“The resources are not simply about investing. It is about becoming a better human being. Learning from the success and failure of others is the fastest way to get smarter and wiser without a lot of pain.”
Alta Fox have done a massive analysis of all the best performing stocks over the last five years.
Overall – they find that financially healthy companies with advantageous business positioning tend to do better.
Acquisitions are a feature of these top performing stocks (perhaps because of the five year time frame).
The analysis is a bit too micro cap focussed and only concentrates on Australia, Europe and North America and excludes some sectors (e.g. materials), but is nonetheless useful.
Loeb’s Third Point Capital Q2 Letter – where he discusses adjusting his process/strategy towards more quality compounders – with rationale for recent purchases (BABA, JD, AMZN etc) supporting this.
Klarman’s Baupost Group Q2 Letter – where he discusses his eight impacts of the pandemic on the future.
They comb company transcripts for interesting quotes.
A few from the latest one.
“I’ve been so impressed with the Disney+ execution. Over 20 years of watching different businesses, incumbents, like Blockbuster and Walmart and all these companies, I’ve never seen such a good execution of the incumbent learning the new way and mastering it. And then to have them achieve over 50 million in six months, it’s stunning. So to see both the execution and the numbers line up, my hats off to them.” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings
“Thus far through April, our in-patient admissions are running about 30% below the prior year. Our emergency room visits are running about 50% below prior year as our in-patient surgeries. Our hospital based outpatient surgeries are running about 70% below our prior year as most elective procedures have been deferred. We have started to see these volume declines stabilize over the past week.” HCA CFO Bill Rutherford
“There hasn’t been enough debate about ability to make billions of doses. And for the record, we have 10,000 people producing over a billion doses right now of our own vaccine portfolio. This is not easy to do.“ Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson
