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 […]

A while back, I tweeted: [Whoops!  My share count was off when I tweeted this….should have been more like ~11x mfcfe.] In case it wasn’t clear from my tweet, the process by which Wizz has gotten there largely mirrors the Ryanair playbook, which I described in an earlier post: “Michael O’Leary, profanity-oozing ass-kicker and Ryanair […]

The fawning adoration that investors heap on certain capital allocators can be a little gross, but Mark Leonard, CEO of Constellation Software(1), deserves most of it.  His letters are a master class in lucid and honest communications and a welcome reprieve from the enervating, mealy-mouthed crap that we hear from lesser CEOs all year long.  […]

In the course of researching Tyler, I came across this synopsis of the company’s distant history.  If the laudatory retrospectives that we all know and love – the ones that start with outcomes and back into causes – were written in the late ’80s, Tyler Corp. might have been featured as an unexampled success story, […]

I’ve followed Zillow on and off since its merger with Trulia and find myself more confused by it with every passing quarter.  There is always so much going on at once and management has failed to concretely explain how its disparate assets all fit together.  What Zillow has effectively demonstrated is that lead gen is […]

[I am currently writing up a somewhat brief companion piece on Zillow.  It will be posted next week.]   Like healthcare and education, real estate is a massive market plagued by inefficiency, protected by incumbent interests, and resistant to reform.  If you’ve ever bought or sold a home, then you have no doubt been struck by […]

Earlier this month, Acxiom completed the sale of Acxiom Marketing Services (AMS), a segment that accounted for ~3/4 of its revenue and nearly all its segment profits, to Interpublic Group for $2.3bn.  AMS partly helps manage the marketing operations of big brands – designing and maintaining customer databases, running custom performance analytics, aggregating third-party data(1) […]

If you were looking at Chegg in 2014, you’d have found plenty of valid reasons to pass on, or even short, its stock.  The company was plowing more than all its operating cash flow into textbooks and renting them out to students at increasingly discounted prices as it braved intensifying competition from Barnes and Noble, […]