Liberty

I was just about to post that. Nice confirmation of my thesis that Altius can have great opportunities both in the up and down cycle.

Thanks Paul! Thanks Parsad! I missed you guys :)

You can bet they are making repurchases. Robin himself spent 500k of his own money to buy shares when price was around 17, so at 15 they definitely must be buying a lot. I'm just not exactly sure how much daily volume they can get based on SEC rules. I'll have to look that up at some point... From my point of view, if shares stay cheap for a long time, that's great because the repurchases will bring more value. As long as the fundamentals of the business don't deteriorate, share price can go down, it'll just mean a bigger payoff for the patient investor.

Overall I'm quite satisfied with the quarter. Keep in mind that they are facing an industry tailwind. I'll be curious to see how they do in a hard market. Based on the conference call, they seem to have a strong pipeline of new products (and upgrades to existing ones), which is a very good sign since - like Wells Fargo - cross-selling multiple products to existing customers is a big part of their strategy. I also think the salesforce expansion is a well-timed idea because their opportunities are changing now that they are bigger and have beachheads in more markets (we should see results of that in a couple of Qs). I'm also quite happy with the repurchases. Robin has publicly said he's going to ask the board for 160m if he comes close to running out of the current 100m. In the mid-term there are three possible scenarios, IMO: 1) Short thesis is right. something bad comes to light, all bets are off, could be very bad. Though unless the problems are so massive that the stock goes to zero, a lot of this seems already priced in. Obviously if I agreed with the short thesis, I wouldn't have put some of my money in EBIX, so I don't believe it likely at all (but I'm not saying it's impossible, so do your DD).. 2) Operational problems lead to decline in fortunes. Somehow they can't execute their business plan, or strategy is flawed, or competition picks up, or market changes, or Robin makes stupid decisions, etc. I don't think it's too likely based on what we can know now, and 2008-2009 has shown EBIX can make good decisions and play defensively during downturns, but you never know.. 3) EBIX keeps buying back shares by the truckload and keeps growing profits by double digit % until at some point the P/E can't compress anymore and share price gets traction, eventually leading to the mother of all short squeezes. Unless Graham was wrong, fundamentals and share price can't go in opposite directions forever. edit: Looks like they still have plenty of NOLs:

Could you elaborate on what you mean here? You are addressing this at me, but I just reposted the announcement without interpretation, so I'm not sure what you are responding to.

Well, it looks like quite the reversal so far. Everything on my watchlist is green (except for LRE). BRK is up the most, unsurprisingly.

http://www.ebix.com/pressrelease_text.aspx?artid=207 • Revenue of $42.3 Million, up 31.2% Year-Over-Year • Net Income of $22.3 Million, up 59.5% Year-Over-Year • Operating Cash Flow for Q2 2011 of $19.6 Million, up 22.2% Year-Over-Year Margins: The Company reported an operating margin of 44% for Q2 2011 as compared to 40.4% for the same period during 2010. Up 11.25% in pre-market trading.

Japan down 3.3%, futures down. Should be another interesting day tomorrow...

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/fortress-paper-announces-second-quarter-2011-results-tsx-ftp-1547264.htm

A good indicator of market valuation would be the number of posts per day on this forum. I bet there's an inversely proportional relationship between the number of posts and number of bargains :)

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=104364&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1594402&highlight=

I never thought I'd see BRK.B selling for $67. wow. Edit: Wow, BRK.B closed at 66.66. Nice number \m/

I'm not panicking, just wishing I had come into this with 100% cash :P But at least the businesses that I own stock in are mostly without debt and have lots of cash to do buybacks or buy underpriced assets, so in the long-term it should turn out well... Just have to be patient.

Here's another indicator that there's panic in the air: Google Finance loads more slowly than usual. If the hordes of people checking their stocks is large enough to slow down Google's servers, we know we've got the average person sweating...

Mr. Market is totally nuts today..

Because I can't believe we still don't have an official thread for Leucadia here, I just had to create it. I feel it's better to have a centralized place to put info than have it spread over tons of different threads that get lost after a while... Now is an especially good day for that since the stock is down 8.7% right now ($26.85, close to book), and it does look like a pretty decent buying opportunity if you believe in management's powers to keep compounding (though with BRK.B at 69.35, many will probably pick BRK first).

Thanks for posting jjsto!

They're probably closed on Fridays, though. IIRC, the weekend over there is Friday and Saturday. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek_and_weekend#Israel

Uncharted territory, here we go. Not that the future is ever as certain as many think...

I definitely wouldn't buy the market as a whole. But there are many individual companies that are dirt cheap right now..

Might not have had much cash coming into this, but I did the next best thing: sold some stuff that was close to fair value for other things that were very undervalued according to my analysis. It's crazy how some small caps are dropping so much on very low volume. Guess this happens with illiquid stocks when there's just no buyers...

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110805005679/en/Ebix-Receives-ISO-27001-Certification

I have to say, it's beautiful to see the members of this board go all DEFCON 9 and spring into action when opportunity knocks. This warroom is probably very different from the average "trader" one ;D

Real bloodbath today. Makes me wish I had more dry powder. Oh well..

Up almost 23% right now.