Peridot Capitalist

The Steak n Shake Company (SNS), an operator of 485 burger and shake focused casual dining restaurants in 21 states, has recently been quietly transformed by a new management team into a small Berkshire Hathaway type holding company. The move is very Warren Buffett-esque, with a 1-for-20 reverse stock split aimed at boosting the share [...]

Back in December I was fortunate enough to be chosen by the editors to provide BusinessWeek magazine a value stock idea for their annual investment guide issue. My selection, beer giant Anheuser-Busch InBev, was controversial at the time due to the just-completed buyout of A-B by Belgium’s InBev, but despite how disappointed many were with [...]

The current bear market resulted in the first negative ten-year period for the U.S. stock market in a long time. This has prompted many people to declare that the investment strategy of buying and holding stocks for the long term (”buy and “hold” for short) is all of the sudden “dead” or no longer viable.
Personally, [...]

The following is a research update to Peridot Capital’s Select List model portfolio. Readers may sign up for a 30-day free trial to the Select List which has outperformed the S&P 500 by more than 8% year to date.
Taking Profits in Cheesecake Factory
April 22, 2009
After a 49 percent increase in the Select’s List consumer discretionary [...]

In November of 2004 I wrote a piece entitled “Sleepless in Seattle” which postulated that shares of Starbucks (SBUX) were trading at such a high valuation (forward P/E of 48) that even if the company grew handsomely over the following few years, the stock’s performance was likely to be unimpressive. I projected an aggressive three-year [...]

As you may have already read in Business Week’s 2009 Investment Outlook issue (dated 12/29-1/5), I highlighted the recently formed Anheuser-Busch InBev (AHBIF) as a potentially attractive bargain pick. Despite various other mergers failing to get done in the current credit environment, Belgium’s InBev paid $52 billion in cash to acquire Anheuser-Busch. Fearing that borrowing [...]

The annual Business Week Investment Outlook issue (dated 12/29-1/5) is out and I was asked to contribute a bargain investment idea from the currently depressed market. My pick (on page 58) was Anheuser-Busch InBev. I am on vacation through 12/27 but I will write about this newly created beer giant in more detail when [...]

News this week that beer giant Anheuser-Busch (BUD) was suing InBev, claiming that its hostile takeover attempt was illegal, looked surprising desperate to me this early in the game. A report out of the New York Times insists that A-B is now in friendly negotiations with InBev about a merger.
What this tells me is that [...]

After seeing that Yahoo (YHOO) was able to reject a hostile bid from Microsoft (MSFT), claiming the offer was “inadequate” despite the fact that it clearly was quite adequate, Anheuser-Busch (BUD) has apparently decided to use the same approach in its battle with InBev. BUD officially rejected the deal yesterday, and in a conference call [...]

After being born and raised in Baltimore, I traveled out to St. Louis for college and subsequently spent a decade there. The long rumored InBev hostile merger offer for American icon Anheuser-Busch (BUD) came true on Wednesday, as the maker of Budweiser confirmed they had received an unsolicited $65 cash bid.
InBev has a reputation for [...]