Episode 11: Audinate, Volpara, Dicker Data, locality Planning and listener mailbag

Here’s a controversial take: to score the really big wins on the share market, you should disregard much of the so-called fundamentals. Not that key financial metrics are unimportant. Things such as sales, cash flows and the structure of the balance sheet provide invaluable insights into the nature of a business — and if they reveal an entity that is viable, growing […]

Accounting may not be the most enthralling of topics, but some basic literacy here is vital if you fancy yourself a stock picker. As Buffett put it: “You have to understand accounting and you have to understand the nuances of accounting. It’s the language of business and it’s an imperfect language, but unless you are willing to put in the […]

There’s a lot of distance between broad, abstract investing concepts and placing actual trades with your hard earned. 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy by Hamilton Helmer makes a good attempt at focusing the investor’s attention on the things that matter, and putting it in a way that feels a bit more actionable. It’s basically a book about ‘moats’, as Buffett would call them, […]

Everyone loves a good stock chart. Up and to the right, all green candles and glory! But that is rarely how things play out in the real world, at least not over any meaningful time frame. What the latest research from Michael Mauboussin and Dan Callahan makes painfully clear is this: if you are aiming for outsized returns, you will […]

In preparing for this week’s update, I was considering rehashing an older piece I’d written a few years back. Why not? All the big ideas in investing are timeless and as relevant today as when they were first conceived.  (More to the point, I was running desperately short on time and — as usual — was struggling to think of something original […]

This week, we discuss Paragon’s (ASX:PGC) profit downgrade, Nearmap’s (ASX:NEA) stellar performance and why Kip McGrath (ASX:KME) is Claude’s second largest position. Plus, Matt takes us through how he likes to prepare for earnings season, and why it matters.

We love our small caps here at Strawman. And not without good reason. The trouble is, at least according to conventional wisdom, that things are far riskier in that space. Perhaps that’s true, to some extent, if by risk you mean volatility. And it’s not an unfair characterisation if you assume, as many do, that “small cap” must mean pre-revenue, […]

Strawman member Bushmanpat kicked off an interesting thread this week, pointing out how pessimistic takes tend to dominate headlines, while optimistic ones are often ignored. Inspired by a piece in the AFR, it was a good reminder of the persistent bias in both media and markets: we are hard-wired to give more attention and credibility to bad news. Our tendency […]