One job of an insurance commissioner is to ensure that carriers under their jurisdiction have sufficient reserves to pay claims. In the early 1900s, the data required to make this determination was collected across insurers and standardized into formal reports by a number of rating agencies. A second job of a commissioner is to ensure […]
One way to make money is to start with transactions and monetize the data exhaust. Intercontinental Exchange disseminates data from the trading activity on its exchanges. Amazon’s ad business relies on first party data spawned by e-commerce. CoStar instead made the less common reverse commute, brute force curating commercial real estate data and then building […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]