Liberty

The CFO has said that the tax rate going forward should be high single digit if the deal goes through. Their low tax rate has to do with the fact that they're a Canadian company and that Canada doesn't tax foreign income the same way the US does afaik, but I'm no tax expert (but I trust that these guys are).

Allergan board doesn't have the strongest hand, due to some obscure corporate technicalities: http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/04/25/dealpolitik-how-corporate-technicalities-can-influence-takeovers/ Very interesting, thanks EliG. I just hope Allergan doesn't start burning the furniture, so to speak, just to avoid a merger. It would be be sad if, for example, they announced a major acquisition for assets that they know VRX doesn't have interest in.

These models would have important strategic costs for Apple. It wouldn't be able to make the best products for its users if it was simultaneously trying to show them ever more ads and gather as much personal information on them to target those ads. Part of the premium experience is they annoy and creep you out as little as possible (the bar is always higher for hardware because you pay for it -- facebook and google couldn't be as creepy if they charged money directly). Apple sells content because it makes their devices better, and because other content providers never figured out how to do a good job until Apple stepped in. It's not a primary business for them. If it was, they would try harder to sell it on other platforms. We'll see. Apple's been operating in commodity industries since it was created, and as long as it doesn't lose track of what its strengths are (like when they had crappy management and way too many undifferentiated products...), it seems to do pretty well. I'm more afraid of the company losing focus than of competitors. More on the iPad: https://medium.com/five-hundred-words/1800acf5410d

If ENDP is like VRX, it's a compounding platform with a huge runway, so there isn't a short time window like with a net-net that closes a valuation gap and then becomes uninteresting. It's a different mental model. And it's not as if ENDP is super cheap either, it's just smaller. I'm not sure how much value I give to being smaller if I don't like the assets and management as much... But I'd say there's no huge hurry.

I also looked at both and ended up going with just VRX because I liked the assets and management better (or at least, I had a higher level of certainty with them). That might change over time as ENDP proves itself.

Apple's not doing a good job monetizing? Who's doing a good job of monetizing? You seem to be forgetting that Apple made it's OS and major software free in the past year and took big charge against the Itunes, Software, and Services line. That number would be quite a bit higher otherwise. Now you'll say: See, they had to do this to stay competitive and to grow. That might be partly true (though just a little -- who buys an iPhone because Pages is free? or a Mac because Mavericks is free? almost no one), but there are major strategic benefits to this move, such as further reducing fragmentation in their user base (everybody on the last version with all the greatest features) which makes their ecosystem even more differentiated and gives developers a much better target (they can be cutting edge, rather than be held back by having to support a few versions back like Android, which is expensive to do, meaning that iOS and OSX will be overall more attractive across the whole existing user base -- if that's not worth a few billions in lost software revenue to help support the much larger hardware business, I don't know what is). It also further reduces the ability of others to make money on software, and we know they're not making much money on hardware, so it's defensive.

Apple is not losing customers, revenues are up YoY, and Apple is making great margins from apps and content (that segment has sales of over 4.5 billions just in one quarter), so usage is nicely monetized. But the point wasn't about that money, though, it's that better users will pay more for better and differentiated devices, which is why apple has the highest margins in the industry by far. If Motorola could price its phones like iPhones and sell them at close to 40% gross margins, it would.

http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2014/04/chitika-tablet-2014-april.jpeg http://www.macrumors.com/2014/04/25/ipad-mobile-web-traffic/ I guess people who don't really use their tablets don't buy Apple (the numbers are similarly skewed to the iPad for number of apps bought, dollars spent on ecommerce, customer satisfaction, etc). Not hard to figure which market segment is profitable and which is low-or-no-margin commodity. What people always forget when they look at market share is how fast each segment of the pie is growing relative to each other. Not every customer is worth the same. With new tech, at first everything is high end, but after a bit the low-end grows much faster than the high end, so the relative market share of the high end goes down rapidly. But if that part of the market is barely profitable, who cares? As long as Apple keeps owning the profitable segment, they're doing about as well as they can (ie. Mac computers don't have massive market share, but they have massive profit share in the PC industry). Apple is sucking out over 80% of all the profits in the smartphone market (Samsung's in the 30% range and the rest is negative), and I don't have the numbers for tablets, but it's probably similar if not higher. Now I'm not saying that there's no impact from increased competition. Some people who would've bought an iPad when there was little else might now buy something else, and cannibalization from more capable smartphones is real, etc. But it just isn't as simple as looking at market share numbers without taking segmentation into account. If Apple made $100 tablets they'd have a huge market share but would make no money on those and hurt their high end business, so what would be the point? As for the death of the tablet, well, let's revisit that in 5 years. They're still forecasting about 20% growth this year for the overall market. I think the rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated, as the saying goes. It's already the fastest adopted new technology ever and I seriously doubt it's going anywhere whatever some article says, though I do believe expectations were probably too high and growth won't be like smartphones. We'll see.

From another site:

Awesome: http://mashable.com/2014/04/25/elon-musk-spacex-booster-stage-atlantic/ http://www.bloomberg.com/video/elon-musk-spacex-s-soft-landing-a-success-czSZgIIVRE2OdDqgD8R6hA.html

Retail at Apple has been leaderless (or with a bad leader) for a while now. I'll be curious to see what Angela Ahrendts can do. She starts at Apple next week, and she's done a great job at Burberry.

I don't think it matters that much if this deal doesn't work, because they'll just do another merger of equals later with the same discipline. It doesn't change the strategy, though it would certainly delay it and there's a cost to that. The question is, can they find another company that is as good a fit assets/geographies-wise as AGN? Maybe, maybe not, but maybe something even better could be found... I don't know.

I think it's the opposite. They've been doing most acquisitions mostly with debt, they could easily have issued more stock, and Ackman wanted VRX to put more equity in this deal but VRX wanted to use more debt (and Ackman has elected to take 100% shares if he can get them, so he also thinks it's quite cheap). The current deal is a compromise. Share count is up around 10% in the past 4 years, revenues are up almost 5x. They've bought back a fair amount of stock a few years ago, and the stock price increase since then tracks the operational growth fairly closely (not exactly). If the company can keep executing anywhere close to what they've been doing, and I have no reason to think they can't, the stock isn't overvalued at all.

I think Altius isn't buying back shares because, among other things, it just bought a bunch of royalties and assets and needs to conserve its cash to pay for those. I see both LMCA and Altius as platforms that should be able to create lots of value for the long term. I don't intend to sell either even if they appear close to fairly valued because real IV is a moving target and hard to estimate, and once you get off the bus it might be hard to get back in (where do you think the stock will be if there's a positive announcement on Kami and/or JL?). ALS might be less undervalued now than it was recently, but a lot of uncertainty is also lifting, which changes the profile. I still think it's undervalued and should provide nice returns for years to come, and I'm not as bearish as you on Kami.

https://oddlotinvest.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/lou-simpson-1987-profile.pdf

this is off-topic...but- I can't understand that at all. If you were wealthy, then do with it whatever you want with your pets. But I can't understand people who spend so much time and money and personally invested their emotions into a pet when they can barely take care of themselves and their own family. I view it as a luxury (just like a large should be viewed as a luxury). If you are in the middle or lower class and wondering why you have no (or minimal) savings, look at your number of pets and children. I can't tell you how many times I've heard friends with pets complain about money issues. To take it a step even further, I don't understand why is acceptable to society that families might own pets with no restriction who are any sort of welfare, foodstamps, (& now) subsidized obamacare Pets are children proxies for many people. It's human nature and won't change, whatever the economics of the situation are.

Glenn is out: https://glennchan.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/closed-my-altius-minerals-position/ I find it perplexing, right before the good news are very likely about to roll in, but it's in character for him, always very skeptical an cautious. Time will tell who is right.

I didn't want to "justify" anything here. I'm looking for an explanation to a perfectly valid question: Why did such a steep iPad "growth" curve flatten out so abruptly? Interesting thoughts from Benedict Evans at the a16z podcast from Andreessen Horowitz: http://pcasts.in/CcUJ He says that because of the shape of the sales curve it cannot be the replacement cycle. The curve looks more like AAPL is "running out" of people to sell it to. Ben Thomson has an interesting perspective: http://stratechery.com/2014/dont-give-ipad/

Litigation vs BAC: http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/KF3K7Ja_C5U/movieposter.jpg?v=4e728829

Maybe I'll give it a try in 10 years when it comes to Canada... In other amazon news: http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304788404579521522792859890-lMyQjAxMTA0MDIwNDEyNDQyWj Amazon, in Threat to UPS, Tries Its Own Deliveries

I doubt it. They are likely prevented from selling at this point because they probably have a lot of non-public info about upcoming announcements and deals, but even if they weren't, unless they knew bad stuff was on the horizon, it's much better to wait because lifting the uncertainty about the mine should provide them with a better price down the road. I also wouldn't be surprised if when they sold, they dumped the shares as a block to a strategic buyer, and not trickle them out in the public market (volumes are way too low).

Here are a few great videos where you can hear Feynman speaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUfXhToX5b8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chKyBUOtfws

I love Feynman. Actually gave "Feynman" as a middle name to my newborn son. Niels Bohr could probably more accurately be called the father of QM, but whatever, I encourage people to read everything they can find by Feynman. 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman' is lots of fun, as is 'What Do You Care What Other People Think' and 'Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman'. All those are accessible to everybody. For something more sciency, 'The Feynman Lectures on Physics' are classic, as is 'QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter'.

Thanks Scott. That's kind of like how I think about it too. I want to make sure that there's not a predictable single event that could be catastrophic for the company, and I don't think the rate hike that was discussed is, so once that's out of the way, I look at the long-term track record, the quality of the assets, quality of management, and the overall strategy, and it made me very confident that the company was worth more than 1.2x book (what I paid) and should be able to keep compounding nicely for years (if not decades) to come.

http://www.colfaxcorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CFX_News_2014_4_24_General_Releases.pdf Update: Well, if someone was looking for an entry point, they certainly had one this morning. Short window, though.