At core I am an old-fashioned value investor. Maybe a growth-orientated one - but the valuation has to make sense on fairly modest assumptions before I get excited.

I owned Facebook in the twenties. I could make the per-subscriber numbers work - and it was a mid-single digit times revenue and it seemed a fairly good bet that revenue would rise a lot and that margins on that revenue would be good. I am not averse to paying six times sales for businesses that are growing fast if the end-margins are likely to be good.

At the time the (incorrect) consensus was that Facebook would not manage the transition to mobile.

I sold my Facebook holding as it went up. Too early I regret - and at least in part unintentionally. I purchased the holding by writing put options perfectly happy to have the stock put to me. I sold by writing call options, modestly happy if it was called. I just had a buy-price and sell price in my head based on what I thought were sensible valuations and decided to pocket a little premium around them. [This is almost the only stock Bronte has ever acquired this way. We did it because the option premium was extraordinarily high and we figured the business was far less volatile than the stock.]

These days I am no longer so in tune with valuation.

Yesterday Facebook did an acquisition that makes no sense to me. I had previously - on Twitter - questioned the $900 million paid by Rakuten (in Japan) for Viber. But that price looks modest compared to the price paid for the (much better) WhatsApp. 

Obviously this makes sense to somebody - and indeed to people who are far cleverer than me. I don't want to second-guess Mark Zuckerberg who has done things and built things and added more value in a week than I might in a lifetime. 

But I would have laid a large bet that Facebook stock would finish down after that acquisition rather than up and I would have been wrong.

I used to be an unremitting bull on the market (a position that is deeply uncomfortable for someone whose skills and inclination are on the short side). I am not bullish now - and have positioned far closer to neutral than any time in Bronte's history.

But I am not comfortable with that position either. Clever people are doing things I don't understand and I am just feeling old and tired. 

John