I sometimes flatter myself by thinking this blog offers interesting insights when in fact I know a key reason that many of you subscribe is to save time:You could spend dozens of hours talking to management and combing through annual reports, proxies, and transcripts, or I can just do it and share what I’ve learned. […]
LILAK, the widow maker. For many years, a core holding of Generic Value Partners. This stock has been pitched many times, each new pitch underpinned by sensible-sounding premises that are by now so familiar that their recitation seems almost tiresome: cable moat, Malone, consolidation, forced selling, insider buying, secular growth. And yet, since it began […]
When someone says they own shares of X, what they typically mean is that a broker owns shares of X on their behalf in “street name”[1]. But wait, no, the broker doesn’t really own the shares either. Shares are held and legally owned by Cede & Co., the nominee of the Depository Trust Company (DTC)[2], […]
Most auto lenders won’t finance cash strapped buyers with deeply tainted or limited credit histories. Credit Acceptance Corp, founded in 1972 by Chairman and 11% owner Donald Foss[1] to collect loans originated by his own dealerships, steps into the breach with an unorthodox lending scheme that goes like this: the used car dealer originates a […]
It used to be that a chip engineer would design an integrated circuit by hand drawing a few dozen pages of schematics using standard templates, the resulting patterns X-ACTO knifed out of plastic film. But with transistor density doubling every 18 months, this manual process couldn’t scale and was eventually replaced with a technology called […]
In the US, tower companies have enjoyed a 20-year growth tailwind that shows no signs of fatigue. The population of wireless subscribers has grown at a high single digit rate, from fewer than 130mn in 2001 to 440mn in 2018. In turn, network standards have evolved – from 2G (voice, SMS; 2000-2006) to 3G (mobile […]
Related posts[MELI – MercadoLibre] Digging the Moat (Or Is It A Grave?): Part 1[MELI – MercadoLibre] Digging the Moat (Or Is It A Grave?): Part 2In 2016, six years and several pro-competition pieces of regulation after the Central Bank of Brazil and antitrust authorities first pried the merchant acquiring market open to new competition, Cielo, […]
Related posts:[Wix – Wix.com] Scaling profitably (November 2017)[GDDY – GoDaddy; VRSN – Verisign; EIGI – Endurance International] Value Migration in Web Services (May 2018)When I started looking into Wix more than two years ago, its capabilities seemed far beyond those of Weebly, Square Space, and several other competing site builders I was researching at the […]