Keytone Dairy Corporation (KTD.AU) Apr 2020

Keytone Dairy Corporation was established in 2011 for production and supply of NZ dairy and nutritional products. The business was listed on the ASX in July 2018. Keytone manufactures dairy and nutritional products under their own brands, ‘KeyDairy’ and ‘KeyHealth’, as well as various contract manufacturing arrangements (including Walmart China (Sam’s Club)). In mid 2019 Keytone acquired Omniblend, an Australian-based product developer and contract manufacturer. The acquisition enabled Keytone to increase manufacturing capacity, expand product range throughout the health and wellness sector and allow potential further vertical integration opportunities (more M&A/PD). In late 2019 a futher consumer foods business was...

Chart.JS with Rails 6 and Webpacker Mar 2020

Chart.js is a great javascript library to quickly create beautiful SVG charts.

With Rails 5 it was quick and easy to install a Chart.js Gem into the asset pipeline to get started.

Rails 6 introduced Webpacker as the default Javascript pre-processor and bundler. This is a much tidier and simpler way to manage JS dependencies. Installing Chart.js into your application is now even easier:

Add Chart.js with your favourite package manager (i.e Yarn) in the console.

yarn add chart.js

Add a require() in your JS pack.

// app/javascript/packs/application.js require("chart.js")...

Cloudcall [CALL.L] Feb 2020

I was browsing some recent hedge fund letters and came accross an excerpt from Lightsail Capital Management which sounded familiar:

Late in September, we participated in a private financing deal for a small publicly-traded enterprise software company located in a developed market outside of the United States. The company is currently sub-scale, but has a large growth opportunity ahead of it that will required additional capital to pursue, hence hte capital raise.

Despite the company organically growing at 30-40%, generating gross margins above 70%, and demonstrating high customer retention, we were able to make our...

Song catalogues as an alternative investment through Hipgnosis Jan 2020

Hipgnosis has recently been attracting media attention after entry to the main market of the London Stock Exchange under the catchy ticker SONG.

Hipgnosis is an investment vehicle for songs and musical intellectual property. Admission to the main market was completed in November 2019 with a total raise of ~£625m which is quickly being deployed into acquiring catalogues.

The current portfolio of catalogues cover over 6,000 songs of which more than 1,000 have been number one or two on the global charts. The catalogues include The Chainsmokers (14th most streamed artist globally on Spotify), including the song 1-800-273-8255...

eCommerce is not living up to its promise Dec 2019

Ecommerce was promised to eliminate middlemen and enable businesses to sell globally directly to consumers who can now buy with ease at fair and transparent prices.

However, this hasn’t really happened.

Marketplaces such as amazon has been flooded with unsafe and potentially fake products (see Wall Street Journal). And sometimes they are not always the cheapest and best option, particulary with growth in Walmart and other large retailers.

There is even this niche called ‘retail arbitrage’ which literally involves people buying products from retail stores and then loading them into FBA by Amazon and making money on...

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