Liberty

Probably listening to him is the best 2 hours I spent on internet this year. Thanks a ton for introducing Naval Ravikant. If you like Naval, he's done interviews on Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Tim Ferriss and Shane Parrish's podcasts. https://fs.blog/naval-ravikant/

Constellation Real Estate Group Acquires offrs.com http://www.constellationreg.com/press-creg-acquires-offrs/

Sun valley interview: https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/john-malone-faang-sun-valley-charter-1203263342/

Say what you want about Tesla, but they went from $102m of TTM revenue in September 2012 to $22.6bn last quarter. Impressive for a manufacturing company that requires a lot of capital and tangible assets and labor (this isn't software scaling up quickly just by copying bits). Anyone who thinks that a company can do that without tremendous growing pains and fires popping up left and right is deluded (even if Musk had never been born, put anyone else in charge, it would be a rough ride). I've been interested in the stories of startups and high-growth companies for a while, and there's always a million things that constantly break during that phase. The book "Founders at Work" by Jessica Livingston is great for those types of stories.

I really like some of the rephrasing that she offers as a way to sharpen thinking and/or get better information. For example, instead of asking people "are you sure?", asking "how sure are you?"

https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/10/amazon-and-leyou-will-make-a-lord-of-the-rings-pc-and-console-game/ Constantly branching out and trying new things...

A relatively efficient market tends to create outcomes where the largest number of people feel pain. Sometimes that's with sideways drift for a long time until both sides are exhausted..

Good point, I was thinking of revenue growth for some reason, which through operating leverage and high incremental margins is lower than EPS growth in these businesses..

I enjoyed this Investing City episode with Bluegrass Capital. His second time on the show. https://www.investingcity.org/podcast/episode/1f0fd980/ep-29-bluegrass-capital-pt-2-business-lessons First time here: https://www.investingcity.org/podcast/episode/f93f7425/ep-22-bluegrass-capital-securities-analysis

http://yetanothervalueblog.com/2019/07/quickie-idea-did-hhc-teach-us-anything-about-other-landbanks-joe-cto.html

Volaris acquisition in Italy: https://www.binarysystem.eu/en/press-reviews/binary-system-e-volaris-group h/t @pearnick

It has tremendously helped them. It's a bit like Apple. They have an event to announce a new product, and every media outlet will cover it front page, giving them a tremendous amount of free publicity. And they'll also get a lot of scrutiny because criticizing them gets a lot of attention/pageviews. That's why there's a fake "gate" scandal with every new product, that a few months later (often without any change to the product) everybody has forgotten. Antennagate, bendgate, etc. It comes with the territory for sure. It's still worthwhile to try to understand the underlying facts under the hype, though.

Here's one that I've enjoyed a lot, a bit different from most of the others posted here (not about finance or health): Mason Hartman interviewed by David Perell: https://www.perell.com/podcast/mason-hartman I've been following Mason for years on Twitter, great wide-ranging mind.

John Huber was on a podcast discussing FB recently: http://sabercapitalmgt.com/a-discussion-on-facebook/

Anyone ever searched for "car fire" on youtube? https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=car+fire There's a lot more energy in a gas tank than a battery, and it's a lot more flammable. But because gasoline has been around for a while, we don't think of the risk anymore. EVs are newer, so anything wrong still stands out, but we'll get used to them too. They're safer anyway (you don't have a huge block of steel in front of you that tries to ram itself into the passenger space at impact, so you can have much larger crumple zones, and the center of gravity is lower and the mass tends to be higher relative to the size of the vehicle).

I think there's a decent chance that the shorts end up being largely right (there's just too many things that are obviously wrong on the financial and operational side with the company for that likelihood not to be decently high), but that most of the shorts might not make much money anyway. If things go really wrong, the stock will fall a decent amount, then the shorts will feel finally vindicated (there's a lot of pent up pressure in that group for sure) and press their shorts and try to milk the situation and be sure that they can ride this to zero, and then either Musk will pull a rabbit out of a hat (get Larry Page or Larry Ellison to invest a few billions) or get bought out by a deep pocketed company or whatever, maybe even with Musk out as CEO but still in charge of tech and product direction, maybe they'll even find really bulletproof COO and CFO to steer the ship, who knows, and on that the downside will be severely capped, maybe we'd even see new highs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ So all that brain damage and carry costs (I mean, something so heavily shorted isn't exactly super asymmetric) and opportunity cost and angst for so many years to maybe make a little dough on this short... Seems like it almost has to be emotional to hang in, rather than be purely a risk/reward, expected returns kind of situation. There has to be easier ways to make money. I think it's more that Musk and the situation rubs some people the wrong way and they get on a crusade about this and it's not even about making money anymore, which is a very dangerous situation, IMO.

That's all valid, I'm just encouraging you to say this to him rather than tell him not to post at all or how to post. I think we all want the same thing: Interesting discussions. How we get there is by asking each other questions and suggesting ideas and by constructively disagreeing.

My whole point here: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/investment-ideas/tsla-tesla-motors/msg374991/#msg374991 Was that people have been saying "it's dying in the next few months" for over a decade now. Maybe someday they'll be right, but timing certainly hasn't be impressive so far...

Interesting reference site with lots of company profiles and histories. http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/

Ok. You don't sound emotional at all about the position.

A business growing 8% a year with 30-40% ROIC's and a 9-10% WACC has a justified P/E in the mid 30's range. More than that, actually: But the question always is, how sustainable the growth is and how strong the moat is. That's judgement calls that will impact the inputs of the DCF... PCE grows at 5%, cash to card/online + B2B gets you 2-3% on top of that at least + operating leverage (incremental margins 90%+). Visa is unique in that it's sustainable growth is probably 5%, and they've got decade long tailwinds that get you over 8% without too much trouble. I'm sorry, I wasn't precise enough in my previous message. I meant that if you truly have "A business growing 8% a year with 30-40% ROIC's and a 9-10% WACC has a justified P/E in the mid 30's range" long-term, it's worth more than mid-30s P/E. The 20-30% sustainable delta with WACC that you mention is gigantic.

Liberty, Chesko, I'm a fan of Peter Attia but even as a medic I do find his podcasts to be very technical for non medical audience. Am (pleasantly) surprised to see his podcasts being favourites in an investment thread. Are you in the medical field? The Jason Fung episode totally changes our way of thinking of diabetes - I like the idea of time restricted feeding but we need some caution as the science is not there - yet. However, the risk of TRF in healthy adults is uber low. I started about a month or two ago and I'm liking it. Maybe we need to start a thread on Time Restricted Feeding? I'm not in the medical field, but I've been curious about it for a long time and tend to be an autodidact. I've read some biochemistry and molecular cell biology textbooks and such to get a better understanding... But let's say that the Attia 5-parter with Tom Dayspring about lipidology was about as close to the limit of what I could follow as I've yet found in a podcast. That's some in-depth stuff! But even if I only understand x%, I feel that's still a lot better than not trying and 0%.

It’s a data point on market sentiment, John, which is a big part of what this thread is about. Publications like USA Today are useful for that if nothing else. SHDL, OK, but then you need to add some kind of personal comment to your linking. Otherwise, you just bring market sentiment to CoBF. That's not how things work. Market sentiment won't just invade a forum unless there's a caveat and it's pre-digested by someone else. We can make up our own minds, no need for the paternalism. And nobody's forcing you to click his links or agree with what he says. If you have a counter-argument or comment, post it, but don't just tell people not to post things that are on topic, please.

So yours is a macro thesis, then? Good luck adding alpha with that.

A business growing 8% a year with 30-40% ROIC's and a 9-10% WACC has a justified P/E in the mid 30's range. More than that, actually: But the question always is, how sustainable the growth is and how strong the moat is. That's judgement calls that will impact the inputs of the DCF...