The Last Straw

Why is it that building or renovation cost estimates are always — and I mean always — wrong? Usually significantly so. If you’ve ever watched shows like Grand Designs, or undertaken a bit of remodelling yourself, you know this to be true. Projects that are completed on-time and on-budget are rarer than hen’s teeth. This is especially true for “nation […]

If you’re a technophile, there’s a fast expanding array of things to get excited about. Synthetic biology, robotics, materials science, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, quantum computing & (more recently) superconductivity are some of the more promising domains where very real progress is being made. Once in a species breakthroughs no longer feel as far fetched as they used to. And progress […]

You don’t need us to tell you that it’s been a tough run for small caps over the past year or so. And the harsh truth is that much of the pain was well deserved. Things always look clearer with the benefit of hindsight, but there was never any good justification for a bunch of sub-scale, cash-burning, undifferentiated wannabees to […]

Charlie Munger once said “show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome“.  A great example comes from 1860s, when the British contracted ship captains to transport convicts to our sunny shores. Back then, the survival rate of those poor souls was a miserable 40%. Human rights weren’t exactly a high priority, but most still felt that allowing 6 […]

In June of 2015, shares in Objective Corp (ASX:OCL) — a much under-recognised compounding machine that provides software to government and enterprise customers — hit $2 per share. It was a record high following a staggering rally from just 20c a few years earlier.  This ‘ten-bagger’ was certainly assisted by improving revenue and gross profits, both of which had grown 25% over the […]

Between 2019 and 2020 Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK) underperformed the S&P500 by 37%. It was one of the poorer periods of relative performance for the Oracle of Omaha, who was “burdened” with loads of cash and missed out on a lot of the boom in technology stocks. As you can see, Buffett regularly lags the broader index. And sometimes […]

“To invest successfully does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information,” said Buffett in a foreword to Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor. “What’s needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding the framework.” According to uncle Warren, factors like habits, character and temperament are what matter most. “What […]

The concept of ‘value’ is core to investing. At one level, it’s a relatively straightforward idea, and one we intuitively understand. As investors, we are, essentially, trying to buy assets for less than what they are “really” worth. For us, the value is captured when the wider market recognises and corrects the mispricing. But there’s also value in something that is (somehow) perfectly […]

Valuation is — or at least should be — at the core of any investment decision. Without a general idea of what a stock is ‘really’ worth, how can you know if the market is offering you good value? Defining the true, or intrinsic, value of a business is easy; it’s the discounted value of the cash that can be taken […]