Liberty

AFAIK he has puts, he isn't just directly short. He was straight short at first. Later switched to Puts, maybe after position moving against him. :D Yeah, after other billionaires tried to squeeze him, not exactly a fundamental change in the company or a validation of the business model by the regulators. ;)

Ok hold on a second He got his PhD in Economics from Stanford. And he's been bearish for 5 years, right?

AFAIK he has puts, he isn't just directly short.

For those who can read French, here's a good summary of the bull thesis on SHLD by a top notch value investor from France: http://club.berichcorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Apart%C3%A9-de-lIF-Juin-2014.pdf It almost makes me want to buy some SHLD, but I still think about it the same way I did a few months ago (50 pages ago in this thread, probably) when I wrote that if the thesis on SHLD is that it's going to compound value for a very long time and won't be a single "pop" back to intrinsic value, then I feel more comfortable waiting for the thesis to more visibly start working and then get on board even if I miss part of the ride. In other words, if you bought Berkshire years after it was obvious things were working for Buffett, you still did fine. If Lampert is really going to extract tens of billions of value and reinvest in good stuff, it won't happen over a week and I should have time to reconsider; in the meantime, I can get the popcorn and watch from the sidelines without getting whiplash...

He's always been very concentrated, that's nothing new. He has 4 billion in the AGN-VRX deal.

Well, to sway my opinion, I would need some facts, and so far I've seen a lot of insinuations about Ackman, which isn't surprising for a polarizing figure who isn't afraid to get in fights with powerful people, but what I could see and read from and about him over the past few years has led me to believe that he's a straight-shooter. I'm open to re-evaluating with new facts.

Because even with no love there is a multiple put on the shares. If you're private and you earn $1 you have $1. If you've public and have even a terrible valuation that $1 might be $3 or $5. Being public has advantages even with a terrible multiple. You make it sound a bit like they're getting something for nothing. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't really see much of a difference between the two except in liquidity. If you are public, you can sell 100 shares and it's no big deal. If you are private, you have to find a buyer and they usually will only buy the whole thing or a significant portion. But either way, $1 of earnings will be worth a multiple in a private transaction, just like in the public market. Maybe the multiple could be higher in the public market, though (liquidity premium? more efficiently priced because of higher transparency?), but there's also the other phenomenon where publicly traded company sometimes sell for a lower price than they would go in a private transaction.

For those of you who can read French, there's a pretty long interview with a few good value investors from France discussing John Malone, his history, techniques, companies, etc. http://linvestisseurfrancais.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/OIDf3-Aout-2014-Méthodes-de-Cow-Boy.pdf

You don't have an elevator version? What do you think about Leucadia funding him? You think Cumming and Steinberg have bad judgement?

Can you elaborate? A google search didn't find much of value about this.

http://glennchan.wordpress.com/2014/07/28/lmca-liberty-broadband-spin-off/

So far Icahn's back of the envelope investing beats Ackman's 300 page long nonsense. I am the only one that thinks that Ackman's prowess is overrated by the investment community? I think he is a gambler by nature mipore than an investor - big gains like GGP and others, but also epic failures like TGT, his first Gotham fund, BKS, JCP and most likely now HLF. Hasn't he been doing over 20%/year overall since the early 2000s? (that's what I saw, anyway)

Apologies for the OT: Do you have a case/cover to go with it? I'd ordered the Kavaj Hamburg, but it turned out to be defective. If you'd rather respond by PM, that's fine too. Thanks, Ragu Hi Ragu, I only got a smart cover from Apple, and later I got an Origami keyboard case to type on a physical keyboard: http://goincase.com/shop/incase-origami-workstation-for-ipad-2 (shown here with iPad 2, but works fine with iPad Air)

The other thing that sucks about IOS in general especially after having used an android device, is the lack of both a back button and a search button. It is really handy to have that back button especially. I think a dedicated back button is really annoying. Too easy to hit by mistake. Much rather swipe from the left side to go back or swipe from the right side to go forward.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/billion-dollar-billy-beane/

Good find, Jay. I didn't know about Mike.

I've never used TA, but thought this blog post was kind of interesting since it's written from the perspective of someone coming from a place similar to many here: http://investingsidekick.com/technical-analysis-value-investor/

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/07/25/an-interview-with-markels-tom-gayner.aspx 20-minute video interview with Tom Gayner.

I'm not Jay, but I thought it was surprisingly very good. Despite the descriptions, Schwarzman actually had relatively little role in the book. It was more a depiction of Blackstone generally with lots of discussion of individual deals in a manner I found quite interesting. I thought it was one of the better books in that genre. Thanks Kraven. I'll bump it up the list.

Does the Nano offer speed granularity between 1 and 2x or are those the only two choices? I guess if that's all you have, it's motivation to learn to get used to it. I haven't tried the nano for podcasts, but the iOS podcast apps I've seen - including the official Apple one - allow you to pick anything you want between 0.9x and over 2x, so that's another thing that might make your experience better.

Jay21, what did you think of King of Capital? TIA.

Thanks I'll check it out. I have a half hour commute each way and I listen to either audiobooks or podcasts every day at 2x speed (2 hours/day of content). So I'm always looking for something else to listen to. Marco Arment just released a new podcast player app (iOS only) that you might enjoy. There's 2 features that are killer: Voice Boost, which is basic compression and EQ that makes voices much easier to hear, especially in noisy environments like a car (reduces dynamic range so that you don't have parts that are too soft and other parts that blow out your eardrums). But most importantly, there's something he calls Smart Speed. It's very low-level audio manipulation that basically removes most of the silences between words and sentences. It still sounds pretty natural - you don't get artifacts of just speeding up - and depending on who's speaking, you can often go to 1.10x-1.20x just by removing those silences. And it's adds up on top of regular speed increases, so if you were to use smart speed + 2x, your actual speed might be 2.4x or something like that (I don't listen that fast, so I don't know how that'd work out, but if you're used to it, you might like it). There's a helpful dynamic counter that tells you the speedup in real-time. There's also cool smart playlist stuff with priorities and such... And it's a 1.0 that just came out, so it should keep getting better (feature set is not mature yet). I recommend it: https://overcast.fm Out of curiosity, how long did it take you to get used to 2x? That sounds way too fast to me right now. Update: thinking about it, I realize there's probably a big difference between listening to an audiobook with a very deliberate and slow narrator at 2x and a fast-pace 3-people conversational podcast at 2x. Do you vary speed by type of material?

http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2014/07/25/elon-musk-on-the-colbert-report-last-night-vs-2010/

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1611983/000104746914006379/a2220790zs-1.htm

I mostly listen to WWNO3, but I listen to WWOZ too (it's great, but more hit & miss, and sometimes they just talk too much, which breaks my concentration when reading). And Treme on HBO is one of my fave series, despite never having been to New Orleans :)