Woolworths and Coles are the two largest grocery retailers in Australia. Between them, they command a large percentage of the market share, with the rest divided between Aldi, IGA, Costco, and smaller players. The recent competitive history between Woolies and Coles is quite an interesting one. Up until Coles was acquired by Wesfarmers in 2007 … More The Supermarket Trolley Index
It’s been 10 years since I started practising Value Investing and it’s time to do a little introspection and write down a few reflections. I hope these reflections can serve as a memory aid to my future self and be of value to others as well. I have always had an affinity to investing because of … More Reflections on Tens Years of Value Investing
Incentive drives behaviour. If you have ever wondered why (brick-and-mortar) grocery retailers historically don’t pay much attention to understanding customer preferences — it’s getting better but things are still moving slowly — then you only have to look at how most of them make their money. It turns out that the main sources of supermarket profits … More Sources of Profit in Retail
When I was building the Data Science Centre of Excellence at Reliance Industries, I once interviewed a world-class researcher who has worked at multiple institutions, including Yahoo and Google, and he told me something I didn’t understand till then. I thought a company like Google has a weak business moat because it is vulnerable to … More The Competitive Moat of Google, Facebook and Other Data Owners
The Macau gaming stocks have been smashed in the last 18 months, down 70% in certain cases. The following chart, which shows the Macau Gross Gaming Revenue (in units of MOP million) as published by Macau’s Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau, shows the underlying problem: since early 2014, the total Macau gaming revenue has dropped … More SJM Holdings — A Value Play
Mental Models 4 Life 