Month: November 2015

November 20, 2015

Spin off Investing – TCI Ltd

If you have gone through Warren Buffet’s early partnership letters, you would find that he had spilt his partnership portfolio into three categories and one of most interesting category was work-outs

So what are work outs ?

Our second category consists of “work-outs.” These are securities whose financial results depend on corporate action rather than supply and demand factors created by buyers and sellers of securities. In other words, they are securities with a timetable where we can predict, within reasonable error limits, when we will get how much and what might upset the applecart. Corporate events such as mergers, liquidations, reorganizations, spin-offs, etc. Lead to work-outs. companies.

If you want to learn on how to invest in work outs (also called special situation investing / Risk Arbitrage Investing) the best book to pick up is Joel Greenblatts – You can be a stock market genius

In this post we will learn about spin off investing through a live example

First understand what is Spin offs

There are various reasons corporations opt for spin-offs, the primary ones are

Reading the scheme of amalgamation shared by company in their regulatory fillings to stock exchanges would spell out reason for spin off.… Read the rest

November 10, 2015

Living in times of bull markets

We have just lived through the first leg of the bull market in India and as with all bull markets there is no dearth of fund managers, individual investors, sovereign funds, high net worth individuals etc. who have done exceedingly well for themselves and their investors.

This definitely is a reason to raise toast – As someone said “Make hay while Sun shine” and a single bull market allocated properly can change your life.

and I for one definitely don’t belong to the school of thought which cribs on over valuation of securities as majority of who crib on valuations over companies leading bull market are the ones who don’t own the company. I have seldom seen people being unhappy when there holdings are hitting upper circuits every day 🙂

Cribbing takes away precious energy and is of no use, if you think a security is overvalued / momentum driven / operator rigged just move on there are 5000+ listed companies, I am sure there will be few with whom you will find peace.

But as Warren Buffet said stocks can’t outperform business indefinitely.

What could be more exhilarating than to participate in a bull market in which the rewards

… Read the rest

November 5, 2015

How to evaluate a CEO’s capital allocation skills

Read below excerpts from Warren Buffet’s share holder letters

Over time, the skill with which a company’s managers allocate capital has an enormous impact on the enterprise’s value.

The lack of skill that many CEOs have at capital allocation is no small matter: After ten yearson the job, a CEO whose company annually retains earnings equal to 10% of net worth will have been responsible for the deployment of more than 60% of all the capital at work in the business.

Now pause and reflect, how often financial pundits talk about capital allocation skills of a manager when they are evaluating a CEO or MD of a company, not often. In fact a lot of reported results and press releases focus on earnings and sales, while the crucial capital allocation decision and their consequences are missed.

In this post we would learn through an example on how you can assess a management’s capital allocation skill though reported numbers. This post is largely built on a superb paper written by Michael J. Mauboussin in August 2014, download a copy from here

To evaluate capital allocation of any firm’s manager, you need to focus on following things

Sources and Uses of

… Read the rest

November 1, 2015

Catching the falling knife – Eros International

Recently Eros media international has been in news although not for good reasons 🙂 Eros which is also listed in NYSE was downgraded by Wells Fargo ,a leading banking and financial services company.

See in this succinct note from the newspaper cut

Wells Fargo analyst Eric Katz had said the downgrade was driven by a continued increase in receivables in the United Arab Emirates business, concerns on whether Eros would turn free-cash-flow positive, and worries about Eros Now.

The management countered such claims

We would like to reassure our shareholders that there has been no material change to the previously announced strong fundamentals of the company.

The first quarter results have been strong and nothing has materially changed since then, the company said.

We will be announcing what we expect to be a strong second quarter in the first half of November,it added.

We reaffirm our commitment to enhance shareholder value.

We believe that the merit in our business and our fundamentals are there for everyone to see as we remain focused on achieving our business goals and objectives

also most of other brokerage houses that cover company continue to maintain their buy rating

My only exposure to Eros has … Read the rest