Liberty

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?

Similar, if not quite as dramatic.

Is that a typo? I'm not seeing it at 10 recently... I assume that's 10 USD for the shares listed OTC in the US. Quite a large drop today....no news that I can see. Ah, right, that must be it. I never looked at the USD version, and back when I owned ALS the CAD was on par with USD anyway..

Is that a typo? I'm not seeing it at 10 recently...

How many did you expect to see at this point after release?

Looks like the indexes truly are done dumping LiLAC, because volumes have gone down and sellers are harder to find. Both the As and the Cs are up around 8% right now.

http://www.asymco.com/2015/07/17/how-ipad-educates/

Interesting point! Could very well be, but I can't say for sure. I wish I knew more on the topic of gear boxes and transmissions overall, but my knowledge is limited in that area. I know a lot about electric motors though since I study electrical engineering. The recent biography of Musk has good sections on this. Originally they thought things would be easy, just buy a Lotus platform and get suppliers to make the parts you need, put it all together, voilà! In fact, suppliers sucked and caused delays, they had to do the work in-house on many things after all, and they had to modify something like 90% of the parts in the original Lotus platform, so they might as well have started from scratch..

Kind of wishing I had just held Google since I first started this thread in 2011. It's now done almost as well as Apple since 2011. Oh well, I redeployed the capital in other things that did well too and that I like more, so no point having regrets :)

I wasn't referring to your answer! ;) Cheers, Gio Ah, but you quoted me when you said that.. Nevermind then :)

My point was simply that he writes “general rules of mindful investing”… Then it is up to each one of us to discern from situation to situation, and in real business no situation is alike the previous one nor the next one. As always God is in the details! I was trying to reason about the details of Nomad & Franklin… and I was answered sarcastically with a generalization. Not very useful. Gio I wasn't being sarcastic, you misread that smiley. I was pointing out that Buffett has been quite clear that he doesn't criticize publicly except in general, but that doesn't mean that he can't be quite tough in private. As for Franklin, I've said what I had to say.

Should of been more specific, I was comparing it to a car with similar specs (torque & hp). It's still quite fast to get to top speed compared to an average car. And you're right, there's really no point of going past 250km/h, let alone ~150km/h lol. Not sure if a gearbox quite works on a car like that due to the ridiculous amount of torque. From what I understood, they had one with 2 gears on the Roadster, but it was always locked in second gear. They eventually dropped it because of "durability issues". I think the problems with the original Roadster transmission was mostly because of their supplier. Tesla was a very small company at the time and the supplier didn't take them seriously and had the C-team to work on that part, and it just sucked. Pretty sure in-house engineering Tesla team could make it work. It's not like there aren't very high-performance transmissions out there that have to handle a lot, and Tesla has very fine-grained control over the amount of torque that is being produced, so they could tune everything in software to make sure everything stays within the tolerances of a hypothetical transmission. But in any case, I don't think they need one, so they'll probably stay 1-speed for the foreseeable future.

Excellent. The June 16 rumor was true after all (they guessed 700-800m). Largest pharma in Egypt, annual growth of 20%, a platform for the fast-growing middle-east. I'm happy about it :)

Ahah!!!! Buffett says and writes whatever he wants… But don’t attack KO on compensation! Otherwise you are going to be ridiculed by "the man with a 50 plus track record of decoding human behaviors and incentives" on TV!! ;) Cheers, Gio Buffett won't publicly attack KO. But you have no idea what he told them behind closed doors ;) In the past he's already participated in the ousting of management there... I'm sure it could happen again if they do stupid things for too long.

At those speeds, it's more a question of going for a gearless design. Add a gear or two and top speed could be higher, but what's the point really? I also wouldn't say that it "accelerates slowly at high speeds", but I guess it always depends what you compare it to :)

Of course I don't personally trust these people like Buffett and Pearson in the way that I trust people I know; I trust their abilities, methods, etc, based on what can be known about them, exactly as you say. I don't see how we can be different here, unless you have a lot more personal connections than I do.

Cogent writing to the FCC to support CHTR-TWC merger: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/comment/view?id=60001093410 :) And looks like Lone Pine Capital (Stephen Mandel) doubled its CHTR position: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1061165/000090266415003096/p15-1589sc13g.htm

I've seen people make investment mistakes because they have bad data. Easy to make a bad decision if you don't have the whole story. Don't you get it, bad data is a big help, how else are you going to have a variant perception on a company? ;)

If it interests you, it's fairly easy to look up. I never said I thought Martin Franklin was Tom Ward, I just said made the comparison that Ackman praises Franklin like Prem Watsa praised Tom Ward, but that this doesn't automatically make me trust these people.

It was fantastic until it wasn't. Well... Can you elaborate a little further? Thank you, Gio Read The Frackers by Greg Zuckerman (not the best book, but the second half is good). Ward co-founded CHK with Aubrey McLendon (and later founded SandRidge, a Fairfax investment); they built it up from basically nothing into a massive multi-billion company that changed the energy landscape in the US and gobbled more land faster than almost anyone. From 1999 to early 2008, the stock did maybe 60x (in less than 10 years) without counting the dividends, and for a while they were considered gods in their industry, people who could do no wrong, they ran the thing as their fiefdom with huge perks and compensation, and then it all unravelled.

It was fantastic until it wasn't.

Probably, I have not been able to explain myself... But the comparison with Franklin misses what I was asking. You really like taking this down the rabbit hole, eh? I explained in a part that you didn't quote that I thought Maffei's compensation was a little high, but that it wasn't anywhere near as high as Franklin's if you look at the size of the companies involved/portion of shareholder capital involved, and that his compensation was structured in a much saner way. I'm not willing to take the risk of putting my capital in the hands of someone who seems to think that my capital is really his. He can think that if he wants, and I can think that it's excessive and stay away. I wouldn't invest with you either if you took such a large portion of profits and things were structured in such a way that your short-term outcomes were very different from shareholders outcomes. But I'm guessing that at your companies you take a very modest salary and just reinvest within the company... Not sure if that's a good guess. I've very aware that many people like him. But trying to do independent thinking means sometimes having your own opinion and not just following others. JAH is an immaterial part of FRMO, in any case. They have an index of owner-operators, so they own pretty much all of them in small quantities, including SHLD and TSLA. Doesn't mean all FRMO owners like Sears and Tesla (two companies with shareholders that tend to be at opposite ends of the spectrum).

No, they don't. I just checked. 5 year data for free. Clicking on 10-year data lands on the $199 a year subscription page. 10 year financials used to be free. About two years ago Morningstar went to five years free and you had to pay for 10 years. That is when I started using my university's library, which had a subscription. I wouldn't mind paying, but if I can still get it free that is what I will do! That's probably what confused me. But I should just have checked first :) Thanks guys. Still looking for that service that has all the CAGRs and YoY percentages pre-computed..

Well, $98 million were paid in a year, weren’t they? If they have created so much value, shareholders are waiting for that value to be recognized by the market… why shouldn’t Maffei? The man is running like 5-6 companies! Consider it 20 million per company or whatever. How much would Franklin be making by that standard? As I said, I think it's a little high, but the scale of the Liberty empire means that Maffei's compensation isn't too material to shareholders, and he's not pushing for weird schemes where he's skimming 20% of profits off the top or anything (imagine his take after he brought the SIRI deal if he had been getting a cut). Franklin's companies are much smaller yet his compensation is much bigger and structured in very non-conventional ways, which is definitely material to shareholders. Know practically nothing about? What is there to know? Franklin is extracting a quarter of a billion in cash in one year from a company that has no track record and is barely a small cap. Some of his options are valued at zero yet they're quite valuable, etc. This isn't some super nuanced thing that I can't possibly understand. I didn't say it was only for the money, another strawman. I'm sure he also loves his job and is very good at it, etc. But you don't structure your own compensation that way if getting as much money as possible out of the company isn't your goal. As I said, he's also a shareholder. Wouldn't that money from the preferreds be better compounding inside the company for the benefit of all shareholders? If he's not doing it for the money, as you claim, why is he trying to take so much of the shareholders' profits (or the potential profits, at this point, as the company hasn't been operating long enough to generate much) for himself rather than leaving it for all shareholders? I understand that Ackman is friends with Franklin and they go scuba diving together and all that, but Prem Watsa also had tremendous things to say about Tom Ward, yet after reading the Frackers I would never put my capital into that man's hands, even if he's been really successful in the past.

A year! Oh no ;) In that time SIRI has been growing quicker than anyone expected, having trouble staying levered to target because they generate so much FCF in fact, CHTR is buying TWC and BHN in a blockbuster deal, etc.. I care more about the value being created in the past year than about what the stock has been doing. The difference with Franklin is that the plethora of companies that Greg Maffei directly and indirectly oversees and advises strategy for are probably worth over 100 billion dollars, and he's still getting just 1/3 of just the "founder's dividend" that Franklin is getting (not to mention everything else) from his brand new, unproven low-single-digit-billion small cap... And I think that Maffei's compensation is probably a little high too, but this no doubt comes from Malone's soft spot for talented managers since he was grossly underpaid for a long time for what he did at TCI. Also note that Maffei's compensation figures are cumulative for all the companies where he's CEO/chairman (5-6 of them I think), while Franklin is getting a huge packaged from every company he runs. This is a total strawman. I'm not advocating working for free. This is about how much, and respect for the shareholders, because it's the shareholders' money. It's not the CEO's money that he can deign leave for the shareholders if he feels like it, it's the shareholders money. Managers who use companies as their own personal piggybanks send me the signal that they put themselves way above the shareholder, and when push comes to shove, that can't be a good thing if I'm a shareholder. It's the principal–agent problem. Saying that Franklin doesn't do it for the money is ridiculous, just like saying that Biglari isn't acting greedily. But we all know that you're fine with that stuff, so let's move on.