Liberty

"I would rather hold a mix of good businesses then a commodity whose quantity is only increasing or cash in debased currency." Very well said Packer.

You write many interesting things on your blog, Innerscorecard. Thanks for sharing your thinking. This is pretty close to my thinking: http://www.innerscorecard.co/blog/2015/1/5/financial-independence-and-value-investing-are-joined-at-the-hip-but-maybe-only-to-me http://www.innerscorecard.co/blog/2015/1/18/aiming-low I also enjoyed the Marry Poppins post. I probably should watch that film at some point (saw parts of it when I was very young, but I don't remember much except flying umbrellas).

Isn't shorting a good business, even if you think it's overvalued by over 25%, dangerous? Wouldn't it be easier to find a bad business that is overvalued (ideally with a catalyst) to short if shorting is what you want to do?

Here's a few that come to mind looking at my shelves. Not every year, but worth re-reading. Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas R. Hofstadter The Blank Slate - Steven Pinker Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman - Richard P. Feynman American Prometheus (biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer) Lolita, ADA - Vladimir Nabokov The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles Memoirs - Hector Berlioz The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins A Pattern Language - Christopher Alexander American Ceasar: Douglas MacArthur - William Manchester With the Old Breed - E.G. Sledge Your Money or Your Life - Joe Domingez and Vicky Robin When Heaven and Earth Changed Places/ Child of War, Woman of Peace - Le Ly Hayslip

And he has a sense of humor too. As a tribute to Iain M. Banks, Musk is naming the two SpaceX drone ships (automated floating platforms where the rockets will vertically land): "Just Read the Instructions" and "Of Course I Still Love You" This is a reference to Banks' GSVs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spacecraft_in_the_Culture_series#The_Player_of_Games Those two names were used in the book The Play of Games. If you don't know Banks, I recommend those three on the SF side: Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons, and Player of Games

http://y0ungmoney.blogspot.ca/2015/01/not-fan-of-horsehead-holdings.html

I don't know anything about renting a house, but I know that there's a pretty big community of people who are obsessed with all kinds of real estate investing, being landlords, etc. I'd start by digging around this site: http://www.biggerpockets.com/ http://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2013/01/04/how-to-rent-your-house/ Sorry if it's not what you're looking for.

Somewhat off-topic, but everybody should hear this when they start out: When very young, the most impactful thing you can do is cut your expenses by a lot and thus increase your saving by a lot. Making tons of money doesn't help if you spend it all, and the hedonic treadmill effect means you probably won't be much happier than if you spent a lot less. Here's the first post on this frugality/early retirement blog: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/04/06/meet-mr-money-mustache/ Use the arrows at the bottom of each post to read them in order. When you've read the past 4 years of posts, you either won't get it (it's like value investing, you either do or don't), or you'll be able to save way over 50% of what you earn and get financially independent super quickly. I did the same thing, except that I got my info from different sources (The Complete Tightwad Gazette, a compilation of newsletter from the 90s, and Your Money or Your Life, a classic book in financial independence). You're lucky because this blog I link above is better and more up to date, and now there are forums of people discussing this stuff.

OK, the cash is in the wrong company ;), but I suggest that Malone & co. start merging content companies to build size and bargaining power. DISCA + STRZA would be the first two candidates. If no one on the outside wants to buy STRZA, why not merge it into DISCA to build size? AMCX could be another candidate. :) Pretty sure that cash will be useful when CHTR/LBRDA start consolidating the rest of the US cable business now that Comcast is as big as it can get for antitrust reasons (or if the TWC deal falls through, CHTR+LBRDA will start pursuing it again). But that's the obvious stuff. These guys usually throw in a few curve balls. I wonder what these could be...

Yeah, there's not much in there. I was posting it so people can see for themselves, not saying it's great.

Personally, almost everything that makes me respect Bill Gates is the stuff that he has done, and is doing, after leaving the Microsoft CEO role and creating the Gates Foundation.

The "You're welcome world" is the part that I read as tongue in cheek. Maybe I have a hard time believe that anyone can write things like that non-ironically until they release an ebook with that title :)

VIC writeup on CHTR: http://www.valueinvestorsclub.com/idea/CHARTER_COMMUNICATIONS_INC/135932 (thanks Jay)

I want to follow him, I really do. But I can't follow someone who posts dozens of times a day. Although this quote is pretty arrogant so maybe not following him won't be that hard. +1 I unfollowed him as well, it was getting to be too much. I never read him as arrogant. Those types of messages always sounded tongue in cheek to me. He posts a lot of RE stats and charts that I'm not finding elsewhere, so I'm quite happy to follow him. To each their own.

Hi snowball, Do you have the analyst report? Can you post the PDF? I'm curious to see what they have to say, just out of curiosity :) I also wonder why they bother covering. It's not like RX will be raising debt any time soon...

Yep. Ben Rabidoux has been ringing the alarm bell on those for a while. He's worth following on Twitter, he knows his stuff about Canadian RE.

Ok, so now Malone and Maffei have a bunch of cash on hand at LBRDA. I can't wait to see what they'll do with it 8)

Got mine at TDAmeritrade, and 3 oversubscribed shares :) I did too, at IB Canada.

Let's not forget that Tesla repaid the loan 10 years ahead of schedule: http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/22/autos/tesla-loan-repayment/ I'd be fine with electric cars and solar companies getting not help from the government if we removed all fossil fuels subsidies, direct and indirect (ie. military expenses to protect oil interests), including retroactively. I think that would be a gigantic boon to EVs and solar...

Curious where the USD-CAD ratio will be when the US raises interest rates (no idea when, but it'll be before Canada almost for sure).

Here's a recording of yesterday's Q2 call (they have a weird fiscal year): https://www.dropbox.com/s/wh0quaqgx7ff0r4/2015-jan-FRMO-CC.m4a?dl=0 Enjoy. The official transcript probably won't be out for many days. Be warned, Murray has a big, uncontrollable cough... Lots of interesting stuff. Including clearly stating that the Winland investment is just the first of many and they intend to buy things outside of financial services, go wherever they see opportunities and "optionality". They've been selling the bond funds that they bought in 2008-2009 so cash is going up quite a bit. Will be interesting to see how they deploy it. Buying stakes in small operating businesses definitely makes the model quite interesting.

I think even the "risk tolerance" and "working in the most fertile areas" aspects underplay things, though they are obviously part of the mix. Genius is often about doing things that other people simply can't do. It's making leaps and connections that wouldn't come to other people, looking at things in new ways, persevering way past the point when everybody else would have given up, etc. It's not just about having a high IQ. I'd bet that almost all the otherwise incredibly smart people out there who don't even try to think big right now, if you gave them unconditional, unlimited resources (lottery winnings, whatever) and a way to hide their failures so there's no social stigma (do your work outside of the public eye rather than publicly like Musk, so if it doesn't work, nobody knows, but if it works, you get the glory) and could make them work in the most fertile areas for big discoveries, they still wouldn't be the people who's names end up in history books. Some might, and on average their contribution to our civilization would go up no doubt about it, but I'm just trying to say that I don't think those two things are the only missing ingredients for most brilliant people to operate on the level of those rare people who change the course of history through the sheer force of their personality and talents.

That's why I pointed out that Musk was working on hard problems that can make a big difference, and that few others even dare to work on. There's a great quote by biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey on this: "It has always appalled me that really bright scientists almost all work in the most competitive fields, the ones in which they are making the least difference. In other words, if they were hit by a truck, the same discovery would be made by somebody else about 10 minutes later." This applies to more than science. So many smart engineers are building Candy Crush apps or working on ways to get people to click on more ads (google, facebook, etc). So many of the most brilliant mathematical minds of our era are working on creating complex derivatives and HFT algorithms on Wall Street. Sure they go where the money is, but I'd say that Musk did pretty well too and he's making a much bigger difference (making a dent in the universe, as Steve Jobs would say).

I think many people just can't accept that some people are just more able than others. They have to find ways to chip away at that. It also boils down to your definition of "better". I think there's a widespread adolescent tendency of focusing tunnel-vision-like on what can be measured (the best guitarist is the one who does the fastest solos, the best programmer is the one who's code routines runs fastest or have the fewest number of bugs or whatever). I used to care about that kind of stuff when I was younger too, but now I don't so much. I'll take a coder who comes up with the idea for the Google algorithm (PageRank) or the hyperlink over the coder who can do fancier math, more complex code and optimizations, and knows more languages but will never do much original or important work in a lifetime. Some people's output is just thousands of times more valuable than others, if not millions, even if pedants will call them "worse" at the mundane parts of whatever field they're in... I'm sure lots of physicists and mathematicians were better at all kinds of math than Albert Einstein or Richard Feynman were, but that's missing the point.

I disagree on a few level, but don't really feel like getting into it since it kinds of come down to how much we think we know these people (to be able to take educated guesses at their motivations, talents, etc).