[MELI – MercadoLibre] Digging The Moat (Or Is It A Grave?), Part 1

A few weeks ago, I came across the following remark from Joe Weisenthal in my Tweet feed: “Smart people can’t help but try to poke holes in things, and see the weaknesses in existing systems.  But long-term investing requires a certain amount of dumb confidence that things will all work out over time, even if […]

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Podcast Blurbs [Freewill, Jerks, Cramer on Switch]

Planet Money, Ep. 795 (Is Record Breaking Broken) “Companies started coming to [The Guinness Book of World Records] asking if we could fly someone out to their event.  Companies and people were coming to Guinness wanting to break a record for publicity or to draw attention to themselves.  They’ve gotten on to the fact that […]

[BLK – Blackrock] Not Another Passive vs. Active Debate

Back in June 2009, reeling from the financial crisis and desperate to fix its balance sheet, Barclays agreed to sell Barclays Global Investors (BGI) to BlackRock, who paid ~$13.5bn in cash and stock for BGI’s ~$1tn in assets, which included $385bn in AUM from its vaunted iShares ETF franchise.  Over the last 8 years, iShares […]

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[MCEM – Monarch Cement] Ash Grove Part Deux?

[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 […]
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Podcast Blurbs [Small cap investing, Ackman on ADP, Cramer on Dexcom, Journalism]

The Investors Podcast (9/17/17, Small Cap Investing w/ Eric Cinnamond) Eric Cinnamond (a veteran small-cap manager…writes a good blog) “Back [when I started my career], the largest holders of these small cap stocks were traditional small cap value managers like the Royce Funds, Heartland, Gabelli, and when prices got out of whack, they were there […]

[V – Visa; MA – Mastercard] Expanding the Rails, Part 1

The basic moatiness of V/MA has been tirelessly discussed for years and is well understood, so I’ll try not to belabor the point and focus instead on some less frequently explored angles.  But I do need to establish a common denominator, starting with the 4-party model….apologies if you know all this, I’ll be quick about […]

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[EFX – Equifax] Investment Implications of Breach Fiasco

Considering what’s at stake, we can’t dismiss the torrents of negative headlines, venemous tweets, pending AG investigations, and congressional rebukes that have justifiably buffeted Equifax on all sides, as hyperbolic grandstanding even if that’s exactly what much of it is.  In a very direct and non-hokey sense, trust – that the data lenders and employers […]

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Podcast Blurbs [Chinese internet, Consciousness, Passive investing]

Planet Money, Ep. #647 (Hard Work Is Irrelevant) “To get a job [at Netflix] and to keep it, you have to accomplish great things.  Here’s another slide [from Netflix’s presentation on its principles]…’We are a team, not a family.  And we are a Pro sports team, not a kid’s recreational team.’  In other words, if […]