefit itself over its users over and over again (for example, brand pages have ever declining organic reach, now down to low single digits -- so if you have 100k followers and post something, you might reach a few thousand of those despite having them explicitly follow you -- all in the name of trying to force these people to spend on ads to increase their organic reach. And once you spend once on ads, your organic reach falls further so that you are now on the ad treadmill. There are also problems with regular users, who end up with feeds full of Buzzfeed and auto-playing 'funny' videos, etc). All that stuff can work for a while, but I'm afraid that you can only mistreat your customers so long. They won't necessarily go away in droves, but you also don't want to be perceived as Microsoft in the early 2000s (the Borg that everybody hates yet everybody uses) because the barriers to switching were much higher back then than today. If platforms like Whatsapp and Line and such can get hundreds of millions of users in short periods of time, I wonder if a different kind of social paradigm, different enough from facebook, yet that canibalizes the time that people spend on FB, might not gain some traction at some point in the future when people dislike facebook a lot more than they do now. That's just speculation, of course, but it does give me pause for the longer term. It's a similar problem with Google. Their interests are not quite aligned with their users. Their goal is to learn as much as possible about you so they can show you as many targeted ads as possible. That conflict in the relationship can only get worse over time (you don't want to show fewer ads to your users over time... growth requires ever more). Apple, on the other hand, is pretty aligned with its customers. They want you to have a really good experience so you'll keep buying their hardware and services. But as I said, all that is more on the qualitative side. I'm sure that Facebook still has a lot of growth potential, especially in mobile and geotargeted ads. It could be a very good investment. Do you have some of the same reservations but they're overruled by the current growth inertia for the foreseeable future, or do you think those concerns aren't valid? Just curious.

Am I the only one who thinks this is an idiotic analysis? It is playing on fears instead of credible analysis. In 2000 certain industries were absurdly high (internet, telecom, and some other mega caps) so the indexes were overvalued but that had nothing to do with the median stock valuation. There were hundreds of dirt cheap "old economy" stocks in 2000. 2007 was different but the crash was not about over valuation but a largely unforeseen housing crash that damaged everything else. One of his metric is also based on revenues, which over long periods overlooks how the economy's composition has changed to include industries that have structurally higher margins (ie. software).