Liberty

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/nokia-mangles-lumia-phone-launch-by-faking-cameras-capabilities/

How do you know in advance where the price is going to go? Picking winners and avoiding losers can be done by studying the fundamentals of a business. But once you've bought something, it doesn't become a loser because price moves around IMO. What matters is how price compares to your estimate of intrinsic value and how fast IV is growing (if it is). Edit: I was looking at it from an investor's point of view, but I guess it can make sense for a trader, though I don't know how to be a successful trader, so I don't really know.

Thank you!

If you are a dropbox user you should be able to put it in your public folder and get a link to it from dropbox.com If not, you can go to a file locker like http://rapidgator.net/ and upload it and make sure to cut & paste the link they gave you once it's uploaded.

Moderating the forum posts itself is more complex because you need really trusted people.. But this forum has so little drama that it's probably not what is taking Parsad's time. Moderating submissions for membership is probably more factual: Is this obviously spam, or a real person? Yes/No. But I still think there's probably a technological way (a better captcha or human-test) to reduce the spam numbers by a few orders of magnitude. But even after that, having a few people going through the submissions might still be a good idea.

Thank you. Does anyone has the file? I'd like to download it without signing up for that site...

Each CPC ad has its own rate determined by auction. Some ads for keywords where demand is high but supply low can pay tens of dollars per click (I think the most lucrative term a little while ago was for a rare form of cancer that trial lawyers were advertising against, it was probably hundreds of dollars per click). So it's definitely possible that if one month you are lucky and get even a few very high-paying ads that people clicked on, the numbers could be much higher than a month with a similar number of impressions but only lower-paying clicks. Google has a lot of anti-click-fraud counter-measures and that whole system is basically a black box because if they explain how it works, there will be more fraud. I doubt you'll ever get details on how it works and what the exact CPC is for each ad.

I think reminding people of the donation option once in a while is a great idea. It doesn't even have to be done by Sanjeev. I'll set up a calendar reminder :) I agree that a way must be found to stop the spam. The fee would work, though I suspect that $1 would work as well as $50 (spammers will never ever pay anything, and if they are stupid enough to do and give you their real email/name via Paypal, you just ban them as soon as they spam and keep their money, and report them to their ISP). But better spam-catchers OR getting trusted volunteers to do some admin duties would also work. Most really popular forums end up with a team of admins/moderators, so it would probably be a normal evolution here to delegate some tasks. Just food for thoughts. Update: I agree with others that we should keep spam out without erecting too high barriers to entry because it would be tragic if they kept out the next great contributor. In theory a small fee shouldn't keep anyone out, but in practice, people are so used to not paying on the internet that it irrationally might do just that, and we'd all lose out a lot more in value than what that fee would bring in...

Good idea or desperation? http://devblog.blackberry.com/2012/09/built-for-blackberry-10k-developer-commitment/

Along with the spam filter and CAPTCHA, I have three questions registrants have to answer...they still somehow get through! It's a pain in the ass, but I'm still impressed how programmers do it. Cheers! Maybe a visual captcha that shows pictures of cats and dogs or whatever and asks you to pick the happy-looking cat or saddest looking dog exists. That'd be hard to get around (as long as the image files aren't named "happycat.jpg") :)

That makes a lot of sense, but if I try to look at the other side of the argument, I would say: 1) If you buy a basket of other currencies and they all inflate, you could be losing purchasing power anyway, while gold might still go up as a safe haven (but can we prove that? not really). 2) If you buy a basket of commodities and there's a big negative event (devaluation, inflation, loss of confidence in the USD, etc) that creates a big global recession/depression (even if just by crushing animal spirits), demand for industrial commodities could go down at the same time as demand for gold goes up (again, as a safe haven that is not anyone's liability, but who knows how that would play out exactly). (in other words, some would claim gold/silver would protect you against those two scenarios, while with your approach, you kind of have to pick one and be right or split capital between the two and potentially lose on one side, and maybe both) 3) Unlike most other commodities, it's easy to take possession of gold and store a lot of value in little space. Most other commodities, you probably won't take possession, and if all goes to hell, having a piece of paper that says you own "X" might not help much. It's still very hard to value gold, but if we look at the cost of production, it seems to be pretty high now, especially if you don't just include the cash cost of taking it out of the ground but also the costs of exploration. What I've seen makes me think the real cost of production is well above 1000/oz, but that won't help if demand dries up, if the paper market is manipulated, or if central banks decide to flood the market again.

+1 :)

Email from Alderon: http://alderonironore.com/_resources/news/2012-09-04-NewsRelease.pdf

I agree. What I meant is I think is that there's a big incentive to inflate the money supply while keeping official CPI numbers 'within the normal range' (trying to have their cake and eat it too), so there's a very high chance that the CPI numbers understate actual price inflation. What this actually ends up meaning at the end of the day is unclear, as is pretty much everything else in the macro world (just too many other variables and feedback loops). As William Goldman would say, nobody knows nothing.

Sometimes I feel like I'm sitting between two chairs and just can't figure out which chair is the solid one and which one is about to break down... The more I read about fiat currency, the more disgusted I am by how manipulated and "faith-based" that system is, and I also find it scary how the powers that be equate consuming and spending with saving and productive activities, but I also can't figure out what precious metals are worth and whether that the fiat system can just keep going and be patched for a very long time. I like to invest in things that I can understand, but I don't really understand macro... My strategy is still pretty Buffett-esque, in that I want businesses I understand with pricing power & a moat & a margin of safety & profitable growth & good capital allocation, etc.. But I've started to look a lot more closely at getting some exposure to commodities (mostly indirectly/obliquely, as mining is such a hard business and I don't want to own miners) in case all the newly created dollars/euros/yuans/etc end up creating a lot more price inflation than people expect (the official CPI definitely should not be trusted, based on what I've been reading) and/or there's a crisis of confidence and financial assets suddenly start to feel a lot less 'real' than hard assets. But who the hell can really know what's what in the macro world? It's so confusing. I hear an argument that makes a lot of sense, and then an opposite argument that also makes a lot of sense... In the end, I think I'll have to just keep buying good businesses when they appear cheap and hope for the best. Being a macro investor isn't for me, even if I really wish I could get a clearer overall picture of the world economy's foundation to better position my portfolio for what is coming (huge crisis? next bull market? inflation? deflation? more government intervention? or even more government intervention than the high level we already expect?). I wish I had the conviction of either the doomers or the optimists, but I just don't know, so I'm trying to put something together that should do all right either way. I guess that's Buffett-esque too, though he might be a bit more optimistic than I am* :-\ *Sometimes I wonder if Buffett isn't a bit over-optimistic because a lot of the data that he gets from Berkshire's businesses comes from such good, above-average businesses. While it is pretty representative of trends in the general real economy, it might still paint a too-rosy portrait. Just a theory... He 's smart enough that he probably compensates for that, so the theory probably isn't correct.

Thanks Sculpin.

http://www.ebix.com/pressrelease_text.aspx?artid=248

Well, not that it matters that much, but if you mute Monish's microphone, you stop having Guy's own voice feedbacking through his own speakers & mic, so the ultimate source was Monish's mic. The varying delay was probably just latency spikes which become more obvious when repeated in a feedback loop. Usually when everybody except one person has echo when they speak, the echo is caused by the person who doesn't sound echo-y :)

Thanks for posting this Parsad! Heh, maybe it's because I spend so much time on conference calls, but it's so obvious to me that Monish is causing the feedback by not muting his microphone, and Google Hangout constantly switches back to him because it interprets the mic signal as him speaking.

Sad news :(

Thanks for the info, triedtestedand.

http://variantperceptions.wordpress.com/2010/11/20/david-tepper-on-investing-under-uncertainty-theory/ http://variantperceptions.wordpress.com/2010/11/20/david-tepper-on-investing-under-uncertainty-practice/ Thanks.

Somehow it's the first time I hear about this guy. I like his style. Any recommended sources to learn more about him, his record, and his investment philosophy?

:o

These are good questions. I don't have a perfect answer, but here's some food for thoughts: I believe they are now beginning a new phase of growth. Their stated goal is to provide straight through processing to their customers, after one data entry, they can do whatever they need to with the data, including transactions on B2B and B2C exchanges, and that for each of the different players in the industry. That's kind of what you can see on slide 34 of their latest presentation. To get there, they had to build or acquire (and often re-write) all the various pieces of that puzzle. I think that for many years' they've been focused on opportunistically adding pieces to that puzzle (especially when the macro environment provides bargains), and now they almost have all that they need on the insurance side. They've started building new puzzles in health and financials, though (f.ex. ADAM + Taima + HealthConnect). I think that in the past year+ they've started to switch gears and invest a lot more into their other engine of growth by building a much bigger sales organization. They now have this integrated suite of products to sell that nobody else has and exchanges that are more valuable and useful with each new member thanks to the network effect, and they are now big enough to be considered for much bigger deals than before. So while they should keep generating lots of cash and will probably reinvest a lot of it into acquisitions (probably more in health and financials, or in geographies where they need a beachhead), I think we should see more growth come from there. In a perfect world they could probably have invested in better internal sales a while ago, but business is all about tradeoffs and allocating scarce resources to their best uses while minimizing risk. Maybe management didn't have the bandwidth to deal with that and everything else at the time, or maybe they thought it was a better use of capital to spend more on acquisitions than sales (and didn't want to use more leverage), or maybe they just didn't feel like they were a big enough company to go after big deals and so it was better to focus on growing their capabilities and expanding to new geographies before focusing more on sales, maybe there was a land-grab time-sensitive aspect. I don't know, but it's not like they rested on their laurels in the past decade. Another thing to note is that the past few years have been pretty bad for EBIX's customers, and that the kind of growth we're seeing now is what EBIX's potential is at the bottom of the cycle. BPO is dead as long as construction doesn't come back, carriers aren't spending on IT, and brokers and exchanges certainly aren't seeing as many transactions as in a hard insurance market and strong macro environment. So I'd say they aren't doing badly all things considered. I absolutely believe that part of the reason the shorts thought an attack could work is because of the optics, and because management gives a bad impression at first glance. They're an easy target, sadly. Some of it is probably due to "lost in translation" cultural issues, and some is because Rain is definitely an unconventional CEO in how he dresses and speaks and so on. So if I had stopped after this first impression, I'd definitely not have a very good feeling about this. But I believe that listening to all the conference calls that are available (the text transcripts are often full of misheard words and don't provide the same experience because of other cues that can be heard in someone's voice) and reading all interviews provide a better idea of what management is really like and what it cares about than more superficial and second-hand impressions. EBIX definitely isn't an easy stock to invest in. The business takes a while to understand, the growth strategy is different from what can be found in many other industries, there are some potential red flags (such as auditor changes), and the CEO sounds weird, dresses like a pimp, and isn't a staid old white guy. That's a lot of barriers to entry for most investors, but I believe that's part of what creates the mispricing :)