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Jan 13

2012 Recap

Below are the results for 2012 from my actual portfolios. My bank does a good job of providing performance analysis; its improved to the point that I may start to track my actual portfolio directly rather than through a practice account. The results available from the service go back to 2009.

In 2012 I managed to outperform the S&P and the TSX and I’m pretty happy with that. I’ve commented before on my time constraints. I work a day job so my time to analyze investments is mostly limited to a few early morning hours, an hour at lunch and sometimes (when I’m not too tired) an hour before bed. While my hope is that this will eventually change, right now time limits me from investigating every possibility and often causes me to get to ideas much later than I would otherwise. Read more

Jan 6

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Week 79: From Chaos to Order

Portfolio Performance

Summary

I am going to try to keep to a shorter update but given my track record with brevity we will see how that pans out. The reason I want to keep it brief is that I am attempting to write a Visual Basic program this weekend that will allow me to paste my transactions into an excel spreadsheet and automatically spit out a list of the closed positions, the open positions, and the relevant transaction parameters. I want a better solution than a snapshot of the RBC Practice Account portfolio holdings page; I have no ability to come up with graphs and charts of performance with my current snipit method, the practice account summary has a bug that screws up the book value and gain/loss numbers every time you make a partial sale of a position, which is a real pain, and I want to be able to post a consolidated list of all my closed positions along with their gain and loss, something that is not possible from the practice account (my current method, which has been to post every one of my updates on my portfolio page, is getting to be a little too long).

On the Cliff

The market was a real yo-yo over the last couple weeks but I didn’t really panic much. I have been known to do violent purges in the midst of chaos, but not this time. I was pretty confident that something would get done, either at the deadline or as a result of the steep fall that would occur after it was passed. As it was, things turned out just about in-line with my expectations. Read more

Jan 2

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Arkansas Best: The Upside of Union Negotiations

Arkansas Best is my second foray into the trucking world. Its discovery I owe to @Largcaptrader1 on twitter, who pointed out to me that the company may be a better way to play the industry than YRC Worldwide.

This is a much simpler investment idea than YRC Worldwide. While it took me weeks to wrap my head around all of the debt, liabilities and history of YRC Worldwide, it took me a couple days to get to the core of Arkansas Best.

But that isn’t to say that this is an easy win. The issue with Arkansas Best is singular, but it’s outcome is not easily determined. Just how well the investment plays out depends almost entirely on the outcome of negotiations with the Teamster union for the soon to be expired workers contract.

A bit of Background

Arkansas Best is a less-than-load trucker, very much a competitor of YRC Worldwide (which I wrote about the other day). Like YRC Worldwide, Arkansas Best is burdened by high costs relative to their competitors due to the high level of union employees. However unlike YRC Worldwide, Arkansas Best has been able to get by and be very marginally profitable without modifications to their employee contracts. They have an efficient operation that is mostly cash positive of an operating basis and that appears to be close to cash neutral after considering CAPEX requirements. They have far less debt than YRC Worldwide ($195 million versus 1.4 billion) and the company trades at a discount to book value ($11.55). Read more