Just read Amwell's ( $AMWL ) prospectus, & watched their roadshow. Assume market spirits are high for something like "telehealth software provider", but I'm not impressed. Lackluster margins, so much deficit to get to so little subscription revenue in 14 years.🤨
$LVGO way better
Doesn't feel like an opportunity to me, doesn't feel like true product-market-fit. Too much effort & energy for too little outcome. Big losses, not too much revenue. So little growth considering tailwinds, imo. 587 employees in 2018 to 686 employees in 2019. After 14 years...
Whitelabel provider = also caps the upside, which I don't like.
More disruption would have been better. I prefer to own companies with a closer relationship with their customers.
Too many parties & partnerships involved, company feels like a middleman. Nice NPS, nice ratings, but just doesn't feel like it's Amwell being in the driver's seat.
Can mostly compare with $TDOC and $LVGO, which feel like the opposite: highly energetic, creative & inventive.
$AMWL mission statement is boring, "enabling" health systems or digital delivery =/= disrupting healthcare. The latter is needed, big price pool is for disruptive company, not for enabler. Amwell feels dusty already.
Also language: "Cyber Command Center", "Centers of Excellence"
Are they even using a cloud provider as their primary infrastructure? Feels like they're still using their own infrastr.?
General conclusion: Whatever the market does with $AMWL's stock, I don't care, having read their prospectus only makes me more proud of $LVGO's achievments.
Very bullish on the $TDOC merger already, but even more so now.
Based on what I've read, I'd say that for people that care about investment styles based on fundamental/quality analysis (=not just speculation on short-term buzz), reward/risk is clearly better with Teladoc+Livongo.
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Just spent 4h on $TDOC $LVGO merger S-4/A (sec.gov/Archives/edgar…), carefully read first 200p, skimmed the (repetitive/formulaic) rest.
Most important stuff:
pic of pre-synergy & standalone financial assumptions for next years.
(btw: synergies are + $500mn run-rate by 2025)
Means that end of 2022, ex merger synergies, one would own combined entity with $2.631bn rev that grows to $3.449bn in 2023.
31.09% growth + 17.14% EBITDA margins for 2023.
[Again, that's ex merger synergies, which are probable bc <25% customer overlap + international expansion]
Fair 2023 forward multiple for that?
Assume 155mn $TDOC shares out. (currently 143.1mn look-through $TDOC post merger)
While there will always be people that perform even better, it's hard to judge how much risk was taken.
I own 171 companies. The performance is one thing, but the HOW makes me happy. No number can truly measure risk taken, but I sleep well because I know I've been conservative.
I am managing this big ship because I'm roughly 1,111 days into investing now and more companies -> more learnings.
A lot of large companies in there, because assuming if I manage a lot of money, I want to show that I can keep up with competition no matter the size of the mcaps.
Basically this portfolio, on a certain level really just is a test for me. I wanted to see if I can do it precisely via an absurd way (171 companies) and still fare well.
I'm innovating. It's my own style.
I'm having fun, my base activity is thinking and information processing.
I'm still early in my investment journey, so I feel the need to prove my consistent ability to come up with the very best investment ideas based on rational analysis. My $LVGO investment represents this. I've worked alone, during a time when it was completely ignored, bought..
shares below $17 (partial >9x in <1y based on the fact that $LVGO touched >157 pre-market), own a decently sized position with an avg cost of $21.606 where I still own 78% of.
It's not a pretty way, but for me, having a low avg cost is a suitable way of showing: I do the work.
Beyond that I wrote a super rough 6 page writeup on $LVGO in September, that I gave to @FromValue (his first PotentialMultibagger pick was $LVGO, currently the single best performing stock of his very recommomendable service) and a one-pager on the wonderful Founder Glen Tullman.
Druckenmiller's "risk-reward for equity is maybe as bad as I've seen it in my career" matters quite a bit to me considering his track record (+the fact that I'm into investing since <3y).
But his actions matter even more: He's long cloud plays.
So am I.
About selling... (1/4)
If I consider selling, I need sth better to buy, imo.
While I don't feel qualified to know if WHOLE MARKET truly is expensive, when I look at e.g. $FB, $AMZN, $SFTBY, $GOOG, $MSFT, $JD, $TCEHY... What's the alternative?
Seems "good enough", so dire outlook =/= selling action.
As a nerd, my base activity is information processing. I believe that I already have more than 10,000 hours of investment work + experience since I heard about investment for the first time around fall 2017.
If Corona happened 1.5y earlier, I would have done horrifying mistakes.
It's funny that Xiaomi mentions the Fortune 500, because every year I study the Fortune 2,000 list and simply think about which companies are likely to move up in their ranking. It's stupidly easy, but highly effective.
"Xiaomi is 10 years old, already number 468"->more to come?
Xiaomi's R&D, like with so many interesting companies, just continues to grow. They will have RMB10bn in 2020, and they plan on investing RMB50bn in R&D over the next 5 years at least.
Wonder how effective ~$1.4bn is in (mostly) China, based on differences in GDP per capita.
Had two and a half intensely focused and fun days to get up to speed with Elastic ( $ESTC ). Have been reading all calls, SA articles, many dozens of Slideshare presentations, various blog posts, skimmed prospectus, 10k & DEF 14A and watched many presentations on YouTube.
Elastic is highly interesting, spending time learning about it, I believe, has great ROI on your time.