Two quick notes: we like reading and book lists, but this post by Farnam Street Blog is taking it into the obsession realm – unless one is really trying to build up his or hers anti-library. On Netflix: CEO Reed Hastings has some people confused with his comparisons of NFLX to Bank of America and the Oakland A’s.
Much noise has been generated by MidAmerican’s purchase of First Solar’s $2 billion Topaz solar energy project. Yes, MidAmerican is Berkshire’s utility/ energy subsidiary and this sizable acquisition has certainly been cleared by Warren Buffett. That does not mean that “Buffett is buying/ betting on solar” as a category. It is Berkshire taking advantage of an opportunity.
In another building block in the “Banking: Global Mess” series, the World Bank says in a report released yesterday that the Latin American financial systems still seem sound, but there are a few yellow flags. The embedded 3-min video interview (inside) is a nice summary of findings.
We highlight three articles about old truths and new business models. First the truth about economic models, according to the Scientific American magazine; second an old and huge sector disrupted by tiny start-ups; and third an entirely new business model that is becoming very relevant.
Today we have both a big, weekend-reading type article and a smaller one. The small one is a summary of Warren Buffett’s impressions about Japan, which he visited in another trip to an Iscar (IMC) plant abroad. The larger one is a New Yorker profile on Peter Thiel, the “dystopian utopian” VC/ hedge fund investor who founded Paypal and was the first outside investor in Facebook. No easy takeaways but he remains one of the most provocative thinkers in our realm.
Share buybacks have an “aura” of shareholder-friendliness. When done right, it’s a very efficient way of rewarding long-term shareholders and reaffirming management’s confidence in the company’s future prospects, usually after the shares have gone down. However, companies can get it wrong and sometimes very much so. Teased by an article, we discuss a few ways things can go wrong.
The IMF has recently issued a report on China’s financial system’s stability that has grabbed plenty of headlines, and yet today it seemed that there were pessimistic articles about banking all over the world. European and US banks are also the subject of stories that highlight risk, interconnectedness, poor balance sheets etc.. While the financials’ situation isn’t necessarily news, it is the trend that’s interesting. Inside we collect quite a few articles about the world’s financial system, all of them very from yesterday or today. Collectively they plant a bleak picture, one that seems very different from what we (still) observe in Brazil’s banking system. It’s very hard to separate signal from noise, especially so in the middle of a crisis, but it’s great food for thought.
We’ve read two stories yesterday that “clicked” together. One was Seth Godin’s post on media choices and how one must now deal with scarcity of attention. Another was a NYT story on the Disney deal with Youtube. Disney has incredible content, but they don’t have kids’ “ears” anymore – incredibly enough for people over 30, Youtube does. On the other hand, Disney brings Youtube credibility with advertisers and families (the latter worry their kids only go on Youtube to watch what they perceive as useless, mindless, purposeless videos). What can we do as long-term investors? Probably nothing, and that’s OK.
Brazil’s efforts to influence its Latin America neighbors are not always well-received. That by itself isn’t a problem, at least not beyond the stated and unstated strategies and goals behind such initiatives. Reaction will always occur as one group or another feels threatened/ left behind. However, it is important to keep an eye on the trend. Much has been said about Brazil having “lessons to teach” other LatAm countries, and we have been skeptical given increased government spending and intervention in the economy – alongside rising inflation. Brazil has done well, no doubt, but let’s keep our minds open to our own problems before we try to “export solutions”.
Always great to be able to catch up on reading, or almost, and here are a few articles that caught our attention – along with two book lists bound to make us fall behind in our reading again.
