JayGatsby

Thanks

Impressive nonetheless!

This speech is great as well: I read Tren Griffin's Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor. I enjoyed it as an intro but some of the Amazon reviews criticize it for not having anything new. Any ability to share #4 or #5? Maybe I'll make it a Munger month as well!

What's the exchange with IBKR? I do most of my international through Fidelity, which does a 1% fee as well. Overall been happy with both Schwab and Fidelity, although Fidelity has better access to small cap internationals. Both charge that damn 1%.

Are the metals recoverable from old batteries at the end of the battery's life or are they used up in one way or another?

+1. I've always been impressed with the breadth of what Icahn invests in. Reportedly made ~$2B profit buying NFLX at the bottom. Thiel's book, Zero to One, is a really interesting look at what he looks at. Basically he looks for micro-monopolies that have a strategy for replicating that micro-monopoly, rather than the typical "it's a massive industry and if we get 1% we'll all make a fortune".

Seems like the people I've known who have been successful with this sort of thing have a deep interest in the underlying product (baseball, stamps, guns, art, etc). For those people who have an information advantage, opportunities present themselves. If your information advantage is declining (old boxes), it seems like you may do better with that value in something else. Personally i've never met a younger person who cares about stamps. Seems like stamps had sentimental value to a generation that communicated primarily via letter, particularly to those who served overseas and a stamp was the key to sending a message a message back to someone at home. Having said that, I've never really asked so maybe it's just never come up. Just my two cents. ;)

My wife has Project Fi and we love it. But you're wrong about the bolded. T-Mobile has had this for the last 5-10 years. Project Fi only has it because they MVNO on top of T-Mobile (and Sprint, but not for Intl coverage) I have T-Mobile for 17 years now... Interesting. I looked at TMUS just a few months ago but didn't pull the trigger. Hard to quantify their "don't make the customer hate us" strategy...

I was talking to someone about this same topic recently and they made a good point that technology has made it a lot easier to flake. You used to make plans and your choices were to either show up or not show up. If you didn't show up the person wouldn't know where you are. Now people can shoot a text an hour in advance and flake. Plans also tend to be a lot looser (I'm headed downtown, text me if you go there too), where outside of TV you used to not really be able to just randomly meet up with people without firm plans.

To play devil's advocate, what makes you convinced that Facebook isn't the Valeant of the internet? - Conversations regarding Facebook tend to drift to a cult of personality around Zuckerberg. How do they plan to generate a reasonable ROE from Whatsapp users? Zuckerberg. How does Oculus fit in? Zuckerberg! - Revenue growth seems to be driven primarily by channel stuffing (higher % of ads per page) and price increases (market driven based on ad success, to be fair). While user growth continues globally, user growth in areas that have high ARPU is fairly limited (Slides 3 & 12: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_presentations/FB-Q4'16-Earnings-Slides.pdf). On one of the calls recently they said they likely can't increase ad volume any further. - I'd be surprised if a material percentage of new accounts in the US aren't fake. I get an average of ~1 friend request per week that is blatantly fake (girl with lots of pictures from different places all added within the last hour). I'll report these as fake and Facebook doesn't seem to remove them (admittedly I don't usually check). - I'd also be surprised if daily minutes per daily active using isn't declining. This is a year old at this point but based on anecdotal evidence the decline has continued: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-sees-personal-sharing-decline-2016-4?r=US&IR=T&IR=T - Innovation is fairly limited that I see. People may point to livestreaming but I haven't seen any evidence this is catching on. I don't see anything to indicate that Facebook is becoming the "content hub" of the internet as they'd hoped. Instagram continues to innovate a bit and seems to be stealing market share from SNAP but Stories don't generate any revenue at this point. - Their strong Q4 was aided by a massive amount of political ads. A lot of people I've talked to are burned out on Facebook because of the election and the post-election. Possible these people just need a break. Curious for your perspective. I'm short but would like to understand the bull case better. Google I agree is definitely an incredible company and never ceases to amaze me with their new products/services. I recently signed up for Project Fi (their phone service). The international coverage is what I've always wanted but no other company was either willing or capable to do (data nearly anywhere in the world is $10/GB, free text messaging, calls are more reasonable and I think you can use data calls on Wifi).

As a newer member, what is the event? I guess I've been asleep at the wheel! Is it limited to Fairfax shareholders?

Would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in 3G. It's a very good overview of their style, with some but not a lot of history of the group. It draws heavily from their published letters as well as the letters of some of the companies they admired and followed closely (GE, Goldman, Toyota). One of the criticisms of the book (on Amazon) is that it doesn't provide a lot of depth on some of their methods. This is true, but the book is meant to be an introduction and the bibliography provides a good reading list if you wanted to learn more about any particular topic. It's also only $6 on kindle and is a pretty quick read: https://www.amazon.com/Way-introduction-management-important-capitalism-ebook/dp/B00MKKWZME/ (not sure if there's an affiliate link to support CoBF?) I read part of Dream Big (the other book on 3G) and didn't find it nearly as informative. I'll finish it in time, but it is much more of a history of the group. The two together would be good for people who aren't very familiar with 3G.

Thanks for these. Good thread. Some good blogs on here that I read and look forward to checking out the others. While not directly investment related, these two are good for thinking about decision making, psychology, life, etc: https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/ (author is a user here) http://www.bakadesuyo.com/blog/ Also for stocks I subscribe to http://www.stockspinoffs.com/ . Good coverage of spinoffs, mainly in the US.

Anyone have access to Capital Account? Going for $325+ on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_2_15?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=capital+account&sprefix=capital+account%2Caps%2C244&crid=1GB2L7256KWPY

Link here: https://valueandopportunity.com/2017/02/11/some-links-052017/

Not to sidetrack the conversation, but what's the incremental cost to list on the Nasdaq? Reason I ask is a company I'm invested in (TWOC) is traded OTC but may be getting close to the point where they're able to move to Nasdaq and get some more exposure ($56M market cap currently).

Have a conceptual question on ASC 805. Anyone here have pretty good knowledge of that and able to answer a question via private message? Not time consuming, just a few sentence scenario and a yes/no type question. Thanks

Not sure that's 100% fair. They made their original fortune building a Brazilian investment bank from basically nothing to the biggest in Brazil. BK is growing. You're right that they seem to recently gravitate to businesses with steady revenue and outsized overhead.

Jim Rogers taught a class at Columbia with a similar strategy... set yourself in the shoes of somebody in a different period and understand an investment from a forward looking view, not a backward one. If done right it's a great strategy for learning (and one I don't do enough since it's difficult).

Sounds like these guys are very innovative. I've never heard of hard charging or ruthless private equity guys in the past who are solely focused on making partners money... They actually do have a pretty different style. They give young, relatively unproven managers a lot of power and the ability to make large amounts of money if successful. Theory being that the young managers have more drive than the old managers and they'll apply that with the right incentives. It may sound like commonsense, but most private equity firms do the exact opposite. There was a good businessweek article on the guys running Burger King... made the point that basically no other company of that size has a management team that young. Have this book on kindle and slowly working my way through it. Interesting guys, but not the greatest written book.

If you're a frequent consumer consider buying a gift card as well: https://www.raise.com/buy-mcdonald-s-gift-cards . Currently 13% off... adds up over time. (if you send me a pm I'll send a referral code and donate the $5 back to CoBF)

If there were feasible every small private dentist, veterinarian, accounting firm, etc. in the country would be part of a 'franchise'; practioners would build up their businesses over their working lives, sell to the 'franchise' on retirement, work 1-2 years to transition their client over, then leave. Yet it doesn't happen - implying that personal brand businesses are just not suited to this kind of structure. SD I was specifically curious about businesses with significant tangible assets (real estate or other).

What is the financing market like on small private companies (less than $1M of EBITDA)? I have watched these from afar but haven't taken the jump. Is it feasible to do a small LBO of these companies without a personal guarantee if the company has tangible assets and has a history of financial performance? I see listings which advertise 75% financing but I think that is through an SBA loan with a personal guarantee? There's a few real estate dependent businesses (car wash for example) and specialized equipment rental businesses in my area at what appear on the listing to be attractive valuations. May be covered in that podcast which I'm listening to now. Thanks for posting!

I find seekingalpha good for following current/watch investments. You set up your portfolio of names and they have a feed of news related to those companies. News being company press releases, seekingalpha editor comments (reposts of relevant news, which are helpful), and seekingalpha user articles (mostly junk, but sometimes good depending on author). They also have a calendar of earnings dates for those companies (actual dates once the company has announced dates. They don't do estimated dates). You can have it email you digests too i think but I check it enough (probably too much) that I don't have that setup.

Investment performance of the companies they mentioned isn't very good. All mid 2013 - Present: Apollo Education : -45% Amerco: +115% Morgans Hotel: -72% (Looks like their activist campaign failed (very limited research here.. only based on the share movements and a Dec 2016 buyout by SBE)) BazaarVoice: -46% Lindsay Corp: -2%