Liberty

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSL3N0MH26X20140320?irpc=932

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-19/valeant-ceo-seeks-acquisitions-in-high-growth-health-care.html

The problem with BYD is that they haven't shown much product capability. Engineering? Sure, though not on the level of Tesla except maybe for the batteries (certainly not the rest of the car). You need the whole package to woo a skeptical consumer and command premium pricing, like Tesla has done. I've seen BYD vehicles in person at the Detroit Auto show a little while ago. Real underwhelming crap. One of their show cars even had corrosion on one side, which shows their level of attention to detail (meanwhile, Musk personally inspected every Tesla before it shipped for a long time)...

Interview for dutch tv from a few months ago.

Specwise, it certainly was, but I think they kept it so long for a very specific part of the market and made lots of money on it. Everywhere you see an iPad being used as a cash register, or in a wharehouse to check inventory, or stuff like that on the business or educational side.. You don't need high resolution or fast CPU, just a nice well-built tablet that anyone can use, which the 2 is. But obviously the 4 is much better.

Apple is replacing the iPad 2 with the resurrected iPad 4 (retina, A6X chip, lightning connector... ) as their entry level model, and released a 8gb version of the 5c. This only makes the lineup stronger and attractive to more people, so it can't hurt. http://9to5mac.com/2014/03/18/apple-re-introduces-fourth-generation-ipad-in-16-gb-model-starting-at-449-discontinues-ipad-2/ http://www.macrumors.com/2014/03/18/8gb-iphone-5c-launch-16gb-ipad-4-relaunch/ Also, there's a report that Microsoft will launch Office for iPad on March 27 (which would be good for both companies): http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/17/5519614/office-for-ipad-satya-nadella-march-27th-event

Do you have any nominations? :) If you want something close to Berkshire in structure and philosophy but without the size, I'd probably say Markel. I don't think they're quite at the level of brilliance of Buffett (who is?), so I don't think they'll have a similarly spectacular long-term book value growth record when all is said and done, but they should do very well nonetheless.

No, the average person doesn't have an edge on any stock, small or large. The average person should buy index funds. Exactly. If you think you have an average understanding of a situation, you definitely shouldn't invest thinking you'll spot a mispricing. You could still do well by buying a wonderful business at a fair price and holding for the long-term, though, but determining what is a wonderful business isn't easy either. But it's not because a company is big and scrutinized that the consensus is correct. Just look at BAC and AIG during the past few years for an example of this.

I'm not sure it'll matter in the end. Apple has never been first, or the company with the most features. They weren't first with digital music players, smartphones, etc. Apple TV for most of its life has been more a peripheral/ecosystem-enhancing device. That's why they called it a hobby. It was a good way to show your photos to family on the big screen, play your iTunes music library, etc (people who focus on spec sheets and content lists forget how useful that is to the average person, lots of value in doing the simple stuff well). Over time, they've added more and more content to it and it has slowly morphed into more than just a peripheral. Roku might be competitive on the content front right now, though probably not on the integration with the Apple ecosystem, which makes it inferior to many. But over time, Apple will keep adding more content, including Prime I'm sure, and the end game will probably take the Apple TV somewhere that is hard to follow for any company that isn't a general computing company (as RIM found out when smartphones moved from email pager phones to fully-fledged computers with full-featured OSes and such). If Apple TV is a gaming console and has an app ecosystem and maybe some natural interface stuff (motion traking?) on top of integration with iPhones and iPads and Macs and all the content that Roku has (Apple's dollars are just as green when it comes to purchasing rights), what will Roku do to compete?

I don't think they ever pretended that it was all they cared about. It was a necessary condition, but not sufficient. I think Jobs cared a lot about making great products, but he cared as much about making a great company, and since they had to focus on so few things to get them right, they had to be the right things that played to their strengths (basically, general purpose computers and a few peripherals that augment them) and made financial sense. Apple has certainly been making people's lives better - you can look up what PCs were before the Macintosh, digital music players before the iPod, smartphones before the iPhone, tablets before the iPad, etc - which doesn't mean Steve Jobs wasn't a shrewd businessman too (he made his money not only from Apple but from NeXT and Pixar), as is Tim Cooks (a lot of his work in the past has been making the supply chain as efficient as possible to increase margins). Either way, their focus on economically attractive products is certainly not something shareholders can complain about in my opinion.

Making an actual TV never made any sense to me. People keep them for way too long, everybody wants a different size so you would have to make tons of models, margins are low, and you don't want to have to change the whole thing including the panel just to get the new version that is faster and has new features. It's not the panel that differentiates TVs for most people, it's whatever software/hardware/services/content is creating the experience. It's much better to have a small box that drives a TV and replaces as much as possible of the crappy software that manufacturers and cablecos ship. IMO the current Apple TV will grow up and keep adding capabilities (including gaming console capabilities, probably) until it does for the living room entertainment experience (which is pretty much universally crappy) what the iPhone did for smartphones and the iPad did for tablets; make is simple, intuitive, good-looking, and create an ecosystem that allows developers to build great things on top of it. But most important, it'll turn yet another specialized device into a general computing device, and to do that Apple is uniquely positioned. Most competitors in the space don't have near the expertise and talent in software-hardare-UI-services-content integration that Apple does. I'd also expect even more integration with other devices (ie. AirPlay is great example, and CarPlay could be over time, and I'm sure they can find other ways to make one device more useful thanks to another or to a peripheral (wearables?)).

Those who are looking a Schiller's CAPE might want to have a look at this. I think it makes good points: http://philosophicaleconomics.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/shiller/ This is an interesting follow up: http://philosophicaleconomics.wordpress.com/2014/03/16/the-u-s-stock-market-is-expensive-and-it-should-be/

This one has been discussed in other places (mostly the LMCA thread), but I think it deserves its own home. I've been looking into it a bit, but it's not a company I understand too well. I know that many people here own it, and I'd really appreciate it if they shared their thesis on it (I suppose the most common one is probably: Malone is recreating TCI outside the US in cable markets that aren't as mature and a lot more fragmented). There's a recent overview of Liberty Global here: http://oraclefromomaha.wordpress.com/2014/03/09/liberty-global-deep-dive-into-media-companies-series-part-1/

I can't remember if he said to sell (probably not explicitely), but his Sun Valley speech clearly talked about overvaluation around the dot com bubble.

A couple interesting pieces: http://daringfireball.net/2014/03/ecosystem_chess_game http://stratechery.com/2014/digital-hub-2-0/

Glenn has a new post on Liberty: http://glennchan.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/libertymalone-update/

Writeup on Liberty Global: http://oraclefromomaha.wordpress.com/2014/03/09/liberty-global-deep-dive-into-media-companies-series-part-1/

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1355096/000110465914019426/a14-8086_1425.htm Maffei on ecommerce tracker's potential value.

I think the internet + globalisation changed expectations significantly because it means that these asset-light software companies can grow much faster than before. Software in the 80s was mostly sold on diskettes and/or installed by IT departments, and companies took a lot longer to get out of their home country and expand internationally. Now, in a few years a company like Facebook can go from a university dorm to over a billion users around the world. That certainly makes a difference in investor expectations, and so they will pay more because they expect more growth.. This land grab mentality also makes it a higher priority to grow first and then monetize rather than wait around to find the best business model and then try to grow. Just a theory. I'm not saying it won't end in tears for many.

One thing I wanted to do when I was reading the recent letter but haven't had time yet; calculate their CAGR if you remove the first year that is like 180%. It's an outlier with such a small amount of capital that it doesn't seem like it's useful to include.

http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.ca/2014/03/jpm-investor-day-2014.html Comments on JPM's investor day.

http://oraclefromomaha.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/standardized-faulty-thinking-bad-assumptions/ Good piece on a basic mistake that Gross made when he called the 'death of equities', comparing GDP growth to stock market returns (comparing a flow variable with a stock one).

But what if you can't trust the financial statements, or that contracts will be enforced? That's another way in which corruption/weak institutions can screw you.

Thanks for posting the letter. "Given our concern about financial markets and the excellent returns we achieved on our long term investments, we reluctantly decided to sell our long term holdings of Wells Fargo (a gain of 125%), Johnson & Johnson (a gain of 47%) and U.S. Bancorp (a gain of 135%)." Wow. Didn't they say a couple years ago that these were core long-term holdings? Maybe I'm misremembering, I'll have to dig that up after I'm done. Still, I was surprised that they sold it all, especially Wells, a Buffett favorite. Not necessarily bad if they redeploy the capital in even better things, but it's still surprising to me.