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Tag: value

PIK the Turnaround

Posted on 20/12/2024 by Keith McLachlan

Following a rights issue and the successful floating of Boxer’s IPO on the JSE, Pick n Pay Stores (code: PIK) offers an interesting opportunity. The market has valued Boxer for us and, thus, Pick n Pay’s 65.6% stake in the retailer is worth R19.4bn (excluding a control premium). With Pick n Pay’s market cap currently…

Santova: A Great Business

Posted on 21/06/202315/06/2023 by Keith McLachlan

Santova Logistics (SNV) has been a long-running stock pick of mine (for a decade or more by now!), and the Group’s latest set of results reinforces the stock’s validity as growth story. Check out my previous article on the Group here (Could Santova be a multi-bagger?). In a recent JSE panel of stock pickers (SA…

Domestic Distribution Gem

Posted on 14/02/202307/02/2023 by Keith McLachlan

What feels like a billion years ago in 2021, I shone a light on the fantastic job domestic industrial and consumer distribution group, Hudaco (HDC), was doing: Hudaco group is flying. While global supply chains have eased (though Durban port & South African infrastructure has worsened) and COVID has receded (only to be replaced by…

There’s Life in the Life Insurers

Posted on 24/10/202218/10/2022 by Keith McLachlan

While the pandemic created excess mortalities and hammered life insurers’ profits, it did reinforce how critical life insurance is and how important the institutions that write this cover are to the broader economy. The pandemic has faded into an endemic, mortalities have drifted lower (though they remain slightly elevated on some metrics and we still…

Omnia: The Right Chemicals

Posted on 06/06/202227/06/2022 by Keith McLachlan

Following a decade of intensive investment with meager returns and a bloated, debt-laden balance sheet, I was one of the skeptics in 2019 who saw Omnia’s R2bn rights issue as confirmation that they had lost their way as a diversified chemicals group. Normally, issuing equity to pay off debt is a very expensive way of…

Sabvest Capital Keeps Delivering

Posted on 31/01/202202/02/2022 by Keith McLachlan

I have a filter that I apply to investment holding companies (so-called “HoldCo’s”) to see whether it may be worth digging deeper into them: Is there an external ManCo? External ManCo’s can mean a misalignment of interest with shareholders. I want HoldCo’s where management are invested with other shareholders. How expensive is the HoldCo structure?…

Afrocentric vs. Discovery

Posted on 27/01/202120/01/2021 by Keith McLachlan

ORIGINAL ARTICLE APPEARS HERE. Having listed on the JSE in 1999, Discovery Ltd (DSY) has been a phenomenal success generating early investors multiples of their money. The Group administers the Discovery Medical Aid (a separate legal entity to the listed company) and, through data mining, clever incentives and cross-selling, the Group has won huge medical…

Master Drilling: Illustrating Value

Posted on 27/08/202027/08/2020 by Keith McLachlan

OLD ARTICLE – Original posted on March 22, 2018 I have written about Master Drilling (MDI) previously and I refer you back to these articles for some of the narrative: Master Drilling: Hidden Gem Master Drilling: The Big Mistake You will notice a consistent theme: I like them. The Group recently put out some soft…

Master Drilling: The Big Mistake

Posted on 27/08/2020 by Keith McLachlan

OLD ARTICLE – Original posted on August 26, 2016 Previously I wrote the following article on Master Drilling (Master Drilling: Unknown Gem). I will not rewrite the investment case that I noted in that article for Master Drilling as a world-class, niche industrial technology play with global, growing scale and sophistication. Pretty much all of that…

Master Drilling: Hidden Gem

Posted on 27/08/202027/08/2020 by Keith McLachlan

OLD ARTICLE – Original posted on March 29, 2016 When I first encountered Master Drilling (MDI), I was mildly impressed and put them on the radar to follow closer. Over the subsequent three years, I began to become quite impressed with the business and its operations. Did you know that Master Drilling (run out South…

Santova: Growing & Undervalued

Posted on 27/08/2020 by Keith McLachlan

OLD ARTICLE – Original posted on October 11, 2017 Santova (SNV) is a non-asset based supply chain manager with more than 65% of its earnings coming from outside of South Africa, including the majority of hard currency in this. Santova put out a H1:18 trading statement yesterday that can be summarised as follows: H1:18 EPS and…

Sabvest: Unique Opportunity

Posted on 27/08/2020 by Keith McLachlan

OLD ARTICLE – Original posted on August 21, 2018 What makes for a good investment? Simple: (1) Quality underlying, (2) Growth / yield / return, & (3) Underpaying for all this. What makes a good investment fit into a diversified portfolio? Simple: (4) Being as little correlated to existing investments as possible. What makes all of…

When Does Valuation Matter & When Doesn’t it?

Posted on 27/08/202027/08/2020 by Keith McLachlan

OLD ARTICLE – Original posted on October 5, 2018 Introduction: Fundamentals are what you get but valuation is how much you pay for it. The less you pay for a given set of fundamentals, the more you weight the odds in your favour that the investment will have a positive outcome. Hence, even if fundamentals are…

Five Reasons Not To Invest In A Stock

Posted on 26/08/2020 by Keith McLachlan

OLD ARTICLE – Original posted April 1, 2016 Given the small cap space as a capital growth asset class and my predisposition towards being long, this website tends to be about which stocks to buy. Let me turn that on its head and give some (hopefully intuitive) pointers for which stocks to not buy. When you are…

The Value of Forecasts

Posted on 26/08/2020 by Keith McLachlan

OLD ARTICLE – Original posted on June 30, 2015 In the context of the stock market and its underlying individual listed companies, what is the value of building, making and using forecasts? By their very nature, forecasts for companies are an attempt to anticipate the future earnings of a company. They are not a promise of what the…

Difference Between Value Investing & Being a Contrarian

Posted on 26/08/2020 by Keith McLachlan

OLD ARTICLE – Original posted on January 29, 2013 Value investing is a process of identifying potential investments that can be bought for less than they are actually worth. This is done via the valuation process. Once an undervalued investment is identified and it meets the criteria the investor is looking for, it is bought and…

Astral Foods: Quality With Converging Positives

Posted on 26/08/202026/08/2020 by Keith McLachlan

OLD ARTICLE – Originally posted on February 4, 2020 As a well-run, ungeared domestic poultry stock, Astral Foods (code: ARL) has two major variables that largely dictate its fortunes: What cost must it pay to raise its chickens? What price can it sell its chicken products at? Firstly, Astral’s long-term track record is superb, proving…

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