Argo ARB.L raised £25m and listed on the London Stock Exchange in August 2018 as a cryptocurrency ‘mining as a service’ (MaaS). In August 2018 bitcoin (BTC) was trading for c. $7K USD (compared to c. $20k at peak in 2017) and business seemed to be going OK, signing a few customers and building momentum. However shortly after this support fell from the cryptocurrency market with prices crashing and sitting at around $3k USD. Mining was not particularly profitable and the cryptocurrency market fell deep into the ‘Crypto Winter’.

Argo appeared to be somewhat dead in the water:

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Supposedly the Yahoo Finance API used to be the holy grail of finance data, providing reliable and accurate finance data for free. I’ve been working on a recent project which required ASX market data - specifically daily historical data (volume, open, close etc).

IEX Cloud has a great API and allows for a fairly high volume of calls. Unfortunately ASX market support has not yet been delivered, however appears to be in the pipeline with an unconfirmed delivery date.

I was about to purchase historical CSV market data however came across Alphavantage and the expanded

Alphavantage...

A number of significant events have occured since I previously wrote about Just Eat’s struggle to remain relevant in the fast-growing food delivery market. There is increased pressure from competitors in all markets, driven by capital raises and strong competitor execution.

Latin America

Just Eat has a large position (c. 33%) in iFood operating in Brazil. Cat Rock Capital has suggested that the stake in iFood could be worth as much as £650mm (Cat Rock Capital - Dec 2018) if divested. This represents c. 15% of the market cap of Just Eat.

iFood has historically been the...

I first came across the concept of value investing from reading Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor. This was followed by poring over the annual Berkshire Hathaway ‘Letter to the Shareholders’ and The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life.

This year I decided to make the pilgrimage to attend the annual shareholders meeting, and to be honest, I was very keen to attend as soon as possible as Warren and Charlie aren’t getting any younger.

Credentials

Despite holding BRK.B shares (the affordable version of the c. $300k BRK.A shares) I struggled to obtain a physical copy...

The rise of Uber Eats since launch in 2014 to > $6 billion USD run-rate in bookings, growing at over 200% p.a has been simply phenomenal. Uber Eats is now part of the vernacular of almost every millennial and young professional living in a large city.

Uber Eats is not the first incarnation of providing food delivery/ordering online. Ordering food from private businesses started with directory style business such as Menulog in Australia and the original Takeaway.com in Europe. These businesses typically charged a fixed fee for restaurants presenting their menus online and were entirely responsible for...