Liberty

Speaking of the B2B opportunity: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190611005296/en/Visa-B2B-Connect-Launches-Globally

One that I haven't seen yet but that I only hear good things about these days is Chernobyl (2019, HBO, 5-episode miniseries). No spoilers please, it's on my "to watch next" list. I realize it's not the best thing to put a recommendation for something I haven't seen, but it was the highest rated series on IMDB last I checked, so it's probably a fairly safe bet.

There's a documentary series that I think should've gotten more attention than it did (maybe somewhere in the area of Making a Murderer and The Jinx and Serial). It's called The Keepers (2017): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6792200/ It takes a few episodes to really get going, but it's quite the story...

WSJ interview with Miller: https://www.wsj.com/articles/star-fund-manager-bill-miller-is-still-betting-big-11560132660

CSI has put audio for the 2019 AGM on the website. Hope they keep doing this every year! https://www.csisoftware.com/investor-relations/annual-general-meeting/2019/05/16/audio-and-transcript-of-the-2019-agm h/t @acesandfaults

Gatan deal is off because of UK regulators: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/thermo-fisher-scientific-and-roper-technologies-announce-termination-of-gatan-acquisition-300864264.html

I remember seeing this around 2011-2012. Didn't think about it since, but saw someone mention it today on Twitter. Wow, down from $20 to $1.

Bloomberg interview with Tobias: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2019-06-06/the-risks-rewards-of-deep-value-investing-video

-45% YTD, -80% TTM. It just keeps going. At some point it'll go up 20% and the bulls will claim victory.

People were saying the same thing 5 years ago, and what happened is that it's WFC that got multiple compression and wasn't as good a business as it seemed, and V that got multiple expansion (partly because the power of its business model became clearer in the meantime). Can't say what will happen in the future, but good businesses that stay good tend to keep fairly high multiples because the higher ROIC deserves it, to the great sadness of traditional value investors who can't see paying past 10-15x for anything even if it's the best business in the world (meanwhile Buffett is ready to pay nice multiples for things like PCP or even coke back in the day, and Ted and Todd are buying Visa and Mastercard).

TSS second acquisition in Finland: https://www.totalspecificsolutions.com/about-us/transaction-updates?tid=44 h/t @pearnick

Perhaps you did not mean this as a punt, so I withdraw my characterization. 8) I was adding to what you wrote, agreeing with you, I wasn't replying to your question. I see how it could be ambiguous the was I quoted both of you. My meaning with that line was kind of: It's really difficult to predict how things will change. some things that you'd have thought were obviously going away are still here, and things that seemed durable are gone. But if this game was easy, everybody would do it...

The same banks that blew up and were bailed out all around the world 10 years ago? You can predict them 30 years forward with "a high degree of confidence"? Yes, you can easily predict there will always be a bank that gathers deposits and lends money in 30 years. Your point about blow ups is flawed because it assumes business model includes the derivatives / investment banking side and we had a once in 100 year crisis. I don't know if the favorable features of the payments industry and Visa's business model will continue that far away. It certainly could. I can also predict there will be popsicle stands in 30 years; I thought the prediction was about what would happen to specific businesses, metrics relevant to whether they'll stay good businesses or not, not about the mere existence of the business model in general. If banks wipe out their equity again in the next 20 years, the fact that they still exist will be meagre consolation. And I'm not the one who claimed the need for 30 year predictions. I can't predict 30 years ahead, I can only predict the present and work from there.

Please tell me a single business where you know the outlook for 30 years with high degree of confidence. banks Both you and Liberty are just punting: you are not naming a single business and you are not providing outlook. Taking banks: in 30 years there will be at least 2-3 financial crises. If you pick a single bank that exists now, it might be bankrupt in 30 years. How am I punting? I never claimed to be able to predict 30 years ahead with a high level of confidence.

The same banks that blew up and were bailed out all around the world 10 years ago? You can predict them 30 years forward with "a high degree of confidence"?

Thank you for sharing, nickenumbers

Please tell me a single business where you know the outlook for 30 years with high degree of confidence. Fax machines and paper cheques are still around... Things tend to change both faster and slower than people expect. The best way to predict whether Visa and Mastercard are at risk of being disrupted, is, IMO, whether they keep moving fast and adapting to the times, and whether they create a price umbrella under which new entrants can come in. At 15 bps, there's no space, and so far they've made a lot of the right moves (Visa has been turning its rails into a platform with bidirectional APIs that have allowed many other companies to build on top of it, strengthening its moat).

https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/06/google-to-acquire-analytics-startup-looker-for-2-6-billion/

That's a strange way to think about all this, and I don't think it really elucidates much.

Apples and oranges. Comparing free email and trillions in worldwide credit/debit transactions is like comparing a chain of dollar stores and running a bunch of airlines. The stakes and regulations and complexity are very different.

Seems to be working all right for him. I think if he knew how to make the same returns without constantly turning on a dime, he'd do it, but his talent is mostly reacting quickly to things before the market understands them.

I don’t think it’s simple or other, it would have been done already. However, now, we have a bunch of very savvy and well capitalized tech tech companies which have already established their own network effects and know a lot about their customers. This is not something that existed 10 years ago.. I any case, the discussion has been quite helpful, for me at least. Even for big tech it's not that simple. It's a question of focus. Visa has 15,000 employees and MasterCard has 13,400 employees, and all they think about is this. Facebook and Google have 87 other priorities and some big other distractions. Google Wallet hasn't exactly taken over the world, and while Apple Pay has done better, even that is built on existing rails. If they had to get acceptance for every point-of-sale from scratch and do the fraud detection and auditing from scratch and deal with every problem that comes up, etc, I doubt they'd have gotten anywhere. Even the upcoming Apple Card that "reinvents" the credit card is on existing rails. Amazon has been better at entering new industries, but even that might be a tough nut to crack for them. 15bps doesn't leave a lot of margin umbrella to try to do better at a lower cost, and since most costs of such a network are fixed (hence the crazy operating leverage), they'd lose money forever before they got to critical mass, if they ever got there.

Like most industries that operate in the shadows, most people who aren't familiar with them assume that they must be fairly trivial to operate, replicate, or modify. Oh, the power grid? Yeah, I'm sure we can make massive changes to it in a few years.. Oh, the financial plumbing of the whole world? Just a bunch of databases, right?

disagree. agency relations (eg client/lawyer, doctor/patient) are built on trust. peer relations (seller/buyer) are built on distrust, which renders negotiating transparency more important. I'm not talking at the nation state level. I'm talking at the corporate level, with suppliers and partners and such.

https://news.microsoft.com/2019/06/05/microsoft-and-oracle-to-interconnect-microsoft-azure-and-oracle-cloud/ Msft partnering with Oracle on some cloud stuff