Liberty

Where do you get your info about customer satisfaction/quality of the products and how do you avoid sample bias?

Happy birthday! Hope you are having a great one, and thanks for all that you do for this community! :)

Happy 4th to those in the U.S., have a good one! Careful with the fireworks. 8)

Well, maybe I'm easily impressed, but a 30-year-old founder of a company valued at 10bn by savvy investors like Larry Ellison, who built a business in a very tough and technical field, where large incumbent companies tend to dominate, and who wants to make hundreds of blood tests available in Walgreens and other drugstores to regular people for a few bucks impresses me. I wasn't seeing anyone else doing that quite yet, but maybe I missed it. We're likely talking passed each other, and it's probably my fault. You were probably just looking for more evidence of what Theranos is doing better than others, while I pattern-matched some of what you said and probably read too much into it (being "baffled", the "she's pretty.. but.." comment, "what's groundbreaking?", etc). I apologize for being a bit defensive. I also hope to learn more about Theranos. Maybe someday they IPO and we can learn more about what's going on in there. The recent press blitz certainly could be the an early step to going public.

Nice menu! https://www.theranos.com/test-menu

i think this is a good start on validity of the claims. the company got recently got some FDA approvals for their system and hiv tests https://fortune.com/2015/07/02/theranos-fda-approval/ OK I really don't get what is the big deal. With HIV testing there are now at home tests using saliva that can give results in 15min. How is theranos groundbreaking? As for hepatitus and herpes, others also offer at home test kits. Seems like to me when they run out of new sexy ideas to tout in the financial community like internet backbone they take an plain vanilla idea and sell some small improvement as out of this world.... I know she is pretty and has an IQ of 180 but I baffled how she can be worth $5B. So you know nothing about the company (which was in stealth mode until recently so very little is known about it), but your are baffled by how it can be worth a lot? I know little too, but it's not too hard to imagine that its tests can be significantly better (faster, cheaper, more varied, lower false positives, based on patented tech that is defensible for a while, whatever), and that this could be worth a lot of money. You don't need something entirely "new" to build a valuable business and improve things. The iPhone was far from the first smartphone, the Model S isn't the first EV. I think the rational position is to say that you need more information to make up your mind, not to try to pooh pooh her company and its technology. I don't know yet if Theranos is the Apple or Tesla of its field, but what I've seen so far is impressive.

ZeroHedge has been a perma bear and has successfully predicted 10 out of the last one crisis in the past decade. :) ZeroHedge has probably lost more people more money than most financial sites out there. Opportunity cost is real.

+ 1 ..they deserve the success and more, though the likes of holmes and musk dont seem to driven by the money. who would really work 7 days a week for 10+ years for an extra billion ? Exactly. I think it's probably really rare to become a billionaire if you are driven by money, because rather quickly you have more money than you can spend and if you don't find the work itself fascinating and rewarding, and if you don't have goals on the horizon that are more motivating than "one more billion", you probably won't continue. I'm sure there are exceptions, though.

Still progressing slowly through the book. Less exciting than I expected, but maybe it'll get better... Wrote some thoughts about it on Twitter. I'll just cut & paste them here, sorry about the reverse chronological order (start at the bottom): http://i.imgur.com/qlXeFuj.png

http://www.oddballstocks.com/2015/07/the-solitron-proxy-battle-heats-up.html

I think Larry Elison is probably a pretty shrewd and smart investor, and maybe the ultimate value of the company will be shown to be a little up or a little down, but I doubt money's being put in at 10bn and it's actually worth 500m or whatever. So maybe her current net worth is really 4bn instead of 5, but it cuts both ways. If the company really is as good as they say, and really is growing fast, maybe her net worth in a year or two will be much higher than the 5bn quoted now. If the economics of the business are really good, maybe an IPO would actually make valuations go up rather than down. But as I said, a billion here or there isn't what really matters to me. I'm just glad to see young entrepreneurs tackling really hard problems that can make the world a better place, rather than all follow the bandwagon and do things that if they were hit by a bus, someone else would do the exact same thing 10 minutes later (one more messaging app, etc).

I know that, but isn't Theranos a private startup still? With presumably very little sales? So this is your typical private equity pie in the sky valuation? again.... i am just trying to get the facts...... The facts are that this is a private business, so there isn't a minute-by-minute quote available, but so far VCs who are putting their own money in seem to think it's pretty valuable. But most importantly, I think the technology seems very impressive, and that's what impresses me most about Holmes. I also don't care how much profit SpaceX is making right now, but I care what they're doing on the tech side, and I know that if they keep being successful, they'll be very valuable.

For those looking to find out more about Holmes, this New Yorker piece should be of interest: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler Wikipedia also has a decent overview. Starting her medical business at 19. Very impressive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes Here's a tedMED talk by her: http://www.tedmed.com/talks/show?id=309114 http://www.inc.com/larry-kim/the-unusual-business-strategy-that-made-this-woman-a-multi-billionaire.html

Impressive entrepreneur indeed. Some people are just incredibly productive.

Been playing around with Apple Music. Seems very good so far.

long term buy & hold isn't the only viable strategy. It also depends how much time you spend on investing-related things. If I spent a couple hours a month on investing, I'd probably never check stock prices. But currently I spend tens of hours per week on it, so that makes it harder to resist temptation.

LILAC presentation: http://www.libertyglobal.com/pdf/presentations/LiLAC-Group-Presentation-June-2015-FINAL.pdf

Agreed. As I have said, I really don’t know. And I don’t understand what’s going on here… If ZTS stock price doesn’t come down, it might be too pricy for VRX to consider buying… On the other hand, if its stock price comes down, Ackman would lose the paper gains he has enjoyed so far… Therefore, how is Ackman going to profit from here? And if he can’t, why is he not simply selling? Gio He can sell it to someone who's not as disciplined as VRX and will overpay. He'll probably try to fix it up some first, make it more profitable, improve growth, and then find a buyer. Pearson doesn't seem that interested in working with Ackman again anyway*, so I'm not assuming the buyer will be VRX. It's a possibility, but I don't see these two automatically walking hand-in-hand and scheming together on the next joint venture... You can usually take Pearson at his word: The only thing that is slightly ambiguous about the piece is if whether they were only talking about hostile deals and that context was removed or if they were talking about working together in general. But Pearson is opportunistic, so the right deal coming from Ackman would probably work, I just doubt they're interested in going hostile again, so it would probably be friendly. http://business.financialpost.com/investing/valeant-pharmaceuticals-inc-moves-on-after-allergan-bill-ackman-speedbump

Sincerely, I don’t know… If you ignore how much fat could be cut off, how can you judge how reasonable a bargain ZTS could prove to be for VRX? VRX, 3G, and others have shown very clearly by now that true value is found where other investors don’t see it. Because other investors are not ultimately able to foresee which results could be achieved by running things more efficiently! Cheers, Gio I'm not ignoring how much fat can be cut off. I've been playing with the numbers (adjusting gross margins, SGA, R&D, tax, etc), and as best as I can see, I can get it from "expensive" to "decent". But what Valeant usually likes to do (as with Allergan) is get things from "pretty decent" to "pretty cheap after restructuring". And if ZTS was bought by someone else than VRX, I doubt the acquirer would be able to get as much cost savings out of it, so I'm not sure what kind of IRRs they'd get... But as I said, I'm open to the idea that there's something I'm missing about ZTS that makes it worth that higher price. It certainly seems to have leadership in a big niche, lots of durable assets, fat to cut, etc. But that's not worth any price...

Tjeez, old geezer is more like it... Age is not just about numbers :) As Stephen King said, I have the heart of a small boy... ...and I keep it in a jar on my desk. :-X

A couple things for me: I partly justify the more frequent checking because I'm young (33) and still accumulating, and still expanding my circle of competence. So I want to be able to jump on opportunities and check new things frequently... But that's not a really good reason because I could get most of the same result without the frequent checking of price action. The reason to avoid it, IMO, comes down to human psychology. It's been shown that we have all kinds of biases that are exacerbated by constantly looking at something, even something random (we do pattern matching, anchoring, loss aversion, etc), and our willpower is limited and can be depleted, especially when we get emotional. Looking at stocks requires the expansion of mental energy (at least for me, maybe it's totally frictionless for others), and it's not a really productive use of that energy most of the time, IMO. But I also find it satisfying, so it's hard to just give up completely...

I wonder: if ZTS stock price is so high, why is Ackman still holding it in PSH's portfolio? Why isn't he just selling it at a sound profit? ??? Gio That's my main reason for thinking that there's probably an explanation. But suspecting that there's an explanation is not the same as understanding that explanation. What do you think about ZTS' valuation?

Too much. My ideal would be to do something like Guy Spiers and check extremely infrequently and never input my trades when the market is open, that kind of stuff. But I don't have the discipline for that yet. I hope to get there someday.

I noticed that too. Not sure if that's a mistake or if maybe they could they have bought some big block in a dark pool or somewhere that doesn't get recorded on the public ticker tape..? Edit: Another thing... These buybacks make me think that there won't be a big merger with lots of equity issued soon. Management has mentioned often recently that they think their stock is undervalued. I think it's more likely that we'll see more small and mid-sized deals for a little while, at least until the Salix inventory runs down and synergies start to take effect. Hopefully by then they'll have a few more quarters of nice organic growth under their belts, Salix's artificially depressed EBITDA will normalize, and the reduced net leverage will give them more options to look at bigger things.

Looking at CanadianInsider.com, it looks like VRX has repurchased 224,215 shares at $223 USD on June 16 and cancelled them. That’s about $50m.