They say a great way to lose money is to open a restaurant. Costs, pricing pressures, and low barriers to entry tend to eat into your capital. Dad pun intended. Food, rent and labor inflation are stubborn and every extra dollar counts. All costs matter. Some restaurants make it work and build lasting brands with…
Category: Investing
Can Healthcare Savings Move Stocks?
The proverbial healthcare industry graveyards and nursing homes are full of companies with good intentions and lots of data. Promises to track our steps and make us healthy have done little. Predictive models tell us that we’re 10% more likely to have an adverse healthcare outcome in 5 years. Yawn. Healthcare exchanges and defined contributions…
Hedging Healthcare
The history of the English landscape garden is one of luxury. Rain is abundant but there’s the opportunity cost of the land, walls of needy hedges, lawns to cut, and sweat. All throughout England, hedges or hedgerows, mark the landscapes. They were also developed as mounds of dirt topped with bushes to act as a…
Who’s To Blame?
Hardbacks are supposed to sell for more. They cost more to make, are studier, and look cooler. Elisabeth Rosenthal’s An American Sickness is now on Amazon, with the hardcover edition priced at a 38% discount to the paper version. What gives? Dig a little deeper and not being part of prime ($5 more for slower…
Up Close With CVS
A 10k means different things to different people. For some, to use what I think is a British term, it’s a footrace. If you’re thinking rings, it’s a measure of the purity of gold. For others, a not-so-breezy 100+ page annual report that’s filed with the SEC by US-listed companies, full of footnotes, official risks,…
Time Frames and Adjusted EBITDA
Corporate earnings calls are dry but can be entertaining. There are the rare “boring boneheaded questions are not cool” Elon Musk type comments. There was a lively moment yesterday on FedEx’s earnings call when a Deutsche Bank analyst started the Q&A session by asking CEO Fred Smith about “balancing capital investments and returns,” given negative…
On Tailwinds
Anyone who wants to understand business should read Warren Buffett’s letters*. All of them. Even his partnership ones when he was in his 30s. I read them about 10 years ago, and continue to intellectually salivate near the end of February when a new one is published. They’re especially an interesting respite and cross-disciplinary perspective…
January’s Healthcare Index
Inspired by the monthly Harper’s Index, this is 2019’s first index on healthcare and finance. The average ratio of Medicaid-to-Medicare payments spending across the US across all services: .72; In CA: .52. The factor by which commercial insurance payments exceed the reimbursements from Medicare: 1.88x The net assets of HCA, the largest publicly-traded hospital in the…
Weighing Machines
Without Benjamin Graham we may not know the name Warren Buffett. Graham was an investor, professor, and practical philosopher. He wrote the masterpiece Security Analysis during the midst of the Great Depression, as well as The Intelligent Investor, and was a professor, mentor, and employer to Buffett. Graham wrote that the markets in the short…
On Hidden Risks and Volatility
Volatility in investing can be a great thing. The attraction to Bernie Madoff’s scam can be better understood by its lack of volatility. His funds showed annual returns of an eerily consistent 10-12% and at one point reported 72 consecutive months of positive returns. His strategy used a split-strike or collar options strategy (not related…