JAllen

Google "Horizon Kinetics owner operator" for the answer to your first question, and probably some more.

The price for a primary product halved. Think if Coke or Burger Kind did that. The business would be worth a lot less. The price of the stock didn't move nearly as much as oil did last December, if I recall correctly.

His investment strategy was basically how he wrote about in You Can Be A Stock Market Genius. Those were highlights from his OPM career. And yes, you can't find early Gotham Capital 13Fs. Why, I don't know. I have looked extensively; it makes no sense. Perhaps he requested them to be taken down or something. No idea. I believe the actual fund was called Gotham Capital, but there may have been another entity, similar to RBS partners for Eddie Lampert. I've written a couple of case studies about late 90s investments of his here: http://jallencapitalmanagement.com/writing.html Also, if I recall correctly Sears was at 5% of revenue with JCP at 50%, so not 1/5, but 1/10. Correction: 6% versus 56%, so 9.3x higher. That was the oft-hated relative valuation plus EV/revenues. Many investors don't approve of these approaches. I will, however, side with the investor with the best audited track record ever. One additional stock he owned at the tail end of his OPM career, since that is the period you asked about, is the one he was chairman of, Alliant.

Except for the past few years, refineries are horrible businesses. I invite you to look at the longer-than-four year history. Without a sustained cost advantage, which it clearly seems like doesn't exist (though it did for a couple of years when WTI was $10-$20 less than Brent), it's a purely commodity business, but actually seems worse than most commodity businesses.

Sun's out in SF now. Rain over!

Regarding notifications: do you mean an email or phone push notification alert? What exactly do you mean by notify?

Awesome. Let me know how you like it and if there are any features you'd like to see that aren't there. We're in the process of working on our feature roadmap as we're finishing up on a couple of large feature releases here in the next week or so.

I built StockBase.com for that. You get all news in one easy to create feed, including all of a company's SEC filings. We also deliver press releases from the major PR services. It's free. Just go to stockbase.com Click sign-up You will be taken to the portfolio page after you create an account Add your favorite stocks

Also, because non-conventional wells are so prolific and gush out a greater proportion of the total oil in the first year, even if we did have a supply imbalance, the price would be pushed down a few months later with greater supply. Before, with conventional wells, it might've taken a couple of years to really add much supply.

Do you think the U.S. will drill itself into an oil glut? With prices < $60 for a multi-year period?

StockBase.com, a stock news site I built that delivers SEC filings and news from dozens of sources into one easy to create feed, found a couple of articles I don't see here: Q&A: Leo Carroll, Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance http://www.businessinsurance.com/article/20141028/NEWS06/141029828 and Buffett sold a business! Berkshire Hathaway sells marketing unit http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSL1N0SN36A20141028?irpc=932

If software could do anything to help you invest, what would it do?

If you were buying the entire company which would you prefer? I definitely prefer the one without debt. You eventually have to pay back the debt - and this is usually in less than ten years so it really matters for valuation purposes.

I strongly disagree that bandwidth requirements are stagnating or will stagnate. There ARE consumer apps that are consuming exponentially more bandwidth-storage (you can't really have one without the other). GoPro just released a 4K camera. This is a prime example of an app that will result in much greater bandwidth consumption. While 4K TVs and monitors are mostly still expensive, they will decline in price just like every other increased screen resolution has. http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/bandwidth-explosion-as-internet-use-soars-can-bottlenecks-be-averted/ Voice calls just started going to LTE = more bandwidth. Still 4 billion people are not using the Internet at all. But they will come online over the next two days. This will equal massively more bandwidth. And if we weren't already pushing up against bandwidth supply, indicating growing bandwidth, I could potentially agree. We will always demand faster/more bandwidth. It still takes me an hour to download movies with Comcast. I want more and faster bandwidth. I would pay serious money to have Gigabit speeds, but alas, they aren't even available. I can't wait for that. Until we don't have to ever wait for downloads we will want more and faster bandwidth. Check out the bandwidth chart here: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/default,date,2008-12-02.aspx I often have to wait for Netflix or Amazon Instant Video to load my video. Bandwidth isn't even close to slowing down. There are still tens of millions of Americans on DSL getting 1-2 Mbps. When/if they get true broadband or better yet Gigabit speeds, will create another tailwind for more bandwidth consumption.

+100 Starting a company has been able to fill up all of my extra time and then some. Checking stock quotes too often, fixed. Not worrying about day to day developments, fixed. Ditto, especially when the markets are quite high, but there are just enough cheap stocks still available to be mostly fully invested, or there are ones I want to hold for 10+ years that aren't classically cheap but will grow like weeds for decades.