Liberty

http://www.macworld.com/article/2951299/smartphones/not-exactly-missing-it-apple-s-quarterly-results.html

Apple Watch minimum bar for success is much higher than Swatch. Target is not Watch wearers, but a lot of people who don't wear a watch. It'll never be iPhone, but nothing ever will. Part of the Watch benefits will be making iPhone stickier and more attractive, though (and also the Mac, iPad, Apple TV eventually, etc). But that won't all happen within 6 months of launch or whatever. Version 2 of the Watch will be better, version 3 even better, etc.

What a monster. And this is with Salix drawing down a ton of excess inventory, and big FX headwinds since they have a big international presence. When that's done...

Probably important to note that Apple (I believe Cook) specifically said they would do this before the Watch was even released. Yeah, why give anything to your competitors in a brand new category? Also, for most of the quarter, demand was higher than supply, so numbers would mostly only tell you how many Watches the supply chain was able to make. We'll know more after much more time has passed, the Watches have been in stores, in more countries, OS 2 with native apps is out, etc.

For those wondering why the big jump, it's on non-fundamental news unfortunately:

He also changed his mind quite often, even if he sometimes took some convincing to get there. Nobody gets everything right at first, but being able to change one's mind is still a lot more worthy of praise than the inflexibility that so many people who end up in positions of powers take pride in. Oh, and I don't think he was against third party devlopers on the iPhone. But they couldn't have that ready at launch, so they tried to sell the "make web apps" solution, but they were already working on APIs at the time (got this from interviews with ex-Apple engineers on the Debug podcast, if memory serves me right).

Just had time to look at the numbers, haven't listened to the call yet, but seems very nice. EPS up almost 45%, greater china revenue up 112%, iPhone revenue up almost 60%... And FX was an 8% headwind, so revenue that were up 33% would've been up 41% at constant FX. And that's for a stock selling still at a very low ex-cash multiple. Hopefully it keeps crashing a bit so Apple can do what they did the last time this happened and repurchase $10-20 billion over a week or two. Lately it seems like every year in the summer Mr. Market gets down on Apple, and then the cycle starts again in the Fall.. All the speculation about the Watch is pointless at this point, especially without much hard data. It's like trying to prognosticate about the iPod or iPhone a few months after their launch. Did anyone get it right? I guess it's what short-term traders do, but only the long-term will matter to investors.

Haven't owned this in years, but someone mentioned they had good results on Twitter and someone else sent this: http://seekingalpha.com/article/3336615-the-rli-corporation-a-high-quality-business-flying-under-the-radar-and-offered-at-a-fair-price Seems like they just keep on trucking.

Whether through video bundles or broadband, customers are paying for access to the infrastructure. That's not going to change. This is a highly predictable subscription business, churn can be mitigated with things like triple play and quad play, and scale is everything, so there's great operating leverage if you can get big enough. If anything, broadband should be more profitable than video because with video, most of the revenue is passed on to content producers anyway. With broadband, you keep that revenue and the marginal cost of extra bandwidth gets pretty low, especially once you phase out analog signals which frees up tons of space that should be able to handle broadband growth for a long while. Average speeds are still relatively low in the US, so if New Charter comes around and starts offering a minimum of 60 mbits or 100 mbits like Global does in Europe, it'll be quite the revolution.

Have you watched the general resource markets recently? The 15% decline in Altius is nothing compared to some of the other names, especially in the gold business ;) To be honest, no I haven't watched general resource markets lately. I just noticed the decline in Altius in my portfolio, didn't see negative internal developments... Altius is the only resource based stock I own; I especially have no understanding or interest in gold. Glad to hear it is just a resource market decline and nothing internal. Would like to see a $9.99 special so I can add more :) Altius seems to fluctuate between $9 and $12 on no news whatsoever. I've been selling about 10-15% of my position when it hits $12 or higher and picking them back up when they're under $10. This recent decline is great though because Altius might actually act on that share repurchase authorization. Yes that strategy has worked quite well here so far. I have made multiple purchases in and around $10 and held on. Hasn't worked as well as the strategy you have mentioned...not under water yet though. If that happens I will add to my position. That's what you call a long-term trading strategy. Altius first hit the current price in 2007.

Overview of the Malone cable and media empire, covers many of his companies (not just LBRDA): http://www.jnvestor.com/malone/

I did finish the book a little while back. The second half is better than the first, possibly because the events were taking place as Zuckerman was writing the book. It also gets less redundant as the book goes on.

People forget that there's been a bunch of duds under Jobs. He wasn't infallible. MobileMe? Ping? The first iPhone didn't have GPS, couldn't record video, didn't have cut & paste, didn't have third party apps, etc. What matters is avoiding making mistakes on stuff that is unfixable or really central to everything else in the ecosystem. Everybody looks to Apple for big brand new innovations, but its real strenght has always been in incremental improvement. It's their ongoing process that is impressive, not just big flashes of glory. Apple Music/iTunes can be improved if Apple decides to put resources there. The hard decision is pulling resources away from other things...

iTunes is definitely overdue for a big cleanup and rebuild from the ground up. It's kind of the Microsoft syndrome; they have crammed so much stuff into the same place, and have to support so much legacy stuff (what if someone still has an iPod that they need to synch with a USB cable? what if someone bought TV shows in iTunes, what if someone is synching podcasts from there, etc) that it's getting too complex. IMO they should break things out in separate apps or at least rethink the general interface. But still, despite that it still does the job. If people can get used to Windows they can get used to iTunes, I just wish Apple did better there, but there are only so many top engineers to go around in any company, and at Apple the top people want to be on the secret net product or iOS team, not necessarily the iTunes team. Chances are that now that the big behind the scenes work of incorporating the streaming stuff is done, they can start to think about doing some cleaning up. The challenge with Apple is that when they start a new service they immediately start at scale and it's not really their core expertise. Spotify grew up from zero users progressively and they found problems along the way. Apple starts a streaming service and potentially has hundreds of millions of people doing the free tryout all at once, so many more people actually see your version 1.0 and when stuff breaks... Oh well, their cloud stuff has been improving. Cloudkit is apparently very good, but iTunes is built on lots of really old APIs and that needs to change.

Just looked up the stock and read the 2014 letter. The letter was very good, and the stock.... well that's simply an insane compounder. Know any books/longform articles about these guys? I'll read the letters this week. Apart from the letters there's not much. They were a very small cap not that long ago. There's a Globe & Mail profile on the CEO that might interest you.

The best annual letters are from Constellation Software in my opinion.

Sort of... you can't tell it how fast you plan on driving and then have it plan the proper route for you. It can set you out down a path and then only later tell you that you won't make it unless you slow down. It's not quite what they advertise it to be. I would suggest that you send a feature request to the company. They're quite receptive with that stuff. It could be in the next software update, who knows?

I would agree with you if gas stations were typically located a few hundred miles apart, with none in between. People in gasoline cars don't need to think about whether they'll make it from point A to point B. Of course range is more of an issue with electric cars. A few years ago it was *the* main dealbreaker with them along with price, performance, looks, safety, public perception, etc, and now it's just something that you have to be more careful about in some very specific situations (day to day you start with a full charge, so you should be fine unless your main job is Uber driver, but for roadtrips you have to plan a route with charging, which the onboard computer does for you). Still doesn't have anything to do with Tesla being somewhat dishonest because they give a range based on the legal speed limit like everyone else does. This is the equivalent of what you can see on every car forum out there: "Hey, I bought Car X, is it broken? Sticker says I should get # MPG with it, but I only get %, what's wrong? Oh yeah, I always drive fast on the highway, race off every red light, etc". Early adopters always have it a little worse than late adopters; early iPhone users congested AT&T's network so much that they had crappy speeds and dropped calls... In a few years there'll be Superchargers everywhere and batteries will have more capacity and this problem will go away, but for now it's something that might inconvenience you. But if you want to trade your Tesla for my Corolla, I'll take it off your hands.

I like the anecdote about the first Gulf war: http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.ca/2015/07/china-crash-us-crash-and-great-book.html

I don't blame the EPA because the EPA just puts out a number. The average person who talks to me about my car doesn't understand how much range declines with just a modest increase in speed -- like from 65 to 75. Tesla uses the EPA's number as a marketing tool without enough clear emphasis that there is a huge drop-off in range at higher speeds. Probably because they don't want people to see it as the unsexy car that has to be in the slow lane when you set out on the exciting first roadtrip of summer. There you are in your fancy new car, going 65 while everyone is passing you. You dare not speed up for fear that you won't make it to your destination. Elon Musk does not want people to think of his cars that way. It's different with electric cars because the buyer needs to properly assess what the range is going to look like given their preferential speed of driving. This is critically important to get right because of the lack of charging options between waypoints. I don't know, the same is true for all cars. They might advertise that Corolla or Infiniti as getting X MPG on the highway, but if you drive 80 MPH instead of 60 MPH, you'll get significantly worse MPG. That's just physics plus the fact that the advertised number is always derived from testing around the most common legal limit (60 MPH or 65 MPH). You won't see an ad for a Mustang and see "it gets 20 MPG at 80 MPH" or whatever. http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger As for places to charges, seems like there are quite a few, and within a couple years (you can see on the maps), you won't be able to throw a stick without hitting a supercharger, not to mention all the other stations that aren't superchargers and the fact that most Tesla owners charge at home so always leave with a full "tank" in the morning. I'd say that on average, Tesla owners probably have to think a lot less about "refueling" than gas car owners (is anything more annoying than stopping at a gas station? I'd trade all those frequent stops there for having to stop at a Supercharger on a long trip once or twice a year in a heartbeat). Main exception is someone who is constantly doing day-long roadtrips. That person should probably wait a few years to get an electric car.

Disclosure: I worked for DHR for about half of the past quarter century. The 3 bullets capture the paradox of the comparison between DHR and BRK. The outperformance is perhaps something many people out there don't simply know. Not only BRK, I don't think there are (m)any others, in the same time period (1989-2014) that have outperformed. So, what's the paradox? Both DHR and BRK buy companies, but how? With a rare exception, BRK buys with cash, seldom issuing shares. Buffett has written enuff about that subject. DHR, on the other hand is a serial acquirer using their stock as currency. Here is a short paragraph from Buffett's letter this year, in the context of conglomerates being in the dog-house, Once again it became evident that business models based on serial issuance of overpriced shares - just like the chain letter models - most assuredly redistribute wealth, but in no way create it That, IMO, captures DHR's acquisition-fueled growth. I will leave the accounting treatment of wealth creation (or lack of) to experts, that's not me. Complex? You bet. Can't even imagine how murky the PALL+DHR and then DHR1+DHR2 is going to look on the finances. The rest of the seeking alpha article is spot on. No other comparable corporation has an execution model like DHR's. Specifically the Danaher Business System. Companies salivate for it. For ex-DHR folks like me, we will take those valuable lessons to our grave. Yet, when I left, I separated the business from the stock. I sleep well thanks to that. Disclosure: I have ZERO $ in DHR and approaching 100% in BRK. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, very interesting! I liked the twist in your comment; it started out and I was expecting you to be very bullish on DHR, but then you don't own the stock at all (which is different from owning more BRK or whatever). Can you elaborate a bit more about why you don't want to own it at all? You find it good but overvalued? You don't know if they can keep producing similar results going forward (because of size? management change?)? You find their deals and spinoffs too complex for comfort? Curious to hear more of your thinking on this. Thanks in advance.

Interesting backstory on how they came up with the ludicrous mode.. http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/three-dog-day

When they reinvest less in the business. Ramping up production at 50%/year at the same time as developing at least two new models (Model X, Model 3, which is not a reuse of the existing platform, and they said they also want to do a pickup truck in the class of the Ford F150, so maybe they've started work on that), at the same time as building a $5 billion battery factory that will produce as much as the rest of the world combined, at the same time as building a network of fast-charging stations worldwide, at the same time as building stores and service centers on three continents, at the same time as hiring tons of software people to work on self-driving cars and rapid updates to the existing software, at the same time as developing an energy storage business for consumers and utilities, along with whatever they haven't announced yet, is kind of bound to have an impact on the income statement...

You'd also get a 300-mile range with the new 90kwh battery. How often do you wish you had a longer range on your 85? It doesn't work that way. Nobody is going to drive a P90D at 55 MPH in order to attain 300 mile range EPA estimate. My P85 starts out with 265 EPA range, but I only get 200 actual miles out of a full charge. I drive 75-80 MPH. Higher speed,more drag, less range. Where is the customer driving a car that sporty and adheres to 55 MPH? Musk is full of shit here, and IMP should stop bullshitting people. Don't be sneaky, you can just be honest and be less of a salesman. It won't hurt to come clean. Tell that to the EPA who makes the methodology for range calcs. At a certain speed, you get a certain range, if you go faster, you get less. Wind resistance increases exponentially with speed, so if you drive fast the impact gets significant. That's true for gas cars too, nothing special about the Tesla (except it's a lot more aerodynamic than most cars). And lots of people do a lot of city driving, leading to much lower averages speeds. And btw, the AWD "D" model gets more range on the same battery than the non-AWD, which you have. Seems counterintuitive if you're used to gas cars, which get worse efficiency with AWD, but with EVs having two motors allows all kinds of optimizations...

No idea. You can probably guess something is going on when small LiLAC has close to as much dollar volume as gigantic LBTYA... There's probably some game theory involved, nobody wants to be the last to sell because it could be a lower price, so all head for exits fairly quickly, etc.