Liberty

Cotton still doing nicely these days. BAL up almost 20% YTD.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1274451-ebix-management-discusses-q4-2012-results-earnings-call-transcript CC transcript. Haven't listened yet, so no opinion either way.

Eric (and others), what are your thoughts about the TARP warrants vs. the common without any extra leverage? I understand that your new strategy optimizes returns and lowers risk vs the warrant (at least at current prices), though not being a math/options wizard I'm not getting all the subtleties of what you are saying (though I think I get the general idea). But did the warrant just go from the bee's knees to total dirt, or is it just sub-optimal compared to this new approach (common + LEAPS, etc)? Or is even the unleveraged common a better deal in your opinion? In other words, if you could only own the common or only the warrant, which would you take? One additional consideration for me is that I'm in a taxable account in Canada, so dividends from US companies are taxed pretty heavily. With the warrant, I feel that div-equivalent is getting reinvested mostly tax-free thanks to the adjustment mechanism. This makes the break-even point between the common and warrant lower than 25 for me, unless I'm mistaken.

I haven't seen it, I'll have to wait for the video to hit the website.

Hmm, was all that BNN scheduling SNAFU about Dresden and not about Q4? Were they supposed to announce it a week ago (or whenever he was first scheduled) and then it was pushed back for whatever reason..?

Surely this will become a quotable quote, if it is not already! Indeed, interesting imagery :) Chad has always described himself as a contrarian deep value investor who goes into out of favor industries. IMO he saw that Dresden was running about as well as it ever would and he could probably build more long-term value by cashing out and putting that money to work in something that is at the bottom of its cycle and more undervalued (the good ol' "sell high, buy low"). That's certainly a more dangerous game than just sitting on good assets and letting them earn a steady return, but if you do a good job of allocating capital, it's potentially more lucrative when what you got at the bottom of the cycle becomes more in vogue. We'll see how it turns out.

Actually, I don't recognize those names and haven't followed Fibrek very closely. Could you be a bit more explicit about what you are thinking here? Thanks.

I'd like to see them keep most of the cash, but a buyback of 10-25 millions would IMO make sense unless share price runs up a lot in the near-term. If things go badly for a while, they'd still have about 190-200m from Dresden, but if things finally go well, they'd have bought maybe 10-20% of the company for what might seem like peanuts a few years from now.

So the question now is, what will they do with the money? I wouldn't mind at least some buybacks.

Well, that was faster than I expected...

My understanding when I watched it (didn't rewatch, so I could be wrong) is that he meant above book.

I've read it and liked it too.

CNBC segment where Buffett talks about banks: http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?play=1&video=3000151816

No idea how the market will react, but we have to remember that this is for Sept-December, and it's already almost mid-March. We won't have to wait as long for the next quarter, and it should look better thanks to higher DP prices since then. But it's really Q2 and Q3 that will be interesting because of the co-gen and any improvements that Pelletier can make (hopefully).

Thank you!

Unless I'm reading this wrong, they shipped 46,909 tons of DP in Q4. On an annualized run-rate, that's 187,636 tons, or 93.8%. Now, it's possible that some of these tons were produced in Q3 and held back and shipped in Q4, so the actual number of tons produced might be lower, but still, it's starting to look good.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/11/us-aig-greenberg-lawsuit-idUSBRE92A13D20130311 AIG shareholders win class-action status in lawsuit versus U.S.

Is Chad on BNN anyway, or will that be later too? I can't watch live, but still curious...

Thanks for posting.

Looks like the public discourse keeps changing slowly.. http://business.financialpost.com/2013/03/11/house-prices-to-remain-flat-for-10-years-td/?__lsa=dfb8-4756 For a while it was "prices will keep going up, it's different here", then "growth in prices will slow down", and now this. A few more months and they'll talk about prices going down...

It'll be very interesting to finally get an update. Mr. Market certainly seems to think that the news will be better than they have been lately, with the stock up over 50 cents right now. We'll see.

Whoa, some people make bad decisions :P http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/03/10/wrd-netflix-tattoo-free-subscription.html http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/images/news/photos/2013/03/10/li-netflixtattoo.jpg

Very sad :-[

http://www.multichannel.com/distribution/unleashing-liberty-malone-muses-global-cable-content-us-economy/139975 Malone Muses on Global Cable, Content, U.S. Economy (sorry if it's a repost)

Thanks Onyx, it's very nice to be able to see it like that.