MBI and I recorded an episode of Never Sell recently (Big Tech Earnings) (Spotify, Apple, YouTube, RSS feed) Having just written up Watsco, I thought I’d offer some thoughts on revisit Pool Corp. given the similarities between the two businesses. Pool Corp is a distributor of pool supplies and equipment. It sources ~200k SKUs from 2k+ suppliers and sells them to […]
It may not be entirely fair to think of Wise as “cross-border transfers for yuppies”, but that’s just where my mind goes. After all, the company grew out of a scheme devised by two white collar professionals – Taavet Hinrikus, a Skype employee in Estonia, and Kristo Kaarmann, a Deloitte consultant in the UK. Taavet […]
One way to carve up the investment universe is between standardized products, like index funds, that run on fixed rules and scale effortlessly, and bespoke ones, like distressed credit or esoteric ABS, where the risk is niche and full of weird wrinkles. In the world of property & casualty insurance, “admitted” lines are more like […]
While investors continue to be enthralled by AI and all things Tech, I can’t help but think there are easier opportunities being overlooked in boring industries that don’t make the business news or saturate our Twitter feeds. So you’ll have noticed that in recent months, I’ve been looking beyond the white hot center, concentrating my […]
I’m sure you’re sick of these annual newsletter recaps by now, so I’ll keep mine brief. In a recent Acquired interview, Michael Lewis articulated what I’ve long appreciated about working for yourself in a creative field – that you don’t need to constantly optimize for the very last dollar. The marketplace may be rewarding certain […]
If I were to tell you about a company whose main job is to move freight from one place to another and whose primary assets consist of trucks and trailers, you’d probably think I was describing a capital intensive business with low entry barriers subject to brutal, commodified competition. And I could be! There is […]
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Avantor is like Thermo Fisher in some respects. It distributes lab products and sells bioprocessing tools. It, too, was built through transformative M&A. It even has an analog to PPI – the kaizen-based continuous improvement framework Thermo Fisher adopted from Danaher – in the form of the Avantor Business System. But sadly, these surface similarities […]
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Hi everyone – on Monday, I’ll share some thoughts on Avantor in my final post of the year. Immense gratitude for all your support. As rewarding as 2025 was from both a business and content perspective, I think 2026 is going to be even better. The research pipeline is in great shape. Writeups on LTL […]