Personal investment research journal. Not a business or financial service. Investing. Entrepreneurs. Philosophy. Curator of thinkers who prioritise quality 🍷
Quality Allocation is a journal of my personal investment research and is for informational/educational purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Investing involves risk of loss. I am not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)
@FinanceJack44 Really good. Thanks for writing and sharing. I would also add that the networks remove the need of trust - a merchant in Spain doesn’t need to trust a US tourist and vice versa.
@DimitryNakhla Glad you've been diving into that piece... I love that comparison table between short termism and long termism... so much in that. I revisit that article probably once every 6-8 weeks
Nick Sleep: “Mistakes often result from overweighing an apparent short-term win, without fully recognising the consequent, long-term cost…”
Patience is not a passive virtue. It is the active refusal to trade tomorrow’s compounding for today’s comfort.
Link to the full piece 👇🏽
https://t.co/ku0GYnQCG1
“When there is a frenzy of activity in one area of the market there is very often an anti-bubble of discarded companies. In the dot com era these were companies with steady cash flow.”
— Nick Sleep 🗣️ (Nomad Letter Jun 2006)
@DimitryNakhla His letters are beautiful. I highly recommend visiting his foundation’s website where he shares his thoughts on non profit’s and a piece on long term thinking vs short term thinking. He’s an inspiration.
$V & $MA’s moat isn’t that people trust the network per-say.
It’s that the network makes trust unnecessary.
Consumers and merchants don’t need to trust each other- chargebacks and authorisation.
Banks don’t need to trust each other (network sets interchange)
@DimitryNakhla This is brilliant… and is what thinking about investing really is. There is a fundamental difference between these type of insights and the endless data collection that dominates this platform.
@WillBiddy_ That’s a good point you make on Dev. Him being able to add to a position is probably dependent on their being new inflows of capital as, like you say, he likes to be fully invested.
@Compound_life_ I think both VAS portfolios are pretty much equally strong but I would edge it just towards Mastercard because I believe Recorded Future is such a strong asset. I think in the long-term it's going to make MA exceptionally strong in the threat intelligence space.
@Compound_life_ From an analyst report: "the difference between the two were the higher-than-expected VAS revenue for Visa from marketing services related to the Olympics and FIFA World Cup, as well as lower rebates/incentives. Excluding this, the trends between them would look very similar."
“I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life�� - Warren Buffet
@realroseceline Agreed. Nice thoughts. Operating profit should be more like +16% as there was a $170m positive impact from divestiture on the Market Intelligence division
Highly confident of this. They know that the ecosystem as a whole needs nurturing and the installed base is very valuable for their service revenue.
They know it's all well and good enabling smaller and smaller chips but their customers have to be able to see a return on them to justify the costs associated with making them... that's maybe a separate issue.
But they definitely know that they will want to sell very high margin services on the installed base and so there's always a balance to find.
Important to also remember TSMC are still a significant shareholder aren't they?
I have an interesting theory relating to $V/ $MA - they are such obviously great business models that it has become very difficult to sound clever describing why the payment networks are great businesses…
This has resulted in an analytical asymmetry where there is a disproportionate amount of bear cases visible on these companies. Because it’s much easier to sound clever and gain attention describing how the payment networks may potentially be disrupted by a new or evolving technology.
You can’t really teach people anything new by saying how they are great businesses.