Co-founder & portfolio manager, Focused Compounding
6 dated public stances tracked since 2018-09-06, most recently 2019-11-25. Each line carries the date and the venue it came from; quotation marks mean verbatim. Methodology.
The stances below are c8alpha's editorial distillation of Geoff Gannon's public commentary — television, podcasts, and interviews — compiled by automated transcript analysis and dated to the episode they came from. They may lag the speaker's current view and may contain extraction errors. Text in quotation marks is verbatim from the episode; everything else is our paraphrase. Geoff Gannon is not affiliated with c8alpha and has not endorsed this page. Nothing here is investment advice.
Raw direction-aware returns on public statements — long calls credited when the price rose, shorts when it fell, shorts capped at −100% — in a rising market this mostly measures who was long, not who has skill. Returns run from the stance date; calls are rarely closed publicly, so fixed 90-day / 180-day / 1-year horizons are used. A horizon shows only once it has fully matured, and only at 5+ scored stances. “% correct” is the share of those scored calls whose direction-aware return was positive at the horizon — in a rising market a bullish call is correct by default, so read it beside the market, not alone.
Every tracked call with at least one matured horizon: the rows behind the Returns
line above. A dash is a horizon that has not matured yet.
2019-11-25
GHIFF
bullish
Focused Compounding · video
Alberta casino operator with solid underlying unit economics in non-boom years (15% median ROE, ~37% EBIT margins) trading cheaply because Alberta's energy-driven economy is depressed, with meaningful upside if regional economy recovers
“if you were looking for a casino I guess you should look at the stock”
Snap Judgements: MLR, MATX, BADFF, EQGPF, GHIFF
2019-11-25
EQGPF
neutral
Focused Compounding · video
Canadian mortgage-focused financial institution with high-cost deposit funding fails the core investment criterion that only financial institutions with very low-cost, stable funding are worth owning, regardless of asset-side performance
“I don't want to be in something that's making its money on the asset side while having fairly expensive way of funding itself”
Snap Judgements: MLR, MATX, BADFF, EQGPF, GHIFF
2019-09-12
PGR
bullish
Focused Compounding · video
Progressive is the pricing-discovery leader in auto insurance (agents use its rate moves as a 6-month leading indicator for the industry), has superior underwriting discipline reflected in a consistently low combined ratio, and its high returns on equity…
“progressive should trade at a huge premium to book value because it can generate huge returns on equity”
90d -7.4% · 180d +4.5% · 1y +27.7%
Investing in Stocks: Valuing and Investing in Insurance Stocks
2019-09-12
LIFE INSURERS
bearish
Focused Compounding · video
Life insurance is a pure commodity where loss rates are easy to calculate, leaving no durable pricing edge, so these companies will compound book value worse than the market and should trade at significant discounts to book
“your average life insurer is going to compound at its book value way worse than market”
Investing in Stocks: Valuing and Investing in Insurance Stocks
2019-09-12
REINSURERS
bearish
Focused Compounding · video
Excess passive capital flooding the reinsurance market has suppressed returns to the point where the business has not offered attractive economics for a long time
“I don't think it's been given since for a really long time... there's just too much passive”
Investing in Stocks: Valuing and Investing in Insurance Stocks
2018-09-06
ETM
bullish
Focused Compounding · video
Probability-weighted upside (potential triple or quadruple) outweighs limited downside equity loss in a high-free-cash-flow business mispriced due to CBS Radio shareholder selling pressure and debt optics
“if you can make a hundred bets like this I don't have a problem with it at all”
Talking Entercom Communications Stock
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