Related post: Wise and the business of cross-border transfers: part 1 I concluded part 1 describing how, by looping unit cost advantages back into price, Wise scaled to become a leading player in cross-border payments. From that starting point, it launched several other notable products. The most significant of these is Wise Account, which allows […]
Every year, consumers the world over move ~£2tn across borders, with roughly 2/3s of that funneled through a labyrinthine network of banks. A typical cross-border bank transaction might look something like this: Amber, a US resident with a checking account at PNC, places an order to send Rupees to her mother’s account at Seylan Bank […]
(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 […]
Related posts: Building materials: part 1 Building 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, […]
Related posts: Building materials: part 1 Building 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 […]
Related post: Building materials: Part 1 In 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 […]
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 […]