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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Time To Buy? Tilson: If I Were To Pay Up For One Stock It Would Be This Retailer

By Jacob Wolinsky. Originally published at ValueWalk.

Whitney Tilson’s email to investors discussing ICR conference; Floor & Decor (FND); pot bubble; Brexit; Bezos’ divorce; China; drug prices; women investors.

Floor & Decor

1) I enjoyed my day and a half at the ICR conference in Orlando on Monday and Tuesday. I wish, however, that I had found more investment ideas, but instead found mostly a bunch of crappy dying retailers like Stage Stores, Stein Mart, Ascena Retail Group, Vince, Build-a-Bear Workshop, and Chico’s FAS plus some popular but overvalued companies that have crushed short sellers like Five Below, Planet Fitness, Domino’s Pizza, Shake Shack, Chipotle, and Wingstop. The latter was trading at 12x revenues when I pitched it as a short at the Robin Hood conference a couple of years ago – and now trades at 19x revenues! A good lesson on the dangers of valuation shorts – but, mark my words, this stock is going to be a dud going forward.


Q3 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc

If I were to pick one stock to pay up for, it would be Floor & Decor (FND). I first became aware of the company years ago when I was short Lumber Liquidators and saw that it was a formidable competitor with a far superior business model: 70,000 square foot superstores with a huge selection and inventory on hand (here is a link to their investor presentation). They have nearly 10% net margins, 30%+ returns on equity, consistent double digit comps, and are growth their store base 20% annually (currently 105 stores with plans to grow to 400). The stock has been cut in half in the last seven months, not due to any missteps by the company but rather concerns about the housing market. The stock, at 26x this year’s estimates, isn’t cheap, but if the company can sustain 20%+ EPS growth, which I think is likely, the stock will do well.

Lastly, I saw a bunch of cannabis companies: Tilray, Acreage Holdings, Cronos Group, Cresco Labs, MJardin Group and Green Growth Brands (which made the silly “bid” for Aphria). The good news for the sector is that there’s going to be a lot of growth and I didn’t detect any obvious frauds like Aphria. That said, these are tiny companies with absurd valuations – which is what happens during stupid bubbles. The smart money is investing in private companies and then making a fortune when they go public. Maybe there will be an opportunity for some bottom fishing if the carnage I expect comes to pass…

Two funny stories:

  1. I ran into Jim Chanos and mentioned the “dedicated cannabis track” at this conference. He laughed and said, “Last year’s track was bitcoin!”
  2. At the Tilray breakout session, I asked the CEO and CFO: “You’re burning $10 million per quarter, have $90 million of net cash, a nearly $10 billion market cap, and trade at nearly 300x revenues. In my entire career, I’ve never seen a company that so obviously should issue as much equity as possible to raise cash. Do you agree?” They replied: “In October, we did a convert (to avoid dilution) and now have $500 million in cash.” I asked, “What’s the strike?” “Around $160” I smiled and said, “I heard you guys were smart!”

2) I continue to have a variant perception on the Brexit-related chaos in the UK (see: May’s Brexit Deal Failed. What Happens Now?). I think the historic defeat Theresa May suffered yesterday is the best thing that could have happened to Britain, as it increases the odds that there will be a second referendum, as which point enough citizens, having realized that they were sold a false bill of goods, will switch their vote and this idiotic Brexit idea will die a well-deserved death. (If only we could do a re-vote here regarding our historic mistake…)

3) The National Inquirer’s revelations about Jeff Bezos’ behavior and impending divorce have made for some entertaining reading (was he really dumb enough to send a d**k pic to his mistress?!), but the real question for me as a (small) Amazon shareholder is whether this should affect my view of the stock. I think only a tiny bit. What he does in his private life is his business, and it’s certainly not unusual for a middle-aged rich guy to have a midlife crisis, have an affair and dump his wife. That said, I found this post on ValueInvestorsClub very interesting:

I am pretty sure that Bezos is on TRT [testosterone replacement therapy]. It does wonders in that it helps with energy, body composition, and aggression for a guy of Bezos’ age. But I am kind of not surprised that Bezos got jacked in recent years and now he’s sending d*ck pics. TRT dramatically increases sex drive and is probably the culpit of the cheating.

………….

I mean what guy do you know goes from looking like Bezos of the late 90s to Jeff “The TRT Terminator” Bezos of 2018. The guy has veins in his biceps. Heck, I only had veins in my biceps when I was 20, working out everyday and running 6 miles after lifting. https://www.reddit.com/r/nattyorjuice/comments/6nneml/jeff_bezos_amazon_ceo/

PS–Another friend speculated that Elon Musk might also be on TRT, which I’m not seeing as much – though it looks like he’s had a hair transplant.

4) Krugman with some interesting thoughts (and appropriate humility): Will China’s Economy Hit a Great Wall? Excerpt:

The other day I issued a warning about the Chinese economy. It is, I wrote, “emerging as a danger spot in a world economy that really, really doesn’t need this right now.”

5) For the last two decades, I’ve always felt like pharma companies jacking up prices in the U.S. (and ONLY the U.S.) by double digits every year was totally unsustainable – but I’ve been dead wrong so far. Here’s a good article about the deadly consequences of our government’s total, disgraceful failure in this area: The price of insulin in the U.S. has skyrocketed. It’s leading to tragic consequences. Excerpt:

Today, critics argue that the price of insulin has far outpaced any innovations. In the past decade alone, U.S. insulin list prices have tripled, according to an analysis of data from IBM Watson Health. In 1996, when Eli Lilly debuted its Humalog brand of insulin, the list price of a 10-milliliter vial was $21. The price of the same vial is now $275. Those costs can be compounded by the multiple vials that diabetics may require to survive each month. “It’s a very big problem,” says Robert Gabbay, chief medical officer at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston. “It’s a tragic barrier to care.”

6) A good article on one of the most costly and difficult-to-solve market inefficiencies I’ve ever seen: women are clearly more successful investors than men, yet they are almost absent from the profession. Consider Firing Your Male Broker. Excerpt:

While neither sex is immune to shoddy behavior, research has shown that female investors are more likely than men to focus on a family’s financial goals over their own absolute investment performance. A study by the Warwick Business School concluded that women outperformed men at investing by 1.8 percent. For one, women avoid “lottery style” trading and are more likely to focus on shares with good track records or on overlooked yet productive funds.

PS—I published two articles on the NY Times website about this in 2014:

The post Time To Buy? Tilson: If I Were To Pay Up For One Stock It Would Be This Retailer appeared first on ValueWalk.

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