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 …
Continue reading "Accounting Insights: Alibaba, JD, and the $330bn Footnote"
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. …
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 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 …
"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 …
Continue reading "The Consumer’s Hierarchy of Preferences: Two Ends of the Strategy Spectrum"
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 …
"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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
