Allison Transmission is a diamond in the rough -- it’s a wonderful business operating in a tough industry. It caught my eye because it appears to be both cheap (9x earnings) and good (600%+ returns on tangible capital employed). It has a dominant market position (60% market share) and is buying back huge amounts of stock (⅓ of shares outstanding since 2013).
Read MoreEagle Point Capital recently purchased shares of Wells Fargo for clients at $46 per share. Whenever we make an investment, we put our thesis down on paper. This makes learning from our successes and failures easier. We also wanted to start a blog and thought our Wells Fargo thesis would make a wonderful first post.
Read MoreBusinesses use assets to produce earnings. Sometimes these are tangible assets, like factories and trucks. Other times these are intangible assets, like intellectual property and trademarks.
One method of arriving at intrinsic value is to normalize earnings and capitalize them at the appropriate rate. I wrote about that in part one.
Another method is to value the assets that produce the earnings. This works when the assets are readily comparable across an industry.
Read MoreThere are two key tenets of value investing:
Every asset has an intrinsic value.
Occasionally, an asset’s intrinsic value and market price differ.
Market prices are concrete. Anyone with a smartphone has them at their fingertips. But what exactly is intrinsic value? This post aims to answer that.
Read MoreOne of our favorite quotes comes from Howard Marks, who quotes John Kenneth Galbraith, noting: “There are two kinds of forecasters, those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know”. We expand upon this idea a bit in the following post.
Read MoreThe concept of margin of safety is one of (if not the most) powerful idea in all of security analysis. When you have a wide margin of safety, a detailed forecast of the future becomes unnecessary because your investment can handle the broad spectrum of possible outcomes. This is good news, considering how hard it is to forecast the future.
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