(taking a break from building products after this. Up next: a 2-parter on Wise)In part 3a, I provided an overview of pre-fabricated trusses, namely the value they offer homebuilders over traditional stick building and what’s involved in the transition from Phase 1 manufacturing (automated saws and lasers) to Phase 2 (robotic systems). You’ll want to […]
Related posts:Building materials: part 1Building materials: part 2a (LPX, JHX)Building materials: part 2b (TREX, AZEK)In Part 1 of this series, I described the steps by which an ocean of building materials are titrated out to end users. Below is a stylized illustration of the value chain from the perspective of BlueLinx, a two-step distributor, who […]
Related posts:Building materials: part 1Building materials: part 2a (LPX, JHX)Next month, I’ll conclude this series with a post (or two) on Builder’s FirstSource and Atlas Engineered Products. I actually meant to publish on those companies today, but a discussion of branded manufacturers felt incomplete without a dissection of Trex.Trex’s origin dates back to 1988, when […]
Related post: Building materials: Part 1In the 1967 film The Graduate, a young Dustin Hoffman is pulled aside by a friend of his parents, who offers the restless protagonist a simple piece of advice: “one word: plastics”. This versatile material had by then seeped into every crevice of American industry and was pitched as a […]
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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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