Liberty

IMO Mr. Market is way overreacting and the best thing to do is to wait. It really sucks that everything's turning out to be late and that macro hasn't been cooperating, but lots of progress still has been made and this won't last forever.

Recent price action certainly has been weird. But that's nothing new..

Alderon up almost 18% right now. There's this news: http://www.alderonironore.com/_resources/news/ADVNR20130212.pdf

Me too, but I know I'm an extreme case. The reason people do more searches on average in a day when they have a search engine in their pocket is the same reason why people will check facebook more often on average in a day if they have a facebook app in their pocket, or email, or whatever. I don't think it's too controversial to say that ceteris paribus, people check email/facebook/the web more often if they have a smartphone than if they don't (they don't just transfer the same quantity from desktop to mobile, they add on top of it because of the extra convenience and availability), and the same applies for search in my experience. Even if I saw data that showed a decline in the average number of searches from mobile users, to be truly convinced I'd have to look closely at the sample used because I wouldn't be surprised if it included a lot of people that didn't use to go online much before smartphones and tablets, and so of course they'll be less active than more technologically-inclined people from the desktop-laptop era (it would be comparing apples and oranges). But bringing these people on board is still a win in the absolute because it's extra searches that wouldn't have been made before, even if they dilute the average. This happens when you make something more accessible. As a relative number, more computer users knew how to program in the 1980s than now, but the absolute number of people who know how to program is much higher now because the whole pie is much larger.

Good for you, having a superhuman memory to remember all the things you'd like to look up throughout the day and then doing a big batch of searches later, but if that's how you do it, you are an exception.

I've seen it. I bet even you do it that way. All the searches that you do when not in front of your computer, would you do all of those if you didn't have a smartphone?

It's not as simple as moving from one to the other, though. People do more total searches when they have Google in their pocket at all times rather than just when they are in front of their computer. A lot of those search are additional searches, not just the same searches done on a different device.

New 52wk high.

The way I see it, it's worth more as a relative share of total revenue/traffic to Bing than Google, but it's worth more to Google in absolute dollar terms.

Apple probably will be very careful in the future about changing defaults to things that its customers will find inferior (ie. Apple Maps backlash), and the same search traffic is probably worth more to Google than Bing because of their better ad inventory, economies of scale on infrastructure, etc, so Bing's probably not quite as ready to spend a billion on this. Just my guess.

Thanks for the reminder. Saw that on reddit yesterday, but before he answered the questions..

That initiative is purely a foreign policy PR thing, IMO. Just so Chavez can say at home that he's embarrassing the US, etc.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-11/can-apple-head-off-a-margin-squeeze-.html

That should come in due time. From what I've been reading, the country is in serious trouble.

One of the things I really like about The Economist is that pretty much every week they have an update on Venezuela. It's crazy just how bad governance is there and how a country that had everything to succeed is figuring out ways to screw itself, and it'll probably take a really long time to unscrew it.

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery.

I looked at that too. At first I thought maybe it was partly the illiquidity of the stock, but while Rayonnier seems to trade with more volume, Tembec isn't that different... So I'm still guessing that the Financial Post article singling out FTP (a higher-profile company because of all the media coverage in the past 2-3 years) probably explains some of that difference better.

There's been many signs for many months now. I think we're slowly reaching a point when things will start to accelerate because the mainstream sentiment will start to change. But we'll see.

One line of thought for Landquart is, would it be worth more to someone else? Would some big player in the industry find it cheaper to get some of its paper supplies from there rather than build a new plant somewhere or expand an existing one? Would a competitor get value from buying it to reduce competition, enabling it to increase its prices overall? Not sure what the answer is to these questions, but it's possible that Landquart is worth more to someone else who could integrate it into a larger operation and/or benefit from the reduced competition. Not sure, but wanted to put the idea out there.

It's just guesswork at this point, but from what I know, China's definitely not a very good place to make DP because they just don't have access to enough woodchips (both in quantity and quality). They'll never compete with Canada and Brazil on that front. But they do have a huge textile industry, which substitutes more viscose when cotton gets pricier. So your reasoning that they wouldn't want to hurt their big competitive industry to protect their smaller uncompetitive industry seems to make sense, but who knows.

Could it be as simple as an inefficient dispersal of the news about it? Financial Post had FTP in its headline, so it showed up on Google Finance and for anyone monitoring news about FTP. But other companies were not mentioned in the news items that I saw, so it's possible that the announcement flew under the radar for a lot of shareholders.

From memory, LSQ is limited to 100k tons of NBSK prior to the transition to DP. You should be able to find the details in the LSQ sale agreement.

There are certainly many levers to pull and various paths that can be taken. It's just too bad that there is turning out to be so many speedbumps on the original path... But hopefully in 6-12 months we'll be in a totally different place (excess cotton from big price spike having been digested by the snake, so to speak) and days like today will be long forgotten. I wonder if there would be a way to negotiate with Domtar for LSQ to produce more pulp than what was allowed in the sale contract... Maybe running that along with its cogen would be the way to go for a longer period than initially anticipated if the DP market is slow to come back.

I wonder what would happen to such a tarrif if Thurso or LSQ was sold to a Chinese viscose producer.. Would China still apply the tarrif to a Chinese company owning an asset outside the country?

Last year their Q4 call was on March 5. Are they in a blackout period right now? Can't remember how many days that is in Canada..