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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Senior who wrote (76325)	10/10/2024 5:57:37 PM
From: Harshu Vyas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78748

Valuation is all I'm seeing. I'm quite bad (no, I've been terrible haha) at trying to predict growth so I try to stick to sheer cheapness coupled with healthy balance sheets which seems to have worked a lot better. I know some of the supermarkets (Sainsbury's and Tesco's) in the UK are using VYX systems but I try to not let my bias get involved unless I'm sure there's some competitive advantage (which I'm not haha). I completely agree with you about the competitive nature of the business and I wonder how it evolves. Commodity? No, because you need scale for the business model to be viable. Monopoly? No, because there's no real barriers to entry nor does any competitor I've looked at have any major difference. (Although, maybe I'm looking hard enough.) And, whilst these companies do provide helpful solutions, they're still a cost function to retail which is slowly dying to online competitors and restaurants which are cyclical by nature. So, how much profit can these guys actually squeeze out in the long-term? I understand why companies are chasing market share but I don't know whether it's the right strategy - you need someone to keep bankrolling you and I learned the hard way you don't want to have that on your mind as a shareholder. But the pay off is massive if the company survives to make profits. The tech giants of today prove that. The other problem I have is that I can't seem to distinguish most of these companies (frankly, I don't trust most of the online reviews) - I looked at Shift4 months ago and passed on it, partly because I thought the CEO didn't have his priorities straight and there were some questionable practices I'd read about ( Blue-Orca-Short-Shift4-Payments-Inc-NYSE-FOUR-5.pdf (blueorcacapital.com)), but also because I couldn't work out what made it any better than TOST (I think I concluded TOST was better but overpriced). VYX is basically the cheap option with lots of bias and lots of catch up required. TOST already has lots of growth priced in. I'd take the "cheap" choice, but I guess it's a difference in philosophy between us.