Infusystem ($INFU) released their 2012 10-K on March 28th. This is the first annual report released since the new management team took over in the spring of 2012. Lots of changes have occurred throughout the year, so I was anticipating the release of this report. You can read my initial writeup on INFU to get some background information. A quick summary of the situation is that the old management group did a very poor job at creating shareholder value for a business that generated high gross margins and growing revenues, ~10% per year. An activist shareholder group took control of the board,...
Feedly – Google Reader Replacement
By now anyone that is a Google Reader user has heard the news. Google will sunset Google Reader on July 1, 2013. I know that a lot of investors use RSS feeds to keep track of the vast amount of information that is released, and everyone up to now has used Google Reader as their RSS reader. For me, I use it to keep track of blogs, company filings, news on portfolio companies, S-1 filings, 13D filings etc… It’s a central source for me to review all of the released information in one location so that I can easily...
Berkshire Hathaway 2012 Annual Report
The Berkshire Hathaway 2012 Annual Report is now out, you can read the full version here 2012 was another year that Berkshire did not surpass the S&P 500 in annual returns as calculated by book value gain vs the index gain. Book Value gained 14.4% for the year versus the S&P 500 at 16%, and that makes it three times in the past four years that the company has under performed the benchmark. To date, we’ve never had a five-year period of underperformance, having managed 43 times to surpass the S&P over such a stretch. (The record is on page 103.)...
$SODI – Investors getting involved
Solitron Devices ($SODI) has been a net net for quite some time, but has recently run up above the net net price of $3.24 per share. OddBallStocks wrote a letter to management in June 2012 urging management to buy back stock and to hold an annual meeting. SODI has not held an annual meeting for over a decade. It appears that more investors are getting involved to institute some changes. Furlong Financial LLC has sent a letter to SODI’s management to make a shareholder proposal. Furlong has proposed increasing the number of board seats from 3 to 6 and...
$NROM – Noble Romans Pizza – Undervalued Growth?
Noble Roman’s Inc ($NROM) is a company that sells pizza. That’s a simple explanation, so let me go into more detail. $NROM has been around since 1972, and recently has shifted its focus into the Take -N-Bake Pizza industry. Prior to the past year, Noble Roman’s had two main lines of business: selling through non-traditional locations and through franchising restaurants. They were not successful in the franchising business with traditional pizza restaurants, and just closed out some pending lawsuits which the company won. The non-traditional business is now the main source of revenue and profits (grocery stores, convenience stores, etc…) but...
$INFU InfuSystem Holdings – Interesting Micro Cap Opportunity
InfuSystem Holdings ($INFU) is a company that I ran across when I was reading about Ryan Morris in Businessweek. Ryan Morris is a young activist investor, and Businessweek wrote up a story about him and a couple of his activist forays. One of those companies was InfuSystem Holdings, so I decided to do some more research about the company to see if it was a good opportunity. Ryan Morris is the managing partner at Meson Capital Partners. Meson had an outstanding year in 2009, which you should read the annual partnership letter, as the partnership gained 753% for the...
Wealth of Data Provided by Aswath Damodaran
I was reading Aswath Damodaran’s blog about the dark side of numbers and began to look at the updated data sets that he provides for free on his data page site. If you do not know who Aswath Damodaran is, he is a professor of finance at the Stern school of business at NYU. He teaches classes on Corporate Finance and Valuation, and is pretty well known for his knowledge and studies on valuing businesses. As I started to dig into the data that is provided on his page, I was amazed. First of all, you can visit his...
Learn Financial Statement Analysis from KhanAcademy.com
I haven’t been very good a keeping up with posts, but I am going to change that and start to post more regularly during 2013 and beyond. I finally decided to check out KhanAcademy this past weekend. I have heard quite a bit about the site from various locations, and wanted to try it out. To my surprise, the site contained a lot of good information about finance and economics. If you do not know about KhanAcademy, then you can read up more about it on their about page. They have a whole section on Finance and Capital Markets which...