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

But is the market over-reacting?

According to Vanguard, here’s what the various asset class returns look like since 1991: Kind of what you’d probably expect; the further you move up the ‘risk spectrum’ the better the average returns. Sure, the differences don’t appear huge, but they add up over time. But you know this. It’s no doubt part of the reason you’re here. So this […]

If you’re not growing, you’re dying. Businesses need at least a modicum of growth to push back against the relentlessness of cost inflation. And then there are cost of capital and opportunity cost hurdles one must consider.  Furthermore, if you’re standing still, there’s a chance your competitors aren’t —  which means you’re bleeding market share and relevance. Stagnation is also a […]

In his book The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry sketches two archetypes: the nurturer and the exploiter.  “I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the […]

There is precisely one way for an entrepreneur to know if there is actual demand for their product or service: put it out there. They must run the experiment to see if the open market validates their hypothesis. Focus groups and market research are fine, but true validation only happens when customers willingly and repeatedly part with their hard-earned cash. […]

Ian Cassel absolutely nails it with this tweet On the ASX alone there are over 2,000 individual stocks. There’s something like 10,000 across all US equity markets. It’s impossible to have a thorough understanding of every single one. The good news is, you don’t need to. In fact, you shouldn’t even try. Having a take on every company doesn’t make […]

The market always offers up something of a mixed bag each results season but, on balance, at least among the most popular stocks on Strawman, what we’ve seen so far has been rather encouraging. Not so much in terms of the immediate market reaction — though we’ve certainly seen some big moves — but in terms of what these numbers say […]

Tune into any results call and you’ll hear plenty of smart-sounding questions (and a lot of alpha-male signaling). What you almost never hear are the questions that risk making someone look silly — even when they’re the ones that are really worth asking.   Technical, sophisticated questions are great for showing off, but it’s the simple, ‘dumb’ ones that really crack things […]