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LowIQinvestor

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Bought more Linamar, new position in AMA Group.

 

AMA Group looks interesting. Auto repair rollup in Australia with maybe a long growth runway?

https://amagroupltd.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FY19-Results-Presentation.pdf

 

I always enjoy learning about your ideas. Linamars results are very weak in their acquired industrial business, but their balance sheet is improving. It is interesting to learn about their effects on electric vehicles in their latest investor presentations.

Yep, something along those lines. There's a decent VIC writeup. They did a big and expensive acquisition, somewhat funded by equity, and then lowered guidance in December which tanked the stock. Management is an experienced operator with skin in the game, but capital allocation humhum (pays a divy but issues equity...). Acquisitions are cheap, but the big one in the fall was expensive (perhaps done somewhat to block a PE firm entering and getting a platform to go after AMAs bread and butter - Blackstone was close to buying AMA before).

 

Linamars industrial results suck somewhat atm, their timing was definately poor with MacDon, but I think it will be a winner longer term and either way it seems like somewhat of a free option here. Auto is going through a rough patch, but that should mean they take share and come out stronger on the other side.

 

Lowered guidance recently, and afterwards pretty heavy insider buying again. They also did a small investment a medtech company in December. Anyway, one is paying something like 6xdepressed earnings. Way below book value, and these Guys have been pretty good at capital allocation historically. They're branching out from auto, which I like, but it means there'll probably always be a conglomerate discount which is fine with me. I hope to put it away for plus 10 years and let them do their thing while I defer my taxes.

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Bought a starter in kab60’s AMA.AX. I also started small positions VIAC and STAY.

Really can't say I'm an expert on AMA, but if anyone is intrigued there's a decent write-up on VIC. Reading the latest conference call is also a really good introduction (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/edited-transcript-ama-ax-earnings-144232794.html).

 

They're basically the biggest player in an extremely fragmented and very resilent industry which they're rolling up by buying smaller mom and pops businesses at 3-4xebitda. It also sheds some light on as to why they paid up for their latest and biggest acquisition (structured sales proces with PE involved. They basically denied PE access to the industry by taking over the other big platform thus multiples on their bread and butter shouldn't increase due to competition). Bull case this is the Australian version of Boyd Income Fund in its infancy trading at some 6,3x 2021 ebitda versus 15-16x for Boyd due to temporary issues.

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ICE and Expedia, a couple of days ago. Seems like CME is a better business than ICE b/c of the futures (right now), but Sprecher seems like a beast to me. 

 

Obviously Barry Diller is strong like bull.  Dara is still on BOD.  I don't get why they decided to emphasize VRBO over HomeAway.

 

Just "library card" positions, as Tom Gayner might say.

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Cast SA recently. Microcap, french software Company transitioning from perpetual licences to SAAS and recurring revenue. 55m market cap, 23m receivables that should be turned into cash in Q1. Spent some 150m on R&D over the years. Seems to be at an inflection that market has not caught up with (or fatique/lack of confidence in management). They've disappointed for years, seems like they're about to turn the corner with SAAS booking growing almost 200 pct in Q4 albeit from a low base and guiding for overall profitable growth of 20 pct in 2020. Low float, interesting shareholder composition. Think it's gonna go big or go private. :)

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Fairfax India.

 

Book value at Sept 30 was $13.53/share. The Anchorage/BIAL transaction will result in BV gain of $3.30/share. This takes book value to about $16.80.

 

Fairfax India owns large stakes in IIFL Finance, IIFL Securities and IIFL Wealth. These are publicly traded companies. So far in 2019 (6 weeks) the stock prices of these 3 companies have increased about 45%. At Dec 31 their combined value to Fairfax India was about $400 million. Today they are worth about $590 million = $190 million gain. With 153 million shares outstanding for Fairfax India the increase in the IICL companies is about $1.20/share.

 

Bottom line, book value of Fairfax India as of today is likely approaching $18.00/share. Shares are trading today at $12.45. Looks like a decent margin of safety to me :-)

 

From Fairfax India Dec 16 press release:

“As a result of the transaction, Fairfax India will record investment gains of approximately $506 million (approximately INR 35.6 billion at current exchange rates) implying an increase in book value per share of approximately $3.30 per share. The investment gains are supported by positive operational developments at BIAL. For the 12-month period ending October 2019, total traffic at BIAL was approximately 33.7 million passengers. The second runway commenced operations in December 2019, making BIAL the first airport in India to operate independent parallel runways that enable aircraft to land or take-off simultaneously on both runways. In addition, the expansion project for a second terminal at BIAL is expected to be completed in 2021.”

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I have no opinion on that security but I think people could make quite a few arguments in favor of the money center banks versus smaller banks over the medium term and longer: Scale and ability to even make table stakes for the necessary tech investments (only like top 8 banks have a piece of Zelle for example), and lower costs per economic unit (account, customer, loan, whatever) for those investments favors; other scale advantages leading to sub 50 bps cost of deposits before massive costs coming out of the business (they can pretty much take any loan from these small banks if they want it), regulatory capture and potential eventual Canadian-style bank oligopoly.  The MTB CEO recent annual letter does a pretty good job of setting up the arguments in favor of the mega banks and then attempting to counter them arguing that (super) regional banks will remain viable.

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Bought a tracking position in SDGR. Super interesting company with some big name backers. Quite the valuation, but whatever. If it comes down some more I'll probably play with it a bit.

 

This one is on my watch list too. Few thoughts:

 

1) It's very expensive as a stock and as a product (by my standards anyway)

2) TAM is pharma and schools (really specialized and expensive) but they are well known and often to of the list for considerations (based on my anecdotal discussions with friends)

3) Barriers of entry for others are astronomical, they are entrenched for those who know how to use it (working with Universities really helps with that), and there are no real free alternatives.

4) They can add a revenue line by adding consulting services to(e.g., help drugs go through FDA process ) or partner with Charles River

5) SUPER intrigued by Faxian and want to see what they do here. Would be an interesting model if they can identify potential compounds, get them to Phase I, sell to larger pharma to carry across the finish line.

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