rogermunibond

The Businessweek writer somehow feels obligated to call the Berkshire AGM the "Coachella for investors" rather than go with the tried and true Woodstock for capitalists. This makes both sad for such a ham-handed attempt to be current and old since it is probably true that a certain generation doesn't know what Woodstock is/was.

Forbes.com has turned into a veritable click farm kind of like Investopedia or Ehow. Really unreadable.

*puts down reading glasses and throws 10-K to the floor*

EPM Evolution Petroleum CEO Robert Herlin has basically turned $1 million in equity to a $400 million market cap company from a royalty interest in the Delhi oil field in Louisiana, in which they partnered with Denbury. Now they're shifting to building out an artificial lift technology that can help declining oil fields bounce back from 5-10 b/day to about 100 b/day. They plan to earn a share of the increased production or sell/install the lift equipment on service contracts.

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/04/08/buffett-will-steer-investors-to-airbnb-to-avoid-price-gouging-by-omaha-hotels/?mod=yahoo_hs Airbnb has a new fan: Warren Buffett. The billionaire investor is planning to mention the website at Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s upcoming annual shareholders’ meeting on May 3 as a low-cost alternative for shareholders who don’t want to pay the jacked-up rates that Omaha hotels charge while the gathering is taking place every year.

Great John Ruskin quote (or at least attributed to him). “It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.” I remember it whenever my wife goes to the dollar store to buy an inexpensive item that breaks before we get home. I used to try to be pathologically cheap emulating Buffett, but then realized I was too old and not good enough an investor to emulate him. Plus, my palate was infinitely more sophisticated. Now, I enjoy in moderation the finer things, but truly in moderation. Still will never fly first or business class.

Sighting in the Maldives would put it way off the Inmarsat ping location along the outer arc. But since we don't know if the pilot had made some special fueling request, does anyone know for sure if the plane could not have reached Somalia. Route over Maldives would but it toward trying to reach the Horn.

Hard commodities deflating. WSJ had a piece about ag commodities seeing 3.5% increases this year. Not as bad as 2008 but definitely soft commodity inflation pressures.

That's pretty awesome. I bow down to you, sir! :D

CNBC is a business right? They've always made the Buffett interviews hard to access since it serves them well to break it into 3 minute clips and play lots of ads before each segment. I'm sure a transcript will pop up in a few days from someone who DVRed the whole three hours.

His summation applies to legacy DVA. I think he has to take mgmt at its word that they can wring efficiencies and lower costs from HCP. It makes sense that the primary care part of medicine is going to lower costs overall for the healthcare system but its harder to realize this. Unlike dialysis, the patients who come into a primary care office are pretty wide open with the ailments and processes they may need at the time of the visit. For the most part, primary care medical offices have reduced cost by substituting nurse practitioner or physician asst time for MD time. This does not always improve outcomes though.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101453957 CNBC Ask Warren next monday. To be joined by Ted, Todd, and Traci.

Default within two years, no. I think they have too many options with selling off assets, privatizing Japan Post and other assets, taxation changes, legislating corporate reform, or even god forbid for them, immigration policy reform. As a last resort, Abe could always resort to nationalism. The guy uses Yasukuni deliberately as a way to distract his critics and to make his right wingers link economic reform to national strength.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/software-services/How-Asian-messaging-apps-LINE-and-WeChat-are-threatening-Google-Apple-and-Facebook/articleshow/30682063.cms

Some of the Asian chat apps like WeChat, KakaoTalk, and LINE are approaching the 250+ million active user threshold. Puts a real asterisk under Tencent valuation which owns WeChat.

WD 40 is kind of a crappy lubricant actually. I think people grab for it because of the convenience and mind share (nice moat), but I've gotten better use from silicone spray or machine oil.

I think PJM points the main problem. It's not so much the Japanese household sector that is saving (I think the latest 2012-2013 numbers show the household sector is reducing savings as the aging population has increased and the working population has decreased), but that the Japanese corporate sector has an extreme overabundance of saving. In this case the cash just sits on the balance sheet. Structural issues and governance problems in the corporate sector are the reason the transmission mechanism is broken. They aren't investing and they aren't sending it to shareholders.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-18/actavis-said-to-near-25-billion-deal-to-buy-forest-laboratories.html I can't believe that no one on this board has posted about this. Francis Chou bought Watson back in 2007 for around $27 per share. They've gone on a real tear since 2012. Acquired Actavis, Warner Chilcott, and now Forest Labs. In this space, VRX and ACT are the two stellar standouts. Hopefully ENDP can repeat as a pure imitator.

http://blog.mpettis.com/2013/11/will-debt-derail-abenomics/ Highly recommend Michael Pettis on this subject as well as China matters. Abenomics success creates problems with debt and interest servicing. Either cuts, new taxes, or asset sales would balance Tokyo's books. This is a medium term situation.

NVGS is a large mid size LPG carrier company that Wilbur Ross took out of the old Lehman. They are on a major fleet expansion. The idea is that petrochem liquids production is going to spike from NGLs in the wet gas plays as well as from increased refinery export of LPGs that are derived from the refining process. It's not cheap though.

dpetrescu - I followed NSR but not so much of late. There is a stickiness to these TLD registry contracts. NSR has bid on the .com TLD but has not been awarded. There is a tendency to favor the incumbent vendor in these things. NSR itself is dealing with a perceived slap on the wrist from its customers for the Number Portability database. The contract expires in 2015 and NSR submitted a bid that the vendors did not like. They returned it unopened. Some analysts are calling it a disaster whereas others are saying its procedural.

Can you explain this more? I've registered domain names with namecheap and godaddy, I don't think either used Verisign. Verisign operates the authoritative registry for .com and .net, so namecheap and godaddy have to go through Verisign. That's what I was wondering. In that case Verisign has an enviable position, a moat for sure! Verisign has this monopoly only through a contract with the Dept of Commerce and in their most recent contract there were limits placed on price increases for domain name registration. There's a similar company called Neustar. They've bid on the dot com registry contract in the past and hold various country TLDs and .biz registry. I think with all the various TLD registries you will see some very competitive bidding. Neustar runs the number portability database. Similarly, the telcoms aren't stupid and put in restrictions on how much price increase Neustar can pass on. So why there is a moat it's not permanent and the depth (pricing) is controlled by someone other than the company (govt).

http://www.canadianbusiness.com/companies-and-industries/forward-fast/ Pretty amazing transformation. Despite the painful staff cuts, still bears notice that there are some huge inefficiencies lurking in some large cap stocks.

These aren't the droids you're looking for. Too bad Achuthan ain't no Jedi.

uccmal - I have no dog in this fight. But my guess is that since we transport most if not all of our refined products like gasoline and diesel by truck and do it relatively safely, it is really just a matter of having the right safeguards and practices in place to make rail accidents with oil and NG products infrequent. PS adding comments about politics and the Keystone pipeline simply make my question meter go off. Maybe that was cardboard and not you.