Alpha Ideas

When Carl Icahn was a big investor in Apple, he wrote an annual letter to Tim Cook, its C.E.O., urging him to spend the company’s cash on buying back its own stock.

“There is nothing short term about my intentions here,” he wrote in the first letter, in October, 2013.

In October, 2014, he wrote that “Apple is one of the best investments we have ever seen from a risk reward perspective,” and that, while he was urging a share buyback, he was also eager “to preemptively diffuse any cynical criticism that you may encounter with respect to our request.”

In a letter of May, 2015, he said that Apple was “very much a long term growth story from our perspective.” The company represented “one of the greatest growth stories in corporate history, as well as one of the greatest opportunities ever for a company to invest in itself by repurchasing its shares.”

A year later, after the company had spent eighty-seven billion dollars buying back its stock, Icahn announced that he had sold most of his Apple shares, for an over-all profit of around two billion dollars.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and you’re starting to develop a business model.

-from New Yorker

The PSU lodged an insurance claim for an amount of Rs 34.40 lakh under ‘burglary and housebreaking policy’. The insurance firm rejected the claim saying theft did not come under the purview of the policy as there was no evidence to show someone had forcibly broken into the factory premises or threatened employees before making away with the goods. The bench dismissed the PSU’s petition.

Citing a 2004 SC judgment, Justice Rao said, “In the absence of violence or force, the insured cannot claim indemnification against the insurance company. The terms of the policy have to be construed as it is and we cannot add or subtract something. Howsoever liberally we may construe the policy, we cannot take liberalism to the extent of substituting the words which are not intended. “…in common parlance, the term ‘burglary’ would mean theft but it has to be preceded with force or violence. If the element of force or violence is not present, then the insured cannot claim compensation.”-from TOI