Liberty

Thanks Paul! Thanks Parsad! I missed you guys :)

Well, it looks like quite the reversal so far. Everything on my watchlist is green (except for LRE). BRK is up the most, unsurprisingly.

Japan down 3.3%, futures down. Should be another interesting day tomorrow...

A good indicator of market valuation would be the number of posts per day on this forum. I bet there's an inversely proportional relationship between the number of posts and number of bargains :)

I never thought I'd see BRK.B selling for $67. wow. Edit: Wow, BRK.B closed at 66.66. Nice number \m/

I'm not panicking, just wishing I had come into this with 100% cash :P But at least the businesses that I own stock in are mostly without debt and have lots of cash to do buybacks or buy underpriced assets, so in the long-term it should turn out well... Just have to be patient.

Here's another indicator that there's panic in the air: Google Finance loads more slowly than usual. If the hordes of people checking their stocks is large enough to slow down Google's servers, we know we've got the average person sweating...

Mr. Market is totally nuts today..

They're probably closed on Fridays, though. IIRC, the weekend over there is Friday and Saturday. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek_and_weekend#Israel

Uncharted territory, here we go. Not that the future is ever as certain as many think...

I definitely wouldn't buy the market as a whole. But there are many individual companies that are dirt cheap right now..

Might not have had much cash coming into this, but I did the next best thing: sold some stuff that was close to fair value for other things that were very undervalued according to my analysis. It's crazy how some small caps are dropping so much on very low volume. Guess this happens with illiquid stocks when there's just no buyers...

I have to say, it's beautiful to see the members of this board go all DEFCON 9 and spring into action when opportunity knocks. This warroom is probably very different from the average "trader" one ;D

Real bloodbath today. Makes me wish I had more dry powder. Oh well..

That's 25M visitors, not users. Google+ is an open site, so you don't have to be a member to view content unlike FB which does not let you in unless you sign up. This does not mean Google plus has 25M accounts. Actually, they're probably at over 25M unique users by now since the invites haven't been closed. Last solid number I saw was 18M users and that was more than a week ago. I think the journalist just uses the wrong terms, in this case. They often do that.

Wow, it's almost like a parody!

I have an uncle in Longueuil, been there a few times. Malheureusement, il ne semble pas y avoir beaucoup de gens qui s'intéressent à l'investissement au Québec... I see so many people mismanaging their money and making what Buffett would call unforced mistakes.

Liberty are you from Montreal? BeerBaron Nope. Closer to Ottawa. Are you in MTL? I was born in Laval...

The transition to a more mainstream user base will be interesting to watch, and it could go either way. But I think GOOG did the right thing with the launch. If they had opened it to everybody from the start, including brands, twitter feed auto-republishes, etc, it would have been a huge mess of spam and short updates that nobody cares about. Instead, they seeded it with the 20k+ google employees, who then invited people they knew and journalist/important bloggers/known influencers. This got them tons of coverage, and what everybody saw when they first joined was more thoughtful posts and lots of comments (rather than short "today I went to the dentist. lol" updates). This is very important, because getting culture right matters, and it's very hard to change once it's set. On twitter I have 7k followers, and I follow back a fair number. But my feed is mostly just people linking to somewhere, with lots of spam, and it's hard to reach just a sub-set of that 7k. On facebook, my problem is that half of my "friends" are people from work (Anglophones), another part is family and friends (Francophone), and another part is people I vaguely knew at one time. There's nothing I want (or can) post to all these people, and it's a major pain to set up groups and have others reciprocate with groups, etc, so I locked my wall and deleted all my updates. I only use FB as an address book for private messages now. On G+, every time I log on there are interesting posts and stories because I follow a bunch of interesting people (like on twitter, except they can write more than 140 characters and I can easily see what others responded to the original post),and if I want to post something it's dead easy to make sure only people I want to write to will get it. Seems like a big improvement.

You can. It's just not a fundamental part of the architecture like in G+, it's not as easy to use, and it's not used as much by actual users.

I'm on it and think it's very well made. And because of the asymmetric follow (like Twitter), it doesn't matter as much if your friends aren't all on it at first. You can follow a bunch of interesting people (I follow many Google engineers, journalists, scientists, etc) and still have a very full stream, and over time more real-world acquaintances will surely join (they can't all be early adopters who get in invite-only, right?). One interesting thing I've noticed is that on G+ the average public post will get many more comments and +1s than on Facebook, despite the smaller overall size of the audience, and it will also be more elaborate (more text, more pictures). This points to a high level of engagement, which is a good sign. I also see a lot of people do public hangouts (video chats with up to 10 people) and comment on how great they are.

Names are funny. If you become successful, almost whatever you pick (within reason) will end up sounding good. People can't help making associations like that...

Growing faster than the others was almost a given (barring a catastrophic launch) because they have a bigger existing user base, BUT, it is still very impressive for an invite-only social network that hasn't even launched publicly yet and that still has un-announced features. That rate of growth won't hold for very long, but all these users are sure to create a lot of value for GOOG even if they don't catch up to facebook any time soon.. One thing is for sure, they definitely have gotten many million dollars worth of free publicity over the past month, as G+ has been discussed everywhere repeatedly.

I've never been a big fan of L either. It's on my watchlist, but I kind of consider it to have a similar model to BRK, FFH, LUK, and MKL, and I'd probably buy any one of those before L, even if L tends to almost always be cheaper (at least compared to book value). I don't like the assets are much, and I don't like the management as much as the others, so it's an easy choice...

Well said.