Liberty

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-29/while-you-were-getting-worked-up-over-oil-prices-this-just-happened-to-solar.html

That makes sense. No worries.

I'm not sure what basis has to do with it. We bought x LVNTA shares at $36.50 for which we paid $1bn cash and various digital commerce assets valued at $1.5bn. Are we talking about two different things? I'm talking about adjusting my cost basis for both QVCA and LVNTA for the purpose of capital gain calculation for taxes and such. The actual economic interest that was purchased can be different from that, of course.

Well look what I found: http://libertyinteractive.com/stock-cost-basis.aspx

I must have got a different LVNTA because mine isn't >:( I might have messed up my post spin-off cost basis calculation. I used the exchange ratio, but now I realize it probably wasn't that simple... Going to search for info on this later when I have time. How did you do it?

LVNTA has been on fire since I got my distribution from LINTA. Up almost 27% in less than a month. Still no idea how to value it, but I'm holding on at least as long as there are buybacks.

Interview with Trent Reznor, who was at Beats and now is working for Apple. Some interesting tidbits buried in there: http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6304122/trent-reznor-talks-nine-inch-nails-scoring-gone-girl-apple-project?utm_source=twitter

Ok, thanks. I'll give it another chance.

I started reading this one, read maybe 150 pages out of 1300 (ebook pages..) and I can't say I'm enjoying it too much. Has anyone else found it to be slow going in the beginning and not always so well written (they kind of assume - at least so far - that you know who Gupta is, what Galleon is, etc). Does it improve as you go deeper in, or should I just give up because it's all similar to the beginning?

For those who, like me, had the Scribd BS, here's a direct PDF link to the trial slide deck: http://advancingallergan.com/app/uploads/2014/08/PS-Trial-deck.pdf

For those who can read french (or use Google Translate): http://www.lesaffaires.com/blogues/bernard-mooney/pourquoi-j-evite-les-ressources-naturelles/573388 This graph basically tells the whole story. It's a commodity composite index of 19 different things: http://www.lesaffaires.com/uploads/images/normal/fa9fe7e8dd8f9eb7b0638345a9588aaf.jpg

I'd want that to be interested. I'm looking for good businesses. Yes, most businesses are bad. But I don't have to own them. Maybe others want to, and that's fine. Different strokes. But that doesn't take anything away from management -- they deserve all the credit in the world for building this business that I use frequently and that I would be sad to ever see disappear. For all I know, it's harder to be the CEO of US Steel than of Mastercard, so that deserves credit on that front too. But that doesn't change which business I'd like to own if I had to choose between those two (that's before taking valuation into account -- maybe the good business is too expensive and that's a showstopper, but personally, I'm not interested in bad businesses anymore, even if they're cheap, and Amazon isn't exactly cheap either).

I don't know, but I think it's easier to learn to parse it than to try to change how everybody speaks/thinks. That's how I see it anyway :)

I agree. It's why I hold the unpopular opinion that immigrants have a lot more legitimate reasons to be proud of where they live than people who just happened to randomly be born there. But over time I've learned to not take the "I'm proud to be X" so literally. I think it's mostly a shorthand for "I don't feel I have anything to be ashamed of". For a long time various groups have been made to feel like there was something wrong with them, and 'pride' has just become the default opposite for lack of a better catchall term.

Not sure I understand your question. That's exactly what I was saying, that they don't have pricing power, don't have control over what they charge. If someone in the space significantly lowers pricing, everybody else has to follow suit.

High value services on top would be ideal. But I don't really see it. Software is hard. I don't see Amazon suddenly becoming a software company competing directly with IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. There's a real possibility that others will capture a large part of the value of AWS by running services on top of the commodity layer. That's the central question for me. What's the great business that Amazon could be really good at? Some people might be comfortable with retail and server rental and such, and that's fine. But for me to invest, I think I would need to see them succeed in a good business first, at least at the kind of multiples of potential FCF that they're selling at... (if the stock was super cheap, maybe that would compensate for the bad business aspect) Now that's something you don't hear often on the internet :D Glad my thinking out loud was helpful. Cheers!

Here's a presentation by Pershing to the court: https://www.scribd.com/doc/245004297/PSCM-VRX-Presentation-to-Court-10-28-14 bunch of other docs related to the case here: https://www.scribd.com/scribdvw/documents?sort_by=newest

I don't know either way. I don't really have an opinion on macro. I just wanted to point out that it's possible for this to be the case. I doubt Pfizer or Oracle will ever have the same margins as retail operations or the steel industry... Lots of mistakes have been made by people who expect things to change too much. But a lot also came from expecting things to be the same (people who grew up with the depression always expected it to continue and the next one to be around the corner, people who grew up with lots of inflation always see inflation around the corner, etc). But I just don't know. I want to be careful not to be too sure either way. There are lots of good arguments either way. For example, have you seen this: http://www.philosophicaleconomics.com/2014/05/profit-margins-dont-matter/

That sounds like "this time is different", heard that a lot around 1999/2000. :) Higher margins always attract competition and when the worker class has less and less real money they buy the cheaper stuff regardless of moats or brands. So in which world should this be sustainable in the long run? "This time it's the same" is just as bad as "this time it's different". Reality is more complex. Some things stay the same, some things change. We have to actually think about which is which to figure it out. So let's think about this: Is it true that the business mix has changed over time? Is it true that there are businesses that have higher margins and that aren't seeing those margins being competed away all the way down (but rather the market gives them a higher multiples, so you might still not make more money by buying them, yet the margins can stay high and this has an effect on the average margin of the index)? Is it possible that automation is increasing profit margins in some industries by reducing the amount of labor needed? I think that with things like software and pharma, margins can stay pretty high, and these things are a bigger part of the stock market than they were, say, 30-40 years ago.

Moving servers isn't difficult. Storage, especially databases, can be more difficult. There is also some proprietary lock-in with things like DynamoDB and SQS. In many cases, the cost of servers is very low compared to the engineering effort required to migrate to a new platform. Maybe. I'm still not convinced it's going to be a good business over the long term. And by that I don't mean that they won't make money, just that, like retail, it sounds like renting servers over the internet could be low-margin, high-competition, hard to differentiate, etc. That's not a 1-foot hurdle for sure.

I think common wisdom is that profit margins mean revert, so no. When sometime in the future interest rates and wages go up they will mean revert. Otherwise we get so much wealth transfer from the poor/middle class to the rich that we get revolutions. (And at that point they will mean revert :D) What if the business mix has changed over time to include more high margins stuff (services, software) and less low margin stuff?

I came here to write those exact words... So +1 then :) Here's his full essay: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-30/tim-cook-im-proud-to-be-gay

Well, that was eloquent for him :)

How stuck are they really, though? If Google cuts its rates by 50% and Amazon doesn't, will people stick with it? Do they have any pricing power, or are people only "stuck" as long as price is materially the same as competitors (is the only real friction the hassle of migrating? it's kind of like you would keep a stock at a higher price than you would buy it because of the friction of taxes)? As far as I know, a lot of the capacity is used as web servers and storage, not to run complex custom software built specifically for one cloud provider (in fact, any smart IT leader should make things platform agnostic if at all possible). Moving web servers and storage somewhere else isn't very hard since it's all standardized on a few platforms that will run wherever. But I haven't really dug deep into this, so I could be wrong.

Reviving this old thread because I wasn't sure where else to put this: http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=26646