Liberty

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/03/libertymedia-barnesnoble-idUSL4N0MV3AV20140403 * Liberty Media cuts stake to 1.6 percent from 16.6 percent * Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei to leave Barnes & Noble board The money is definitely better used somewhere else IMO, either in a new thing or just buying more Charter or doing LMCA buybacks...

But the real costs of goodwill amortization would remain. Drug values peak a few years after launch and then decline over time as they face new competition. Indeed, which is why the selection of the assets is so important. My understanding is that some are more durable than others and can more easily be extended with reformulations and slight improvements, and others are just branded generics anyway. Others are more valuable to Valeant than to the acquiree because of valeant's global sales, giving it ability to leverage an under-marketed product. VRX certainly isn't trying to go into the highly competitive areas, both geographically and product-wise (if you listen to the calls, Pearson mentions this a lot, how they're staying out of certain markets because there's too much competition or they don't have the economies of scale yet). They release data on their patent cliffs as % of their revenues, and on any year for the foreseeable future, it's very low single digits.

One way I think about it is, if Valeant was to stop acquiring today, it would not grow nearly as fast (though it's organic numbers are still pretty decent), but within a year or two all acquisitions would be fully integrated and all the one-time costs related to M&A would fall to zero. That would be a way to maximize current owner's earnings vs. growth. That seems like a bad strategy at the present time since there are lots of M&A opportunities, interest rates are low, Valeant has a tax advantage and appears better at operating efficiently compared to others (kind of like how Capital Cities got more out of a TV station than other operators because they cut the fat). What matters is that a dollar invested in growth return more than a dollar of value. But if someday all that changes and management can't find businesses that meet its hurdle rate, they could redirect capital to organic growth (more R&D? more small bolt-ons rather than big ones? organic expansion into new markets? etc) and capital returns (dividends, buybacks) and still do well. But until we reach that point, I don't see why they should change a strategy that seems to be working superbly at creating value.

If I could I would go the Steve Jobs route and wear the same thing every day :) I've always liked the quality of American Apparel basic t-shirt (2001 model, iirc). They are usually $21, but they went on sale for $8 a few days ago so I ordered 5 black ones. Not sure I ever would pay $50+ for a t-shirt... http://store.americanapparel.ca/2001.html?cid=198-313

For those who haven't yet seen it: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-and-spacex-elon-musks-industrial-empire/

Thank you, I appreciate your response.

http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.ca/2014/04/24-billion-wealth-transfer.html

I think it depends on what your product is. Both methods work best with different things. Releasing early and often and correcting bugs and adding features on the go works great for software and services, even better if ad-supported and people. But when you're selling hardware, it better be great because you can't easily go back to fix it and people paid you good money, so once you've delivered crap to your customers, they stuck with it and won't forget it for a while... Since Apple builds the whole thing (hardware-software-services), they can't afford to be in perpetual beta like Google.

Thanks for the list Sanjeev!

I wish you the best of luck. I know that I couldn't invest like that, but if it works for you, that's cool.

why not? Usually you post pretty intelligent stuff. I keep seeing this, but I find it hard to define what makes a good investor. If you could break it down, then you know what to get better at no? Maybe someday I'll write a longer piece about my evolution as an investor, if anyone's interested. But the short version is: I've only been doing this for a few years (unlike some here who have been doing it for decades), so I'm still adjusting my style and discovering what works for me and what doesn't. All this takes a while, but over the past couple year I think I might have found my sweet spot, which is different from what I thought it was maybe 4 years ago. Time will tell if I'm right. I'm 31 so hopefully I still have a lot of years to learn and improve, which is most of the fun anyway. You write: "If you could break it down, then you know what to get better at no?" I find that it's more complicated than that. It would be easier if there was just one way to invest well, so you could know exactly what to aim for. The challenge is finding a good way to invest, among the promising variants, that is compatible with your personality and skillset. Not only do you have to find an approach, but you have to know yourself and not pretend you are something you're not (even if unconsciously).

My view is really I don't know. I do share other people's views when I find them interesting or when they seem to correct widely held misconceptions, but when it comes to macro, I just watch it from the sidelines, mostly because I find it interesting. I certainly don't have a coherent general theory of macro, and I don't need to since I don't plan on owning an index -- during a period of low returns for the indexes, lots of individual businesses have nicely compounded... But like Buffett says, there's always reasons to be negative. Some people have been bearish and piling up cash since 2011 or 2012. How far would the market have to fall for them to make up the lost opportunity since then? And people who are very bearish tend to stay bearish even when things get cheap because any drop seems to confirm their views (ie. people who thought that things wouldn't turn around until the market got to a P/E of 7 in 2009 and so never bought anything). Personally, I now try to be mostly fully invested in high-quality long-term holdings that should be able to survive almost anything and allocate capital for me, and just ride it all out. I've spent the past 2 years seriously upgrading the quality of the businesses I own and diversifying more. I'm not good enough to do what many here do successfully, so I don't even try anymore.

I have the 2011 edition, and my understanding is that each edition builds on the previous ones, so you should get the latest. Just don't expect your mailman to like you after this. These things are heavy...

Amazon adds more than a million products to Canadian store: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/amazon-beefs-up-online-offerings-in-canada-1.2593861 I'm not a shareholder, but its nice as a Canadian shopper :)

Here's Geoff Gannon riffing on this idea: http://gannonandhoangoninvesting.com/blog/2014/4/1/stock-price-guidelines I liked this part:

I think people shouldn't take "this time is different" to mean "it's always the same" either. I think it's a warning, but the way to find out the truth is to do a lot of work and see what makes sense, not to always assume that everything will be exactly the same. This time for newspapers, it's different. Same for a lot of businesses that got disrupted (you want to own a record store?). People who assumed that the GFC was a replay of the Great Depression had it wrong. etc. I don't think that the author is arguing that any level of valuation (ie. dot-com bubble) would be reasonable, just that if you look at the correct figures, things right now aren't much outside of historical norms, or at least not as high as the bears claim, and that historical norms weren't always as stable and mean-reverting as some might think. That's all. Who knows what will happen from here? Lots of gray zones. It's never completely different, but it's never completely the same either, which is something that people just as often forget and pay for.

Good read on profit margins and the flawed way in which they are often calculated (mixing 'national' data with 'domestic' data, etc): http://philosophicaleconomics.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/foreignpm/

That's why I said I'm not convinced that HFT does net harm. If they only make money that past less-efficient market makers would've made otherwise, that's fine with me. I don't care about those victims because they are just victims of a better system, and that's progress. I'm no HFT expert, but if there are HFT strategies that aren't in that category and that make a lot of money in a zero sum way without providing benefits to anyone (front running, whatever), I don't think there's anything wrong with changing things to block them, just like insider trading is banned. Otherwise they just add friction to the system, acting as a kind of fee on the markets (not that it affects me much personally, but it's still a problem if it's the case). But if all they do is try to react to news faster than others, that's fine with me too...

I just did the same thing. ;D I'm about a quarter of the way though the general section and I started with the 3 "Ask" threads, Packer, Eric and Kraven. There's some gold in those general sub-forums, especially from '09 -'10. Shows just how smart this forum is. So far I'm about mid way through 2010 and I found the strategy about the members who used preferred shares early in '09 hugely enlightening. After general I'm going to start the investment ideas section. It's time well spent for me. That's what I did when I first joined. I went through the whole archive. I highly recommend it to new members.

First, my comment was meant mostly as a joke. I'm not convinced that HFT is a net bad compared to the system that we had before. I'm all for them keeping spreads low and providing liquidity, but there's a law of diminishing returns that is reached at some point and what might have been good at first could stop adding value past a certain point. Everything looks crazy if you push it to the logical limit. What if there was a police officer following everybody around all day and night? See, the idea of having a police force is crazy! Sure putting delays of days or having randomly selected stocks would be hugely problematic. But putting a small random delay (it could be between 0.1 and 1 seconds, whatever works) would probably kill a lot of strategies that aren't adding much value and keep a fair amount of market makers around. The stock market is a system created by humans, all the rules were created by us, so changing those rules to try to improve how capital markets work isn't some crime against nature. It all depends on what the end goal is; is it to built a really cool casino or to build a system that allows the fractional ownership of businesses and the allocation of capital to those businesses. If it's a casino we want, I'm sure we could do a lot better than what we have now.

Add a randomized delay of between 1 and 10 seconds to everybody's trades ;)

Another downside is that participation is usually pretty low and unhappy people are more motivated to vote than happy people, so if there are 5 people who dislike you and rate everything you write 1/5 star, it soon looks like everybody hates you. It can also encourage groupthink if every time someone with a unpopular opinion gets -15 votes, soon enough you get an echo chamber of the majority. Places like Stockhouse have ratings, and it rarely tells you much about the real quality of anything in my experience... One way around that would be to have only positive voting with a limited number of votes, like 1 gold star per user par day. So when you like something, you could vote for it and next to the post it would say "X people gave this post a gold star" or whatever. The limited number of votes would mean that they are worth something (otherwise, people would just vote for anything and everything and it wouldn't mean much), and you could have a feature that ranks posts by gold stars to see the Best Of. For negative stuff like spam or things against the forum guidelines, you can already use the "report to a moderator button". This keeps it to the serious stuff, rather than thumbing down random stuff you mildly dislike and making everybody feel bad because they don't know why they are getting anonymously downvoted...

Interesting article about Apple's SoC prowesses for the hardware geeks out there: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7910/apples-cyclone-microarchitecture-detailed The non-technical summary can be found here: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/03/31/apple-a7-desktop-class/ Also, LTE ipads launching in China: http://9to5mac.com/2014/03/31/apple-launches-td-lte-ipad-air-and-retina-ipad-mini-models-in-china/

Handsome devil! 8) I wish I was able to attend this year, Gio. We are interested in a lot of the same companies/capital allocators, I would have been fun to compare notes over a drink. Maybe next year... I know it's early, but do you plan to make the trip again?