The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 9 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Batchelor: Investors should avoid stocks with unanimous Wall Street buy ratings
“If you go to Wall Street,
And the 10 analysts tell you need to buy this stock.
So, absolute unanimity.
More than likely, you should not take their advice.”
Batchelor: GameStop now requires everything to go right to profit
“When we were buying it, almost everything had to go wrong to lose money in GameStop. That's a lot different than today, where almost everything will have to go right to make money.”
Batchelor: KPMG withheld Spiegel audit opinion after team found accounting oddities
“So make a really long story short, after a lot of analysis, focusing on these few things, we identified some accounting oddities that ended up causing this bank to liquidate, and Spiegel to go bankrupt. KPMG did not file an audit opinion based on the work that…”
Batchelor: Overweighting deep value added 50 percentage points of return
“We've actually done an analysis of this and over the first 11 years, almost 11 years of our all cap strategy, it's added an incremental 50 percentage points to the total return, the ability to opportunistically overweight that deep value sleeve.”
Batchelor: Value investing generates alpha because people fear looking dumb
“When you're a contrarian and things go wrong, you look like an idiot, and that's an occupational hazard that a contrarian has to live with. Maybe it's something in my personality type that I'm okay looking dumb occasionally, but that psychological difficulty i…”
Clifford Capital sold GameStop in December 2020, narrowly missing meme rally
“We sold GameStop in December of twenty-twenty. So prior to the excitement with the Reddit army”
Batchelor: Abercrombie traded at half Hollister's standalone value in 2017
“Abercrombie & Fitch was trading, in our opinion, well below what even Hollister was worth. So we valued the company and said, in rough terms, business is trading at half of what Hollister is worth”
Batchelor: American Express's business model is a natural inflation hedge
“Amex has a fantastic business model. They keep all the economics of their cards, which is rare. And also inflation protection, which is a big deal in today's environment. Wasn't a big deal when we purchased it, but we were getting inflation protection for free…”
Batchelor was one of two analysts to rate Mastercard IPO a buy
“So in 2007, the first time Morningstar had actually done a pre IPO analysis of a company was Mastercard. And I was pegged to cover Mastercard before there was any price on the stock. Morningstar usually had publicly available prices. So this was a first buildi…”