I apologize for going a couple of weeks without posting (hopefully, you noticed). I was traveling for work and well…playing Grand Theft Auto V. I was just doing market research on this e-sports thing. I promise.
The punditry is predicting that e-sports is going to be yuge (I prefer the old “professional gaming”, but I suppose that could be confused with Poker or other gambling). Speaking of e-sports, the podcast I wanted to flag for your attention this time is a related episode of Invest Like the Best
Host Patrick O’Shaugnessy could legitimately change the name of this show to “Podcast Like the Best”, because he is maybe the best interviewer in the space. In my opinion, he should be given a shot to take over Charlie Rose’s old gig on PBS/Bloomberg (if he’s interested and does not, unsolicited, show people his…bad joke; never mind).
The episode I am highlighting this time is with Niel Robertson. Robertson goes through his bio briefly in the interview, but he’s a tech entrepreneur and investor who sold his first company in 1999 for $280MM, at the ripe old age of 24.
They cover a number of topics; one of the real interesting ones to me was his projection/outlook for e-sports. It could be a big deal. The e-sport theme seems a bit kind of “glamour” right now, as I am hearing a lot about it and the stocks of the usual suspects have been on the move. As discussed, however, the demographics are great and the future looks bright. If even 40+ year old men with babies are playing GTA V, the future could be even grander than bubble vision can project. I think it is valuable to go ahead and start preparing the mind for potential opportunities in this space when consensus opinion temporarily sours or the NASDAQ gets gashed….whatever.
I am watching Take-Two (TTWO). Though they don’t own any of the current big e-sports games like CS:GO, League of Legends, or Overwatch, I like that they create their own I.P. (as opposed to lots of licensing like Electronic Arts). I also like their CEO.
He has his MBA and J.D. from Harvard and is an interesting dude. I guarantee he’s the only video game CEO who wrote a health and wellness book:
I think Icahn was long this stock at some point, but I don’t see him on the current shareholder list. I wouldn’t buy it now with all the froth, but as of publication the tech stocks are finally….maybe….getting slaughtered. Hopefully, some of that pain will spill into this area and we can look more closely at investing in some of the video game publishers.
Other Media Musings
Since were talking about the media space, there are a few other things to stick a pin in for potential further discussion. First, I finally watched The Last Jedi on Netflix. I am very seriously considering a levered short position in DIS and NFLX as a result. Seriously, almost as bad as Jar Jar Binks debut film. Oh.my.god.
Anyways, I have also been monitoring Viacom and CBS. I owned some CBS at one point after the spin. It was hated and had that fat cash flowing radio stuff back then, if memory serves. Sold it way to early but made a few bucks.
I wrote a little about the $VIAB and $CBS saga before: Weekly Media Pin – Double Entendre Edition. It seems like $VIAB has been horribly managed and $CBS has been well managed. So, of course, Shari Redstone reportedly wants to force the CBS management to take over $VIAB and retain many of the $VIAB executives.
Over the last couple of days, stories broke about allegations of Moonves behaving inappropriately in the workplace. Here’s a CNBC hit on the latest. We will see if there’s anything there but you know it definitely won’t strengthen his position (and could be the other side playing hardball).
Anyhow, this VIAB/CBS thing has a ton of “hair” on it, but the market knows all of that. There are some good properties/I.P. in the combined enterprise and the industry is consolidating, so we have pretty good/fresh comps (not to mention NFLX moneh). What if VIAB and CBS were back together and had 100% control of Star Trek?
Seems like a very valuable and timely property given all of the space billionaires capturing the world’s imagination (and potentially even actually taking some baby steps into the stars). I would go to a well done Star Trek Universe or similar theme park and many others probably would too (reportedly J.J. Abrams wanted to work more with the Star Trek properties, but because of the way the rights are spread across CBS and VIAB it was too big a PITA, so he moved on to Star Wars). The theme park would probably be a hell of a lot cheaper than a flight on Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic (and I could see some Klingons, Romulans, and Vulcans). Also, once DIS finishes killing of Star Wars, Trek will have no real competition.
The Future
Ok, I think that should do it for this little warm-up post. I am working on something (hopefully) more substantive about opportunity cost. Munger was really eloquent/perceptive about the topic in some of the early Berkshire meetings on the CNBC archive. So if you are getting annoyed with the sort of aggregation/commentary posts, hang in there.
By the way, did you buy any BRK when it was trading down around 1.3x book recently? I didn’t get any because I kept trying to lowball the offers (it was seeming pretty week there for a minute when the Barron’s article came out and a few other negative pieces…I maybe got a little greedy). Then, WEB comes off the top rope with “I have a ton of cash and I could use it you know” moving the stock up pretty smartly.
I still am going to look to buy some on any weakness. I have additional thoughts about the BRK “is too big to outperform” stuff. They are probably sort of obvious. Nonetheless, I will probably keep them to myself until I can get some stock in hand (or in street name).
My next post, however, will probably be my personal finance/ savings diary update. It is looking like I made a pretty strong comeback from the downdraft/gift of last update.
Thanks for reading!