Liberty

Thanks for posting this, looks like a good overview!

Thought many here would enjoy it: http://www.scribd.com/doc/18173672/fs1979 If you know of other sources (online or offline) to learn more about him and his thinking on capital allocation, please post them here. I've read a good chunk of Distant Force, but sadly the book can be pages and pages of lists of acquisitions and it seems like while chapters barely mention henry and rarely go very deep in his thinking. Not very satisfying so far, though maybe it gets better later on in the book...

Be careful not to confuse the absence of a mention of buybacks below IV with the absence of the consideration itself. For example, I will often write about buybacks without putting the disclaimer that I like them because they are under what I consider to be IV, but it doesn't mean that I don't think about it. For me it goes without saying, but I can understand how some people (mostly on other boards) will cheer any buyback, at any price.

This analysis is a bit older, but could be useful: http://m100.marketocracy.com/rmcduff_RMG1/2010/05/mastercard_nyse_ma_22309_price.html Interesting that almost none of Visa is held by insiders while about 10% of MA is (according to Yahoo finance, anyways). Does anyone have color on MA's management? Have they shown to be talented, ethical, energetic?

Congrats, it's been a nice run. Out of curiosity, what made you choose MA over V? Looks like they're following each other pretty closely, so I suppose it doesn't make that much of a difference (at least so far), but I wonder if they'll start to diverge more as their fortunes are more and more dependent on emerging markets..

Should I? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/16/google_html5_effort_stinks/ I'm *this* close to filing you under 'troll' and just stopping caring... Honestly.

Do Fibrek and MERC make any kind of niche/specialty products? It was my impression that they were much more commodity players than FTP, though I haven't really researched them much (I took one quick look at the financials in Google finance and I knew they were not my kind of company - small margins, lots of debt...). That's one big advantage that FTP has over other companies that it too often gets lumped in with...

Welcome to the club! Whatever you do, do it before Thurso starts shipping because I doubt it'll stay anywhere near 30 after that catalyst finally arrives.

Second day in a row of pretty high buying volume and big price movements on seemingly no news... Hmm, did info about a new acquisition leak out somewhere? It could be something else or just random, but I'm thinking there's a probability that we'll see an announcement in the coming days. Just a guess though, I've been wrong a lot about this kind of stuff in the past - I do it more for sport than for any serious purpose :)

:o

Stock down 23% right now. Good opportunity for the RIM bulls to load up, I suppose.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ebix-continues-focus-on-growth-with-seven-new-key-hires-2011-09-16 I like that health and financials are now being mentioned more often along with insurance. There are certainly nice opportunities in these sectors too.

I never said that google was a small company being bullied, I was just illustrating how these patents are often used and I didn't happen to have a big company example, but the principle is the same. Size doesn't mean that Google can't be attacked using the patent system, and it doesn't mean that the current software patent system makes sense and is a productive part of our legal system. The worst of the worst are patent holding shells that don't actually have any products, they just have patents and they sue (and because they don't produce anything, they can't be counter-sued). But there's little doubt that if Google had had tens of thousands of patents in the recent past, they wouldn't have been sued even if they had infringed on the very same patents that they are being accused of infringing right now. This isn't a game of what is right and who owns what, it's a game of who has the biggest stick and the most legal resources (Oracle is almost a law firm by now). All the other big tech firms could sue each other, because if they looked, they could find patents that others infringe. Why don't they sue each other? Because they'll be counter-sued and it wouldn't be productive. But Google only had a few hundred patents and so it was vulnerable... Google has thousands of very talented engineers, and if they wanted to they could start producing tons of patents and eventually sue everybody, but so far they seem to mostly just want to defend themselves rather than attack. We'll see if that changes over time. As for competing with Flipboard and Groupon and Facebook and Twitter and Expedia and whatever, I hope you realize that business models are not patentable, and that the world would be a lot worse for everybody if companies could say "nobody can do what I do!" and there was just one source of everything. Most of those companies built on what came before, and there will be others building on what they do. What you're accusing Google of doing is something that Microsoft has done quite a lot, and not always as nicely.

Down almost 20% today. http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/15/technology/netflix/index.htm

Just so you know, this is a different thing from what I was talking about.

And Windows stole from the Mac OS which stole from Xerox, and all TVs and tablets and a million other things look alike. Good ideas spread. I'll admit that I think that some of the Samsung UIs built on top of Android are too close to iOS for my taste (and iOS has stolen a few things back from Android, like notifications and such), but having phones that are mostly big touchscreens with icons and clocks and whatever is pretty much a given at this point, just like most DSLR cameras are very similar or whatever.

About health, have you looked at standing desks? Recent studies seem to show that sitting too much is pretty bad for your health, so that's a nice solution: http://www.geekdesk.com/default.asp?contentID=613 You can also set up an alarm on your computer that reminds you to take walks outside once or more per day.

I think it's very probable that Google infringes on that patent, and many others. In fact, the software patent system is so fucked up that if the law was 100% enforced by some omniscient deity, the whole software industry would entirely shut down, and writing a "hello world" program would take years because you'd have to go through tens of thousands of patents written in incomprehensible legalese covering all kinds of broad and obvious things to make sure you aren't infringing anything. And every time you go to court it's a dice roll because the courts aren't exactly equipped to understand the fine points of software engineering, and even when you win, the delays and legal fees can still make it a huge business loss... It reminds me of something someone wrote on a forum for startup programmers iirc (I'm paraphrasing from memory): So it's a small startup just starting to make some money, and one day they get visited by 2 guys in suits coming from IBM, and they say "you are infringing on 7 our of our patents. We'll license them to you for 6 million." So the startup guys take this very seriously and they examine the patents carefully. They come back and say: "6 of those have nothing to do with what we're doing and the last one seems bogus and wouldn't hold in court". The guys in suit yawn and go: "We have 20,000 patents. Do you really want us to go back to headquarters and find 7 other patents that you infringe? Or do you want to go to court and fight our legal department? Make out the check to..." Basically extortion. Google is much more vulnerable because they are a lot younger than most other big tech companies their size, and because they haven't put their engineers on the patent-generating treadmill like some other firms (some firms expressly tell employees that every time they come up with a patentable idea, they have to call the patent lawyers, and they give out big bonuses for patents, etc. I've heard from people who have software patents and they say that their own patents are bogus). But with the recent patent acquisitions, they should soon have a big enough stockpile for mutually-assured destruction, and a new equilibrium should be reached with other big tech firms. There was a great episode of This American Life about it. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack

http://www.valueinvestorsclub.com/value2/Idea/ViewIdea/55886 Recent VIC writeup. Update: Up 11.8% right now. Guess a big fish read that writeup :)

Very good points. It's one of the reasons why I like the study of heuristics and biases.. Best to learn how to fail and figure out how to avoid it.

Ironically, thats the same reason I started posting on this threads. Because every time a positive article or a positive piece of news came out about Google, it was posted here. But none of the downside or negative articles were posted. So I decided to balance it out with counterpoints to your posts ;D ;D ;D Well, ain't we all dogs chasing their tail. :)

I was explaining the variables important to valuing a search user, not what CTR is. You can measure things in absolute numbers, or in relative numbers, and when doing the latter, search volume matters. In the context of talking about search engines and bing vs google, I thought you were talking about some of the articles that came out about how bing users had a higher CTR than google. CTR is used one way in the advertising industry, but it is also a generic term that can apply to many other things. It was ambiguous.

Well, you're a better man than I, because I won't go through the archives to find examples of what I meant. This discussion is way past being constructive. Right back at you. I heard your arguments and nothing you've said has convinced me that Google has anything else other than a great moat and solid dominance of the search market, and I've already explained why your examples of bias in Levy's book don't have anything to do with my arguments because I'm just as capable as you to detect that bias and I'm not basing my positions on Levy's view of Page as a superhero or whatever. And btw, I provided numbers in the past and pointed you to them.

Thanks for the recommendation. unfortunately, the public library here doesn't have it. Do you think it's good enough to be worth buying, or is it just nice if you can find it, but not worth paying for..?

Are you playing a game of gotcha? I said I knew how ad CTR worked, not that I knew secret internal numbers for those two companies (and it wasn't clear in the first place that this was what you were asking).