KPO

BTI

https://www.dataroma.com/m/holdings.php?m=DJCO Looks like the DJC board decided to sell down a portion of all four positions.

TRC at the open

I do this in my Roth and traditional IRAs for stocks I perceive to be close to full value. Just wrote calls on SMG and some O&G yesterday. I’ve been doing this the last 15-16 years and have rarely been disappointed.

Pipelines like KMI, WMB and ENB are solid options. There’s a little lodging REIT called Sunstone that I came upon at the beginning of COVID that had a neutral cash position at the time and is still under levered with a yield of around 7% on their two preferred issues. In similar vein there’s always HST, which yields around 4%

This is a fantastic post. Thanks for explaining this so clearly.

CPRI repurchased ~45% of S/O in the last decade and almost 25% in the last three years. If the deal falls through I suspect management will fire the repurchases up again.

More BTI

Agreed and was surprised this reference wasn’t picked up earlier. He obviously views the Haslams as scum, which sounds about right based on the fact pattern.

AOS, although it likely doesn’t meet the valuation criteria.

TDOC

SMG

Some of it is dividend differential, but mostly it’s the combination of Venezuelan risk and to a lesser extent the possibility of an antitrust challenge of the deal.

Yeah, I don’t have illusions of meaningful free cash flow growth here, but I do envision per share growth driven by a stable to minimally decreasing business that repurchases shares at a rate that leads to modest FCF per share growth.

It like seems you and I bought EBay around the same time before posting about it. It probably qualifies, although I’d argue there’s a solid base of customers that makes this one more durable than something in obvious secular decline.

Thanks for sharing. The press release wording suggests they believe the ~$2.15 per share breakup fee is coming their way. This could become an interesting purchase.

I’m sure that’s right, but my point was the product set overlaps to a large extent and Buffett bought it due to the simplicity and consistency of the business. It probably brings up an inconvenient truth of many businesses inside of Berkshire in terms of them being sub-optimized for profitability (e.g. UP vs BNSF). I suppose this is upside if Abel is as good as many hope.

CPRI

It looks like Lowe’s buyback is mostly debt financed as their debt has more than doubled to -$36B in the last four years. That said, the other Loews decreased their share count by about a third and paid down a third of their debt over the same period.

It seems kind of strange in an environment where rates are likely to decline from here plus their credit profile should continue to improve leading to a lower premium over the risk free rate. Oh well, I guess they can’t get everything right.

This was on my list as well. Almost 45% since the beginning of 2019. Not bad.

Why would they redeem 4.875% notes 8 months early only three weeks after issuing 6.0% notes? Odd.

Sounds like Berkshire’s MiTek business, which is a good little business.

+1 I feel like I’ve learned more from this board over the last few years than any other single investment resource. Merry Christmas folks!

I wouldn’t be surprised to see something as boring as CPRI beat the indexes next year with a 15% return from here when the deal closes. I realize this is boring, but it’s a solid risk adjusted return investment.