Category: Newsfeed
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The Piton Network: Decisions that Simultaneously Support and Limit the Future Decision Space
Business Philosophy Series We have recently decided to increase our publishing cadence and you can now expect a written piece from us every Friday morning. Also, a podcast of this memo has been released if you prefer listening over reading. You can find it on our podcast feed here (Apple,…
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Etsy Deep Dive
We just released our latest report on Etsy! Some background on it below. Robert Kalin felt there had been a multi-century war against the individual craftsman. The unrelenting drive of standardization and mass production kicked off by the industrial revolution centuries ago had driven consumers away from carefully crafted, unique…
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RH 2Q23 Business Update
In this post, we provide an update on RH’s business, as well as some commentary as it relates to our 86-page Research Report released in March 2023. We use these Business updates as extensions of our larger report and thus hope they help our subscribers get caught up on the…
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About Speedwell’s New Podcast: The Synopsis
Hi all, As you might have noticed, Speedwell just launched a podcast 3 weeks ago called “The Synopsis” (Apple, Spotify). We wanted to share a bit more with you on the thinking behind it and what we hope is different. When we research a company, we read everything from their S-1…
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RH Business History
This is an excerpt from our RH research report, which goes over RH’s early history. It is just the beginning (~10 pages) of our ~21k word deep dive (80+ pages). We hope you enjoy it! Get the full RH report, among others, by becoming a Speedwell member today! Please email…
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Walker & Dunlop Deep Dive
As a 60+ year old, small, family-owned business with just a few dozen employees and a valuation of just ~$25mn, Walker & Dunlop could have lingered as a middling business were it not for a savvy and ambitious leader—who also happened to be a 3rd generation heir. The usual cliché…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…