Liberty

Is that bird a transparent window (which would mean durasafe)? It's kind of hard to tell depending on what was undernearth the note. In any case, nice money! I like the graphic design and symbolism.

Sorry i am not old enough to remember that times. But since i don`t know these, i doubt that they where great businesses with a strong moat and brand. :D But i could be wrong on these. :) I wasn't born back then either, but Singleton at Teledyne and Tom Murphy at Capital Cities are two of Buffett's favorite managers and capital allocators. I suggest you look them up (get the book Outsiders, which was recommended in Buffett's latest annual letter).

I didn`t say you should buy above IV. I would say numbers/IV ist the important part. When a great company is run by an idiot, you have much more upside potential than the other way round. Look for example at Microsoft, it is a great company with a moat and one of the strongest brands in the world. But it is not run by good management. I still don't think it's that easy. I would rather have been in Capital Cities in the 1970s rather than in CBS, or in Teledyne rather than worse managed conglomerates in the very same niche industries... Sometimes bad management just stays bad.

It's a little harder than that, though, no? A great company won't be a great investment at any price. Pay too much, and you won't do well (at least not until a long time, until the IV grows into the market valuation). Being sure that a business is a great business isn't that easy either. Newspapers were great businesses, until they weren't. I'm sure many thought that big banks were great businesses right before 2008. I'm sure some idiot managers found great ways to ruin (at least temporarily) great businesses by diluting them via stupid acquisitions and creating lots of new shares, scaring away top employees with stupid policies, etc. So knowledge about management and IV vs price is definitely crucial when investing. I recognize the Buffett sayings under what you are writing, and that's great. But these are mental models to get you to think about the right things, but they shouldn't be taken entirely literally. Reality is messier, something that you can see in Buffett's actions (he cares a lot about quality of management and price, and few businesses meet the 'great business' test, and he has encyclopedic knowledge of all the details of all the businesses he invests in, and of all those he doesn't too (he read IBM's Ks and Qs for 50 years before investing!).

Dazel, you've been buying ALS pretty constantly for at least 3 years, it seems from your posts. The market cap's not that big. You must own more shares than Brian Dalton. How is it that you don't have a seat on the board yet ;)

Agreed. I'm definitely not agitating for that outcome, just sharing what I saw. If Tembec had stronger cash flows, a merger might help internally finance LSQ, and the specialty DP expertise could be valuable if it helped go into that market much more quickly than otherwise (but I don't know if it would help that much?). Apart from that and some SGA savings, I don't see much benefit. And if it meant Chad left, it would severely hurt the thesis IMO.

Those are good points. How much would you estimate the adjusted cash EPS numbers need to be discounted to compensate for that? Personally, I don't know, but I don't think it's much more than 5-15% (you could fiddle with it, add it to their current R&D spend and see how it compares to other pharmas with similar product mix, then decide if the acquisition approach is more capital-efficient or not, etc). Does it kill the thesis? I think that what will make a huge difference over the long term is whether Pearson is right when he says that a lot of what they're cutting isn't providing good returns anyway (it's not like everybody's so great at capital allocation -- they mostly do what others are doing); they do marketing differently, with more emphasis on less expensive direct doctor-relationships, and they don't entirely cut R&D -- just most of the long-shot, blue sky stuff -- the question is, is what R&D remains enough to maintain the type of products that they have (not have that melting ice cube, or at least, melting slowly)? They aren't in the big blockbuster business. With their product mix, it seems to be about making a slightly improved formulation of some cream, or a slightly more comfortable contact lens, etc, not about making the next Viagra from scratch. Other benefits that can offset this partially are the lower tax rate than US pharmas (making acquisitions de facto less expensive), the cross-selling opportunities (ie. you acquire a small pharma that had very limited reach because of its size, and you plug its product into the global Valeant sales force), and the ability to allocate wherever there are opportunities worldwide (ie. they seem disciplined about staying out of markets, geographically and product-wise, where expected returns are too low). Do the pros of the approach more than compensate for the cons? Good question. Management seems very smart, and has incentives that are fairly long-term (iirc). I wouldn't be surprised if they're very aware of this issue and feel that the approach addresses it. But that doesn't mean they're right... It's one of those "if you want to do significantly better than everybody, you have to do something different". Can I get the conviction that they are different and correct? :-\

Couple questions: 1) You say it's a single quarter. Does it mean you've looked at past ones and pro-forma they were positive or at least neutral? 2) Not sure if you've read my comment earlier in this thread, but if you consider that some of the acquisition cost is just a substitute for R&D (possibly a more cost efficient and less uncertain way to refill the pipeline, since you know what you're buying and can pick good value out of many choices on the market, but you might not know what will come out of R&D), then that decline pro-forma doesn't quite seem as bad. It's just a different way to refill that pipeline. What matters in the end is FCF/share, not that there are no pro-forma revenue declines, no?

I thought this slide based on data from Samsung's investor day was interesting: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2013/11/12/a-note-on-the-high-end I don't necessarily think that people here are under that impression, but too often in the media there's the perception that "Samsung is outselling Apple by a lot" while if you look at the market segment where Apple is competing, Apple is actually outselling Samsung (and making more per device too).

It would only make sense if it was a merger of equals and both companies were trading similarly cheaply in the stock market, IMO. Then they could ride the cycle back up together as a stronger combined entity. But I haven't studied TEMBEC much, so I can't speak on their valuation. Doubt it makes sense, but maybe this could happen in the future if both companies are trading at similar relative valuations.

HSN (39% owned by LINTA) partnering with Univision to reach hispanic audience: http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20131114-909116.html?dsk=y

http://www.americanbanker.com/people/time-to-rethink-the-term-branch-b-of-as-moynihan-1063663-1.html Seems like a good plan to keep driving cost out of the branches.

Some speculation by a SH post about a Tembec merger:

This I agree with 100%. Your average person is never going to want the same things that a computer geek wants. I think in the near future the Mac OS will be more and more like iOS, that is if Apple doesn't just start using iOS for everything. I'll still build my own system and install Linux, as will all the computer geeks, but Macs with an easier to use OS will sell like hotcakes. Maybe they will keep a more full featured OS on their expensive Pro systems. I think they've already done a lot of that. Bringing the App store (with signed apps, and centralized update mechanism) to the Mac, Launchpad to start apps, and many of Mavericks' optimization bring some of the power-efficiency of iOS to OS X. And they've always had some of the other stuff like drag-and-drop to install, drag-and-drop to uninstall. But I don't subscribe to the view that OS X and iOS will eventually converge and become the same thing. iOS is purpose-built for smaller-screen mobile devices with limited resources. If you ran it on a computer with a much bigger screen, full-size keyboard, mouse-trackpad, and super-powerful hardware, it would be holding you back, not making your life better.. So IMO, they'll keep importing the features that make sense, but also keep what makes OS X a great powerful desktop/laptop OS.

I've been using Linux for close to 20 years and I've never thought Gnome or KDE where better because they offered so many options. In fact I've always thought that the bad thing about Linux was that it was behind in the GUI department. I loved Linux because it was stable and unix based. I'm an engineer I rather do everything in the terminal than use the GUI anyway. Also when comparing Linux to others, what are they comparing it against? Usually Microsoft Windows which was just a god-awful OS, at least until Windows 7 came out. No one ever compared it against Macintosh because in the 90's no one used a Mac anyway and in this century Mac was unix based (BSD) as well and has an excellent GUI windowing system. The only reason I've never owned a Mac is that Linux is free. I love Linux, for what it is. I ran the Slackware distro on my main box for a few years. Some distros are even getting close to grandma-proof, as long as your grandma doesn't do too many things (Ubuntu). But Linux is still far from being curated enough for the average person, and it'll always be hard to have a strong design voice when you design by committee. It's awesome for computer geeks, though. The best OS for the average person isn't even OS X, its iOS, as we're finding out in the market. Each app an icon, all apps findable in one place, no need to deal with the file system and find where that file has downloaded to, sane default settings, hard to screw things up if you make a mistake, system resources are managed well transparently (can't open a dozen things and then wonder why things slow to a crawl because you're swapping to disk), etc.

http://www.transdigm.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=196053&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1876282&highlight=

QVC CEO speaking in 2011:

As I said, the questions were fine. I'm sure in a text transcript everything would look good. But he still sounded like a kind of a dick. Maybe he's normally very nice, I don't know...

Maybe they'll turn out to be right, who knows? But I'm starting to think that the market has forgotten entirely what good news looks likes for FTP, so any positive surprise could have a big impact. Even random macro stuff could take everybody by surprise (Swiss Franc falls significantly vs euro giving landquart back some margin, there's a terrible cotton crop, tariffs made permanent lead to wave of cancelled supply projects, landquart sold to strategic buyer who pays top dollar, etc).

Clearly the effectiveness and reliability of the computer system matters a great deal in answering that question for any specific situation. But given a computer system with enough quality and reliability, there's very little I wouldn't let it do. I'd go so far as to say I'd let a computer-operated machine perform surgery on me. And I don't see any reason why a computer system can't be more safe and effective than a human driver. That's interesting. I think that most people, knowing that any small mistake while driving can mean life or death, would choose to have their fates placed in their own hands rather than a computer's even if in theory the possibility of life-threatening accidents is lower in the latter case. I agree with you that the efficacy of such technology will play a major factor in driving behaviour. This happens all the time over the course of history. At first, people don't trust a new technologies. Then they see it in action over and over again, they get used to it, and after a while they stop thinking about it and trust it. People who grow up with it don't even question it. It's the transition periods that cause these hesitations. I'm sure it happened with ATMs at first. Do I want to give my money to a machine? What if it swallows it and doesn't credit my account? What if there's a problem, who do I talk to? What if I make a mistake on the buttons and screw everything up? How can I trust what's happening inside of the machine? etc.

Most analysts tell you where you've been and pretend it's a forecast. When the stock was shooting up, the targets were higher. Now that it's been going down, targets are lower. It's almost momentum investing... Hopefully it goes to 3.5 just long enough for them to max out the buybacks... If they're going to do some, might as well make it count.

Thanks for the clarification. You might very well be right. Nokia (Microsoft) certainly is more differentiated than many other mobile players out there and has lots of hardware talent. The question is, can they overcome the ecosystem challenge, as well as Microsoft's culture which isn't very well suited to making consumer products? That will be tough.

Texual, your admiration for Elop isn't reduced by what happened to Nokia's mobile division under his watch? If he's so talented, why did things go so wrong? Or was the company doomed whoever was at the helm? (Maybe Steve Jobs himself not have been able to make it work? But if so, is that a good asset for Microsoft now?) Just curious how you reconcile that outcome with him being the best CEO for Microsoft in the mobile era.

I notice this is your first post. Welcome to the forum, Investor Man! :)

https://twitter.com/aaronissocial/status/400669713807978496