Liberty

Seeing how much analyst reports move the price of FTP, I'm guessing that few people actually do their homework, they just do whatever the analysts tell them to.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-14/federal-reserve-to-tweet-on-monetary-policy-in-new-twitter-feed.html Sign of the times, I guess..

I would like to buy more too, but I probably won't be able to because I'm currently looking at allocating capital to something else.. Wish I could add a bunch, though!

Anyone knows how long it takes to build a LNG terminal and if any are currently approved/in construction in North-America?

Even though I haven't done spinoff arbitrage yet, and might not do any for a long time, I liked the book. Contains lots of good mental models to help you look at things differently.

I think they're just being careful. In the past they answered that question with lots of details and it caused a lot of controversy because others calculated organic growth differently, etc. So now they don't give details about this. And I understand why; they don't acquire companies to keep running them as is, they immediately integrated them and cross-sell as much as possible, making it very hard to break things down. It's not just some accounting trick, it's how they squeeze the most value from acquisitions. Where have you seen this? I don't see reviews in iTunes. I wouldn't worry to much yet. It's still early, the apps will probably keep maturing, and people with grievances are always much more motivated to leave feedback than those who think things are fine. I think in a past call they estimated their long-term tax rate at 10-15%. It could take a while to get there, though, and it's still pretty good. The way their SaaS model works, the more customers they have, the higher their margins can be because each additional client only has marginal impact on costs, so I wouldn't be surprised to see them grow their operating margins further above 40% over time, even with the drag of higher taxes and sales. Just my 2 cents Canadian.

I hope you guys learned the importance of having redundant backups ;)

+1 Sounds about right to me.

A 14-year old can't even buy a closet for $14,000 in Vancouver! ;D Cheers! Millionaires are having trouble finding housing in Vancouver...

When 14-year olds can afford houses, it definitely feels like a bottom to me :P Pretty much the opposite of what is going on up here..

lol. I kind of regret selling my RLI too, but I think that what I bought with the money is probably even better, so I should do well in the end. I still have a lot of love for that company, though, so maybe someday I'll own it again.

I liked the CC. In their business, if they move first somewhere, there's a good chance they'll almost be the only player there because exchanges are more infrastructure than anything else (even better if they don't just have the exchange but a comprehensive end-to-end system). Kind of like in Australia and NZ.. So good they're focusing even more on Africa, Asia-Pacific, South-America, etc. Also good they're hiring more senior sales people and going after bigger deals. Despite over 100% more spent on sales in 2011, they still had nice FCF growth. If they had spent less on sales, their numbers would have looked better short term, but not long-term, as now they've spent on sales but they haven't got much benefits yet because it takes some time to train people and for them to start closing deals (and then because of the model, there isn't a big lump sum, but rather a stream of cash when the customer comes online)... I also really like that they keep branching out into health and financials. These are industries - like insurance - where we just know that paper is on the way out and where one integrated SaaS solution will be more efficient than dozens of independent software systems that run locally and need to be maintained/upgraded/etc.. So the sooner they move there, the more they have a chance to become dominant and become the infrastructure on top of which others build. Happy about the move into mobile. They talked about this a while ago, and I'm glad it's almost done. Once you drive paper out and are on a SaaS platform, why limit yourself to desktops and laptops? Making it available on tablets and phones will make it more convenient for agents/brokers/etc vs competing products, and maybe event drive up marginally the number of transactions on the exchanges (at least at first -- maybe eventually it'll be a substantial amount). They hinted at big announcements coming soon. Partnerships? Big new clients? We'll see. HealthConnect def seems like a strategic piece of the puzzle, and after integrating it with the other pieces they already have, it sounds like they'll have a nice offering to a whole industry. 18m is not that high to pay for that. They said they think they are not strong enough in Europe and want to correct that. Said the macro environment wasn't that great yet, but that an improvement could make a significant difference especially if construction comes back (will help BPO and P&C a lot). And of course better environment means more money spent on IT by insurers and more transactions on exchanges. Still have 23m available out of 100m approved buybacks. Seems like the reason they slowed buybacks in Q4 was because of the acquisition (but that's just my guess). If you exclude non-recurring one-time events form this quarter and the YoY quarter, growth is pretty impressive.

did it in my head roughly = share price of $23.60 x 39374 fully diluted shares + debt - cash I could be wrong, but I don't think you should use fully diluted shares for enterprise value (at least, that's not how I've seen it done). http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/enterprisevalue.asp#axzz1p15UAnL3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_value Using that method, current EBIX EV would be closer to ±850m Otherwise you get an EV that is higher than the current market cap.

How do you get an EV of 960m?

If I'm reading things right, they spent 17 million on HealthConnect. A bigger acquisition than I expected, which is good if they got good value (we'll have to wait and see, but they have a great track record there).

Not my preference either, but it still leaves them with 90% of FCF for buybacks and acquisitions, so it's not that bad.

I don't mind quiet either, as long as when there are news they are good :D

Margins for year: 41%. Exchanges grew 39%. http://www.ebix.com/pressrelease_text.aspx?artid=223

About 2/3 of the way through this one, and it's very interesting. I know that lots of people here have already probably read it, but I didn't see a threat in the books section so thought I'd create one. http://www.amazon.com/Theres-Always-Something-Do-Investment/dp/0773538631/

One more graph: http://www.greaterfool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/chart.jpg

I like Geoff Gannon's articles: http://www.gurufocus.com/news.php?author=Geoff+Gannon

Well, this stock is up about 40% since I started looking at it. Too bad I never bought any :P

Thanks. Ackman's so smart, it's always nice to hear what he has to say even if I don't invest in the same kind of businesses he does.

Nice. On the back of mine I engraved: Life is not about finding yourself. It's about creating yourself. I believe it's by George Bernard Shaw.

I ordered one. Been waiting 2 years to get one... When I saw that the 2 didn't have the hi-rez screen, I decided to wait.