Geoff Gannon

Someone emailed me this question: How do you think management should analyze acquisition opportunities? For example, how would you like the management of companies you own to think about them and decide to acquire or not (acquire) a company? Because they could, say, value the companies and determine if they are undervalued or overvalued… also they can make the value of them increase by making changes (e.g., such as Murphy did at Capital Cities by significantly increasing the operational efficiency of acquired companies and Buffett

A 12-minute read Hi Geoff,   I think you have touched on this before but I will ask a bit more detailed. Do you think it’s better to be an expert on one industry and the stocks within that industry vs knowing a little about many industries? What about if that industry is a “bad” industry like shipping? Would you still think an investor is better off knowing everything about that industry and the stocks vs being a generalist? I guess that having a deep

Hi Geoff,    I am very new to investing and I have most of my savings invested in Vanguard S&P 500. I would love to learn more about the world of investing but I just don’t know where to start. Could you please give me a roadmap to begin?   Geoff’s Advice to a Brand New Investor   You Need to KNOW YOURSELF First, So…   It really depends on what approach would work best for you. You should read about the investor who most

What Makes a Business Durable? Hey Geoff, I noticed in one of the recent videos you mentioned that the durability of the business matters more then the returns. I believe you were answering a viewer question on return on capital for the subject matter. When you mention durability are you talking about recurring revenue, sustainability of the business going forward (like waste collection industry or railroads etc…)? Answer: A Good Place to Start is With the Oldest Companies in the Oldest Industries Yes. So, this is something

Someone sent Geoff this email: Hi Geoff,   On regular days your focusing on overlooked stocks makes much sense to me and is the right place to look for good companies at a decent price.   But in this market selloff, wouldn’t it be better to buy blue chip stocks such as Nike, Disney, BrKb, etc.. if they fall to the right price (and I’m not sure they are there yet…).   Also, wouldn’t it be better to diversify? To own 10-12 stocks instead of

Someone Geoff  this email ( to ask your own question: just send me an email ) : My question is a simple one. “What do you think is a fair price to pay for Omnicom?” Answer: Omnicom (OMC) Could be Worth Anywhere Between 1 to 1.5 Times Sales – so, About $70 to $100 a Share – But: You Probably Want At Least a 35% Margin of Safety, So Try Not To Pay More than $45 a Share for Omnicom This is a simple question. But, it’s tougher

Someone sent Geoff this email (to ask your own question: just send me an email): I think that car dealers face a lot of competition, especially for used cars and service, that I could never thoroughly understand the competitive advantages. But car dealers tend to have very stable margin. So I do think that they have certain competitive advantage thanks to location, long-time presence, as well as customer relationship built up through its new car business. So, I’d like to ask you about your thoughts on the

Middleby (MIDD) is a stock I was excited to write-up, because it’s rarely been cheap. I’ve seen 10-year financial type data on the company. I’ve seen it show up on screens. And now the government response to coronavirus – shutting down so many of the restaurants that Middleby supplies – looked like a once in a lifetime opportunity to buy the stock. The company also has quite a bit of debt. That can make a stock get cheap quickly in a time like this. So,

Someone sent Geoff this email:   Dear Geoff, In this video   you mention a PE of 26 for OTC and yet use an implicit growth rate of 6% which is not the inverse of 26. I would like to understand why that is. Answer: If a Company Converts 100% or More of Its Earnings Into Free Cash Flow While Also Growing – a Normal P/E Ratio Would Deeply Undervalue the Stock I’d assume it’s because 10% = (1/26) + 6% In other words… 10% – 6% = 4%

Someone sent me this email: …you mentioned Omnicom, and you said that per share numbers should be avoided when computing growth…as you mentioned Omnicom buys back its stock, therefore why remove this information I have about this company from the implicit hurdle rate? Suppose we have 3 companies: a historically savvy buy backer, an automatic buy backer and a company who doesn’t buyback, shouldn’t we be able to discriminate between them if they were to all have the same FCF yield? Answer: It’s Best to

Someone sent Geoff this email: I’m curious why the SMAs are 40% cash. Did that happen once you learned about the potential impact of the virus? Or was that the case beforehand? I know you were fully invested at some point last year, and I would have assumed your strategy was to stay fully invested. So you either sold things last year and never reinvested, or you went cash this year. I’m interested in anything you’d share. Part of the reason I ask is I

Bunzl (BNZL) is a business I’ve known about for a long time. However, it’s not a stock I’ve thought I’d get the chance to write about. The stock is not overlooked. And it rarely gets cheap. EV/EBITDA is usually in the double-digits. It had a few years – the first few years of the recovery coming out of the financial crisis – where the EV/EBITDA ratio might’ve been around 8 sometimes. It’s back at levels like that now. Unfortunately, the risks to Bunzl are a

Gainsco (GANS) is a dark stock. It does not file with the SEC. However, it does provide both statutory (Gainsco is an insurer) and GAAP financial reports on its website. These reports go back to 2012 (so, covering the period from 2011 on). Not long before 2011, Gainsco had been an SEC reporting company. Full 10-Ks are available on the SEC’s EDGAR site. Anything I’ll be talking about with you here today about Gainsco’s historical financial performance has been cobbled together through a combination of

Written by: Vetle Forsland   Introduction The video game industry is a large and rapidly growing market with revenues projected to reach nearly $200 billion this year, a consistent growth rate in the high single-digits, and over 2.3 billion gamers across the globe. As video games have developed in graphics, gameplay and story, while moving most of the gaming experience online, it has silently become the largest entertainment industry on the planet. According to IDG Consulting, by 2020, the video games industry will bring in

Transcat is an interesting stock for me to write-up, because I probably have a bias here. Quan and I considered this stock – and researched it quite a bit – several years back. We were going to write it up for a monthly newsletter I did called Singular Diligence. All the old issues of this newsletter are in the stocks “A-Z” section of Focused Compounding. And – you’ll notice, if you go to that stocks A-Z section of Focused Compounding – that there’s no write

Hilton Food Group (HFG) trades on the London Stock Exchange. It qualifies as an “overlooked stock” because it has low share turnover (17% per year) and a low beta (0.28) despite having a pretty high market cap (greater than $1 billion in USD terms). On a purely statistical basis, Hilton Food is one of the most predictable – in fact, in one respect, literally THE most predictable – companies I’m aware of. There’s a reason for this I’ll get into in a second. But, first

Someone asked me my thoughts on Cheesecake Factory. It’s a stock we’ve looked at before. But, I have written about it recently. The stock hasn’t done well lately. It looks fairly cheap. Here was my answer: “I haven’t followed it lately. I know the stock hasn’t done that well. I did a very quick check of the stock price just now looking at the long-term average operating margin, today’s sales, today’s tax rates, etc. It seems that on an earnings basis (normalized for a normal

Canterbury Park (CPHC) is a sum of the parts stock. After our experiences – and when I say “our”, I mean my decisions to buy – Maui Land & Pineapple, Keweenaw Land Association, and Nekkar – Andrew has a sticky note on his desk that says: “When thinking about SOTP, think STOP”. Canterbury Park (CPHC) is a sum of the parts (SOTP) stock. Since we’re thinking “SOTP” should we also be thinking “STOP”? Yes, Canterbury Park is a sum of the parts stock. But… That

Stella-Jones mainly provides large customers with pressure treated wood under contractually decided terms. The customers are mainly: U.S. and Canadian railroads, U.S. and Canadian electric companies, U.S. and Canadian phone companies, and U.S. and Canadian big box retailers. Stella-Jones has some other sources of revenue – like selling untreated lumber and logs – that provide revenue but no value for shareholders. The company also has some more niche customers – probably buyers for using wood in things like bridges, piers, etc. – that probably do

By Geoff Gannon 06/07/2012   For understanding a business rather than a corporate structure – EV/EBITDA is probably my favorite price ratio.   Why EV/EBITDA Is the Worst Price Ratio Except For All the Others Obviously, you need to consider all other factors like how much of EBITDA actually becomes free cash flow, etc. But I do not think reported net income is that useful. And free cash flow is complicated. At a mature business it will tell you everything you need to know. At

Points International (PCOM) is a stock Andrew brought to me a couple weeks ago. It always looked like a potentially interesting stock – I’ll discuss why when I get to management’s guidance for what it hopes to achieve by 2022 – but, I wasn’t sure it’s a business model I could understand. After some more research into the business, I feel like I can at least guess at what this company is really doing and at how this helps airlines. My interpretation of what the

Today’s initial interest post really stretches the definition of “overlooked stock”. I’m going to be talking about Sydney Airport. This is one of the 20 to 25 biggest public companies in Australia. It has a market cap – in U.S. dollar terms (the stock trades in Australian Dollars) – of about $13 billion. It also has a lot of debt – including publicly traded bonds. So, not what you’d normally consider “overlooked”. On the other hand, Andrew and I have a couple standard criteria we

Today’s initial interest post is a company I like a lot. It’s trading at a price that could be justifiable – possibly – based on that company’s past performance. But, it’s not a stock I’m going to give a very high initial interest level too. The reason for that is uncertainty about the future. I’ll get to that uncertainty in a second. First, I want to describe what FW Thorpe does. The company makes lights. I won’t go into too much detail here. You can

Today’s initial interest write-up is a lot like yesterday’s. Yesterday, I wrote about an Alberta based company paying out roughly 100% of its free cash flow as dividends. In fact, that company was paying almost nothing in cap-ex. Today’s company is doing the same. It pays almost everything out in dividends. And it doesn’t spend much on cap-ex. So, cash flow from operations translates pretty cleanly into dividends. And like yesterday’s stock being written up (Vitreous Glass) – today’s stock being written-up (Gamehost) probably attracts

Vitreous Glass is a stock with some similarities to businesses I’ve liked in the past – NACCO, cement producers, lime producers, Ball (BLL), etc. It has a single plant located close enough to a couple customers (fiberglass producers) and with an exclusive source of supply (glass beverage bottles from the Canadian province of Alberta that need to be recycled) and – most importantly – the commodity (glass) can’t be shipped very far because the value to weight ratio is so low that the price of

This was going to be one of my initial interest posts. Then, I started reading Daily Journal’s SEC filings for myself. At that point, I realized there just isn’t enough information being put out by Daily Journal to possibly value the company. There just isn’t enough information to even gauge my initial interest in the stock. I’ll still try at the end of this post. But, my look at Daily Journal will be a quicker glance than most. Daily Journal is a Los Angeles based

Psychemedics (PMD) is a micro-cap stock (market cap around $50 million right now) that trades on the NASDAQ. It is not – by my usual definitions – a particularly overlooked stock. The beta is about 0.53 (low, but many stocks I’ve written about have much lower betas). The share turnover rate – taking recent volume in the stock and multiplying it to see how much of a company’s total shares outstanding would turn over in a given year at this recent rate of trading –

Accounts I manage own some shares of Vertu Motors (VTU) – bought last week – but, far less than a normal position. Whether we end up owning a full position – that is, having something like 20% of the portfolio in Vertu – or not depends mostly on whether the stock’s price comes down and stays down for a while. As I write this, shares of Vertu trade for about 40 pence. They were as low as 31 pence not too long ago. I wrote

Originally posted at www.Gannononinvesting.com on June 01, 2011 by Geoff Gannon Someone who reads the blog sent me this email: Dear Geoff, in your article “Should you Buy Microsoft?” on GuruFocus, you said, that it makes sense for some investors to use LEAPS instead of the stock. After thinking long about that, I came to the conclusion, that LEAPS can be viewed as a form of leveraged investment with an insurance against a falling stock price included…So LEAPS would make sense, if you want to leverage

Some readers have emailed me with questions about exactly how to calculate free cash flow, including: Do you include changes in working capital? Do you really have to use SEC reports instead of finance websites? Yes. You really do have to use EDGAR. Finance sites can’t parse a free cash flow statement the way a trained human like you can. As you know, I’m not a big believer in abstract theories. I think you learn by doing. By working on problems. By looking at examples. Here are 5

“In lieu of (earnings per share), Malone emphasized cash flow…and in the process, invented a new vocabulary…EBITDA in particular was a radically new concept, going further up the income statement than anyone had gone before to arrive at a pure definition of the cash generating ability of a business…” William Thorndike, “The Outsiders”   “I think that, every time you (see) the word EBITDA you should substitute the word bullshit earnings.” Charlie Munger   The acronym “EBITDA” stands for Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. A company’s EPS (which is just

By GEOFF GANNON 09/05/2019 A Focused Compounding member asked me this question: “Have you any thoughts on why U.S. banks are so profitable (the better ones at least)? I’ve looked at banks in other countries (the U.K. and some of continental Europe) and banks there really struggle to earn the spreads and returns on equity of high quality U.S. banks. This is particularly strange as the U.S. banking market is actually pretty fragmented, certainly more so than the U.K. which is dominated by a few

By Geoff Gannon December 8, 2017     Someone emailed me this question about tracking portfolio performance: “All investors are comparing their portfolio performance with the S&P 500 or DAX (depends were they live). I have asked a value investor why he compared the S&P 500 performance with his portfolio performance…for me as a value investor it makes no sense. A value investor holds individual assets with each of them having a different risk…it’s like comparing apples and oranges. The value investor told me that…Warren

by GEOFF GANNON This is my initial interest post for Monarch Cement (MCEM). I’m going to do things a little differently this time. My former Singular Diligence co-writer, Quan, emailed me asking my thoughts on Monarch as a stock for his personal portfolio. I emailed him an answer back. I think that answer will probably help you decide whether you’d want to buy this stock for your own portfolio better than a more formal write-up. So, I’ll start by just giving you the email I

April 24, 2016 By Geoff Gannon Moat is sometimes considered synonymous with “barrier to entry”. Economists like to talk about barriers to entry. Warren Buffett likes to talk about moat. When it comes to investing, “moat” is what matters. Barriers to entry may not matter. Thinking in terms of barriers to entry can frame the question the wrong way. If you’re thinking about buying shares of Omnicom and holding those shares of stock forever – what matters? Do barriers to entry matter? Does it matter

December 17, 2017 by Geoff Gannon A blog reader sent me this email: “Do you ever pay attention to insider transactions when analyzing a company?” I do read through lists of insider buys from time-to-time. I follow a blog that covers these kind of transactions. But, I can’t think of any situation where I incorporated insider buying or selling into my analysis.     Learn How Executives are Compensated I can, however, think of situations where a change in how insiders were compensated was included in my analysis.

December 14, 2017 by Geoff Gannon A blog reader emailed me this question about why I appraise stocks using a pure enterprise value approach – as if debt and equity had the same “cost of capital” – instead of using a Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) approach:   “…debt and equity have different costs. In businesses with a (large) amount of the capital provided by debt at low rates, this would distort the business value. In essence I am asking why do you not determine

By GEOFF GANNON Investors often overestimate the reduction in volatility they will get from diversification and underestimate the reduction in volatility they will get from simply owning stocks with a beta less than 1.   Over the last 10-11 years, I’ve owned 5 or fewer stocks in about 90%+ of all quarters. My portfolio’s returns have had a lower standard deviation in terms of returns than the S&P 500. And in terms of just “downside volatility” – which is what most investors mean when they

December 23, 2017 by Geoff Gannon Richard Beddard recently wrote a blog post about company strategy. And Nate Tobik recently wrote one about how you – as a stock picker – have no edge. I’d like you to read both those posts first. Then, come back here. Because I have something to say that combines these two ideas. It’ll be 3,000 words before our two storylines intersect, but I promise it’ll be worth it.   Stock Picking is Like Playing the Ponies – Only Better Horse races use

by GEOFF GANNON Truxton (TRUX) is an illiquid, micro-cap bank stock. TRUX is not listed on any stock exchange. It trades “over-the-counter”. And it does not file with the SEC. The bank has two locations (one in Nashville, Tennessee and one in Athens, Georgia). However, only one location (the Nashville HQ) is actually a bank branch. So, I’m going to be calling Truxton a “one branch” bank despite it having two wealth management locations. The company doesn’t file with the SEC. But, it is not

Bonal isn’t worth my time. It might be worth your time. It depends on the size of your brokerage account and the extent of your patience. So, why isn’t Bonal worth my time? I manage accounts that invest in “overlooked” stocks. Bonal is certainly an overlooked stock. It has a market cap under $3 million and a float under $1 million (insiders own the rest of the company). It often trades no shares in a given day. When it does trade, the amounts bought and

Accounts I manage hold shares of Keweenaw Land Association (KEWL). I’ve written about it twice before: Keweenaw Land Association: Buy Timberland at Appraisal Value – Get a Proxy Battle for Free And Why I’ve Passed on Keweenaw Land Association – So Far I didn’t continue to pass on Keweenaw Land Association. Like I said, the stock is now in accounts I manage. There are really two things worth updating you on. One is the annual report. The other is the appraisal. The appraisal is something

As this is an initial interest post, it’ll follow my usual approach of talking you through what I saw in this stock that caught my eye and earned it a spot near the top of my research watch list – and then what problems I saw that earned it a low initial interest score. I’ll spoil it for you here. IEH Corporation (IEHC) is a stock I’m unlikely to follow up on because of the difficulty of digging up the kind of info that would

BWX Technologies (BWXT) has been at the top of my research pipeline for a while now. I wrote about the company – when it was the combined company that is now split into BWXT and Babcock & Wilcox Enterprises (BW) – a few years back. You can read my report on the combined Babcock & Wilcox in the Singular Diligence archives. Today, I’m not going to talk about the business – which is described in great detail in that report (see the “Stocks A-Z” tab).

This is a revisit of Resideo Technologies (REZI). My initial write-up of Resideo was done before the stock was spun off from Honeywell. Three things have changed since that initial interest post. One: Honeywell spun-off Resideo. So, we now have a price on Resideo. Two: I’ve created a five part scoring system – a checklist of sorts – for the stocks I write up here at Focused Compounding. This helps me more systematically order what stocks I should be writing up for the first time,

Vertu Motors owns more than a hundred car dealerships in the United Kingdom. About half of the time – so, at 50+ locations – Vertu Motors also owns the land on which the dealership is built. They lease the other half of their locations. The stock trades on the London Stock Exchange (the AIM market, specifically) under the ticker “VTU”. Back on November 14th, 2017 Focused Compounding member Kevin Wilde sort of wrote up Vertu Motors. He did an idea exchange post on U.K. car

I chose to write-up Green Brick Partners (GRBK) this week for a couple reasons. The first is the company’s headquarters: Plano, Texas. I live in Plano. And the company gets about half of its value from its Dallas-Fort Worth homebuilding operations. My “initial interest post” checklist goes something like this: Do I understand the business? Is it safe? Is it good? Is it cheap? The single most important questions is number zero: “Do I understand the business?” Since I’ve lived for about seven years right

The Resideo spin-off has taken place. And the stock has traded on its own for a bit now. So, I thought I would very quickly re-visit the stock here. You can check the ticker REZI (Resideo Technologies). It’s $19.56 a share as I write this. Here is a link to the press release announcing the completion of the spin-off: https://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/REZI/news/story?e&id=1207602 “Honeywell distributed one share of Resideo common stock for every six shares of Honeywell common stock held as of 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time on October

(Note to Focused Compounding Members: Geoff here. This is one of my general investing posts – not a specific stock write-up. The first half of this post was made available free for everyone at “Gannon On Investing”. The second half of this article is exclusive for members like you. My actual stock write-ups are always exclusive to Focused Compounding. The first half of my general investing articles are available free at “Gannon On Investing”; you get the whole article here because you’re a member.) Someone

Yesterday, Honeywell set the distribution date for the spin-off of its home comfort and security business “Resideo”. So, I thought now would be a good time to do an “initial interest post” on Resideo. In this article, I’ll give my first impressions of the stock and then I’ll conclude by giving you an idea of how interested I am in following up with this stock idea. As always, I’ll grade the idea on a scale ranging from of 0% interest to 100% interest. To give

Notes on Honeywell’s planned spin-off of Resideo Technologies I’m trying something new here. A lot of you want to see more “initial interest” write-ups from me. But, those write-ups are actually step two of my investment process. I first read a 10-K (or, in this case, a spin-off document) on EGDAR and mark-up that SEC filing. I make my notes directly on the 10-K through a combination of highlights and questions, comments, etc. in the margin and at the bottom of the page. I never

Wednesday, June 13th – Monro by DAVE ROTTMAN   To Focused Compounding members: As a stock picker, when you’re first faced with the decision to buy or not buy a stock – it seems like a complicated question. Consider the mental math problem of 54 times 7. There are a couple ways of tackling this problem. The simplest though is to multiply 50 by 7, getting 350 and then multiply 4 by 7 getting 28. You add 350 to 28 and get 378. There are

A member commented to the write-up I did yesterday on Pendrell. I think the comment and my response are worth making into a full follow-up “memo”. So, here they are: “Geoff, This company definitely seems promising. I saw the blog post from Hidden Value that you retweeted and ended up buying a small starter position in the company after reading the 10k. That was before even seeing that you ended up writing a post on it. I’m struggling to decide how to size the position