In honor of Father’s Day, Miller Value Investors father-son duo, Bill Miller III and Bill Miller IV, discuss cryptocurrencies and the stocks that are driving their funds’ returns.
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Q1 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc, Also read Lear Capital: Financial Products You Should Avoid?
Legendary Investor Bill Miller On His Favorite Stock Picks
Transcript
This Father’s Day being this Sunday we wanted to bring you a father son dynamo in honor of the occasion. And who better than Miller Value Partners Bill Miller the third and Bill Miller the fourth which I have to always remember it’s not Senior and Junior. It’s you. So who is the original. I mean we’re going way back. Well the more interesting question is when his younger brother was born I wanted to make him the fifth wife wouldn’t let me do that. That when I was with George Foreman kind of thing you know that’s true. Maybe it works for Joe anyway guys welcome. We love talking to you again. There’s a long list of stocks to discuss. So let me just plunge right into it. So Bill let’s start with Amazon just because that’s been such a winner for you over time. Every other segment we’re talking about how big can these companies get or are they going to get a trillion dollars should they buy media assets. And what would you like to see. Would it be bad for you if Amazon started to buy a lot more media assets. I don’t think Amazon is going to buy anything. And if it’s a media space because they already got their own production studio and one of the things that that they saw early on that netflix saw was that the media business was fragmented between content and distribution and with the Internet you can put those two things together. You can greenlight a project make it and distribute it globally which again can’t be done under special media that’s why AT&T bought Time Warner. Right.
And ironically now that the kind of the regulatory environment is OK with that type because Netflix and others have been so they’ve done it already. If you said no to this you probably have to go back and say well somehow they don’t work either. So you think Amazon can build this it sells in-house. Oh yeah they’re already doing it. I mean that’s part of the reason that they just raised prime by 20 bucks. It’s because so many of the people are signing on to prime video in the way Jeff thinks about prime. Let’s let’s give people a lot more benefits and then after we give them that a few years later we’ll raise the price. And do they have to make it as successful as Netflix and maybe this new Disney World with a combined Comcast Fox looks like they’re basically following the Netflix model and that they’re going to be making more and more original programming movies and shows each year. Part of the idea here is that what Jeff wants this to become is to get so much content that that part of the business effectively has fixed costs. So that then the next day the next project or something that comes along is all pure profit. So is Netflix a bad investment right now then. With all of these other players aggressively coming on the scene you know we would but Netflix on the old stock it sold in the 30s and it went to 300 then it went back to 55 we bought it there and we made 12 times our money.
And I think 18 months and sold it and shouldn’t have done that because it’s doubled this year right. Right but it’s very expensive. It’s very good but it’s very expensive. And so they’re just going to have to contend with you know the fact that other people are coming and willing to spend maybe I don’t know if it’s going to be a billion dollars a year but it’s going to be billions of these new competitors. What about Apple today they’re tying up with Oprah now so they did a cartoon deal yesterday.