Liberty

My guess is it's because most DP mills were built for DP from the start and weren't NBHK before (only very few conversions worldwide), so might not be that easy to swing those because of how the mills are designed. While if you build a DP mill on top of a NBHK mill, you still have that layer underneath.

I don't think it's a good idea to even consider this when you're still ramping up and tweaking things. But once you have stable DP ops, you can probably start swinging because you know what to swing back to. It probably also takes a while of not turning the corner before you look at certain options. I'm sure they originally thought they'd be in a different place by now... But skepticism is definitely warranted.

The shift to a swing mill seems like a good idea if they can really pull it off with "no down-time to modify operations into a swing mill" and "minor modifications and no capital expenditure", especially if they can do specialty NBHK pulp that gets a premium (we can assume) over the baseline commodity kind. Will be curious to see what their cost per ton of NBHK will be. Should be lower than in Thurso's former life thanks to the cogen, and possibly because of some de-bottlenecking that has been done for DP.

Maybe you are right about tax loss selling, but I think that many have probably been holding for more than a year and, with the market in general being so high, will want to sell some losers against their winners before the year is over. Even YTD it's down 25%, and 1y it's 55%. I haven't sold any of mine. I'm in 'being patient' mode.

Well, I suppose it's good that they haven't done buybacks yet* if the price is going to tank like that. I can't expect it recovering before 2014 because of all the tax loss selling, unless they have some really interesting things to say on the next CC. At the end of Q2 they had $136m of cash on the balance sheet. *Though if they only report once a month, they could be doing them in October and we'll only find out in November..

Number of MW installed is growing nicely http://amda-14lqre.client.shareholder.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=796398 Stock up over 18% right now on that guidance.

Anyone has the RBC report? I'd love to have a look. (If you do but don't want to reply here, you can message me in private. Thanks.)

[amazonsearch]The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon[/amazonsearch] Where else to buy this than on Amazon? :) This was mentioned in the Amazon discussion, but this is probably a better place to discuss it when it comes out...

Thanks, didn't know about that one. Added the book to my list.

http://qz.com/134132/moguls-plan-to-kill-netflix-unite-cable-companies-to-build-a-competitor/ Nothing new. Malone still trying to convince the cable cos to consolidate.

Malone doesn't seem to think that SIRI's valuation is too high, though. Otherwise I think he'd stop the buybacks there, or do a special dividend if he wanted to take some money out. And by buying back LMCA, he's basically buying lots of SIRI since most of LMCA is SIRI. He probably feels IV is high because of the high operational leverage (once your satellites are up and you've paid for your content, it costs pretty much the same to serve 25 or 50 or 75 million customers) and moat.

Have you seen that anywhere? AFAIK there's no cap. It seems more like a capital allocation decision; they want a majority of shares to maintain hard control, and anything above that can be opportunistically sold to be used elsewhere. That was my take anyway, but now you've made me question it. A quick search didn't reveal anything about a cap. If anyone knows for sure, please let me know. Thanks.

I like Gladwell's stuff. He's a great raconteur and there are lots of insights to be found in his writings.. I'm just not sure his conclusions are always based on a sound, scientific methodology, as has been demonstrated. Hence the grain of salt required (you take some, you leave some). Doesn't mean he's wrong about everything, just that his process seems a bit lax... That's the danger. Gladwell's talent seems to be to have one big idea and then dig up juicy anecdotes in science and history and weave great narratives around them to support the big idea. That's fine. It can be very entertaining and insightful. Problem is, when things get more complex (in fields like statistics and psychology) he apparently sometimes bases his stuff on weak or flawed studies, or studies that have been contradicted, or he cherry picks and doesn't try to falsify his hypotheses, and because he's such a great raconteur, you end up with 50 million people retelling those incorrect things to their friends on the bus. I love Munger to death, but he's not infallible and it's not because he likes something that it's without flaw (Lee in Singapore or the Chinese government come to mind).

Heh, now if we can find something bad that Gladwell wrote about Taleb, that'll close the circle. I think it's very possible for both Taleb and Pinker to be right; existential risks are higher and potentially more destructive, because human technology is much more powerful (nuclear war, global warming, biological weapons, etc) while our everyday life is a lot less dangerous and violent than is used to be (Pinker's thesis in Better Angels).

Seems like a good move, if I'm following everything properly. Basically, LMCA sold $500 of its SIRI shares back to SIRI. Then they functionally turned around and gave $417m of that money along with some non-core assets to Comcast to repurchase 5.2% of LMCA, worth ±$925m at today's price. My brain hurts when I try to think of the per LMCA share effect of this; SIRI is reducing share count as is LMCA, so the per share interest in SIRI and CHTR went up because they more or less swapped the non-core assets for more concentration into what they already owned, but I'm not sure by what % things changed. If both LMCA and SIRI are buying back under IV (which is very probable, considering Malone's track record), it's all very good. The new debt seems to be about pushing back maturities on the current debt, though you never know what these guys could do with the money...

I quite enjoyed reading Gladwell's The Tipping Point, but after that, I read some things about him and his methodology that made me take everything he says with a grain of salt. F.ex, see here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (piece by Steven Pinker, one of the smartest people I know of -- I highly recommend his book 'The Blank Slate') http://ksj.mit.edu/tracker/2013/10/should-we-stop-believing-malcolm-gladwel (an overview of some of the criticism)

Sad news. I never followed him that closely, but I've heard lots of good things.

I'll tell you what type of person he is. While I had met him before a couple of times, it was in Omaha 2010, when I actually spent a fare bit of time with him. Mohnish, Guy, Alnesh, Dr. Ajay Desai, myself and a couple of friends were having a very late bite to eat, about 1am or so, at the burger restaurant in Harrah's in Council Bluffs. During all of the discussion, Guy is occasionally taking photographs..nothing unusual. A very charming, affable fellow I found him to be! About two-three weeks later, a package arrives at my desk in my office. It's a photograph Guy took of Alnesh and myself. He had it printed, labelled, framed and shipped over to me for no reason...other than that is his nature. It's on my desk to this day! Cheers! Great anecdote. Thanks for sharing :)

http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/08/ipad-and-iphone-usage-remains-strong-among-u-s-teenagers/

Good question. He still posts on Twitter: I always appreciated his contribution too.

Thanks, that was good. Very candid interview. :)

I asked IR to make sure, and they say debenture buybacks would show up, but that under their NCIB they only have to report once a month.

I know he wishes he could've bought more BAC in his fund (but was limited to 10%). Next time banks get real cheap, I'm sure the hedge fund will load up.

Thanks for the link. Seems like the authenticity shift is part of the first book too, though.

[amazonsearch]Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time[/amazonsearch] Starting this thanks to recommendations from this board. Thought it deserved its own thread. (Btw, I'm also halfway through 'The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt'. Great stuff! Not really investing related, so probably doesn't deserve a thread, but definitely a lot of life lessons in there.)