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Author Archives: scuttleblurb

[ICE, NDAQ, CME, CBOE] Exchange Operators: Fragmentation and New Points of Differentiation

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) Intercontinental’s multifaceted data and exchange platform began as an electricity marketplace, founded in 2000 by current CEO Jeffrey Sprecher with the backing of two investment banks and seeded by volume from energy majors Shell, Total, and British Petroleum (the collapse of Enron, the dominant electricity broker at the time, fortuitously diverted a […]

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[WDAY, CDAY, PAYC, ULTI, ORCL, SAP] Workday and Competitive Dynamics in HCM

Workday’s commanding position in enterprise HCM partly traces back to the design choices it made at the very start.  At the time, behind most enterprise software products were long bodies of code interacting with huge relational databases (columns and rows that store customer data) made up of thousands of tables.  The complexity of the application […]

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[COUP – Coupa Software] Savings-as-a-Service

You’re a middle manager at the branch office of a vast multinational.  And you need an armful of binders for your team.  Would it occur to you that a procurement manager at HQ has negotiated discounted rates through Office Max?  Even if it did, would you know how to order against that contract?  Do you […]

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[DWDP – DowDuPont] Rack & Break; Part 2

Two years after it was announced, the merger between Dow Chemical and DuPont finally close in August 2017, creating the conditions for a three-way spin-off that will take place sometime in the next 2-4 months.   This two-step merger/separation process was part of a grand design to drive scale among the businesses that these two companies […]

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[DWDP – DowDuPont] Rack & Break; Part 1

Part 1 is about the past.  It will give you an overview of what Dow and DuPont were before their 2017 merger.  Part 2 is about the future.  It gets into the profit potential and valuation of DWDP’s constituent parts. Salient experiences create salient stocks.  We zone out to Netflix on our iPhones, order more of […]

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[PROTCT – Protector Forsikring] Insider Buying; Reserve Hits; Low Cost vs. Cost Advantage

In the insurance industry, growth stories are to be treated with caution.  When I come across an underwriter, like Protector Fosikring, that is profitably growing premiums by 20%/year when its peer group is growing 1-4%/year, the first flag I raise is colored red, not green.  More likely than not, it is underpricing risk or accepting […]

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[ADS – Alliance Data Systems] Value Delayed, Value Revealed

In late November 2018, Alliance Data made an announcement long awaited by frustrated investors who, for years, endured missed growth expectations, operational fumbles, and a wilting valuation: “Alliance Data Systems Corporation (NYSE: ADS), a leading provider of data-driven marketing and loyalty solutions, today announced that it is exploring strategic alternatives for its Epsilon business, including its digital […]

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[ELLI – Ellie Mae] Market Opportunity, Competitive Threats, and Profitability

Ellie Mae is one of the few SMID-cap SaaS vendors I track whose stock has lost value over the last year, its growth narrative clouded by waning growth in mortgage originations. During the first half of 2018, a common view espoused by housing-related companies was that refinancing volumes had pretty much nowhere left to go […]