One of the advantages of writing for a public audience is that readers and other investors who follow the companies and industries we’ve written about, start to send their own information. We recently posted a short thesis on L Brands on SumZero and followed-up with a LinkedIn article discussing the risk in the company dividend. … Read more
Last week, we published a piece on SumZero recommending a short position in L Brands (LB), the company that owns Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works. The key point is that there is a fashion trend away from the complicated underwire bras sold by Victoria’s Secret for $50 – $60, and towards more casual … Read more
L Brands (LB) Overview: L Brands (ticker LB) is the owner and operator of Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works. Other businesses account for less than 5% of revenue and no operating profit so will not be addressed here. Victoria’s Secret is now about 60% of the $13B US lingerie industry. Bath & Body … Read more
A couple of months ago, we put out a piece pointing out that CBS had the idea that the company would get an additional $100MM in revenue related to changing the way they accounted for delayed viewing of programs on DVRs. In other words, advertisers would get the exact same value, but CBS would charge … Read more
Back in the golden days of television, the only way to watch a show was live. TV ratings measured the live viewing audience which in turn affected ad revenue. The networks’ ad revenue was a function of the size of the audience multiplied by the ad rate for that audience. (Not every viewer is worth … Read more
This paper is the Silver Arrow response to Highfields calling Digital Realty (ticker: DLR) a Ponzi scheme and a fraud. We discovered that Highfields misunderstood the business and we were proven correct in our long position. DLR – Silver Arrow Writeup
TV is Next is our whitepaper outlining the then-upcoming upheaval in the television business. While many of the conclusions about the disruption caused by the streaming revolution are now common knowledge, the piece was highly controversial when we published it in 2012. At the time, many hedge funds had large positions in the stocks we … Read more