Stocks

Interesting, and often contrarian, Snippets on individual companies and the stock market.

Stocks

Sucralose

  • A recent study has some negative conclusions for the artificial sweetener Sucralose.
  • They found that Sucralose + carbohydrates in healthy people can lead to glucose intolerance increasing risk of diabetes.
  • This is negative for Tate & Lyle.
  • Word of caution – the study had only 60 participants and didn’t control for other food intake during the investigation period.
  • Artificial sweeteners have been seeing a lot of negative research.
  • This is an interesting start-up that instead of making artificial sweeteners is developing a new delivery mechanism for sugar.
  • It has the same taste but 40% less sugar is needed
Stocks

Coronavirus

  • Contrasting coronavirus related transcript quotes.
  • “We began to see the impact of the coronavirus on our business in mid-January with occupancy declines gradually spreading from Wuhan to other markets in the Asia Pacific region. In February RevPAR at our hotels in Greater China declined almost 90% versus the same period last year.” – Marriott International CEO Arne M. Sorenson
  • “we’re seeing that many of the cities around China, people are actually going back to work. We’re seeing some of the shops in Beijing are opening up. When you’re going on the freeway now, you’re actually seeing traffic jams versus, say, two, three weeks ago, where the roads were pretty empty…we started seeing activity pick up a little bit two weeks ago. And then also, this week, we’re also seeing continued pickup.“- Baidu (BIDU) CFO Herman Yu
Stocks

Value

  • Interesting long term chart of value and growth outperformance.
  • “The development of share prices has long vindicated this theory: from 1926 to 2007, Value stocks recorded around 5% higher annual returns than Growth stocks. Over the last five years, Value stocks have underperformed Growth stocks by an average of nearly 6% per year.”
Stocks

UK Housing

  • This is a chart that shows how, after a change in planning policy (NPPF) in the UK in 2012, the amount of land permitted for construction went up.
  • New building starts and completions on the other hand didn’t.
  • In other words house-builder hoarded the land and constrained supply.
  • On the other side help-to-buy continued to keep demand strong inflating prices.
  • Margins went up to 20%
Stocks

Google Project X

  • Great article from Wired on Google X.
  • “We are a creativity organisation, not a technology organisation.” 
  • “The real test is 15 to 20 years from now, when the dust is settled and we look backwards. Then how are we doing?” Teller says. Until then, there will always be more crazy ideas worth chasing. “The world’s got more than enough problems, sadly.”
Stocks

Schrodinger

  • Citron Research, famed for short selling reports, are recommending long this stock – Schrodinger (SDRG).
  • They describe it as – “the most disruptive software platform to ever hit the pharmaceutical industry, which also happens to be backed by the world’s most sophisticated investors, has just gone public.“
  • Looks interesting and is worth investigating. The shares are sadly ca. +100% since IPO already.
  • As always with investing – this is not a recommendation, do your own work, use common sense.
Stocks

Salmon

  • Salmon, as it is a fresh high value discretionary product, could be an interesting lead indicator?
  • “Right now there is no trade with China of salmon, although you can find the air freight for the salmon. It doesn’t help because you don’t have the clients. And the price is also very high because of the cost of air freights…There people do not go out and eat….95% of the salmon consumption in China is through restaurants and the likes. So 120,000 tonnes of that market is out.” Mowi Conference Call via thetranscript.
Stocks

Hedge Fund Closure

  • Interesting article about Michael Platt.
  • After shutting BlueCrest he continued to trade his own money.
  • Last year they returned 53% net after costs.
  • Interesting to see a pattern – successful hedge fund gets too big, loses focus and closes down after bad returns.
  • Manager reverts to running own money and focus on one strategy – starts to perform strongly again.
Stocks

Franchises in the US

  • A great article full of tons of information on franchises.
  • This chart shows the fee for opening a franchise.
  • Notice how stand out Chick-fil-A is. This is because they pay for all the opening costs.
  • In return Chick-fil-A charges 15% royalty (vs. typical 4%-8%) and takes 50% of net profit.
  • Arguably this is a different model.
Stocks

Disney

  • This is a chart of the top app downloads in US. Check out Disney.
  • “The launch of Disney+ in mid-November was unprecedented in the U.S. Its 31 million downloads in Q4 2019 was more than double the total for the next closest app, TikTok.” 
  • It was still top despite launching Nov 12 – some way into the quarter.
  • Source: Sensor Tower (lots of good app stats inside report).
  • h/t The Big Picture.

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