Liberty

Thank you for posting. I'm about halfway through, and I'm impressed. Very clear thinker. I wasn't too familiar with Ackman, but I now want to learn more. He doesn't really operate in the kinds of businesses that I like, but his mental processes seem very interesting. I've put a hold at the library on a book about him (I think the title is Confidence Game), and I was wondering if there was a good source of his investor letters or something of the sort..? If anyone has a few URLs or titles to shares, that'd be great. edit: Still haven't found archive of his letters, but found this Charlie Rose interview if others are interested: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9498

If you look at it like that, I agree. But if you dig deeper, in Motorola they got a shield for inter-company patent fights. It was never expected to protect them against trolls because there can be not mutually-assured destruction equilibrium with them.

Nothing ironic about it. They can sue whoever they want because their thousands of vague bogus patents cover everything under the sun, that's the 'beauty' of their model (and since they don't make anything, they can't be counter-sued). Have you listened to this? It's mostly about Intellectual Ventures. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack Companies can stockpile patents to defend themselves against other companies. But there's no way to defend yourself against a patent troll/extortionist like IV.

With my limited understanding of how these things work, I'm parsing this as: They're hitting about 30% grade on all their drill holes. That seems like great news in itself, but is there something I'm missing, or is that the main takeaway here? As usual, thanks Dazel for posting this :)

Are you putting it in quote marks? It seems to work here for =GoogleFinance("AIG+")

Yeah, I wish they added more, which they probably will do over time.

Here's an insightful comment that I saw somewhere else, and it said what I tried to say better than I could:

Charlie Munger said that you can learn a lot about people by knowing who their heroes are. Shortly after Steve Jobs' death, Robin Raina wrote on his facebook page a nice tribute to Jobs that started with "One of the two people I have admired, and looked up to, on my work side is no more today." Since I'm a curious guy, I asked him who the other person was. Within the hour, he replied (I guess it's true that he gets by with 4 hours of sleep per night) and said: "Hi. Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett are two people I have always looked up to in my work life - Buffett's ability to simplify things, grasp the economics, create wealth and yet give it all away are truly inspiring for me . Robin" He couldn't have picked better business heroes, IMHO! btw, a few weeks ago I sent him the Manual of Ideas podcast (http://goo.gl/L89wW) and 1979 Forbes article (http://goo.gl/ByBlI) about Henry Singleton, the ones that detail how Singleton made strategic acquisitions with stock when it was dear and repurchased a large fraction of the company when it was cheap. I figured he might find them interesting :)

Very, very sad news. One of my heroes. :'(

Another under-appreciated quality of Jobs is that he is a total control freak. Sometimes it takes that to achieve a vision. Lots of other people have great taste, but they compromise, settle, there's a bit of design-by-committee going on, they give up when the going gets rough, they don't dare tell others that their ideas suck, etc.. Jobs has both the great taste AND the ability to bulldoze ahead until he realizes his vision.

Cool. Except for the taxes, that's better than I expected :)

I agree about Siri being a big deal, but it's still an acquisition and still a feature that could have been implemented on any version of the iPhone. It's not iPhone 4S specific since what you need it a microphone and a connection to the internet (in fact, there was a Siri app available previously, though it wasn't quite the same as what was released). The change of direction to more cloud based services (SaaS) is industry-wide and not iPhone 4S specific. In fact, even if they had not released any new version of the iPhone they could still have gone ahead with iCloud and Siri and PC-less synching and all that. I still maintain that there's a difference between changing the whole phone between 3 and 4 and what happened between 4 and 4S, and even Apple seems to agree since they didn't call it the 5. But as always, discussion with you rapidly becomes totally unproductive and pointless, so respectfully, count me out of this one.

This is something completely different from the specific hardware and software changes between the iPhone 4 and 4S. I could have been accomplished on an iPhone 3 or 5.

I'm guessing that Alibaba will probably try to buy itself out of YHOO if it can and leave what's left to the others...

Hey, I'm curious to know what you guys use to keep track of your portfolios, watchlists, and to check out stocks. I know we have a wide range of investors here, so some are probably using Google Finance while others have Bloomberg terminals.. Still, I'm curious about the whole spectrum (particularly curious to know how Parsad does it, actually, because I really like the way he thinks :) ). Let's learn from each others' experience. So what are you using? I'm sure some of you have really polished workflows that others could benefit from. Thanks for sharing! Me: A pretty simple spreadsheet and some Google Finance portfolio watchlists. My main complaint is that the canadian prices are delayed (in practice it doesn't change much since it's not like I'm trading on short-term moves, but it would still be nice to have real-time without having to log into TD Waterhouse).

Did you get your order filled, Myth? Up 9.33% right now :P Update: Well, I sure hope you did because it's almost up 20% over the past 2 days.

This doesn't mean that if X numbers of months ago (these things have a long lead time) they had felt threatened and saw really scary things on the horizon from their competitors, that they couldn't have decided to pick one of the external designs that they have been testing and launch production on it for it to be ready around this time of year. Other features that we're seeing today would still be present, and the one in beta might still be in beta, but we could also be having a different exterior with probably a few more features to warrant a full version number bump. As I said, a lot of those feature are rather modular and don't have that many dependencies now that the iPhone has most of the hardware that can be expected in a phone (GPS, accelerometer, multi-touch, camera, etc).

Version numbers are always arbitrary, but once you pick a way to do it, consistency is best. If they had called the iPhone 3GS the iPhone 4, maybe the 4 would have been the 5 and this one would have been the 6th... But now they've established that full version bumps are for exterior redesigns, IMO. Deception would have been greater if they had called it the 5, so it wasn't a winning proposition.

btw, for those who didn't know, you can get real time google finance info in your google docs spreadsheets: https://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=155178 Pretty useful to build watchlists and portfolio trackers and such.

This patent crap is going to far, on all sides: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-05/samsung-to-seek-ban-on-iphone-4s-sales-in-france-italy-in-patent-dispute.html Can't wait for a big reform, hopefully throwing out 90% of software patents and changing the rules for the creation of new ones...

Dazel, do you have an idea of their average cost on Royal Gold?

Read this: http://disruptivewireless.blogspot.com/2011/10/my-suspicions-on-iphone-delays-chipset.html You're making the same mistake that everyone else is - you're judging the book by its cover. You're looking at the exterior design of the iPhone and saying "Meh, nothing much changed". Not true. You're putting words in my mouth, I never said nothing changed or that what mattered was the external design. I just said that from the 4 to the 4S the step was smaller than from the 3 to the 4.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-05/rim-executives-resisting-buying-stock-make-investors-fret-tech.html

Agreed, but what's that kind of moat good for if it doesn't help you preserve high margins and/or high growth? It can probably protect them from being put out of business, but it doesn't seem to lead to particularly attractive economics. But as I said, I just had a 2-minute look, so I might be missing something...

It doesn't change anything to what I said.