Liberty

Curious to know if anyone here is buying RIM at these levels? I'm not, but curious. We used to hear more RIM bulls when the stock was worth twice as much, so I wonder if they all gave up or are buying silently.

Here's how I think Chad is looking at Landquart (and this is just my guess): In that business, moving from 'new order' to 'printing' seems very tough. There are delays, lots of bureaucratic layers, very stringent specifications to meet, which can cause more delays, etc. But once you are printing, as Alfonso said on the call yesterday, a new series can go on for 10 years. Landquart just upgraded from 2,500 tons/year to 10,000 tons/year. That's 7,500 new tons that didn't exist before, so they need new orders to fill them, all at once, 3x more than what they had before. So now they're in the tough part of trying to get to printing, and they're getting the delays and bureaucrats.. But once they start printing enough big orders to almost fill the papiermachines, it sounds like there should be minimal fuss for a while, and Landquart at 4X the production that it had before sounds like it could be nicely profitable. I think that's why Chad is being so patient with it. They just have to get through this transition period (after all, you don't quadruple production very often) and get to a stable state. But that's just my guess.

I like the way you think. Turmoil right now can indeed lower Alderon and Aurora's costs, remove competitors, and allow them to deploy capital. Good news on the automatic repurchase plan. The end result should be that they will be able to buy back more than they otherwise could, so can't hurt.

Wow, I hope they release the rest and that some heads roll.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2012/05/15/gm-says-facebook-ads-dont-work-pulls-10-million-account/

It's now on BNN.ca http://watch.bnn.ca/clip679792#clip679792 (funny how they screwed up the video ratio on Chad's feed so that he looks like he has a super wide head)

http://beta.fool.com/mhenage/2012/05/15/ebix-earnings-behind-headlines/4595/

Some head in the clouds stuff: Looking at the price of the stock, it almost makes me wish they would sell either Dresden or Landquart (or both) quickly and try to buy back something like half the outstanding shares in a tender offer. But it probably wouldn't work, in good part because price would probably rocket back up if they tried to do that, and they couldn't get these kinds of prices for a few million shares (volume has always been low and price volatile). Too bad. Imagine if they could buy back half of Thurso and LSQ for something like 150 million.. That'd be so great, much better expected ROI than if they keep Dresden and Landquart.

You beat me to it Optsy, my CC notes are pretty similar. Thanks for sharing.

CC starting now: A conference call to discuss the financial results for the first quarter 2012 will be held on May 15, 2012 at 9:30 a.m. (PST). To attend the conference call, please dial one of the following numbers: North America: 1-855-353-9183 International: 1-403-532-5601 Participant pass code: 15086# Conference Reference Number: 770462 A replay of the conference call will be available for 7 days. To access the replay, listeners may dial 1-855-201-2300 from North America or 403-255-0697 International. The conference reference number is 770462 and the participant pass code to access the replay is 15086 #.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-15/facebook-said-set-to-finish-taking-ipo-orders-tomorrow.html

Not good, but not a surprise. Now the next few quarters should become really interesting :) Nice price they got for the hydro at Landquart. I don't see the downside of not owning that anymore, so good deal.

Getting really cheap again.

Thanks for all the good suggestions! I've added Billion Dollar Lessons to my library queue.

(Not sure if this belongs here or in the books sub-forum, but I figured that since it wasn't just about one book, it probably belonged here) I love to read about other people's mistakes and flaws, or how some frauds were perpetrated, hopefully to try to learn something and avoid making those mistakes and falling for those frauds. I'd love to know what are some of your favourite books - or at least books that you learned something from, even if not a real favourite - about this kind of thing. Here are some of mine, in no particular order: Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Taleb Black Swan - Nassim Taleb Too Big to Fail - Andrew Ross Sorkin Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room - Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind Confidence Game - Christine S. Richard Fooling Some of the People - David Einhorn Financial Shenanigans - Howard Schilit The Great Depression: A Diary - Benjamin Roth I've got "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" on order at the public library... So what books about these kinds of topic did you like?

I don't, I've just liked following Ackman ever since I read the book Confidence Game about his fight against MBIA.

Kind of a summary of the saga so far: http://business.financialpost.com/2012/05/11/shift-underway-for-canadas-clubby-corporate-culture-after-cp-rail-proxy-fight/ and about canada's corporate board culture: http://business.financialpost.com/2012/05/08/bill-ackman-slams-cozy-canadian-corporate-culture/

Related: Kuppy writes a lot about Mongolia and sometimes about IVN: http://adventuresincapitalism.com/search.aspx?q=mongolia

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/05/google_vs_bing_i_switched_to_microsoft_s_search_engine_for_a_week_here_s_what_happened_.html

Thanks, Rick Rule is always interesting to listen to. Hopefully ALS can deploy significant capital in the near future.

What a joke.

I saw those photos too. I'm guessing the old Mercedes is there to make some kind of point, ie. they might be using it internally as an example of their design/engineering philosophy and put it there remind employees of it or something (Steve Jobs did that kind of thing with Cuisinart appliances and Porches and such). Or it could be a cultural thing and maybe in India it's common to put old Mercedes on pedestals :) As for the nightclub vibe, well, he did write that the area was designed for staff to relax. Having a nice work environment certainly helped Google to retain and attract talented programmers, so that's probably what he's going for. Who needs another endless bland cube farm?

I believe he was talking about CSC http://www.google.ca/finance?q=NYSE%3ACSC Looking at their financials puts EBIX's achievements in perspective...

Conference call was interesting. They set a goal for the next 5 years. Want to get to half a billion of revenue while keeping margins in the 40% range. No guarantees and it's not guidance, but if I remember correctly, the last time they had a goal a few years ago, they under-promised and over-delivered, and that was in the middle of the financial crisis. The beauty is that as they grow, their costs don't go up linearly with the number of customers, so they margins should keep improving (once the software has been written and the exchanges have been built, whether you have 10 or 1000 customers, your costs are very similar, but the number of transactions on exchanges go up exponentially with the number of participants - kinda like VISA and Mastercard). They said they delayed two big exchange products for strategic reasons, so that probably helps explain the slower growth in exchanges this quarter. At first I wasn't sure what a "strategic reason" could be, but then I remembered how they do things and it makes sense. Because of the networking effect, they want to launch new exchanges with the top 3 distributors and some of the biggest carriers already on board, because these then bring all the small fish with them. Maybe one of those big players had a delay in implementation, or maybe they found an extra big player to add to the group, so it was worth pushing back launch a bit to do it right. That's just my best guess, though. They say their deal and acquisition pipelines are strong, with some larger deals than before because they've now reached a size where they can bid on bigger deals, and because the new sales force helps. ADAM + Taimma + Healthconnect = pretty much one integrated thing now. Seems to have great strategic fit and give EBIX capabilities that no other player has. As previously mentioned, the new sales people aren't all showing results yet because training takes a while and then there's the sales cycle, but it should start to pay off later this year. (the sales people are selling complex products that are at the heart of their customer's companies, and they're dealing with top executives, so EBIX can't just hire your average software salesgirl and let her loose after 2 days of training... but I'm fine with it as being in an industry that requires a highly skilled salesforce just means there's one more barrier to entry for smaller players) Some sales partnerships announced with Microsoft, Accenture, Unisys, CGI.. Robin addressed the big drop in carrier channel, saying that part of it was because they changed from giving perpetual licenses to a recurring subscription model, and part of it was because that channel is mostly made up of P&C insurers in the US, and these guys are 1) used to buying perpetual licenses for software and then keeping it forever and 2) they're not spending on IT right now because they have a big margin crunch. Raina said they won't sell their IP with perpetual licenses, and won't compromise their margins, so they've decided not to focus on that channel for now, but they seem optimistic that this channel will grow nicely in the future. I think if there's a hard insurance market and P&C insurers start spending on IT again, EBIX should be very well positioned to get its share, and once in, the revenues should be recurring for a very long time, not just a lump sum and then nothing for years and years. BPO channel is very tied to construction industry, so pretty flat right now, but if US construction turns, should grow nicely. They also hinted that more acquisitions might be coming, maybe a big one, and they seem to want to pay for it with debt rather than stock. I wouldn't mind that considering their track record of making acquisitions that are both strategic (building a puzzle piece by piece that ends up being worth more than the sum of its parts), and accretive in the short term (ADAM had a goal of 0.15 cents for 2011. naysayers said that was impossible. It ended up doing 0.25 cents AND EBIX repurchased all the shares it emitted for the acquisition at a substantial discount, so that was doubly good).