Welcome to Speedwell Research!
We focus on producing comprehensive research on great public companies to equip investors with a thorough understanding of the business. Each research report covers a single company and goes into an incredible level of detail. Our investment analysis is not focused on quarterly trends, but rather distilling information down to make the big picture clear.
Speedwell is named for the ship that helped ferry passengers to the Mayflower, which is how we view our role: we want to help investors so they can take their own journeys.
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Accounting Insights: Alibaba, JD, and the $330bn Footnote
This is the second piece in our Investor Education Series. This post goes into details on how to piece together financial disclosures to build novel company insights. We go through JD’s disclosures back to 2015 to better understand Alibaba’s ability to monetize their platform. It is our most accounting intensive piece yet, but we believe…
Copart Deep Dive
Junkyards, wrecked cars, a duopoly, 30% operating margins, and two self-made billionaires: this is the story of Copart. From a single salvage yard in California to a global facilitator of over 3mn vehicles sales, Copart is not just the world’s largest salvage vehicle auction marketplace, but also a critical logistics provider and large land holding company. …
RH Deep Dive
From a money-losing retail mall concept that sold gimmicky mayonnaise spreaders, garden gnomes, and nostalgic snack foods to elaborate six-floor luxury furniture showrooms with some of the highest grossing restaurants nationally, RH (formerly Restoration Hardware) is one of the greatest business turnaround stories of all time. While we are often taught to be weary of…
Speedwell Research Process & Philosophy
Speedwell Philosophy PowerPoint presentations, heavy in graphics and light in text, make it easy to BS and seem knowledgeable without having much expertise. Steve Jobs opined, “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking”. Jeff Bezos would ban them from his boardroom in favor of written memos that require a clarity of…
The Consumer’s Hierarchy of Preferences: Two Ends of the Strategy Spectrum
“To not decide where to go, is to decide where to go.” Marshalls and Hermès At the extremes, there are two strategies in retail: 1) work hard to get people to spend a lot for your product so you can charge a high price, 2) work hard to get your product cost down so you can charge a low…
Meta Platforms Deep Dive
One of the world’s most influential tech companies, and just one of a handful businesses to ever reach a trillion-dollar valuation, Meta’s family of apps have achieved ubiquity on an unprecedented scale with ~3 billion active users. Their revenues have grown at a ~50% CAGR since IPOing while being wildly profitable with a ~50% core…
The Consumer’s Hierarchy of Preferences: The Other Side of the Consumer Value Prop
“Clarity of thought is only made possible by clarity of language. Lacking the latter, the former will forever remain out of reach.” We are all familiar with the idea that companies have different and specific value propositions (or “value prop” for short). The value prop is what a company offers a customer. At a high…
Floor & Decor Business History
This is an excerpt from our second Speedwell Research piece, which goes over Floor & Decor’s early history. It is just the beginning (<2 pages) of our ~14k word deep dive (50+ pages). We hope you enjoy it! Please email us at info@speedwellresearch.com for any questions, concerns, or comments. See our full disclaimer on our website. Business History. Floor…
Floor & Decor Deep Dive
For our latest research report, we chose to cover Floor & Decor (FND, ~$8bn market cap). If you take Costco and mix it with Sherwin Williams and focus on just the hard surface flooring market, then Floor & Decor (one of Berkshire’s more unmentioned stakes) is what you’d get. Floor & Decor is a fast-growing…
Constellation Software PM Summary
PM Summary: Our PM Summaries are designed to make our content more accessible to readers who have time constraints or want to get a sense of whether a business could be of interest to them before having to go through the full report. These PM Summaries are very high-level compared to the granularity of our full…
Constellation Software Business History
This is an excerpt from our first Speedwell Research piece, which goes over Constellation Software’s early history. It is just the beginning (<2 pages) of our 12k+ word deep dive (40+ pages). We hope you enjoy it! Please email us at info@speedwellresearch.com for any questions, concerns, or comments. See our full disclaimer on our website. Introduction. Founding History. An…
Constellation Software Deep Dive
Best business in the world? How about a provider of a service that absent of which the business stops functioning entirely and only charges a small fraction of the overall cost base for it? Add in that the service isn’t just mission critical, but usually customized on the client’s dollar with both companies having their employees…