The diffuse nature of LiveRamp’s solution makes it hard to understand, so I thought I’d revisit a few points from my last LiveRamp post.  Here again is the marketer’s challenge: “When you walk into a Nordstrom and purchase a bow tie, the details of that transaction will be stored in a database alongside the phone […]

In this post, I offer thoughts on the Muddy Waters’ report.  Some of its claims were valid, some were innocuous, and a few seemed so obviously flawed as to be postulated in bad faith.  I was surprised by how readily the write-up was received as gospel truth.  Twitter was inundated with self-loathing from former Burford […]

Below the wings of a widebody commercial aircraft, you might find one of these: That right there is a Rolls Royce Trent 1000 jet engine.  The engine forces air through several compressors, squeezing the air to 1/50th of its original volume before directing it into a combustion chamber, where it is mixed with fuel and […]

For those of you who are intimately familiar with Burford (there seem to be a lot of you!), bear with me for a few paragraphs as I run through some preliminary concepts for newcomers.    Here is how Burford represents the returns it has generated on its portfolio: ROIC is simply the profits realized on […]

This is a two-parter. Part 1, today’s post, discusses the industry and Burford’s putative moat; Part 2, which will be posted a week from today, digs into Burford’s reported returns (including Cannacord Genuity’s skepticism thereof) and valuation. Law firms are staid institutions, averse to change and culturally ill-suited to bearing risk on high stakes IP […]

Google and Facebook have come to dominate online advertising in the US, claiming 60% of the industry’s revenue.  It’s easy to understand why.  With billions of users persistently logged into their properties, Facebook and Google have broader reach than just about anyone in the ad ecosystem and can ensure that impressions are served to as […]

In the Spring 2019 issue of Graham and Doddsville, John Hempton was quoted as saying: “In my case, [I usually want to own] a company that makes a widget that is a small yet important part of a bigger thing, has high switching costs, and has incrementally improved over time. I call this the trifecta. […]

You don’t recognize the value of an Everbridge system until things go bad – bad like a class 5 hurricane is closing in on your warehouse, or a tsunami descending upon your town, or an active shooter roaming the streets outside one of your coffee stores.  The headlines scuttling past you on the TV don’t […]