Liberty

(Sorry if it was posted before)

https://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy2017125

If you guys are looking for more good test pilot/astronaut stuff, I recommend "The Right Stuff" by Tom Wolfe and "A Man on the Moon" by Andrew Chaikin.

They were never there in the first place. Ubiquitous cameras showed that. Leaks from even the NSA showed you can't keep secrets like that (Trump would've tweeted u by now). Same for yetis and others creatures (loch ness?). Doesn't mean there can't be life elsewhere in the universe, though.

Yeah, I like his conversational/stream-of-consciousness style combined with his "let's reason about this from first principles" approach. One of my fave financial bloggers.

http://brooklyninvestor.blogspot.ca/2017/11/is-buffett-bearish.html

I'm enjoying this Michael Mauboussin presentation (from 2014), thought others here might as well.

Good luck avoiding discussions about politics at the dinner table. ;) Cheers!

Probably a liquidity discount. LILA and LILAK inverted for long periods too. Yesterday FWONK traded 1.44m shares and FWONA traded 188k shares.

Video presentation of Tarasoff (55 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m18fG6FQpE Found via Ian Cassel.

Once in a while, anyone should look to see if their theories have any value. Hussman has been wrong for so long, I wonder why anyone listens to him. Even if what he predicts does end up happening someday, someone would be richer by not having listened to him at all than by having listened to him. Opportunity costs are real. The problem with perma bears in a world where stock markets are up way more than they are down on average over the long-term is that it leads to something like this: "This is a fake market, a house of card, it'll crash any day now, look at these charts and metrics, better stay cash and/or short" *market doubles or triples over many years* "Any day now the big one will come!" *Market falls 20%* "This is the big one! The 50%+ drop, great depression, here we come! I'll just wait a bit more before deploying capital..." *Market bounces back* "This is a dead cat bounce, it'll start falling again any day now" *Market keeps growing for a few more years before another 10% correction* "The big one is coming any day now! We're still too high on the CAPE, look at the gold ratio, these debt levels... Someday I'll get to invest that cash at great depression levels!" *years pass* Meanwhile, someone who started with the same capital and just rode it all out in great companies generating good returns is probably 10x richer than the permabear.

Thanks, sarganaga. I can't comment on the actual business, as I just looked at the financials (I try to at least have a quick look when I see a name I haven't seen before), so I know there's a large part of the picture that I'm missing. If it's indeed stable and they can get decent returns on capital because of a moat, then there might be a delevering story. Not knowing the past history of the business, my next question would be how did they get in the current situation and why debt has gone up so much and returns haven't been that good for many years (a turnaround story too?), but I know that's another tangent and I'll move it to the company's thread if I want to know more. Thanks.

Finally re-stumbled on the chart I was referring to somewhere else in this thread: https://steinbuch.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-growth-reality-versus-projections-of-the-international-energy-agency/

Thanks. Have you calculated how big a shock the company could absorb before the debt becomes unmanageable? ie. Some unforeseen delay/downturn/bad luck cuts EBITDA by 10/20/30%? I'm wondering because just looking at the past few years, it looks like op. income is volatile by more than 40% over short periods. By unmanageable I don't necessarily mean it kills it. These companies tend to sell assets in those situations... But that still impairs the value, especially since it's hard to get good prices on distressed sales. Like burning the furniture for heat...

Just had a glance out of curiosity. Are you not worried by the debt-to-EBITDA levels?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeZ3fKSWmcs It's refreshing to hear someone who doesn't stand for BS... "People mistook leverage for genius." "Incentives trump ethics all the time." “Everybody in this chain was paid on volume, nobody was paid on quality.” "Hard to argue with someone who thinks he’s god because making more money every year." (found via John Huber on Twitter)

And here's the transcript: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/16/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcript-liberty-media-chairman-john-malone-speaks-with-cnbcs-david-faber-today.html

I think he supports some of his policies. I do too (lower corporate taxes I have nothing against, though the way to get there is a different question...). I agreed with some George W. Bush policies too. Pretty different from being a supporter of either guys.. Malone won't go on TV and say negative things about almost anyone, not his style. Go to Barry Diller for that: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2017/07/12/barry-diller-on-trump-hopefully-will-be-over-soon.html

Mexico doesn't even have 1GW of solar power yet afaik (around 180MW last year). Storage isn't an issue at this point, that's what I said. On very sunny days when these solar farms will produce most, A/C use will be at its highest and the grid will easily absorb all that power and some other peaker plants just won't turn on, reducing pollution. Now in many years when solar is 20-30% of the grid, then yes, storage will be an issue. By then storage costs will also have come down a lot (including V2G and demand-response, as EVs come in by millions), and the grids everywhere will be a lot smarter and more interconnected so that if Mexico has a surplus of solar power it might send some up or down to neighboring countries and vice versa, as well as store some in things like grid-scale batteries, pumped hydro, etc. If it all happens overnight it's a problem, but a gradual ramp up, as any infrastructure change is, is fine. Of course it's a challenge, but building out the internet was also a challenge, but it was done because it was worth it. Building some transmission lines to then get almost free and clean power for decades is also worth it. In one specific spot renewables are very variables, but over large areas, and across categories like wind (onshore and offshore) & solar, things are a lot more predictable. It's like how hundreds of stocks might be a lot more volatile individually than an index that smooths things out. That's why more interconnected grids will happen, because while it might be cloudy somewhere, somewhere else it might be very sunny and windy and excess power can be moved across regions.

No need to store anything until much further penetration. The grid will easily absorb all that.

https://electrek.co/2017/11/16/cheapest-electricity-on-the-planet-mexican-solar-power/

More videos (I hate when they split up interviews like this..): Update: Full video here: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2017/11/16/watch-cnbcs-full-interview-with-liberty-medias-john-malone.html

Malone on CNBC today: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2017/11/16/john-malone-its-all-about-scale-in-media.html?play=1

CSU.to Diversified across hundreds of niche businesses (in multiple industries) that tend to dominate their niches and be very sticky with customers (highly recurring revenue, negative working capital), as well as diversified geographically. Asset-light (the assets mostly go home at night + IP, so highly variable costs), little debt (mostly long-term and non-callable), proven track record of capital allocation, in a downturn they will be able to deploy more capital at higher rates (they're already getting ROICs in the 30s) and maybe snag some bigger businesses. When things go well it should do fine, as it has in recent years, and when things go south, it should create lots of value through M&A or by taking share from less well-funded mom & pops operations. Even in very tough economic circumstances it'd be extremely hard to kill (the last thing its customers will cut is the software that runs their back-end operations and allow them to operate and make money -- that software is typically a small fraction of their total costs anyway). Worse case scenario is they can't deploy capital through M&A at a decent rate, in which case the multiple would compress a few turns and they'd start returning excess capital through special dividends and invest more into organic growth initiatives. Hardly a catastrophic risk.