Liberty

"How do you internalize what you read?" I mostly don't, probably, and that's sad to think about...

Promo video (8 mins) by the company showing some of what they do. Fun to watch, if very glossy-corporate.. (thanks to Johan Hjorstsson for pointing it out)

We had an interesting discussion about LMCA and SIRI yesterday on Twitter. You should be able to follow it chronologically here just by scrolling down:

I just read the intro, so I could be missing something, but on average, all introverts vs all extroverts, the premise is probably correct.

Innerscorecard, what markets are you referring to where valuation is higher? There are 60,000 stocks that a North American investor can invest. There are always pockets of cheap stocks: eg., HongKong, Russia, Greece, many stocks in these areas are not trash as I think of the word. I definitely agree that there are cheap stocks out there, or sure. But the crucial variable isn't whether there are cheap stocks on an absolute basis, or even enough cheap stocks for individual investors to be completely fully invested. It's whether valuation levels are higher or lower than they were when this board was more active. All those international opportunities existed then, too, but there were also more US and large-cap opportunities then as well. So the aggregate amount of actionable ideas is lower now than then, even if it is still enough for people to be fully invested. Some people will be entrepreneurial and risk-seeking enough to find the ideas that exist currently. That's why we still do have posts on this board. And others won't, which is why there are less posts than before. For example, copying 13Fs will be less frutiful than before, because this only draws from the universe investable for 13F filers. I agree with innerscorecard. There will always be undervalued opportunities, but there were a lot more 1,3,or 5 years ago. My suggestion is to follow the threads about the stocks you are interested in and ignore the ones you find less illuminating. Nothing wrong with a little small talk on the fringes and it's going to be a larger part of the conversation when compelling investment ideas are few and far between. One of the things with most of those 60,000 stocks is that if you write about them, nobody is going to reply and the thread will sink. That's understandable, most people look for businesses they know and understand, which is why the period when everybody was writing about the big banks and Sears and AIG and GM and so on generated so much activity. Everybody knows these names. But start a thread about HEICO, and you'll be lucky to get a reply 3 weeks later if you ask for it, and that's still a multi-billion business, so forget about most tiny OTC stocks or foreign stocks that nobody has heard of when it comes to generating sustained discussion. I'm not blaming people. I'm often the same. I see a new thread, I have a quick look, but I have nothing to add about some small weird german business that is outside my circle of competence or whatever, and the thread goes down the memory hole... Just explaining why the big discussions will mostly be around big companies that everybody knows, and as long as these aren't particularly cheap, it'll be more effort to create sparks in the investment board.

So we're all reading constantly, 10Ks, 10Qs, conference call transcripts, news items on the companies we follow, blog posts, books on investing, books on tangential things (biographies, history, etc), right? That's what it takes to be a good investor as far as I know. So if scanning a list of topics that changes by maybe 10-20 lines per day for those that seem interesting, or clicking on 2-3 sub-forums rather than looking at the recent post list, is suddenly too much work, I fear that this is the least of our problems as investors. As I said, if you control for the fact that we just went through along period when everything was cheap, I'm pretty sure that the number of good ideas isn't doing too badly, and that if we go back there, the number will go back up again. And besides, the more good ideas are buried, the less competition there will be for them, right? ;)

I have the same question. Also, very interesting new chart. Great way to see how most of the returns from most investments seem to happen within 5-8 years.

That's it for me also. The quality of the board has diminished noticeably the last year or so. It's been a huge influx of new members combined with some of the older posters disappearing or at least going silent. I don't mind off topic threads but the same question being asked over and over again is really annoying. Apparently some don't know the forum has a search function to see if their question of comment has been asked before. Every online community that I've ever seen, about music, tech, everything, from the early days of the BBSes in the 90s, have seen complaints about this exact thing. Quality is apparently going downhill everywhere all the time. I doubt it'll ever change. I think it's simply because everything changes, and people who were there early notice the difference and always feel like things were better when they were all new and novel for them and they were in a steeper part of their personal learning curve, feeling more productive. Also, in this specific case, of course an investing board will have more juicy ideas when the market has just had the biggest crash in a 100 years than when things are more normal. Expecting things to go back to those crash days all the time is unrealistic. I do miss Sanjeev's and Eric's more frequent posting, and I'm not immune from this, but the only way that people can actually do something about it is by posting stuff that they think is good. I encourage you all to do so if you don't like what you see from others.

Complaining about general talk on the general board, eh? ??? You know what's great about discussion threads? They have a subject line. If the subject line doesn't interest you, don't click on it. If you only want to talk about investing, don't go to the general board, as it's designed to be about investing and other things. By sticking to the Fairfax, Berkshire, and Investment boards, you should be able to easily avoid threads that are not about investing, including this thread. And you know what? By not only just talking about balance sheets and NOLs, this board has become a community. The general board is very important to this forum, and maybe some people would have designed it differently, but I'm glad Sanjeev didn't try squash any non-investing talk. People here are smart, and I've learned a lot about other things from them, and I feel like I can size up many posters better because of the breadth of their posting.

A couple more page-turners: Losing My Virginity, by Richard Branson With the Old Breed, by E.B. Sledge

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/28/vodafone-liberty-investors-idUSL5N0YJ1FC20150528

Thanks, good one.

If you want to internationalize it even more, the Quebec-french version would be "tête à claque" (literally: head for slapping) :)

I am taking the over. Management guidance is far more bullish and I believe management more than prognostications from a random website (which was wrong about the timing of the IBS-D indication). IBS is a very large market and there are a significant number of IBS patients that are not consulting clinicians (hence the plan to do a DTC advertising campaign similar to Jublia). I think it is fairly easy to substantiate that claim by doing a search for peer review journal articles on the epidemiology of IBS. Further, why would VRX management want to spend capital on DTC advertising if the potential sales were so small? Based on what I've heard, I wouldn't be surprised if it did more than 220m in the first year, but that's just my guess.

Looks like Arlington Value (Meecham) has opened a small position in Heico.

FDA approves! http://ir.valeant.com/investor-relations/news-releases/news-release-details/2015/Salix-Announces-FDA-Approval-of-Xifaxan-550-mg-for-the-Treatment-of-IBS-D-Irritable-Bowel-Syndrome-with-Diarrhea/default.aspx

USD vs CAD

I don't want to sound like a hipster, but I'm glad that Musk is getting so much recognition now. I've been following him since about 2006, and I've actually met him briefly in 2010 (we joked about the upcoming falcon 9 rocket test-flight, which had just been delayed IIRC), and for most of that time that I've been following him, either people didn't know him or were sure that he would fail. Glad he proved them wrong so far.

Dazel, there is nothing wrong with asking the question. So far, there is no answer, though, unless you are implying that Dalton is going through a divorce. We might never know, but if I was still a shareholder, it would give me pause and make me double-check my valuation. It might be true that in some cases (Bradstreet) big insider selling doesn't mean anything about the company, but it is also true that at other times it does mean something about either valuation, future prospects, etc (buying is usually less ambiguous than selling, of course).

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/0128/050.html (from 2008)

Faber interviewing Tom Rutledge: http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000382977

I've just started the book. I hope I like the second half better than you do... :)

Bezos has already tried that with the Fire Phone ;)

http://bloom.bg/1PLkEAr

I don't know exactly how many shares Dalton holds, but Management & Directors hold 7-8% of the company. Most of it is Brian Dalton though. I'm too lazy right now to dig this up, but I believe Dalton owns 4-5%. Edit: Not so lazy I guess: He owned 1,394,992 shares as of the last Management Information Circular.