Liberty

I was lucky*, I got a nice chunk at the low of the day. *I'm sure it's just temporary and it'll tank by 20% now that I've added.

Any highlight for those of us without a FT subscription?

You watched today's four hour presentation? I can't find a web link - do you have one? Linked from the investor presentations page. This should work: http://www.vpsevent.com

Wise words!

Looks like Apple is now one of the top - if not the #1 by profit dollars - sellers of Android accessories ??? I've also read somewhere that they said they'd keep the Android version of the Beats Music service. That's not what I expected, though they could still change course in the future, but that also makes sense as a kind of Trojan Horse. If it's a really good service (and they keep improving it), it's a good way for Android users to get familiar with an Apple product. Kind of like the iPod and iTunes was the introduction to Apple to so many Windows users.

I wonder if they shaved off 200 million from the price to teach them a lesson about leaking information 8)

If the 4-hour presentation wasn't enough for you, Mike Pearson is speaking at the Sanford conference right now. Audio should be available later. The interviewer is basically grilling him with all of Allergan's arguments and Pearson is giving very good replies, IMO.

Yes Malone hiring Rutledge is a valuable piece of information. Maybe more valuable than my perspective of his record at Cablevision. But no matter who you hire to run a business, it's a good idea to say they are the best. Sure everybody says that, but Malone isn't everybody. He wouldn't try to get a 40+ billion dollar deal done and consolidate the cable industry via CHTR (even if ultimately comcast beat them to the original deal) if he didn't have an extremely high degree of confidence in Rutledge, IMO. I think that charter can do quite well just by going from below average to above average, and M&A and better content pricing from scale are bonuses on top of that. Add to that good capital allocation and a shareholder friendly management, and results should be very satisfactory.

+1 There is so much "anecdotal" evidence on Rutledge but it's hard to back it up with numbers. I guess charter has been on a tear since he took over but that's too short-term in my opinion. Malone seems to think he's the best operator in the business and is not just saying that but is putting his money behind him. Seems like a pretty good endorsement.

So S&P puts them above Sears, the supposedly unkillable forum darling. Not bad ;) How laughable is that? In the time it takes an established player to do a model refresh on an existing vehicle, Tesla has basically built a whole supply chain, factory, and ground-breaking vehicle from the ground up, getting the best reviews of any car ever, along with a network of charging stations, service points, and company owned stores on 3 continents. Oh, and their brand is now highly respected and there's huge pent-up demand just waiting for a more affordable model, and they did all that going through the worst financial crisis in generations, surviving what made 2 US car makers go bankrupt. Meanwhile, they were working on plans to double world lithium-ion battery production with one factory. And that's while top management was spending 50% of its time building space rockets going to the ISS and attempting full reusability with vertical landing. But they're less likely to "adapt" than established automakers..? Heh.

http://qz.com/213889/a-uranium-price-collapse-has-made-mining-companies-radioactive-to-investors/

Follow up to the original write up that started this thread: http://www.peridotcapital.com/2014/05/sales-figures-disprove-thesis-that-whole-foods-shoppers-are-fleeing-to-the-competition.html

http://glennchan.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/lmca-investment-company-act/

I watched the whole almost 4-hour long presentation. I encourage those who want to understand the company better to do so, there's a lot of good stuff in there.

Pages 170 and 171 are very interesting! ;) Gio 169 isn't bad either, showing how Allergan makes the same non-GAAP adjustments (I'm looking at the page numbers on the actual PDF, not within the PDF reader, as that gives different numbers because of the intro slide).

http://ir.valeant.com/files/doc_presentations/2014/20140528_Valeant%20story%20draft%20deckv87.pdf They address AGN's allegations from yesterday toward the end. On the organic growth, Ackman had explained it very well. There's two sides to the business. Durable assets, and depleting assets (near end of patent life). The latter can mask the growth in the first, but all that matters is you get good IRRs on that side and it's worth it even if the optics are distorted. That's why they report with and without generics. It's actually shareholders who asked them to do that because it makes it easier to analyze the business (if you understand it), not as some pro-forma BS to remove bad things from the numbers.

Maybe it's because I just listened to the Munger speech from 1995 yesterday and it's fresh in memory, but Munger mentions the interesting phenomenon that sometimes when prices are higher, you actually sell more units. There's a psychological heuristic that most people have that goes something like "price is a proxy for quality". Some people spend tens of thousands on their cars, or granite countertops, or vacations around the world. Some people want to splurge on food; that market has been well understood on the restaurant side forever, but was probably not that well understood on the grocery side until not that long ago (always been niche shops, but not much on the supermarket concept template, afaik). No sure the brand is a good moat, or if it's cheap, but I can understand how this counter-intuitive business model makes sense. It meets a need, because while not everybody wants to pay a lot for food, not everybody wants to pay as little as possible either, and the price-insensitive part of the market must be quite profitable.

So I don't know much about WFM and this is not an endorsement of the company, but I read an interesting piece on it and thought I'd post it in the WFM thread when I realized that there was no WFM thread. So here it is: http://www.peridotcapital.com/2014/05/the-death-of-whole-foods-market-is-likely-greatly-exaggerated.html

If anyone can post that report, I'd be curious to see what they have to say. Thanks. Here Thank you.

If anyone can post that report, I'd be curious to see what they have to say. Thanks.

Original Poster. Person who started the thread.

Here it is: http://www.allergan.com/assets/pdf/investor-presentation-may-27-2014.pdf

"Premier Tom Marshall Natural Resources Minister Derrick Dally, area MHA Nick McGrath and Alderon President Tayfun Eldem have called a news conference for tomorrow morning at 11 at Confederation Building. VOCM News will be there to bring you the news first." Do you bring all that brass in front of cameras to say that it's not going to happen, "sorry guys"? I think it'll be positive. Wonder why they don't do it before market opens or after rather than at 11 am. I think some people will read into the pre-announcement the same thing I do and it'll run up tomorrow morning. This was my short-term prediction of the year. Let's see how it turns out..

Only thing I saw is an insider buy from the CFO.

I extracted the audio from this Youtube video of Munger's 1995 speech on "The Psychology of Human Misjudgement" (it's the last speech included in Charlie's Almanack): It's the one mentioned in the recent WSJ piece on Guy Spier. I figured I probably wasn't the only one who wanted a small audio file to listen to rather than a youtube video: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6962923/Munger-psychology-of-human-misjudgement-1995.m4a I'll leave the file up there as long as I don't run out of space in dropbox. Enjoy!