Liberty

Dundee (DC.A) just announced a pretty big buyback plan, shares are up around 10%.

I was considering getting it when I bought Charlie's Almanack, but found some negative reviews that turned me off. I'll give this a second look.

Exactly. ideally, BRK would end up with a small group of superinvestors like Fairfax.

Have you missed the discussion above about this? If the strike price is reached, which isn't a given, the money spent on puts will just replace money spent on buybacks (and the stock being bought back at such a low price will be accretive to shareholders over time), and they're doing more than 22.5mm in buybacks every quarters. Even if they did it with debt, they could pay it back in a matter of months, and interests are low. This isn't a problem. They are not Salesforce. They have a very specific list of customers whom they contact directly. In fact, a large fraction of big insurers and brokers are already clients, whom they only sell new products to. They aren't counting on customers randomly finding them on the internet and they don't have consumer level products. When a big insurance company decides to change its back end systems or join an exchange, it isn't because they saw a demo on a website or an ad in a magazine. They do demos in person. EBIX has such higher margins for many reasons: They are in the software business, so each new customer has very small marginal costs. The system they sell mostly substitutes paper processes, so they have a huge cost advantage over the legacy systems they replace (which is why they sell even in soft markets; they help insurers reduce costs and increase profits). When it comes to the exchanges, the network effect mostly means that the winner takes all, so there's very little competition pressuring their margins (which is why they make so many acquisitions - time is of the essence). And because of EBIX's low cost structure (India, Singapore), competitors probably have higher costs than they do, making it hard to undercut them. I fully expect EBIX's margins to keep growing as they get bigger, just as they have in the past 5 years.

That's absolutely ridiculous. There is a mountain of evidence for macro evolution, and just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't there. We can track species and their evolutions and where it split in time very clearly in DNA and in fossils and there are dozens (if not hundreds) of independents hypothesis that can be empirically tested that confirm it. Nothing at all makes any sense in biology without evolution, and you can't separate marco and micro, they're the same thing. I suggest you read Adaptation and Natural Selection by George C. Williams, and then you can graduate to almost any textbook that is written by an actual biologist. Or even this is a starting point http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ Or even this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution Ever since we could sequence the whole genome of multiple species, arguing against our understanding of evolution is about the same as arguing about our understanding of the law of gravity.

There's a new writeup on the VIC from July, claiming its cheap at 36.5. Now selling at 28. Not a company I'd buy these days, but I know some here were interested and might want to check out that writeup.

My impression is also that Obama almost always tries to include something typically republican in his offers, while I don't remember the last time I heard a republican make a proposal and claim that it contains "positions usually favored by democrats, and that risk angering some in my own party", etc. Hard to have a working relationship when the other side isn't even trying.

This is very personal for you, isn't it? you seem to be trying very hard. What's the alternative? Have code repositories that are public and updated in real-time so that as you start working on a new feature, the whole world - and especially your competitors - can look over your shoulder and try to implement it in parallel (or faster), meaning that you are basically never ever able to take the lead on anything. Smartphone OSes are a very competitive industry and so a certain level of openness will make more sense than with other types of software. What's the point of being all 'real-time open' if it hurts Android and by extent all the Android partners? Better to build in some delay in the process so that those who want to look under the hood can, but as long as they aren't competitors trying to beat you to the punch and benefit from your innovation. Google isn't trying to start a religion, they're running a business, and so this means making pragmatic tradeoffs. I hope I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. But if you are hitting on google for not being open enough, you should be hitting much harder on Apple and Microsoft and RIM...

That's to be expected. Google has 26k employees, many of them with a strong startup/entrepreneur bent, so a % are bound to leave after a while. Same thing happened to MSFT and AAPL and others.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904103404576561020226498738.html

That might not last long. If Goog + Motorala creates a patent pool for Android phone makers, chances are some will sue MSFT for amounts similar to what they're paying. Software patents are mostly worthless, it's just extortion and counter-extortion... Hopefully when it gets bad enough we'll see some true reform.

Biggest drop today is NATL -4.95% I don't own any, and it's not on my shortlist. But it's on my extended watchlist.

I haven't followed this at all, but do we know this isn't survivorship bias? Do we know the returns of that guy's who portfolio? Maybe he invested big chunks of cash in all kinds of stuff and we later just heard about the biggest success. I'm not saying it's the case, I don't know. Just throwing that out there.

Or you could get WRB at book and probably outperform all the others while taking on less risk, IMHO :)

Looks like someone finally noticed today. ALS up 6.17%. Probably because Altius sent a press release about Alderon.. Meanwhile, Alderon's down 4.4%.. Oh Mr Market...

This might help:

Indeed, they often acquire companies to get the talent, or to get parts of the technology which are merged into bigger products. It's not because the stand-alone product/company doesn't live on that all is lost.

No worries, I just wanted to make sure that people who follow this thread but not the one at EBIX wouldn't read that and conclude: "Ah, so they did find something bad at EBIX..." ;)

Interesting, but still just anecdote.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14851455

Best book I've read on the topic of nutrition is Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. Despite the cute title, it's a heavy tome that is quite well-researched, synthesizing a lot of research. To give you an idea, it took about a decade to write. Highly recommended.

No fraud at EBIX as far as anyone knows, so don't lump together with Sino Forest please :)

Google's model is to release early and often and see what sticks, lots of beta stuff and projects developed by a couple of engineers. Very different from Apple's model. The important part to make this a success is to also fail quickly when it doesn't work so you don't have zombie projects that hang around for years. Larry Page seems to want to do an early spring cleaning this year, though.

It makes their mobile offerings better. More people using them = more people clicking on ads in them = more money.

I won't quarrel with that. Totally agreed. But it's not that binary. Saying: "I don't think X is going to happen" is an opinion in the most abstract form. That can't be right or wrong. But if you add to that sentence "...because of Y" and you manipulate that data to make your point, if you make things up or try to deceive your readers by comparing apples with oranges or implying things without basis in fact (or only based on half-truths, the most insidious form), then it's not longer just an opinion that can't be argued with. It's fair game to set the record straight and disagree because of gaps in the logic or because the data doesn't apply or whatever. Sometimes it's possible to be wrong in good faith, having just missed something or misunderstood something, but reading Copperfield's piece, that's obviously not what this is. You seem to greatly admire activist short sellers who uncover frauds and lies and bring them to the light. Well, it works both ways: Short sellers can also be frauds and liars. And I'm sure more frequently than not it's the anonymous ones who gladly try to destroy someone but won't put their own reputation on the line to back up their claims, so that they have nothing to lose. It's not for nothing that they say a good reputation is one of your most precious assets...