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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

In what seems like ages ago now Fintwit darling, Burford Capital, was flamboyantly attacked by Muddy Waters. The prominent short seller claimed that Burford “misleadingly boosted its IRR numbers”, rendering ROIC and IRR metrics “meaningless”; misled investors through the “egregiousness of its fair value accounting”; and was “arguably insolvent”, raising outside capital as a matter […]

I spent several weeks speaking with 70 automotive paint protection film (PPF) installers to better understand the industry and the impact that OEM-direct installations of PPF could have on Xpel. I’d like to share what I learned. But before doing that, let’s bring everyone up to speed.Most of Xpel’s revenue comes from selling a product […]

Hi everyone, I embedded audio of me reading this post. Let me know what you think. If enough people are into this feature, I will include it in future write-ups. These recordings won’t be word-for-word translations (I’ll summarize here and there) but pretty close. You’ll notice that I confuse “Vertafore” and “Vertafone” several times in […]

AMETEK was birthed out of failure. After its predecessor, Manhattan Electric Supply Company, a supplier of electrical switches, telegraph sets, alarm clocks, flashlights and other novel gizmos of the late 19th/early 20th century, declared bankruptcy in 1930, months after the market crash, shareholders created a new company from the ashes. The newly formed American Machine […]