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Author Archives: scuttleblurb

thoughts on Guidewire, Wizz Air, and Upwork

Today I want to talk about 3 stocks I own that have gotten smashed this year: Guidewire (-48%), Wizz Air (-66%), and Upwork (-60%). Guidewire (GWRE) I’ve written about Guidewire before (here and here). To recap: with 40% of policies are still processed on mainframes, the P&C insurance industry is long overdue for an upgrade. […]

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[OKTA, W] back to reality

A stock provokes different reactions depending on how much it is down. When the stock of a once-lauded company sells off by 30%-40%, some investors see an attractive buying opportunity. But when it draws down 70%+, they no longer see a broken stock; they assume a broken company. Stock price drives narrative and I’m wondering […]

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IAC and MGM

There was a time, not too long ago, when an investor could treat IAC as a collection of binary early stage bets anchored by a few more mature and profitable entities. To most, IAC’s 12% passive minority stake in MGM, acquired near the COVID lows, was a weird one-off opportunistic gambit that could be marked […]

[URI] United Rentals

I. United Rentals rents equipment that customers use to build and maintain commercial structures – office buildings, refineries, bridges, roads, etc. This includes general construction equipment, things like bulldozers, backhoes and excavators that dig and move dirt and rubble on construction sites… Source: Equipmentshare aerial work platforms – scissor and boom lifts – that carry […]

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[TXN] Texas Instruments

I. I was first introduced to Texas Instruments by my dearest high school friend: Only years later would I learn that this wonder was but a thin product sliver within the TI complex, lumped in the stagnant “Other” catch-all segment that today accounts for just 5% of profits, with the other 95% coming from analog […]

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[UMG, WMG] record labels and the music industry: opportunities and challenges

I. Every few years, this graphic from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), reproduced by Matthew Ball, makes the rounds: It shows how a 15-year decline in recorded music revenue, precipitated by the cannibalistic effect of free downloads, is being reversed by the rise of subscription fees from digital streaming providers (DSPs). As I […]

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[ODFL] Old Dominion and less-than-truckload

Let’s say a parts supplier needs to get a full trailer of parts from its facility in Boston, MA to an OEM manufacturing plant in Los Angeles, CA. One way to do this would be to hire a full truckload (FTL or just TL) carrier, most of them owner-operators with 1 to 5 trucks in […]

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[CRM] Salesforce

Customers are the lifeblood a business and Salesforce touches just about every nook of software that has anything to do with finding, acquiring, and supporting them.  The grandaddy of SaaS, Salesforce pioneered a cloud-hosted subscription model that altered not only when software vendors realize revenue but how they create value. With one-and-done license sales replaced […]

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