Liberty

Benmosche on bloomberg: http://bloom.bg/LYuCPh (priceless look in his eyes when Tim Armstrong is mentioned)

Thank you!

Thanks jay, I hadn't seen that one. Certainly puts a different light on things. :P

That's another possibility. Recently there were rumors that Liberty/Charter were going to do a deal with Comcast to offload some stuff after a TWC deal. Maybe they just agreed that it was better for all if they switched things around and Comcast was the acquirer and Charter got the offloaded homes. Maybe it'll just be easier to digest for Charter that way. Less risky. Who knows what's going on behind the scenes.

Only if Comcast didn't overpay. Time will tell. Better to stay disciplined and find other ways to grow than to chase Comcast and pay $170 and then get mediocre returns because the price was too high.

Never a dull moment. I really expected Malone & Rutledge to find a way to make it work. Now if nothing else, they can use the market's disappointment to do some buybacks and maybe increase their stake in Charter if they still think things will work out well (they always said they didn't need acquisitions for Charter to be a success, but there are other targets). Fascinating time for the industry, for sure.

I quite like that idea. I find it very rational and appealing. In the real world, though, it would probably be shut down because of the optics. You'd have the local news and Jay Leno doing a bit about the CSU unit dusting around where the garden gnome was stolen. Maybe some very charismatic official could sell it well enough to the public ahead of implementation to preempt that, and then it could be possible to do with taxpayers' full back backing because they understand that this could save more money than it costs (studies showing that would certainly help sell the point). Anyway, that was a good daydream. Thanks Omlsted! :)

Agreed if you don't have a full position and/or they are a company doing buybacks, absolutely. If not, it can shoot up straight away, I won't care :) Almost a billion for Victor Tech, that's pretty big for Colfax. Part of an existing platform, but not quite a regular bolt on. Charter was transformational and was 2.6b, so this is smaller, but still significant. Should be good if they just keep executing the way they have been. http://victortechnologies.com/index.php/investor-relations/webcasts-aamp-presentations.html http://ir.colfaxcorp.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=825365 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-12/colfax-to-buy-irving-place-s-victor-as-bdt-converts-stake.html 2013 net sales are 500m and adj. EBIDTA is around 100 million. Gross margin in the first 9 months of 2013 was 37.8%, and EBITDA margin was 19.8%. http://victortechnologies.com/Investor%20Relations/News/Colfax_Acquisition_Feb2014.pdf

No way to know, but I wonder if some selling is from people who missed the memo that the chinese decision was pushed back (was it only mentioned at that conference that Chad spoke at?) and are worried by the lack of news.

Looks like you had impeccable timing, at least in the short term.

It is a lot more complex. It also does a million more things than the original version. Random tip: Here's my favorite thing to do in iTunes. I have a lot of music, maybe 200 gigs of it, across multiple genres. I don't always feel like browsing through and picking what to listen to, so over time I've rated most tracks (1 to 5 stars), and I've created a 'smart playlist' that plays randomized 5-star songs that I haven't heard in 6 weeks. So I can listen to music I really like that I haven't heard in a while all day long.

I've never had anything like that, and as far as I know it's not a common issue. I suggest you google that problem and see if someone has a fix, and if you can't find anything, go ask Apple tech support either on the phone or in a store. No product past a certain level of complexity is entirely problem free. I wish things worked like that :) "Oh, we've had websites/browsers/Windows/databases/etc for years now, why are some people still experiencing bugs?"

Thanks FiveSigma. I had seen similar things about the future roadmap. Another piece of the puzzle is dropping entirely the analog signal (something that Charter is working on), freeing up tons of bandwidth. It's actually impressive to see how much bandwidth analog signal is using -- there's a Charter presentation that has a graph.

Netflix is not available in most of Europe (only UK and scandinavia, afaik), and I don't think streaming is as popular as in North-America. Once it is, it might change things. There's a huge difference in average data consumption between someone who streams HD content for hours each day and someone who doesn't, especially when everybody streams at the same time (evening peak hours). Cablecos will use more and more fiber too, but they don't have to bring it to people's homes, just to various hubs. The last mile can be coax, which Malone is confident should be able to go to gigabit speeds cost-effectively.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/02/10/charter-c-e-o-is-pressing-all-the-right-buttons-on-time-warner-cable/ And another one: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303874504579375291009721158

Oh I'm sorry, I was lacking some context. When you said "look at what they're doing with netflix" and mentioned competition, I didn't realize you were talking about the net neutrality stuff, I thought you were just talking about how cablecos are cooperating to try to compete against them (and other national players like DTV). That does kind of suck, but I guess it's a sign that the current model of unlimited download isn't sustainable. It might have worked back when most people just did a bit of email and web, but now that streaming HD movies is mainstream, it probably doesn't. Malone has been saying for a while that he thinks the industry will switch to a different model where heavier users pay more than light users (which is how it is in most other things). That might solve the problem without needing to secretly throttle and do other things that customers dislike. The cable industry certainly doesn't always seem to provide great service and transparency, though I think their rising prices are mostly due to rising content costs (which they have to pass to their customers). Some operators seem pretty good, while others seem pretty terrible (same applies to airlines, restaurant chains, retailers, etc).

I don't see it as scummy. They just don't overlap geographically. It's the nature of cable; the economics wouldn't work if you had a bunch of companies wiring up the same town, running wires in parallel. So they can't pretend to compete with each other if they aren't operating in the same places. Might as well try to work together when it makes sense. There's plenty of competition with cable from telecos, satellite, and netflix & other streamers, as well as lots of arm-wrestling with content owners. All these have national scale, so by cooperating on some things, cablecos are basically working their way up to a level playing field.

Icahn gives up: http://www.shareholderssquaretable.com/our-letter-to-apple-shareholders/

You'll be waiting forever for that paper. We know how radio waves work, we've been using them for a looong time before wifi came around.

Tim Cook interview in WSJ: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/02/07/apple-still-a-growth-company-cook-says-in-journal-interview/

Apparently it's not true: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/06/sochi-iphone-sochi-athletes-samsung-sponsorship

I think it depends on your model. If you're selling the same stuff as everybody else the same way, it'll be very hard to have higher margins than average over sustained periods. In that game, Amazon will eventually win because of their scale and focus on operations. But if you can have exclusive products that people want and a different, more effective way to sell and build customer relationships, you can have pretty good sustainable margins. I'm thinking of QVC here. Not 100% internet retailer, but its video + web model is closer to that than traditional brick & mortor. http://oraclefromomaha.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/linta-7.png (and unlike the big department stores, that's with prices that are competitive with Amazon)

I know I'm late with this one, but I figured I couldn't be the only one who hadn't realized the homage: Compare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiyIcz7wUH0 The homage is even better when you read the backstory of the Think Different ad campaign that was created when Jobs came back (this one: ) http://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2011/12/14/the-real-story-behind-apples-think-different-campaign/ The writing was inspired by the film Dead Poets Society, a Jobs favorite, and Robin Williams was a personal friend of Jobs. You could say there are many parallels between the message of the film and how Apple does things. Anyway, I thought it was cool. Maybe I'm the last one to notice that the ad was taken verbatim from the film.. Good film too, I rewatched it yesterday. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097165/

Very good, looking forward to the update in March or April. Almost wish they didn't say anything and just kept buying, but this is better than not opportunistically seizing the moment.

Thank you for posting, that was great!