Building materials: part 1: Many of the companies I discuss on this blog are not just good businesses, but obviously good. Visa, Moody’s, Sherwin-Williams, and Heico are wonderful and readers of this blog need not be further convinced of that fact. And notwithstanding regulatory or macro pressures that cast doubt on their prospects at certain points (interchange regulation in the case of Visa, the GFC ratings fiasco in the case of Moody’s) these companies are great for pretty much the same reaso
July 11, 2024, 12:39 p.m.
[MKTX] MarketAxess: I first wrote about fixed income trading platforms in 2020. To recap: this market has consolidated into an oligopoly, with MarketAxess, Tradeweb, and Bloomberg at its center. A number of other competitors have emerged over the years, some are still around (Trumid), others have failed (Bondcube, Algomi). But, for the most part, when an asset manager like PIMCO buys Treasuries or corporate bonds from a sell-side dealer or even another buyside participant without picking up the
June 19, 2024, 7:04 a.m.
quick Xpel update: Original post: [XPEL] Xpel (4/1/24) I bought some XPEL shares in March and wrote some nice things about them. Naturally, soon after, the company reported an awful quarter and the stock cratered. Management cited broad aftermarket weakness in the US – “it was not uncommon to see dealers who were down 10%, 15% in the first quarter from the prior year period” – and a horrendous 78% revenue collapse in China. Consolidated topline growth decelerated to 5%, down from 20% a year ago
May 28, 2024, 8:52 a.m.
[LW] Lamb Weston: Few menu items so singularly express our collective surrender to fat and carbs than the habitual ease with which we order french fries. We can’t get enough of them. At the McDonald’s I worked at one summer in high school, I recall heaving what seemed like an endless bounty of golden fries into the fry station knowing that a red box of them would find itself in the paper bag of pretty much every customer that placed an order.
May 28, 2024, 8:52 a.m.
Revisiting Burford: In what seems like ages ago now Fintwit darling, Burford Capital, was flamboyantly attacked by Muddy Waters. The prominent short seller claimed that Burford “misleadingly boosted its IRR numbers”, rendering ROIC and IRR metrics “meaningless”; misled investors through the “egregiousness of its fair value accounting”; and was “arguably insolvent”, raising outside capital as a matter of survival rather than growth. These charges followed on the heels of a Canaccord Genuity analy
May 2, 2024, 12:08 p.m.
