Liberty

This deserves its own thread. Cool announcement yesterday: http://blueorigin.com/news/going-to-space-to-benefit-earth-full-event-replay http://blueorigin.com/blue-moon http://blueorigin.com/assets/blueorigin_bluemoon_ascent.jpg http://blueorigin.com/assets/blueorigin_bluemoon_payloads.png

Acquisition at Harris: https://uniphyhealth.com/harris-healthcare-acquires-uniphy-health/ h/t @pearnick

Checking in again on this one out of curiosity. Still down 70% from last year, 97% past 5 years. Doesn't look like its getting much leverage from improving price of oil.

What did you like most?

CGP Grey on a Tesla road trip:

"We've offered you a crappy price for your business in the past, but we're getting less cheap. Get back in contact and we'll make you a better offer!" Probably makes sense to do this. If they're anticipating having excess capital, it'd be better to deploy it at slightly lower rates than they've been getting in the past than to keep it as cash. It is also likely better than doing buybacks at the current valuation. They were not seeing a lot of larger transactions. The brokers employed by the sellers were likely not calling them because they weren't known for giving top dollars. They're trying to increase their coverage of what is sold to improve the chances that they'll get some once in a while. It's an experiment that will affect few transactions, from which they will learn where to go next. The hurdle probably went from the high 20s to still somewhere in the 20s (mid? low?), so not exactly going Softbank quite yet...

I'm not expert on accounting arcana, but I suspect that they're just following the rules on these types of weird transactions where you basically get paid to take a distressed asset off of the former owner's hands (which in the meantime will depress margins and FCF and uses up working capital, as well as not really count in the nominal amount of capital deployed, but I'll take real economic value creation over optics).

fiscal Q2: https://www.transdigm.com/investor-relations/news-releases/news-article/?myartid=2397456 http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9NzA2NTIxfENoaWxkSUQ9NDE5MTc0fFR5cGU9MQ==&t=1

https://redef.com/set/media-set-1530041317916 Matt Ball pieces on Disney.

Good stuff as usual by Matt Ball: https://redef.com/original/quality-is-a-distraction-if-it-exists-at-all-netflix-misunderstandings-pt-6 https://redef.com/original/netflix-is-resilient-because-its-rarely-competing-netflix-misunderstandings-pt-7

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/06/apple-buys-a-company-every-few-weeks-says-ceo-tim-cook.html

For those who want to listen to the audio, there's a podcast version here: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/berkshire-hathaway-2018-annual-shareholders-meeting/id1233777301

Hour-long interview with Josh Wolfe by RealVision:

I'm starting it, have heard good things about it. Just saw Prof Cunningham at the CSU AGM. He's on the board, and lead the Q&A questions on stage with two other shareholders.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-02/satya-nadella-remade-microsoft-as-world-s-most-valuable-company https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/02/microsoft-launches-a-drag-and-drop-machine-learning-tool-and-hosted-jupyter-notebooks/

So I'm going to Toronto tomorrow (May 1st). Plan is to meet whoever wants to come at C'Est What (address above), I'll aim to be there around 6-7 PM. Will post on Twitter when I'm more sure of the time (hard to estimate how long it'll take to do various thing in an unfamiliar city). Hopefully I see some of you there tomorrow!

What's the economic P/E, though? If you Bill Nygren's method from a past interview and update it, you get this:

Q1: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019Q1_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf?cache=8ac2b86

That's an aptly named location for a member of this forum.

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/breaking-amazons-digital-freight-brokerage-platform-goes-live

Welcome to the forum!

Getting closer to the AGM (May 2). Like the past couple of years, I'm planning on having drinks with whoever shows up the night before (May 1st). Very likely to be at the 'C'est What' pub again (I don't know any other pubs in Toronto, to be honest). More details to come.. https://goo.gl/maps/jSM4XtVu2tLAiciR6

I saw it mentioned on twitter yesterday and added it to my list. Thanks for sharing your opinion on it.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/25/walmart-unveils-an-a-i-powered-store-of-the-future-now-open-to-the-public/

In today's episode of Gruber's podcast, he mention around 45 mins in that he spoke to some people who were working on Air Power (the Qi chargin mat that could have multiple devices in any location), and that they were working on it long before they acquired that company, and that he heard that most of the problems they had with it showed up when they tried to move to production (from pre-production prototypes). Not that it matters that much in the grand scheme of things (I'd rather they cancel something that doesn't quite work out as planned like this than ship it to reviewers the way samsung sent it's terrible $2k folding phone that broke for most people in a day), but it's still interesting to have more of the backstory.