by Travis Johnson, Stock Gumshoe | May 12, 2023 3:56 pm
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Travis- you said you would give us an update on Omaha trip on BOC & Markel. I see the BOC update but am more concerned with Markel. What about Gaynor & news on Markel? Your thoughts & opinions are very important to us readers. Thank you !
Haven’t written up my Markel notes yet… will get to it soon. No big changes to my opinion, but I want to do some different valuation work and see where that leads.
Thanks Travis. Looking forward to your Markel valuation. Can you tell
us readers which value investing seminar you attended the Friday before the Berkshire meeting in Omaha. I’ve attended several different value meetings in Omaha & am curious which you picked to attend. Thank you
I went to the Value Investor Conference at UN Omaha’s business school.
Let me see. If I remember correctly a company named Level Three was going to connect the Midwest with fiber. I think their emphasis was connecting cities and businesses in the cities. Level 3 is now Lumen Technologies. and is trading around $2.50 down from $14 a year and a half ago. Lumen recently spun off it’s legacy consumer business, presumably to help their bottom line. As I recall Berkshire Hathway bailed level 3 out many years ago. I have fond memories of the bail out as I bought some Level 3 bonds at 30 cents on the dollar when I heard that Buffet was going to bail them out. I got paid at maturity. Maybe it’s apples and oranges, but I hope Boston Omaha knows more about making money with fibre than Level 3. Also, I notiice that the cell phone companies are getting into the “last mile” broadband business too.
It’s true, fiber brought a lot of bankruptcies with the first buildouts. BOC has a rational model, from my perspective, but it could certainly fail. The fixed wireless and satellite offerings are so much worse than fiber that they seem to make sense only for the genuinely remote areas, but certainly there’s reason to be wary of whether fiber ends up being the best solution ten years from now. I like the homebuilders projects more than the rural broadband extensions, but they’ve mostly convinced me on the rural stuff, too.