Category Archives: Quick Blurbs
[RYAAY – Ryanair] Anchor Post: [RYAAY – Ryanair] Low Cost Flywheel In mid-September last year, Ryanair announced that it would be cancelling 2% of its daily flights over the subsequent 6 weeks to free up aircraft and ensure punctual departure times for the other 98%. The press attributed this snafu, which inconvenienced 0.5% of Ryanair’s […]
[MCEM – Monarch Cement] On Sept. 20, Ash Grove announced that it agreed to be acquired by its largest customer, CRH plc, a global producer of building materials cement with €27bn in sales and €3bn in EBITDA across 31 countries. [For background on Ash Grove, see these previous posts]. “While the final amount of the […]
[FAST – Fastenal] Fastenal’s dense branch network affords scale advantages in distribution and service relative to Grainger, which has 2.5x Fastenal’s sales but only ~1/10 its branches and ~1/7 its field employees. Local market density is especially important because fasteners, which comprise nearly 40% of the company’s sales and a greater proportion of gross profits, is […]
[SPGI – S&P Global, MSCI – MSCI Inc.] New indices are created every day as passive strategies flourish and investors invent ways to track exposures across asset classes, geographies, sectors, and market caps. They are stamped with the imprimatur of a well-known provider, validated with fresh pools of capital, and before long, become indispensable benchmarks or […]
[TRIP – Tripadvisor] This stock had a few crazy trading days last week, opening down 8% before closing up 2.5% on the first full trading day post-earning and then rallying again days later, apparently sparked by rustlings of a take-out [TRIP’s chairman Greg Maffei stoked such hopes a few months ago]. At least opposes this hypothetical […]
[IBKR – Interactive Brokers] Partly due to an exceptionally low volatility trading environment, which has made it difficult to earn profits and which Petterfy says may continue “indefinitely,” the company is winding down its options market making operations. While the company will use the excess capital from market making to further support its brokerage operations, the […]
[WETF] After a killer few years from 2012-2015 on the success of its currency hedged Japanese (DXJ) and European equity funds (HEDJ), the stock lost 2/3s of its value from peak (Aug. 2015) to trough (early Nov. 2016) on heavy fund outflows before rallying 40% after the Trump election. WETF experienced a huge inflow in […]
[AXP] Mounting pressure on multiple fronts could collectively confound the Street’s expectations of low double digit EPS growth in 2018 and 2019. [As you’re likely aware, AXP primarily differs from Visa and Mastercard in that the company, in addition to running a payment processing network like its peers, also: 1) issues credit cards (i.e. makes loans) […]