Fructivore Investments

Long-time readers will know that rural telecom companies have been a particular favorite of mine. Although these companies’ core residential landline business is in decline as mobile phones become the primary phone line among an ever-increasing proportion of the U.S. population, rural telephone companies can respond by lowering capital expenditures accordingly and refocusing their offerings […]

Update: Yes, the company has declared bankruptcy and the bonds, being junior to the bank debt, have been damaged done badly, having been converted to rights to purchase up to $90 million in equity. I confess I got this one wrong, but I’m not going to cover over my mistakes by deleting this post. As […]

You’ll never guess where I’ve been. Yes, the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders’ meeting in Omaha. And here’s how it went. The meat of the meeting occurs on Saturday, where Warren Buffett and his co-chairman, Charlie Munger, spend hours fielding questions from the financial press and from lucky audience members. I would have asked, but most […]

As some of you may recall, a couple of years ago I recommended Black Box Corporation, a company that mainly performs IT installations and maintenance for companies and government entities that don’t have the resources to handle such a project in-house. Well, unfortunately the company encountered a decline in sales and margins owing to weakness […]

UPDATE: Since this article was written, Alaska Communications sold its remaining wireless assets to GCI and used the money to pay off a great deal of its bank debt, which made these bonds much safer and moved the price to 100. So, buying these bonds when the article was written would have worked out nicely, […]

One of the more famous places to look for value is the net-net company, which has a market capitalization that is less than it could be liquidated for, meaning that the company could never earn another cent and investors would still get more than they paid for. Surprisingly, even in the age of the database […]

I am often struck by the fact that, when it comes to companies, size is no guarantee of quality. By which I mean that generally speaking I have no bias in favor of large or small cap companies, and frequently I see a symbiosis of small companies serving the large ones like the pilot fish […]

I am one of the no doubt very few people in the world who enjoy watching the Federal Reserve Chair testifying before Congress. Among the issues presented in the latest round from Chair Yellen was the difficulty of old people coping with the low interest rate environment in living off their investment income. The Chair, […]

Banks are sometimes difficult to get a handle on; the Citigroup 10-K for fiscal year 2007 was over 200 pages long and you could have read every word of it and not found a line reading “Oh, by the way, we’re doomed.” But not every bank is a too-big-to-fail megabank that dabbles in derivatives; the […]

Like many investors, I’ve always liked used basic company statistics as a screen to identify companies worthy of more in-depth investigation. I readily admit that there are many qualitative aspects to a company that are unlikely to show up in the figures, but on the other hand, a corporation is a device that turns cash […]