What market share can NTS win in its markets? How long will NTS need to win that share? I’ll try to answer those questions using a couple of early NTS fiber markets as case studies. I’ll start with markets focused on business customers. The original NTS fiber market was Lubbock. NTS began building its own … Read more
How many of the homes and businesses that NTS’ fiber lines pass will ultimately sign up as NTS customers? Information on national broadband adoption would be helpful in answering this question, and luckily the topic is one that gets a lot of research attention. Two recent reports in particular—one by the Department of Commerce and … Read more
In the previous post, I offered some background on NTS and gave an overview of the three businesses the company operates today. Soon I’ll offer an analysis of the future profit contributions of each individual network. But before doing that I want to step back and look at the economics of broadband in general. To … Read more
The series of posts to follow will explore NTS, a holding of Monte Sol and its affiliates. I have been sitting on this research for a while, waiting for the right time to post it. After yesterday’s stock price drubbing (for no reason—or at least no good one), I feel now is the appropriate time. … Read more
These are numbers for a real company: In ten years this company has multiplied its revenue 100 times. It hasn’t posted a losing year in a decade. What’s more, over the period shown this company has made exactly zero acquisitions. All of the growth has been internally generated. This company is Autoinfo, ticker AUTO. I … Read more
The goal is to generate the greatest returns possible within the constraint of a portfolio that poses no more than a remote risk of losing money in the long-term. This concept sounds obvious but it is one that many investors gradually forget. Over time most investors drift toward one end of the spectrum or the … Read more
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius … There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for … Read more
An investor named Dan Beck recently posted an interesting write-up of Titan Machinery (TITN) on SumZero. Titan is America’s largest independent dealer of Case-New Holland (CNH) agricultural equipment. CNH is a major player in the industry, second in size only to John Deere. Mr. Beck’s write-up showed that Titan has much to offer as a … Read more
The table below shows a relatively comprehensive list of North American exchange-traded electronic manufacturing services (“EMS”) companies. These companies are sometimes referred to as contract manufacturers because some or all of the goods they manufacture are ultimately sold by another company under another brand name. The P/E ratios for the industry are horrendous. The average … Read more
In June the Chinese government lowered its 2012 GDP growth forecast to ‘just’ 7.5%. Few actually believe the economy is growing that fast. Within the investment and economic communities it is widely accepted that Chinese GDP statistics are at least partly falsified. The Chinese government itself has said as much in cables revealed by Wikileaks. … Read more
