Liberty

Ebix felt the need to release this today: Update: There's also this: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110603-709335.html

I wonder if it's because the Motley Fool article that came out an hour ago linked to the seeking alpha piece. It seems like every time this one resurfaces, the stock drops a lot on high volume. Update: Whoa, back to -3%. Looks like the company started its buyback machine.

This sentence is a bit ambiguous. You are now a believer that their past performance was too good to be true, or the reverse?

My understanding of the situation is that they're suffering from a crisis of confidence from many shareholders, a kind of salad oil scandal, if you will. The stock has been going up so fast in the past 10 years that they no doubt picked up a lot of shareholders who don't know or don't care about fundamentals, they just saw a chart going up and wanted on that ride. So when the shorts attacked with that anonymous piece full of insinuations, half-truths, and outright lies, this scared a lot of people. And when you have 10M shares in float and 15M are traded in a day, this also smells of market manipulation, but I don't know enough about how that would work to be sure.. Anyways, I feel like we've been seeing the aftershocks of that since then. It's created a vicious cycle where the technical analysts and other non-fundamentals/value shareholders have been losing their nerve and overselling, even on good news like the past Q. I don't think this'll be fixed soon, as Ebix doesn't seem very good at PR, but what matters to me is what the company will be worth in 5 years. My timing was pretty bad since I bought most of what I had before the short attack, but I console myself by thinking that this will allow lots of buybacks at 'fat pitch' prices, and that I'll be able to pick up a bit more than I would otherwise have.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/06/03/ebix-posts-strong-first-quarter-results-market-act.aspx http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110401-704628.html With a $45 million buyback plan, if they use it all, at current prices they could be buying back over 20% of their float. Not bad, though they might not use the whole 45 if they do more acquisitions..

Potential good news: http://www.millrockresources.com/news/millrock_provides_update_on_estelle_gold_project_alaska_and_early_exer/

More details here: http://quote.morningstar.com/stock-filing/Proxy-Statement/2011/5/19/t.aspx?t=XTSE:FTP&ft=&d=36e4f3f96f5c2a4d1805ca744f36206a

Did you just call me a dbag? That's not nice, man... :P ;)

I'm wondering the same thing. It's still up over 50% for the year, but it's losing ground pretty fast. Mr. Market is feeling depressed...

I think (hope!) he was joking ;D

Dazel, is that you buying today? ;)

Have you seen this? http://seekingalpha.com/article/260820-craig-hallum-research-report-provides-counterpoint-to-copperfield-claims Good starting point.

Not a good thing if you decide to sell at that price and the company then keeps growing profitably and is eventually repriced by the market at a higher multiple, but it's great if you are a shareholder who keeps holding shares since you'll own a bigger % of the company via the buybacks.

That's an interesting idea, but I fear changing a huge company's culture is a lot harder than most would think, and most would think it very hard. Buffett shaped Berkshire into what it is pretty much from the start. Steering Microsoft in a totally different direction now that it is this big is something else... Would be great if they could pull it off, though, but who here thinks Ballmer could do it? And Gates won't leave his Foundation.. But I don't think they can pull it off, so it's a moot point. I'd rather see buybacks when shares are priced low and dividends (eve with tax hit) when not.

Thanks, that was a good read. Strange that it says 'confidential' in the bottom left yet it's available publicly on their site... ???

Microsoft has received five times more income from Android than from Windows Phone http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/27/microsoft-has-received-five-times-more-income-from-android-than-from-windows-phone/

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-26/google-says-demand-surges-for-video-advertising-on-partner-website-network.html

Good post. I don't know much about Overstock, so I can't answer your questions. But another possibility is for Amazon to buy Overstock. That's what they did with Zappos.

Thanks for creating this thread. Good idea!

Well, sometimes the simplest solutions are the best. This probably doesn't scale to the whole forum, but I just called and spoke to a very nice lady who said she'd put a copy in the mail for me. I'm very excited to finally get my hands on this book! Cheers!

I know you're kidding, but it reminded me of what Munger said (iirc): "You know who had a huge compliance department? Lehman Brothers." (or did he say Enron? not 100% sure on the exact quote..)

Here we have a company with highly recurrent revenues spread pretty evenly over many clients around the world, with high potential growth and greenfield infrastructure-like opportunities, low expenses, low taxes thanks to operations in India and Singapore, high margins that seem sustainable, a highly capable owner-manager, a main product segment with a natural moat thanks to the networking effect (exchanges are pretty much winner-takes-all), fragmented competition, lots of cash and very little debt, making opportunistic buybacks, a good track record of not overpaying for acquisitions and integrating them well, and a stock price that is getting ever closer to single digit P/E. On top of this, it has been doing very well even during an historic recession and a soft insurance market, a time when insurance companies aren't investing into their back-end IT (picks and shovels selling well even when there isn't much mining going on...). I'd be backing up the truck to load up on this if it wasn't already such a big part of my portfolio. :-\

Hi Parsad, This makes sense, but I don't think it's the case. All other sites stay fast during the time that I'm having trouble with this site, and I'm with Teksavvy, who are pretty good about letting me know when they do maintenance. My package also gives me access to PEER1, a pretty fast internet backbone. I'm on a Mac and don't have anti-virus software or anything else that could be slowing down this particular site, and when I get the slowdown, I get it on both my desktop and laptop. Your theories were good, but I think it must be something else, unfortunately :-[

No. I've been meaning to ask the same question..