colinwalt

Price action is definitely a bit nuts... fwiw, my TD account shows this "Discovery shares trading lower as the Benzinga newsdesk is hearing Morgan Stanley is working on a 16 million block trade in the stock, between $45 and $50 per share. Wells Fargo downgraded the stock from Overweight to Equal-Weight." I got unbelievably lucky on this one, sold my entire position pretty much at the top - it was a close call - almost didn't sell, as it still looked reasonably priced, but reckoned anything that goes up that fast can easily reverse course (unless its ticker is TSLA ;-)) - but never in my wildest dreams did I expect anything like this... Agree, it's looking cheapish again...

So theoretically, they can go out, borrow a bunch of money, do a massive buy-back, share price spikes and the counterparty has to pay them a small fortune ....

+1

https://renx.ca/dream-unlimited-continues-with-strategic-changes/

https://horizonkinetics.com/wp-content/uploads/Dream-Unlimited-One-Pager_March-2020.pdf Some key points... lightly edited... Our investment thesis for the company has always been rooted in the belief that the market value of its assets and its asset management business far exceeded what was reported on the company’s balance sheet. There have been a number of recent transactions that have highlighted for the first time that our thesis is not only correct, but that the valuation upside is potentially much greater than we had estimated. Dream Global REIT, a publicly-traded entity managed by Dream that was sold to Blackstone in September 2019. Dream earned C$379 million as its management incentive fee (relative to Dream’s market capitalization at the time of approximately C$850 million). Sold a large block of undeveloped land. The sale will generate proceeds of C$84 million. ... the land portfolio ... is held at original cost, yet, as this transaction shows, the current market value for even its undeveloped land can be multiples (in this case, a 190% increase when adjusted for the retained interest) of the original purchase price.

https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-smart-ridesharing-co-via-raises-400m-1001323953 "Via has developed a dynamic transportation system, which uses algorithms to adapt ridesharing routes to passenger needs. Minibuses or large shared taxis which use the company's technology collect passengers from pre-arranged stops. Passengers order the ride via an app and are told where to catch the vehicle from a nearby point. Routes are adjusted in real time according to passenger demand, traffic congestion and other factors. Via already operates in 100 cities worldwide using various business models. In some cities Via offers its technology as happens in Tel Aviv with the Bubble service - a collaboration between Dan and Israel's Ministry of Transport. In other cities, Via wins tenders to operate bus routes and in other locations Via acts as a private operator which leases vehicles and runs a network of smart minibuses. Profitability varies from model to model."

Liberty chooses new Virgin Media CFO as part of overhaul https://www.ft.com/content/c3d648ae-36c4-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3cba4 "Last summer, it established a new investment vehicle — Liberty Fibre — to co-invest in new fully fibre-optic networks beyond its existing UK cable network and go head-to-head with BT. But it has now changed tack and will focus on splitting off Virgin Media’s Project Lightning fibre and cable network into the new venture and establishing it as a wholesale operator that competes directly with BT’s Openreach, according to two people with direct knowledge of the revised plan. The name of the company has already been changed to Liberty Networks. But the plan, which would transfer assets, liabilities and debt linked to Project Lightning off Liberty Global’s balance sheet, is contingent on signing an exclusive wholesale deal with Sky. Top Liberty Global executives met in Florida last week to consider options for the UK business as well as other assets."

https://www.valueinvestorsclub.com/idea/LIBERTY_GLOBAL_PLC/5924588272 You can sign up as a guest and get access to the main report and many of the subsequent messages (some are hidden to guests)

That's true in many cases, however, even when true, other considerations can mean it's not that relevant - for example, I work in the IT industry and we use many many 3rd party software packages to support our software engineering teams - for example, software for tracking bugs is a major requirement and we, like many of our peers, use Jira by Atlassian... In theory, it's a commodity product, in practice we have dozens of teams and many times that number of projects that rely on it, with hundreds of configuration settings, customizations (workflows, filters, scripts), additional 3rd party apps that integrate with Jira providing additional features that we use, etc So even though there are dozens or hundreds of competing products out there, migrating to a new bug tracking system would be incredibly disruptive and costly - never mind the costs of trying to evaluate a competing product to see if it would be better... And believe me, some features of Jira are crap... but we live with it...

+1

Loeb presentation from May 2017 https://www.thirdpoint.com/portfolio-updates/portfolio-update-structuring-the-new-dowdupont-to-maximize-shareholder-value/

You mean of the Q4 call? https://seekingalpha.com/article/4251829-dundee-corp-ddejf-ceo-jonathan-goodman-q4-2018-results-earnings-call-transcript

4th Quarter Commentary January 2019 https://horizonkinetics.com/wp-content/uploads/Q4-2018-CVALUE-Review_Final.pdf

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/germany-gets-wrong-facebook-120602470.html ...why go after Facebook and not Google, the biggest fish of all? Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc., collects more data.

https://www.wired.com/story/germany-facebook-antitrust-ruling FACEBOOK’S MASSIVELY LUCRATIVE advertising model relies on tracking its one billion users—as well as the billions on WhatsApp and Instagram—across the web and smartphone apps, collecting data on which sites and apps they visit, where they shop, what they like... On Thursday, Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, the country’s antitrust regulator, ruled that Facebook was exploiting consumers by requiring them to agree to this kind of data collection in order to have an account, and has prohibited the practice going forward. “Facebook will no longer be allowed to force its users to agree to the practically unrestricted collection and assigning of non-Facebook data to their Facebook user accounts,” FCO president Andreas Mundt said in a statement announcing the decision. ...[until now] authorities haven’t done a good job of articulating why privacy is an antitrust issue. Here, the German regulator makes it clear. “The FCO’s theory is that Facebook’s dominance is what allows it to impose on users contractual terms that require them to allow Facebook to track them all over,” Khan says. “When there is a lack of competition, users accepting terms of service are often not truly consenting. The consent is a fiction.”