On the day of this year’s Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting, Andrew and I were in Omaha at a Willow Oak event. Willow Oak is the company that provides a lot of the administrative support functions for our fund. The event was a panel which Andrew moderated and which featured four managers of funds associated with Willow Oak. I was one of those managers. And one of the questions we were asked had to do with what we’ve learned, what we’d have done differently, etc.

Geoff wrote about U.S. Lime back on February 18th, 2018. Focused Compounding members can read that article here:  U.S. Lime (USLM): A High Longevity Stock in a Low Competition Industry U.S. Lime at the time was trading around $75 per share. Today, the stock is at $130ish per share. Why is now a good time to revisit the company? Consistency. Irrespective of valuation, I really like this business. Buffett always talks about how he and Munger have filters in their head to decide instantly whether

I plan to use Focused Compounding as my investing journal. My “writeups” will be less structured than Geoff’s, but could serve as a starting point for members to research a new stock. My posts will literally be similar to emails that I send to Geoff whenever I have thoughts on a business — basically straight from the stream of my consciousness, lol. Feedback/your notes/thoughts are highly encouraged in the comment section below. The first stock that I want to talk about is Calloway’s Nursery, the

From time-to-time, I research a company where I think I’ll do a write-up of the stock and then discover it isn’t as interesting a situation as what I first thought. That’s the case here. Kingstone (KINS) seemed fairly cheaply priced on the surface. And seemed like an easy enough business to understand. But, several of the things I found – while not individually all that serious – added up to a pass for me. Instead of writing about the company, the valuation, etc. in a

Over the last 10 years or so, Jewett-Cameron (JCTCF) has roughly quintupled its stock price while the company’s total revenue has remained basically the same. There are some interesting signs here. But, I haven’t learned enough to say anything definitive about this company. I can summarize what we know from the SEC filings though. Jewett-Cameron is an illiquid microcap. The company files with the SEC. In fact, it also files with SEDAR (because it’s incorporated in Canada and used to trade on the Toronto Stock

This is a stock I talked about on a podcast with Andrew. It looked cheap based on the simple ratios you might use to decide if something’s a value stock. And the business of writing homeowner’s (and renter’s) insurance in Florida seemed like something that could be good enough (in some years) and simple enough for me to understand and possibly invest in. However, what I found when looking into Universal is a lot of stuff I don’t really like. Having said that, the stock