Liberty

It wouldn't be the first thing that people are wrong about. Buybacks aren't always good, just like dividends aren't always good or investment in the business or M&A isn't always good. If a company is doing something stupid, the solution is to not invest in it. We'll never be able to turn all CEOs in Warren Buffetts. Even if for most companies buybacks are a stupid choice, that doesn't make buybacks themselves bad, just like M&A isn't bad in itself just because most companies destroy value for the sake of empire building. With a hammer you can build a house or hit yourself in the head, it's just a tool. You certainly wouldn't want to restrict/outlaw buybacks/M&A/hammers...

Most companies and managers being bad is a general problem, it doesn't have anything to do with buybacks specifically. Whatever system you put them in, most people will make mistakes, follow the herd, put their interests above the shareholders', grow for growth's sake, waste money, focus on the wrong things, follow fads, etc. Investors get more of a choice with buybacks than with dividends, actually. With dividends you don't have a choice but to get it and pay taxes. With buybacks, you can decide to sell shares in pro-rata to the buyback or not (and then be taxed less).

Montier is not academic. He's in investment management. I meant that in the broadest sense of the word. This isn't exactly something that Jane Average would read in between two reality show episodes.

https://www.gmo.com/America/CMSAttachmentDownload.aspx?target=JUBRxi51IIBoe1yul9uERnfCmQoglFl9k5qwJSfHx8w%2fWCnFLmEb2MC9GoFnZVlslR5NzCRY1ajgn503icBv67VQg%2fNVUMWsYvi3A2%2fL%2bS28A7Pthjp7LmOfLYQfHMJc The World’s Dumbest Idea James Montier It's interesting to see that internet Buzzfeed-style click-bait headlines have made their way to the academic world.

Do dividends grow a company? Why aren't people mad at dividends? (my answer: Most people don't understand capital allocation, most regular investors still think that dividends are somehow magic free money) What's the difference between a shareholder getting back money and then using the capital somewhere that helps the economy vs a company investing directly somewhere that helps the economy? Why is growth good? Not all companies can grow profitably, and if they can't, they should return capital. If they can, they should invest in growth, but even that might not use up all their capital (how are Apple or Mastercard supposed to use up all their FCF without diluting their good business with acquisitions that are worse than what they already have?). It's a case by case thing, there's no one-size fits all.

Granted, I just skimmed part of that piece, so maybe I'm missing the point (hey, gotta pick how you spend your time...), but just from the premise, I wonder if they would write an article about how "dividends are killing the American economy"? Buybacks are just a return of capital to shareholders, who then can spend it however they want (investing, consuming... all things good for the economy).

Agreed on the personality type, though obviously that didn't stop him from doing incredibly well. And another good example of this would be Ben Graham himself. Quite the renaissance man. Singleton owned 20% of Teledyne at the end, despite never having bought a share (he got 1% in founder's shares at first, that's it). He was also on the board of Apple in the late 70s, so he might have gotten some stock at that time too.

I expect Pershing to do well over the long term. Probably better than non-activist big funds, since they kind of auto-catalyze their investments. Glad to see you deploying capital, Gio :)

"Apple just raised $1.35 billion of Swiss-franc denominated debt in two tranches (0.28% and 0.74% implied yields)" http://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2015/2/10/apple-is-getting-paid-to-raise-debt Functionally, Apple is getting paid to raise debt: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5446f93de4b0a3452dfaf5b0/t/54da3638e4b08d5aa768db72/1423586873779/?format=750w And of course, this doesn't take into account how the shares bought back might perform over time.. Or the fact that they're very very likely to keep raising the dividend over time.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/10/us-iea-oil-idUSKBN0LE02O20150210

If interested in learning more, you can check this out: https://www.fightaging.org/introduction/ And then keep going through the links on the right of that page. This is old but a good intro to some of the concepts: This one goes into a bit more details: Then if you want more details there's this book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0312367066 And if you want even more detail and the very latest, there's this peer-reviewed scientific journal: http://www.liebertpub.com/overview/rejuvenation-research/127/ http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejuvenation_Research And if you want to help fund the effort to defeat the diseases of aging with the engineering approach described above (not trying to modify or learn everything about metabolism, that's too hard, just periodically repair damage before it accumulates enough to cause pathologies), you can donate here: http://www.sens.org/donate

How optimistic people are depends on how old they are right now. I'm 32, and I think that the chances that medical science advances a lot over the next 50 years is very high. What people miss is that to benefit, we don't have to go from zero to a perfect therapy for the diseases of aging. We just have to do enough to allow you to live long enough for these therapies to be improved enough in the meantime so that by the time you would need them, there are developped. So you add 15 years to someone, and in those 15 years you improve treatment enough to add a further 15 years, and during those 15 years you figure out how to fix the remaining problems that you couldn't fix well enough in the earlier therapy, etc. It's the concept of longevity escape velocity. Of course that's most dangerous to people who are just on the edge of what can be done, but those who have a buffer of a few decades ahead of the bleeding edge should be safe. Once you add more than 1 year of extra longevity per year, on average your chances of death stop becoming correlated with your age. You can still be hit by a truck or die from any of the things that can kill a healthy 20-year old, of course. But if you look at mortality rate for young people in the western world, you can pretty easily extrapolate how long the average person could live (and then you can assume that in a world of longer lifespans, we'd be more careful about things like driving, so it'd be even longer). All the cells in our bodies are replaced multiple times over the first 4-5 decades of our lives. It's not like an engine that wears out and stops functioning well; the reason why everything starts going wrong after 50-60 years is that it's an evolutionary blind spot. For most of human evolutionary time, relatively few people lived that long and reproduced after that age, so genes for repair mechanisms aren't selected for. We are not our cells that are wearing out; we are a pattern that is maintained, and if we can figure out how to periodically repair the damage that accumulates in long-lived molecules, we should be able to keep our bodies in good shape. Same concept as how you can maintain a vintage car indefinitely if you just do enough maintenance and repairs on it. After 50 years, maybe you've changed almost all the parts, but as long as you kept the original pattern of the car intact, it's still the same car. It's not because you solve the diseases of aging that you automatically solve everything else, but those other problems are worth working on too, and maybe more people would care if they had longer lifespans.

Same. And on AI, that's why Friendly-AGI research is so important: Machine Intelligence Research Institute We need to figure out if we can prove mathematically if it's possible to design a recursively improving AI that would conserve goals and values in a safe way, and how to achieve that.

I hope not. Helping the poorest people might be top of the list, but helping everybody else who suffers and die from the diseases of aging (iirc around 200-300k die every day, and multiples of that are affected, ie. friends and family) still ranks very high on the list. If we have to cut somewhere to support that effort, obviously we shouldn't cut in what the Gates Foundation does, but there's millions of other useless things that we spend human capital on that are way less important for the betterment of the human condition (if all the bright people who go into finance went into biogerontology instead, maybe we'd be getting somewhere). Besides, the Gates Foundation is helping fund some tools that will be helpful in the fight against aging (some of the computational biology efforts from Washington University come to mind). It might not be direct help, but it helps nonetheless.

It depends how life is extended. If you just extend the frail period at the end of someone's life, then that's a problem. If you actually work on curing the diseases of aging so that you don't get to that frail state in the first place, then retirement isn't a problem anymore; the current system is set up so that people who are in bad shape can stop working. But if you are 100 but as healthy as a 30-year-old currently is, there's no reason why you couldn't retired for a few years (a few decades) and then go back to work, or just never fully retire if you like what you do. When something big enough changes, you have to look at all assumptions, not just try to keep the old system going in a totally different context.

I'll just leave this here: SENS Research Foundation

There's tons of banks/CC companies that are advertising Apple Pay. It is actually annoying for me as their customer and shareholder, since they are spending money on advertising someone else's product. The way Apple Pay is set up, banks and CC companies still get their cut, and might even make more money via a reduced fraud rate, so it's in their interest to advertise it (especially if it further replaces cash). CC companies probably also like that this further entrenches them against other payment systems that might try to bypass them (good luck with that). So don't feel bad, it's win-win.

There's a series of articles on Singleton here: http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/02/henry-singleton-strategies/ Earlier parts are linked at the top.

American Express ad showcasing Apple Pay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMw_rr3OYYw (always nice when others spend money on marketing your new products) Also:

I found this article published in The Economist in May 2012. With hindsight, the impression I have of Batista is that he was more of a schemer and a promoter than an empire builder (although I guess empire builders have to scheme and promote). Thanks I think that's the one.

A few years ago there was a positive piece about him and his empire in the Economist. Now's probably a good time to find that article and re-read it just to show that if you don't do things right and build on solid foundations, it can all disappear in the blink of an eye.

Ok, thanks. :)

More like a distributor: "A majority of Parasol Canada's revenue is derived from the sale of Xpel products."

Out of curiosity, for LBRDA, were you waiting for the FCC to show its hand? Did you already own some and now you're adding, or is this your first buy? Thanks.

Good discussion on innovators vs executors (that sounds ominous). Obviously, innovators are more interesting to learn about because they have an arc and through our education/progression, we often kind of follow a similar arc (hopefully compressed, since we're learning from someone else's experience and mistakes). People who execute really well can also be good role models, but they tend to not really have an arc since they started out with someone else's model that they just then implemented. There's inherently less of a story, there. Another innovator, IMO, would be Ackman. He's clearly following what others have done, but he's putting enough of his own twist on things. Some might see his approach as good or bad, but it's definitely not just someone else's model. While I like Klarman, I, too, can't say that I feel like his writings have influenced the way that I invest (other than as a reminder of the Buffett/Graham way). He's one of those really good guys that is almost impossible to really copy, like (in totally another area) George Soros.