Category: General

January 18, 2016 General Post a Comment

Is a Brand a successful Moat or Barrier to Entry?

Are Brands Moats

I’ve decided in the past, that a company’s brand was a strong enough moat to keep competitors at bay, and allow the company to keep earning profits  This has been a grave error, and warrants further study.  I’ve since learned that a brand, by itself, is not a strong competitive advantage resulting in a defensible economic moat.  For a strong moat a stronger situation needs to be in place such as some kind of customer preference, distribution or network effect that is the source of a strong competitive advantage.  Companies spend a lot of money on marketing and advertising to build...

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January 26, 2015 General Post a Comment

Size Matters, if You Control Your Junk

This is a new research paper published on January 22nd 2015 that studies the return of stocks based upon the size (defined in multiple ways).  What was done differently than other studies, was that the authors used a Quality and Junk variable to apply to the data.  The result was that smaller firms outperformed larger firms in the stock market if the portfolio was controlled with the QMJ (Quality Minus Junk) factor.  Meaning that a lot of the smaller companies were “junk” but the ones that were of quality outperformed the market. The Authors: Clifford S. Asness – AQR Capital...

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January 22, 2015 General Post a Comment

The Average Investor is Terrible at Stock Picking

Asset Class Returns vs Average Investor

Thanks to The Big Picture and Value Walk for bringing this chart to my attention that was included in a recent Seth Klarman note. Asset Class Returns vs the Average Investor   I’m not sure what most investors are doing with their investments, but it isn’t pretty.  In the above chart, it displays the annualized return over the past twenty years by asset class.  Farthest left is Energy which average just over 12% return per year for 20 years, and all the way to the right is Japan with a dismal 20 year return.  But look at where the...

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January 12, 2015 General Post a Comment

Questions about Bitcoin that I Would Like to See Discussed

I’ve been interested in Bitcoin and the underlying technology for the past couple of years, and have tried to learn as much as possible about the technology and its potential use cases.  There is a lot of hype surrounding Bitcoin and the Blockchain, but I do not think many people posses enough knowledge about the technology.  I don’t claim to be an expert, but I’ve been trying to keep up with the technology, the current arguments as to why Bitcoin/Blockchain are important and finally what impact it will have on the future of money, currency, finance, trade, insurance, contracts, legal,...

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February 10, 2014 General Post a Comment

Smart Links from February 9th 2014

Word Science of Social Media is an infographic created by ShortStack which analyses the titles for highest social media sharing.  The infographic is broken down by Twitter, Facebook and Blog and displays the words in title that get that most shares.  A good read if you want to increase your social media shares. Value Investing goes Back to the Future discusses the apparent change in thinking of value investors (according to Barron’s Conway).  In recent years value investors were concerned with bankruptcy risk and book values but it appears that might have changed to forward-looking metrics like p/e ratios....

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February 2, 2014 General Post a Comment

5 Links to read for January 20th 2014

How Momentum Investors Create Narrowing Breadth – As momentum plays run out, investors pile into a smaller pool of stocks thus creating a narrowing breadth of options until no more options are available. No Silver Bullets in Investing – By James Moniter thanks for PMJar.com – A single silver bullet option is not available in investing no matter how much investors try to find it. How To Create Your Own Cryptocurrency – Have you thought about how to create your own Bitcoin?  Well, it’s really not hard to create a new cryptocurrency, but it’s much more difficult to make it successful....

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January 25, 2014 General Post a Comment

Good Reading from the week of January 20th 2014

Below are a collection of links that I have saved from my reading over the past week. Want a list of current EV/EBIT and EV/EBITDA ratios by industry?  Click here and you’ll see an updated list of industries with their EV/EBIT and EBITDA ratios as of this month.   The data is available as a download also from the link.  This comes from the great professor Damodaran. This article by Warren Buffet was dug up this week, and was written in 1999.  Remember 1999? That was the during the first internet stock market boom, and it is worthwhile to...

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January 21, 2014 General Post a Comment

My Recent Experience with T-Mobile vs AT&T

Tmobile vs AT&T

I’ve recently had to update my cell phone situation due to work and a change in the cell phone policy.  What I thought would be something quite easy, to move the phone number to my personal account, turned out to be something more complicated and ended up giving me an excuse to try T-Mobile.  Some people may read this account and think that I’m being harsh with AT&T, but I couldn’t receive what I wanted as an end result, and now AT&T opened up the door for an existing customer to move to a competitor. I’ve been intrigued by...

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