Liberty

Just finished listening to the call. Good quarter, I'm satisfied. Even better if the market doesn't like it and they can buy back more at low prices. Most of the things that look bad at first glance had good explanations in the CC, IMO. Those who only look at a few headline numbers will miss what's really going on underneath.

That's basically Malone's theory about unbundling. It used to work because people didn't have a choice, and the technology didn't make it easy to have a choice anyway. But now, it seems inevitable that it'll happen at some point. And because more and more content will go over the top, through the IP connection, those who are able to provide fast internet at the lowest cost will be well positioned (ie. cable companies should be able to go all the way up to gigabit speeds over time with fairly minimal capex, especially once they go all-digital and free up tons of bandwidth on their pipes that is currently being used by analog signals -- telecoms won't be able to go that fast with DSL, and satellite players don't have the bi-directional infrastructure).

I read Everything Store this week. I found it quite interesting and recommend it. It certainly helps better understand the company, if not necessarily on a financial level, at least their culture, tactics, and strategy, and how they intersect the landscape of giant tech companies and retailers/publishers.

Thanks for the link and the notes. I listened to it, and there's a lot of interesting stuff in there, especially about Landquart. I hadn't realized before this that the Swiss Durasafe order was this far along and more or less just a question of time now.

The Mac is 30 years old today. Apple made this page with a video to celebrate: http://www.apple.com/30-years/

You can easily dual boot into windows with Boot Camp. http://www.apple.com/ca/support/bootcamp/ But there's also a Mac version of office: http://www.microsoft.com/MAC Or should be able to use Parallels or VMWare to run the windows version within OS X. Many options.

I have no inside information so I don't know where the numbers are from, but be careful. These numbers are marketing as much as anything. On Facebook, companies buy followers. On their own sites, they don't even have to do that and can figure all kinds of ways to have impressive numbers, from auto-signing on people and having them opt-out (which most people don't bother to do) to just plain writing whatever impressive number they want on the webpage to create social proof.

IMO buybacks (as long as the stock is cheap) and steadily raising dividends are the best use of capital. Big acquisitions or investing in publicly traded businesses would just be diworsification. This isn't an old textile mill that you want to use as a cash cow to buy good assets (ie. when in a chronically leaky boat, efforts to change boat are better than efforts to patch holes). This is one of the best businesses in the world, so the extra capital should go to increasing the per share interest in that business or be returned to investor so that they can decide what they want to do with it (if it's diversification, that's their choice and they should do it at the level of their own portfolio, but to me Apple becoming a gigantic hedge fund is a bit like Coca Cola buying shrimp farms and movie studios -- it's bound to make things worse). They're already spending all they need on R&D, capex, bolt on acquisitions and acqui-hires, and it isn't making a dent in their cash pile. If they forced themselves to make more acquisitions just because they have cash, it would be like the tail wagging the dog, doing things for the wrong reasons. The low multiples that Mr. Market is attributing to the business won't last forever if they keep delivering, so they should take advantage of them with buybacks while they can. And if they don't deliver, it won't be for lack of cash, so having 140b in the bank or 15b in the bank won't make a difference. Product quality and how much cash they have aren't really directly related past a certain amount that is just a fraction of their reserves, as I've written about a few months ago.

Is the presentation available (slides & recording)?

Add a wireless keyboard and mouse and it's hard to see how you could be disappointed with that, especially if you are coming from an older Macbook Pro and liked that experience. Things have gotten a lot better since 2007 :D That seems much better than the iMac + Chromebook because this way when you're mobile, you're still in the same environment with all your stuff and all the same capabilities instead of being on a lower quality, more limited machine. Another option would be iMac + iPad + origami case and wireless keyboard ( http://goincase.com/shop/incase-origami-workstation-for-ipad-2 ). I have that setup for my iPad, and it has replaced my laptop for all living room activities.

http://www.alderonironore.com/_resources/news/ADVNR20140123.pdf

Thanks for posting, Viking. This is even better when you think that until recently, the majority of the population who was on China Mobile didn't officially have access to the iPhone, and even a lot of those who did get it (on the grey market or on another carrier) were stuck on antiquated 2G/EDGE networks. iPhones are going to be much more desirable now that fast 4G networks are being rolled out on a larger scale.

Interesting. Same internet speeds and comparable video package? Where are you located?

Charter's all about bundling (triple play), though. Price how much it costs you to get video + internet + phone via Charter compared to what it would cost to get DTV + phone at a telco + internet of similar speed somewhere else, and I suspect that things would look a lot more competitive.

Up another 9% today. Whiplash indeed.

Icahn said on Twitter that he bought 500m more in AAPL shares in the past two weeks, now owns over 3 billion. Keeps pressuring for larger buyback and will release another letter about it soon.

Interesting. Personally, I would be seriously surprised if that happened. With Handler and Friedman both coming from Jeffries where they were big shareholders and helped build the business over many years, I think they're probably more familiar and more attached to it than to anything else in LUK. I see it as a permanent part of the business now, kind of like the insurance operations of Berkshire or the BNSF now.

I'm not saying I'm particularly worried about that, just dotting the i's and crossing the t's.

Empire building? edit: To be clear, I'm really asking the question. I never dug too deep into Lenovo because I don't care too much about their business, so I don't know how good management is. But in general, empire building should be the default assumption whenever a big acquisition is mentioned, because that's how most managements (who aren't big owners, aren't great capital allocators) think about things, even if they won't say it. Great acquisitions that create lots of value are the exception, not the norm.

Unless they changed brokers, it's not buybacks. I was told that Raymond James is their broker for the debs and Blackmont for the common.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but that's only the case for the Sherritt coal royalties, no? The Voisey's Bay and the potash royalties are not based on tonnage, and neither would Kami's.

I think the operational thesis, so to speak, is similar (minus LSQ, most probably), but what has changed is that there's a lot more uncertainty from external factors like tariffs, and that a lot of the targets the company set have proved to be too ambitious/optimistic (took more time to ramp up, more things went wrong than expected), so should we expect other things to go wrong or are we done with that bad streak? Did they learn from their mistakes? And as always, the question is, is that priced in? Is everybody so down on the business that any good news would take everybody by surprise? They do have lots of cash on the balance sheet, Lanquart seems like it's going in the black and could eventually be sold, and Thurso has the potential to be very profitable if a few things go right. But what will happen? Who knows...

Another ±3.9 million DB.A traded so far today.

http://oddlotinvest.wordpress.com/2014/01/11/lamperts-lemon-and-lemmans-lemonade-the-difference-between-value-creation-and-destruction/ I thought this blog post was interesting. It starts by looking at media coverage of both Lampert and Lemman and finds that they both have similar approaches, despite articles by the same publication published one montha apart using the same types of strategies to explain both success and failure. Seems like a good example of the halo effect; the same thing will be seen in a completely different light depending on whether you are currently succeeding or not. If things ever turn around at SHLD, I'm sure the media will use the same facts to explain a different outcome.. But I think the conclusion of the blog post also matters a lot: A jockey will only be as good as his horse. Lampert picked a much tougher business with Sears than Lemman with Heinz...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25805136