Trading your own equity
findthemoat By definition, value oriented investment processes seek to derive a fundamental valuation of a company independent of its market valuation – end game being to identify a mismatch between the…
Financial Ratios as a System Input
Companies are essentially dynamic systems comprising of numerous moving components subject to a myriad of internal (e.g. management) and external (e.g. competition) forces. Financial statements in turn provide periodic snapshots…
Debundling the Newspaper
Mass circulation newspapers have borne the brunt of “disruption” by the internet. Clearly, they are trapped in a death spiral of declining circulation and revenues. Yet our local newspapers remain…
Dissecting Afterpay
Often we come across growth investment opportunities where (1) current valuation does not make sense under any traditional valuation frameworks, yet; (2) the company is clearly gaining traction in the…
Signals from Management Incentives
Economic incentives govern how participants behave and interact in a free market economic system. In context of company analysis, spending some time understanding incentives is one of the most rewarding…
The long and short of it
Why do most of my articles have a negative bias? Am I an evil short-seller conspiring against honest fair dinkum Aussie companies (and investors)? For what it’s worth, I will…
Investing in Trump
I’ve always been a fan of Peter Thiel. His musings on the ideology of competition (from his book Zero to One) is in my view a must read for anyone…
Lessons from the Temple & Webster IPO
One of my favourite books in recent years is What I learned losing a million dollars. The lesson is a very simple one and in short there’s a million ways…
Timing Matters
I re-watched this short TED presentation given by Bill Gross (not the fixed income guy, but the Venture Capitalist): Fitting neatly into this, Sequoia Capital’s biggest question for entrepreneurs is…
Micro disruptions
A key benefit of being the co-owner of an operating business is that sometimes you get very interesting investing insights from the coal face. The service my company provides is…