Liberty

One thing I find strange is that we haven't gotten reports that Altius has been buying back shares in a while. The last time they did, last year (iirc), they filed every few days and it popped up on CanadianInsider. But lately, nothing, despite them putting the buybacks in third party hands to avoid conflicts with material info. I hope they are buying as much as possible and we're just not seeing the reports filed as quickly as before...

I certainly see how that would be a good deal for a royalty company, but I hope that's not how it plays out. Even at a decent premium, it would still feel like my shares were stolen.. I'd much rather see the team keep allocating capital and reap the full rewards from Alderon/Aurora/etc over the years, rather than see this great team diluted into a bigger company. Hopefully they are under the radar and can stay independent.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2012/Jun12/06-25MSYammerPR.aspx 1.2 billion for Yammer..

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8985409/Mark-Sellers-So-You-Want-to-Be-the-Next-Warren-Buffett-MBA-Talk-2007

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-21/microsoft-s-surface-tablet-said-to-be-wi-fi-only-in-first-models.html

Raina selling some shares to pay income taxes due because of vested stock options that he has exercised during 2012. http://atlanta.citybizlist.com/3/2012/6/22/Ebix-CEO-Robin-Raina-Enters-Plan-to-Sell-400K-Shares.aspx

In the last CC they talked about how challenging that channel was (P&C have small margins, are used to buying perpetual licenses and keeping them for decades, etc), but that they felt they were about to start making significant progress there. I guess they were foreshadowing this deal. Hopefully what it does is show other P&C carriers that it's a good idea to go with this model and snowball into something big over time. In any case, this announcement does seem to validate the switch to a SaaS approach in that area. btw, interesting trading activity today. There was a block of over 325k shares, which is about a day's average volume. Update: Here's the part of the CC that I was referring to:

http://www.ebix.com/pressrelease_text.aspx?artid=242 Finally good news for the carrier channel.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-ideas/fortress-paper-playing-the-waiting-game/article4357935/ I find it interesting how he was fine recommending the company at twice+ the current price and while the company was a year+ away from shipping DP, while now that it is months from getting full cash-flow from Thurso and the stock is half the price, it's a "wait and see" story. I mean, I understand how the situation doesn't look as good as it once did (macro and micro), but the long-term potential remains very similar, and since you are paying less than half what you used to, the risk/reward profile is probably much better than it was.

He wouldn't be a true Bond villain without a volcanic island.

Thanks for posting!

Indeed. Sometimes that's because it's an unpredictable or bad business/industry/management/etc, and sometimes he just doesn't have the specific technical knowledge to really understand the products and competitive dynamics deeply enough to be comfortable.

Yeah, I guess it depends what kind of business we're talking about. I had in mind someone like my wife who sits in the same cubicle all day and for whom a tablet would be a big step down in practicality.

Ah, if you mean this tablet as opposed to other tablets rather than as opposed to desktops/laptops, then yes, that sounds more plausible.

We were talking about corporations, where I think the desktop still makes most sense. But even the laptop would make more sense there than a tablet, IMO (you can have a docking station, a bigger internal HDD and plug in external storage and peripherals more easily, etc). If you're sitting at a desk all day, the last think you want is to spend your day typing on a pancake keyboard attached to a smalls screen. But maybe it's just me...

A lot, actually, but it's not the only thing used... For example, there are some businesses with really nice numbers that I won't touch with a ten-foot pole once I learn more about the management or about the industry or whatever.

What will the incentive be? Isn't a laptop or desktop a better choice for most businesses since most employees are sitting in the same place all day and a desktop is much more ergonomic and probably leads to higher productivity? And it's not like laptops aren't portable enough for most business use, and they tend to be more full-featured than tablets.

You get a gold star. :) And I wasn't being facetious. :) That's actually what too many people miss about Buffett and other super-investors. They are so good not because they have special tricks to crunch the numbers, they are so good because they make sure to really understand the business not only on a quantitative, but also on a qualitative level, and to stay away as much as possible from things they don't understand.

Notice how the kickstand is in the landscape direction? one can imagine that most people will use it in landscape mode? I've never been a fan of the 16:9 format. It's annoying to have so much horizontal space that never gets used... it makes sense on a 24" monitor where I can stack 2 windows next to one another, but to have it on a tablet or a laptop doesn't make that much sense to me. After you look at the menu, the title bar, the toolbars, the ribbons, then the headers for most websites etc, everyone makes use of the vertical space, squishing whatever is left into nothingness... I'll stop my rant now... That's the thing.. If you use it in landscape mode for things like PDFs and webpages, you have very little vertical space. If you use it in vertical mode but it feels like you're holding a miniature-TV on the wrong side or a legal document cut in half vertically, that won't feel quite right... Guess I'll have to wait and try one out in store when they are out (who knows when).

I wonder how a 16:9 screen ratio would feel vertically in the hands as a tablet. I think there's a reason the iPad isn't 16:9.. Intuitively, it seems like it would either feel too tall or too narrow..

Stepping away from the specifics a bit; the best way to value a business is to understand it and it's competitive position very, very well.

And one more, looks like the full version of the speech: I'm not a precious metal bug like him (though to be fair, he does seem to hold those more as a cash-replacement while waiting for opportunities to buy equities than as an investment, which I don't think is a bad idea, despite it not being my preference), but I do like his contrarian value approach.

It always depends on the company and one what you need to feel comfortable (some techniques are inherently more conservative). Basically you need to learn about all the different ways until you have a good grasp of which is appropriate for each situation and why. There's no silver bullet. But for those companies that are valued more with cashflow than assets (ie. not banks or insurance companies), I now like EV/EBITDA. Here's some of the reasoning behind this: http://www.gannonandhoangoninvesting.com/blog/one-ratio-to-rule-them-all-evebitda.html

Here's the reply that I got from FTP:

I feel $31 is low, but it's still about 50% over the current price, so probably about as good as they could have gotten under the circumstances.