Liberty

Thanks. Ackman is always interesting. I'll check it out as soon as I have some free time.

No matter how great it turns out to be? I find that statement a bit weird. Like saying that Buffett should have stayed in the hedge fund business no matter how great Berkshire turned out. (of course, Buffett's transition was cleaner and clearer to his investors, which makes a difference) But I think it does matter how things turn out over a sufficiently long period of time. Short term, anything can happen, though.

Ha! ;D

It's great, worth buying for future reference.

I wonder though if you were to open a spa in New York or Los Angeles, how much would customers pay to bathe in a bathtub full of cash? I dunno. Cash is dirty. But maybe if it was brand new bills (supplied by Fortress Paper?)...

I ended 2011 flat, but so far for 2012 I'm up about 15%. But I wasn't one of those who thought it was the end of the world. I've been deploying my cash pretty much as I got it since many companies I like have stayed quite below IV. I'm basically all in, and quite comfortable with what I own - I wouldn't mind if the stock market closed for 5 years.

Babytel.ca also does 911 address location. I don't think something like Skype does it, though.

My home phone is with babytel.ca via a dry-loop DSL connection (with Teksavvy.com).

The scariest thing about RIM's future, IMO, is the culture inside the company. I have no first hand experience with it, but what I hear is not very good. Tech companies live and die based on how many A players they can get and retain (and those in turn make the place attractive for other A players that can then be hired - it either becomes a virtuous cycle or a vicious one, it rarely entirely stabilizes one way or the other). What I heard is that RIM is losing many talented people and they are becoming a second tier choice for talented engineers and designers (might go there if they can't get into Apple/Google/Facebook/Amazon/etc). This isn't farming; top level A players don't just do 3x the amount of work that B players do, they do things that no quantity of B and C players put together can do. You can't fake technical genius or taste. So if I was a RIM shareholders, I'd try to get as much information as possible about the state of the culture and recruitment at RIM. But that's not easy, because most non-technical people cannot distinguish between A and B players (B players can be great at what they do, come from the best schools with the highest grades, etc.. maybe the X factor is just having a totally unbalanced life and spending every waking moment obsessing over the quality of what you're working on to the point where you would almost do it for no pay? Maybe it's the only way to truly reach the top, kind of like how Buffett was smart to begin with but he also focused his whole life on investing)

Feeney is an inspiration, both as a philanthropist and as a businessman. We have a thread about the book here: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/books/the-billionaire-who-wasn't-conor-o'clery/

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-25/apple-investors-await-dividend-gusher-as-cook-ponders-cash-hoard.html

Thanks!

Thanks for posting this. I've been quite interested in MA and V for a while, but I haven't yet gotten to understand them well enough to get an IV estimate.

Are they just pulling number out of a hat?

That's also been Microsoft's strategy from the very start. It's certainly not a bad business.

All right, I've now finished it. Great book, surprisingly inspiring and emotional in part, but also contains lots of ideas that can be applied to investing.

I won't go down this path again, I know it leads nowhere. If you want my opinions about all this, re-read the pages and pages that I've written in the past. Cheers.

Old habits die hard, I guess. I think my first browser was Netscape Navigator 3.04, and before that I was on local BBSes with my U.S. Robotics 24000/9600 bauds modem.. Heh I guess the importance of the quality of the results depend on what you search. I spend my days doing research for a living, and then some more when I'm not working, so I guess I'm what you would call a power user.

And I'm sure that was their thinking with the nice images. Perosnally, when searching I care more about content than form, though. I find that a bit strange. With auto-fill, dedicated search fields, homepage settings that can be set to whatever you want, and the smart URL bars of all modern browsers, who ever actually types a search engine's address manually anymore? You could save yourself that trouble very easily.

It's not the only variable here, so of course you won't see a direct relationship between the two. But that fact that Yahoo gets none of it while both Google and Bing get some is notable. And as I explained in the past, Bing is a smaller player but has the biggest browser. Google is a much bigger player with a smaller browser (growing, but still relatively small). The impact of a big browser on a small player will be relatively much bigger than of a small browser on a big player. Simple bayesian math, afaict. Another interesting to note is that I think Google's market share isn't climbing with Chrome because if you are savvy enough to install a third party browser, chances are you are already a google user. Google's main benefits from Chrome as pushing forward the development of the web (they've had great success there, with everyone pushing javascript performance to match Chrome's V8 engine, allowing all kinds of new web-apps to exist) and keeping it as open and standards' compliant as possible. Same reason why they have helped Mozilla/Firefox for a long time.

Just started reading the book (saw the movie a few months ago). Definitely all about identifying value and separating price from value. Good to revisit these themes over and over again...

Yahoo search is powered by Bing, btw. Yahoo's share of search is probably more valuable, though, because people actually have to go there and want to search -- it's not a typo-catching default in browsers and such.

Hey, After reading about how people like Bill Ackman and David Einhorn noticed all kinds of changes in 10K and 10Qs (respectively in MBIA and Allied Capital), some of which were really subtle (a sentence somewhere was remove, a word or two were changed to alter meaning, etc), I got to wondering if I should start routinely running a program to compare the delta between the PDFs and see where the changes are and what stayed the same. Does anyone here do that systematically? What's your system? What software do you use? (Mac software, preferably) Thanks!

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/hunter-harrison-ready-to-take-the-reins-at-cp/article2298096/ The Ackman vs CP sage continues.

Unless I'm missing something, your link is exactly the same as mine.