Liberty

Fiscal Q4 is out: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191216005779/en/HEICO-CORPORATION-Reports-Record-Net-Income-Operating

Kevin Kelly interviewing Marc Andreessen (dec 12, 2019):

Tesla at new all-time high. Guessing this is due to the possible new EV tax credit revamp?

ETG acquisition: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191216005532/en/

Got this from the author of the paper, who wanted to post here but didn't have an account, so I'm posting it for him: If you want to get in touch, he's at:

I guess I just have different priorities and investing style. I don't like keeping drama in my portfolio for little reason. I'd rather spend the time and energy that you'd spend on monitoring this trying to find my next big investment that will make a noticeable difference to returns. I'm not saying the other approach isn't valid, my original comment was just that I don't think it's a good return on the energy that most shorts seem to spend on the company. If something is 1% of your portfolio but you give it 25% of your mindspace (or whatever.. for some shorts it seems even higher -- and it rarely pays to get as emotional as they do about an investment, rational decisions go out the window), that seems a bad deal to me. I'm not saying it applies to you, but I know it definitely applies to many that I see on Twitter.

I'd also be interested in seeing it. You can message me through the forum, and my DMs are open on Twitter.

I think there are multiple discussion threads on TSLA which confuses the discussion. There is obviously the death culters ("TSLA is a fraud worth $0") vs. Uber bulls. But then that is often confused with those who are simply short the company or long the company without being insane. I think the oddness about the name is that those (typically) who lean bullish or bearish like to point to the dumbest arguments on the other side vs. the smartest comments to prove their point which makes the discussions on Tesla very charged (one of the reasons I like to back away from comment too much so I don't trap myself in a bearish consistency bias) That said, the one thing that the "bulls" say in this thread over the years that makes the absolute least sense to me is that fact that Tesla stock price is up and thus shorts are wrong and/or dumb and/or sad, etc... Tesla has under performed the market this year, and over 1-2 Trailing years. it's flat to the market over 5 years. Short selling is a relative portfolio affair. The oddest thing in the world i hear is "Tesla is up, you should be wrong/unhappy". I would *love* if Tesla went to zero speaking of my portfolio, but if anybody has any other names that underperform the market by 15-20% and are easy to borrow, please send those "bad shorts" my way. lol... Just my 2 cents. I personally believe Tesla is fundamentally poorly run, over hyped, dishonest, and it's overvaluation is growing even as it's underperforming the market. It's the kind of company that their stock goes up 2% when their 3rd GC in 12 months steps down - because the bull case by institutional investors is basically the ability to maintain regulatory arb/subsidy theft - a weak lawyer helps with that. However, I may be wrong about all the above. But I'm pretty sure I"m not wrong that short selling as part of a neutral or long biased portfolio (99.9% of short selling is this in one form or another) a name that rises by less then the market compensating for borrow costs is a good thing to do. The fact that this isn't apparent to so many on this board makes me think most folks don't short, but do like to opine on short selling. Congrats to the bulls who bought recently... quite a run... I wish I would have covered more! Seems to me like this only works if instead of shorting Tesla you would have shorted the market instead. But is that the case? You can't eat relative performance, so being flat (plus borrow cost) vs the market might sound like a win on paper, but in reality, what does it get you? Is it just to redeploy the funds in more longs? Sounds like a risky source of leverage, unless you keep it tiny in size, in which case, even if it goes to zero, you just get what, a single digit higher return on the portfolio?. I just think that there's got to be easier ways to make money than to short a company where clearly anything can happen at any time, they can crash tomorrow or pull a rabbit out of a hat and rocket up, but they've certainly proven over time that they have cockroach-levels of resiliency to adversity. I don't think anyone has an edge on this... If they had, it wouldn't have taken this long to happen and the company wouldn't have gone from less than $0.5bn in revenues to about $24bn TTM during the period during which the shorts have been so vocal about it being on the imminent verge of collapse (well, even longer than that, technically, since IPO).

Two new ones at Jonas: https://www.jonassoftware.com/About_Us/Latest_News/Jonas_Software_Acquires_Retail_Sport_Systems https://www.jonassoftware.com/About_Us/Latest_News/Jonas_Software_Acquires_Motion_Software h/t @pearnick

Only down 78% in the past 12 months now. Great success!

So much drama and brain damage on both long and short sides over the past many years, and all that for a stock that is still near all time highs, but has been mostly going sideways for a long time... The market's pretty good at causing the most pain to the most people.

All the way down to where it was in November

Good time to bump this up. I currently have 13 CPU cores running Rosetta@home 24/7. Here's a recent presentation by Dr. David Baker about computational protein design (he's the head of Baker Lab at U. Washington, where Rosetta software is being developed):

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_nq78cSnol3I/TTmuP9JGAKI/AAAAAAAABfQ/jJq0eaNwWfY/s1600/Norris-popup.jpg

https://www.seilernfunds.com/files/file/view/id/594 I thought this was interesting. Via

New interview with Tobi: https://pca.st/olctiemg

I enjoyed it too, seen as one more episode of the show, an epilogue. Those expecting "a movie", something fundamentally different and of much larger scale, will probably be disappointed.

I actually just got through Halt and Catch Fire after your recommendation. Me getting through a TV series is a feat in and of itself. Overall I liked this show. Seasons 1 and 3 were great. Season 1 in particular was amazing. Season 2 was terrible IMO. Basically a frat house with daytime drama and relationship bs. Season 4 kinda sucked as well IMO. After a while, you also kind of just roll your eyes at how the story continues to push ahead. First these guys stole the IBM product, and would've/could've/should've been the ones to create the Mac. Then, they basically developed Ebay. Next they invent Google. Like I wasn't around that environment and dont know what it was like in that space; maybe everyone in SV was really all on the cusp of creating the same things...but I dont buy it. Keep it grounded in reality. You dont need to have Joe McMillan stare off into the distance, and dramatically deliver a "what if...we took.......(insert major tech them that emerged half a decade later)" in EVERY SEASON. Glad you (partially) enjoyed it. I still haven't finished season 1, but so far I like it. Got side-tracked with other things (Barry, Succession, Killing Eve -- all enjoyable so far).

Andy Jassy, head of AWS, keynote at re:Invent 2019 (Dec 3, 2019): CNBC: "AWS' Andy Jassy: JEDI cloud contract was not adjudicated correctly": Werner Vogels keynote:

If something gets haircut, it's going to be the bank's cut. Capping V/MA take rate would be barely noticeable to consumers. They take very little, it just happens to be very high margin because it's mostly a fixed cost network. But if you regulate what banks can take, there's going to be a lot of complaints from people who like their rewards and such... There's no free lunch.

Acquisition at Harris: https://www.force-uk.com/force-information-systems-acquired-by-n-harris-computer-systems/ One as Jonas: https://www.jonassoftware.com/About_Us/Latest_News/Jonas_Software_Acquires_Automated_Integration h/t @pearnick

https://www.blog.google/inside-google/alphabet/letter-from-larry-and-sergey/

Don't have time to read all that right now, but after a bit of skimming, sounds like anti-capitalist/zero-sum fallacy to me. Basically you can apply that argument to Microsoft or Facebook or Google or Apple or whatever successful company out there, right? Why do they have these "obscene" margins? Must be because they're doing something bad, must be by taking something away from customers.. let's regulate them to hell and everybody will be better off, right? Or nationalize them, because government-run things are great. Meanwhile, Visa and Mastercard provide near-instant, secure ways to pay and move money around the world for trillions of dollars while fighting a deluge of fraud, and for their trouble they take in the 0.x% range, often a lower cost than cash (security costs, theft, employee time to count and store it, etc). Clearly a win-win proposition. And they keep improving their rails, allowing new businesses to be built on top and new capabilities to make life better for their customers (contactless, 2-way, APIs, tokens, NFC, etc). I'm sure a nationalized network would do that just as well... ugh.

Interview with Andy Jassy, head of AWS: https://siliconangle.com/2019/12/01/commentary-andy-jassy-aims-reinvent-amazon-web-services-clouds-next-generation/ https://siliconangle.com/2019/12/03/exclusive-new-tech-andy-jassy-aims-take-amazons-cloud-everywhere/

https://www.obsidianenergy.com/press-releases/obsidian-energy-appoints-stephen-loukas-interim-president-ceo-and-makes-other-appointments-to-management-team-including-peter-scott-as-the-senior-vice-president-cfo-announces-reconfirmation-of/ CEO and CFO change.