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 […]
Many investors have come to know of Teledyne through Warren Buffett, who in John Train’s 1980 classic The Money Masters, declared the company’s co-founder, Henry Singleton, as having “the best operating and capital deployment record in American business”. Buffett’s seal of approval spawned a vast collection of fawning articles and books about the unconventional engineer, […]
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(all $ are Canadian unless otherwise specified) I first wrote up GFL nearly 2 years ago. To recap: garbage collection and disposal is one of the few businesses that you can be sure will still be around in 20 years. Its recurring necessity gives rise to predictable and stable cash flows. Residential collections are locked […]
Online dating has easy parallels to other online social experiences that if taken too seriously can lead to dubious outcomes. A dating app is like social media in that there are lots of people broadcasting themselves, making connections, and seeking validation. You might “like” a photo on Instagram as you might right-swipe on a photo […]
Each of the 3 major US consumer credit bureaus (CCBs) – Equifax, Experian, and Transunion – are an agglomeration of regional credit agencies, some dating back to the early 1800s. That a once fragmented industry consolidated into oligopoly is a natural consequence of the benefits that come from pooling data: a lender will go with […]
U-Haul is a weird company. It rents moving equipment and self-storage space but also sells annuities. It boasts a ubiquitous brand synonymous with do-it-yourself moving that until recently was buried beneath the non-descript banner of its parent company, Amerco. It runs the 4th largest self-storage operation in the US by square footage but is rarely […]