If I had to force rank industries most resistant to new technology, P&C insurance would be right up there with other notoriously innovation averse sectors like local government, life insurance, education, and healthcare. To some extent, this makes sense. Given the critical nature of their services, insurance carriers should be culturally biased towards minimizing downside […]
That TransDigm, a proprietary, sole-sourced parts provider with a business model narrowly designed to maximize shareholder value should, well, produce tons of shareholder value, is perhaps unsurprising. That HEICO, with an opposing value creation ethos, generates comparable returns on capital selling generic PMA parts, is less intuitive. A PMA part is an aircraft or engine […]
The diffuse nature of LiveRamp’s solution makes it hard to understand, so I thought I’d revisit a few points from my last LiveRamp post. Here again is the marketer’s challenge:“When you walk into a Nordstrom and purchase a bow tie, the details of that transaction will be stored in a database alongside the phone number, […]
In this post, I offer thoughts on the Muddy Waters’ report. Some of its claims were valid, some were innocuous, and a few seemed so obviously flawed as to be postulated in bad faith. I was surprised by how readily the write-up was received as gospel truth. Twitter was inundated with self-loathing from former Burford […]
Below the wings of a widebody commercial aircraft, you might find one of these:That right there is a Rolls Royce Trent 1000 jet engine. The engine forces air through several compressors, squeezing the air to 1/50th of its original volume before directing it into a combustion chamber, where it is mixed with fuel and passed […]
For those of you who are intimately familiar with Burford (there seem to be a lot of you!), bear with me for a few paragraphs as I run through some preliminary concepts for newcomers. Here is how Burford represents the returns it has generated on its portfolio:ROIC is simply the profits realized on concluded investments […]
This is a two-parter. Part 1, today’s post, discusses the industry and Burford’s putative moat; Part 2, which will be posted a week from today, digs into Burford’s reported returns (including Cannacord Genuity’s skepticism thereof) and valuation.Law firms are staid institutions, averse to change and culturally ill-suited to bearing risk on high stakes IP and […]
Google and Facebook have come to dominate online advertising in the US, claiming 60% of the industry’s revenue. It’s easy to understand why. With billions of users persistently logged into their properties, Facebook and Google have broader reach than just about anyone in the ad ecosystem and can ensure that impressions are served to as […]