High-End Luxury and VMS Serial Acquirers - Off To The Races
Let's talk about Topicus, Otis and Hermès
Welcome to another weekly digest to stay informed about everything that matters most to quality growth investors!
The goal of these digests:
to elaborate on premium members’ questions (you’ve provided some great inspiration for future posts and deep dives, thanks for that!);
to have a high-level discussion on some macro events;
to elaborate on some fundamental topics;
to talk about portfolio strategy;
to highlight a research piece that may be of interest to our members;
In case you’ve missed our previous articles/webinars/earnings recaps/deep dives, we did share a couple of blogs on our favorite stocks for 2025 and beyond, and our Q4 and FY24 Letter.
Five stocks that balance high-quality, nice growth, cash flow resilience, and defensive traits.
Talking about our Portfolio’s performance, which valuation metric we prefer, our companies’ growth in underlying earnings, market environment, and highlighting the investment thesis for all our 11 companies.
Covering TSS’ (Topicus) recent large Belgian acquisition: the company’s background, while analyzing the parent company’s P&L and potential EBITA on a fully-consolidated level. We’ve also tweaked our valuation model to reflect the potential effect from this acquisition. Without doubt, we’ll further adjust our input based on future reporting.
In this digest, we’d like to share our perspective on:
the recent inflation report (although it didn’t shock us);
high-end luxury names soaring on Richemont’s blowout quarter;
Otis’ new buyback program of 2 (!) billion USD (funnily, we talked about/predicted it in last weekend’s webinar and our Q4 Letter);
Topicus’ continued M&A news flow.
As a reminder, if you’re a conservative investor looking for strategy diversification with quality companies, while having significantly lower volatility, then you might want to check out our second Substack “The Theta Tortoise”. To celebrate our 50+ premium member count, there’s a 20% discount till the end of the month.
Without further ado, let’s get on with this weekly digest.