Liberty

So you work in HFT, eh?

http://manualofideas.com/members/pmr201004_allan_mecham_interview.pdf

1 year after the book, good piece by Michael Lewis: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/03/michael-lewis-flash-boys-one-year-later

Thanks for posting.

I wish we had cards with huge signup bonuses in Canada, but afaik we don't (at least not in cash -- I don't care about points or miles).

3 month exclusive on Apple TV 8)

FWIW, it's from The Economist.

I was reading something interesting on that the other day:

I don't think it's being updated anymore, though.

I think this is new. Sorry if it has already been posted: http://www.sequoiafund.com/Reports/Annual/Ann14.pdf

Because I think cable companies are going to turn into utilities. Dumb pipes. Consumers are not going to pay a lot for dumb pipes. And regulators won't let them extract wealth from content providers. For example, John Malone used to use TCI monopoly power to extract equity stakes in various television networks like BET. But how are you supposed to do that now when regulators are pushing concepts like Net Neutrality. The internet is what is driving this. On top of this I also think John Malone made the cable industry seem much better than it really is. He pushed analysts to focus on cash flow which makes little sense for cable companies where depreciation is a huge cost. He somehow got acquirers to buy his cable networks for much more than they were worth. And he exhorted a lot of upside from emerging cable networks when TCI was the only game in town. All those games are going to be much harder in the current environment that they were in the past. Maybe I'm wrong but I feel that a lot of people are essentially extrapolating what John Malone did in the past to the present. I know I was. Thus they look at someone like Drahi and all they see is John Malone. And I think that is a mistake. Thanks for explaining your point of view. Saying that cable won't be as profitable because of net neutrality and the "dump pipe" effect implies that it is a good business right now because they are non-neutral on internet content or whatever. I don't think that's the case. Europe has a friendlier regulatory environment to cable than the US, mostly because there's more competition and regulators have seen cable companies invest heavily in taking speeds up, but even in the US where the FCC recently went a lot farther than many even expected, they are not touching rates. If they had capped rates and how much pricing cable could take, maybe that would be a problem, but I doubt that regulators want to risk making a big piece of the US internet infrastructure uncompetitive. Cable companies aren't making much right now by charging some companies more for faster lanes or whatever, so if they are barred from doing that at all, it won't change much. As for dumb pipes, I don't know. What's the opposite of a dumb pipe in this scenario? I think video might lose a bit of ground, though the switch to all-digital is allowing cable to compete with satellite (the huge growth that nationwide DBS operators had took place in a certain context that is changing) and frees up a lot of bandwidth for broadband without new capex on that side, and broadband is making up for losses in video and can potentially be very profitable over the cycle because most of the revenue doesn't go to content producers the way most of the video bill does. Also, the ability to do triple and quad play reduces churn a lot, which is one of the main things for profitability; competitors mostly can't offer 3-4 play. And OTT video might compete with the video bundle, but it makes broadband more attractive. Depreciation is a real cost, which is why free cash flow, which takes into account maintenance capex, is the right measure. But when Malone argued for the switch to EBITDA, it made a lot more sense than GAAP earnings (which is what people were looking at for cable companies at the time), because optimizing for GAAP meant paying a lot of taxes and growing a lot slower through acquisition at a time when consolidation made sense. Separating the underlying economics from the capital structure for analysis isn't a bad idea, because it's a lot easier to change the capital structure than the underlying business. You just have to make sure you aren't fooling yourself about what you're looking at.

Why do you think it will be worth a lot less than it is now?

That doesn't make it a more significant comparison ;)

http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.ca/2015/03/berkshire-hathaway-annual-report-2014.html

Rrrright.... So not counting 2009, which Buffett's recent purchases have been "obvious"? Or perhaps you can tell which of your recent purchases have been "obvious"? :) Obvious to him doesn't mean obvious to everyone. Otherwise, there wouldn't be much opportunity to take advantage ;)

Speaking of Eric, has anyone seen him lately?

Wasn't Buffett recently on Bloomberg also? Does anyone have a link? Or did I misread that somewhere..?

As an aside and because it ties in with the theme of unconventionality, today there are many people who play and live stream video games for a living. The most popular site (I think) for watching these streams is Twitch.tv. Some of the most popular streamers draw tens of thousands of viewers every day. The streamers make money from people who subscribe to their channel, from donations and from ads. Some of them make a very good living. The most popular ones probably also get paid by game studios looking for a channel to promote their newly launched games. Twitch takes a cut of subscription revenues and also makes money of the ads. Amazon bought Twitch last year for about $1 billion. To me it is amazing how a site like this pops out of the ground and becomes an alternative to television for many (young) people looking for entertainment. It has allowed some entertaining gamers to make a career out of their hobby. In South-Korea, pro-gamers can be stars. The Starcraft scene, for example, has many teams with coaches who all live together and train all day long, with matches being shown on TV and streamed online. This type of thing will only keep getting more popular over time. Starcraft is so 2000's. LoL/Dota2 are where it's at. They are more popular than SC/SC2 for sure, though I never saw the appeal myself. I was into the korean SC2 scene for a while, but I stopped following it a little while ago.

Is that chart showing a whole 12 months? The financial media keeps getting more long-term oriented.

As an aside and because it ties in with the theme of unconventionality, today there are many people who play and live stream video games for a living. The most popular site (I think) for watching these streams is Twitch.tv. Some of the most popular streamers draw tens of thousands of viewers every day. The streamers make money from people who subscribe to their channel, from donations and from ads. Some of them make a very good living. The most popular ones probably also get paid by game studios looking for a channel to promote their newly launched games. Twitch takes a cut of subscription revenues and also makes money of the ads. Amazon bought Twitch last year for about $1 billion. To me it is amazing how a site like this pops out of the ground and becomes an alternative to television for many (young) people looking for entertainment. It has allowed some entertaining gamers to make a career out of their hobby. In South-Korea, pro-gamers can be stars. The Starcraft scene, for example, has many teams with coaches who all live together and train all day long, with matches being shown on TV and streamed online. This type of thing will only keep getting more popular over time.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-04/spacex-profitable-as-musk-pulls-in-nasa-contracts-google-cash

I know it's the right approach, but I haven't had the discipline to do that yet. I hope to be able to improve on that front, because looking at prices more often than necessary uses a lot of mental energy to little effect.

I never had the time to see what you wrote, and I'm here a lot... I wish I had seen it.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-04/oil-at-95-a-barrel-discovered-in-sec-rules-on-reserves