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Sunday, September 6, 2026

Investment Policy

Investment Policy

Okay, it's my Investment Policy...Everybody is different and shaped by their own personal investing experiences. but if I could go back in time, and start all over again, knowing what I know now, this is how I would invest.

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1) Wager Value

Money is made in the dark, not the light.

Carlo Cannell, Cannell Capital
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Back in the eighties I use to go to the racetrack to bet on Thoroughbred Racehorses. It was a good training ground for investing in the stock market. I came across a term by handicapping author,  James Cramer. He called it Wager Value.  Essentially it meant focusing on information that other handicappers weren’t using. Whereas most people who went to the track used speed ratings and the horse’s current form shown in the past performance tables, Cramer like Stephen Davidowitz before him, focused on trainer patterns, track bias and result charts. He reasoned that if he based his handicapping (estimating probabilities) on underused information, the horses he would come up with would help provide him with more attractive odds. So he might estimate a horse’s chances of winning to be 3-1 while the tote board (based on everybody else opinion) would have the same horse going off at 8-1. This is the very heart of handicapping a horse race, betting on the horse who has the best chance of winning relative to his odds.

Applying the concept of ‘Wager Value’ to the stock market you would want to focus on the inefficient areas of the market. Small and Mid capitalization stocks tend to be a major source of inefficiency in the stock market. Most mutual funds and institutions want to increase their assets under management so they can grow their businesses and get bigger. Most of them get so big that they price themselves out of the smaller cap world. The small and mid caps end up being too illiquid for the giant institutions to bother with so they are forced to move up the food chain to the large caps. This means there are less people buying the small/mid caps and fewer analysts following them. This makes them prone to being mispriced. The small/mid cap world is an ideal environment for the small do-it-yourself investor who is far more nimble and quick than his huge institutional counterparts. Of course small/mid caps can introduce additional risks as well. They tend to more unstable then the large caps. Small caps often have just one or two products lines and a smaller customer base. They can be overly dependent on a few key individuals in the executive suite. So you have to be careful. These risks can be mitigated by concentrating on companies that are serving a potentially big market and that actually have growing revenues, cash flow and earnings. You also like to see management own a good portion of their own stock. If it's run by a founder CEO, even better. It’s an attractive area to explore and their financial statements can be easier to read as well, and its great fun and after all that’s all part of the game.

In my own portfolio I hold some large and mid cap names, while holding some small caps as well. I run sort of a barbell approach in my own investment portfolio. It’s all a matter of taste. You might want to have just a few of the smaller cap names in your portfolio or hold many and maybe have a larger cash position, it’s up to you.

Great patience is often needed as small caps especially, can be out of favor for long periods of time and in this day of the internet can be the subject of bear raids so it’s important to be familiar with the underlying fundamentals of the company. You don't want to be shook out of your position. There are some great small cap mutual funds out there where you can get some unique investing ideas in this area. 

The small do-it-yourself investor gives up a huge advantage to the financial establishment in ignoring this area. Remember when investing you have to have some sort of edge over your competition and the small to mid cap area is a great place to exercise it. And Canada is basically a small to mid cap market and an ideal place to go hunting for under followed names.
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2) Margin of Safety 

What is it that makes outcomes tolerable even when the future doesn't live up to your expectations? The answer is margin of safety.

Howard Marks, The Most Important thing

The Margin of Safety (MOS) is the difference between a stock's intrinsic value (what the company is truly worth) and its current market price.

In simple terms, it's a principle of buying a stock at a price significantly below your estimate of its true value.

Here's a breakdown of what it means and why it's so important:

Core Concept: The Protective Cushion

The Margin of Safety acts as a protective cushion or buffer for the investor. This idea was popularized by Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing and mentor to Warren Buffett.

  • Protection against Errors: No valuation model is perfect, and human judgment can be flawed. The MOS provides room for error in your intrinsic value calculation. If you were wrong and the company is only worth 15% less than your estimate, a 40% MOS ensures you still bought at a discount.

  • Protection against Market Volatility: It minimizes your risk of capital loss during market downturns, bad luck, or unforeseen corporate challenges. When the market price drops, you are protected because you bought the stock for a price that already had a significant discount built-in.

  • Maximizing Returns: When the market eventually recognizes the stock's true value, the price is expected to rise from the discounted purchase price to the intrinsic value, providing a higher potential return.

A wide Margin of Safety is the central principle for value investors. It means:

Never pay full price. Always buy assets for significantly less than their worth. (As Warren Buffett famously said, "You leave yourself an enormous margin. When you build a bridge, you insist it can carry 30,000 pounds, but you only drive 10,000-pound trucks across it.")

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3) Know What You Own


The first step in building a margin of safety is to research the company.

There is a plethora of literature available for anyone who is interested in learning how to analyze a company…Read the financial statements. Since the passing of the Safe Harbor Act in 1995, U.S. companies have been incented to provide timely and accurate financial statements in their 10-K, 10-Q, and proxy statements. The 10-K and 10-Q (annual and quarterly reports) each provide three financial statements: income statement, cash flow statement, and balance sheet. There is plenty of information available in these three statements to allow an investor to thoroughly understand how the company operates. The proxy statement discusses management compensation. A brief examination of the proxy statement will offer great insights into how top management compensates itself.

For investors who are seeking a deeper understanding of the company, there are many more questions to pose. Has the company increased its earnings, revenue, and cash flow consistently over the long term? Is it in an industry that has long-term growth potential? Is the management team stable and experienced? Has management laid out its goals and milestones? Has it delivered on those milestones? Has it been successful in expanding its services or its product line? Has the company treated its shareholders fairly?

Recent changes in the disclosure laws plus the ubiquitous Internet have given individual investors the ability to easily access and read transcripts of quarterly management conference calls and corporate presentations to institutional shareholders. These transcripts often give investors valuable clues into the mindset of top management. There is no excuse today for any investor, large or small, to be insufficiently informed on any public company.

Benjamin Graham and the Power of Growth Stocks,
Frederick K. Martin
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4) Buy and Hold

Investment is a process in time.

Hyman Minsky

'Buy and hold' is a long-term, passive investment strategy where an investor:

  1. Buys a financial asset (like stocks, bonds, or mutual funds) based on the belief in its long-term growth potential.

  2. Holds that asset for an extended period—often many years or even decades—regardless of short-term market fluctuations or volatility.

Key Principles of Buy and Hold:

  • Long-Term Focus: The strategy relies on the historical tendency of the overall market (or a fundamentally sound company) to grow over long periods.

  • Ignoring Short-Term Noise: The investor deliberately ignores daily or monthly price swings, resisting the urge to sell during market downturns (panic selling) or buy into temporary speculative bubbles (chasing returns).

  • Time in the Market, Not Timing the Market: It emphasizes that consistently staying invested over a long time is more effective than trying to predict when the market will peak or bottom.

  • Benefits of Compounding: The strategy maximizes the effect of compounding, where the returns on your investment are reinvested to generate their own returns over many years, creating exponential growth.

  • Lower Costs and Taxes: Fewer trades mean lower transaction costs (brokerage fees/commissions). In many jurisdictions, holding an asset for over a year qualifies for lower long-term capital gains tax rates, which is a significant advantage.

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5) Concentrated Portfolio

The strategy we've adopted precludes our following the standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying it.

Warren Buffet

Since we're familiar with the underlying fundamentals of the company we've invested in, and are judgements are based on hidden or neglected information, it only makes sense to concentrate your holdings on your best ideas. Why diversify your edge away? As Marty Whitman and Charlie Munger both said, "diversification is a hedge for ignorance."

Joel Greenblatt too observed, as the number of stocks in the portfolio increases, the benefits of diversification drop quickly. In other words know what you own and pick your spots. Put your money into your best ideas and learn to think for yourself. Ten stocks in your investment portfolio are enough if you have good well-thought reasons for investing in them and you spread them out between different industries. Yes, it may be volatile, but volatility is not risk, it's noise. The longer you hold your positions the more the risk will go out of them. A better way to approach diversification is by putting money into low-risk investing instruments (cash, T-bills). Sort of a barbell approach. 

In my own investing, I run an unbalanced as well as a concentrated portfolio. I put most of my money into my best ideas. It's all a matter of taste. The longer you are in the market, your investing style will gradually emerge over time. The market not only teaches you how to invest in stocks, but it will teach you about yourself as well.
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6) Be a Contrarian

If everyone's doing them, there must be something wrong with them.

Henry Singleton

Don't do the obvious thing. Because if it's obvious, it's already a crowded trade. A crowd yields to instincts that an individual, acting alone, represses. The crowd instinctively  follow the impulses of the herd. An individual who becomes involved in a group becomes less capable of thinking for himself. In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his ability to think for himself and to stay dispassionate about his investments. He gets emotionally swept away with the crowd and soon finds himself lost and out to sea.

Market extremes represent inflection points. These occur when bullishness or bearishness reaches a maximum. Figuratively speaking, a top occurs when the last person who will become a buyer does so. Since every buyer has joined the bullish herd by the time the top is reached, bullishness can go no further and the market is as high as it can go.

There’s only one way to describe most investors: trend followers. Superior investors are the exact opposite. Superior investing, as I hope I’ve convinced you by now, requires second-level thinking—a way of thinking that’s different from that of others, more complex and more insightful. By definition, most of the crowd can’t share it. Thus, the judgments of the crowd can’t hold the key to success. Rather, the trend, the consensus view, is something to game against, and the consensus portfolio is one to diverge from. As the pendulum swings or the market goes through its cycles, the key to ultimate success lies in doing the opposite.

Howard Marks, The Most Important Thing

And above all, at times of extreme emotion in the market...Be Contrary.
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Source

Google Gemini and Myself

Thursday, September 3, 2026

Andrey Omelchak’s Top Picks for Aug. 31, 2026

Andrey Omelchak’s Top Picks for Aug. 31, 2026

Sunday, August 30, 2026

Upcoming Spinoffs - Flex Announces Intention to Spin Off its Cloud and Power Infrastructure Segment

Upcoming Spinoffs - Flex Announces Intention to Spin Off its Cloud and Power Infrastructure Segment

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Flextronics International Limited trades on the NASDAQ


Flex Announces Intention to Spin Off its Cloud and Power Infrastructure Segment into a New Independent Publicly Traded Company

Spin-off will create two companies with distinct growth strategies that are poised to drive significant customer and shareholder value

News summary

The new company (“SpinCo”) will be a high-growth critical digital and electrical infrastructure company, delivering end-to-end power and thermal management technologies and integrated infrastructure systems for AI data centers and mission-critical applications.

Flex will continue as a leading advanced manufacturing company, designing and building highly complex products and services at global scale for premier brands across diversified end markets, with a disciplined focus on portfolio optimization, durable cash flow, and shareholder returns.

Revathi Advaithi will become CEO of SpinCo. She will also serve as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Flex for a transitional period upon the completion of the spin-off.

Michael Hartung will be named CEO of Flex.

Transaction intended to be tax-free to shareholders and targeted to close in the first quarter of calendar 2027.

AUSTIN, Texas – May 5, 2026 – Flex (NASDAQ: FLEX) today announced that its Board of Directors has unanimously approved moving forward with a plan to spin off its Power and Cloud portfolio from Flex, creating two independent, publicly traded companies, each optimally positioned to serve their customers and create value for their shareholders.

“Today’s announcement is the next step in a deliberate transformation that has reshaped Flex into a technology-focused industrial company over the past seven years,” said Revathi Advaithi, Chief Executive Officer of Flex. “By creating two focused, independent companies, we are giving SpinCo the platform to build and scale the products and digital infrastructure that the world’s most demanding AI workloads depend on, and Flex the focus to deliver advanced manufacturing solutions at global scale for diversified industries. We believe each company will have the strategic clarity and dedicated leadership to drive exceptional outcomes for its respective customers and shareholders. I’m excited to be part of the journey for both companies.”

Benefits of the spin-off

As separate companies, SpinCo and Flex are expected to benefit from:

Sharpened strategic focus and execution

Distinct financial profiles and capital allocation policies

Improved transparency around performance and expectations

Unique investment approaches to fund long-term profitable growth

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Source

http://thezenofinvesting.com/upcoming-spinoffs/

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Google Gemini Insights

In May 2026, Flex Ltd. (NASDAQ: FLEX) officially announced plans to spin off its Cloud and Power Infrastructure (CPI) segment into an independent, publicly traded company.

The transaction is structured to be tax-free to shareholders and is targeted to close in the first quarter of calendar 2027.

Key Breakdown: The Two Post-Spin Entities

The move separates Flex’s highest-growth, AI-adjacent infrastructure business from its core global advanced manufacturing operations:

FeatureSpinCo (Cloud & Power Infrastructure)RemainCo (Flex Ltd.)
Core FocusHigh-density digital & electrical infrastructure, end-to-end power, liquid/thermal management, and compute integration for AI data centers.Advanced contract manufacturing across diversified markets (industrial automation, automotive, healthcare, lifestyle).
Financial ProfileHigh Growth / AI Pure-Play: Fastest-growing segment (~24% of Flex revenue in FY26, with revenue growth projected at 65%–75% for FY27).Cash Generation / Margin Discipline: Focuses on operational efficiency, portfolio optimization, and durable free cash flow.
LeadershipRevathi Advaithi (current Flex CEO) will become CEO of SpinCo.Michael Hartung will become CEO of Flex.

Strategic Rationale for the Separation

  1. Unlocking Value & Pure-Play Multiples: As a consolidated contract manufacturer, Flex’s stock traded at standard industrial/EMS valuation multiples. Separating the CPI segment allows the market to value it as a direct AI data center infrastructure peer (competing alongside liquid cooling and critical power providers).

  2. Capital Allocation & Strategic Clarity: SpinCo will require aggressive capital expenditure to expand capacity for skyrocketing AI workload demands. Flex can maintain a leaner capital structure aimed at share buybacks, steady dividends, and disciplined margin expansion.

  3. Customer & Product Focus: SpinCo consolidates power distribution, embedded power, and liquid thermal management under one roof—offering hyperscalers a single-vendor solution from grid to chip rather than piecemeal components.

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What incentives are built into this spinoff for its new management?

In corporate spin-offs like Flex’s separation of its Cloud and Power Infrastructure (CPI) segment, executive incentives are carefully structured to align management’s pay with the new company's standalone growth profile.

While exact dollar-denominated equity grant figures for "SpinCo" will be detailed in the forthcoming Form 10 registration statement and Schedule 14A proxy filings, the structural incentives built into this spinoff for management fall into several key categories:

1. Pure-Play Equity Alignment (Capturing AI Multiples)

  • Direct Stock-Price Sensitivity: Historically, Flex’s overall stock traded at valuation multiples typical of traditional Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS). Moving CEO Revathi Advaithi and key executives to SpinCo shifts their equity compensation package into a pure-play AI infrastructure entity.

  • Unlocking Compensation Value: Because equity and stock-based performance awards make up the vast majority of CEO and executive compensation at Flex, leadership’s net worth is directly tied to SpinCo securing higher market multiples (comparable to power and liquid-cooling peers like Vertiv or Eaton).

2. Tailored KPI Targets (Growth & Margin Expansion)

In a diversified parent company, executives are held to consolidated metrics. Under the independent SpinCo, management’s Performance Share Units (PSUs) and annual bonuses will be recalibrated around CPI-specific performance drivers:

  • Hyper-Growth Benchmarks: Incentives will be tied directly to hitting aggressive revenue targets in AI data center infrastructure (where CPI revenue is projected to grow 65%–75% in FY27).

  • Margin Expansion & ROIC: Leaders will be rewarded for expanding operating margins in specialized high-density power and liquid thermal management rather than general manufacturing.

3. Separation Retention & Transition Packages

  • Lock-in Grants: To prevent leadership flight during the multi-month execution phase leading up to the expected Q1 2027 close, spin-offs typically utilize transition equity grants that vest over multi-year periods post-separation.

  • Dual-Entity Bridge Incentives: Revathi Advaithi taking on the role of SpinCo CEO while remaining Non-Executive Chairman of Flex during a transitional period aligns leadership to ensure the separation is executed smoothly without operational or supply-chain friction for either company.

4. Capital Allocation Autonomy

  • Direct Control over CapEx: Management is incentivized by having a tailored capital structure and balance sheet. Rather than competing with legacy contract manufacturing segments for corporate capital, SpinCo management can re-invest cash flows directly into high-return AI infrastructure expansion, directly driving the equity value of their personal shareholdings.

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Who are the key executive leaders appointed to SpinCo versus RemainCo for the Flex spinoff?

Flex announced the executive leadership slates for both SpinCo (the Cloud & Power Infrastructure business) and RemainCo (Flex Ltd.).

1. SpinCo Leadership (Cloud & Power Infrastructure)

SpinCo's executive team brings together Flex’s top enterprise executives to drive its high-growth AI data center, power, and thermal management operations:

RoleAppointed ExecutiveContext / Notes
Non-Executive ChairmanBill WatkinsIndustry veteran serving as Board Chair.
Chief Executive OfficerRevathi AdvaithiCurrent Flex CEO transitioning to lead SpinCo as a pure-play AI infrastructure company.
Chief Financial OfficerKevin KrummCurrent Flex CFO; will oversee finances through separation before becoming SpinCo's permanent CFO.
Chief Operating OfficerHooi TanDriving operational scale and supply chain execution across high-density facilities.
Chief Commercial OfficerRob CampbellManaging hyperscaler relationships, cloud accounts, and strategic enterprise growth.
Chief Technology & Strategy OfficerChris ButlerOverseeing technical roadmap (liquid cooling, high-voltage racks, and power architecture).
President, Embedded PowerMattias JanssonHeading board-level power conversion and embedded compute power units.
President, Critical PowerTodd HooverLeading grid-to-rack power distribution, transformers, and facility-scale infrastructure.

2. RemainCo Leadership (Flex Ltd.)

Flex Ltd. retains senior operational leaders to manage its core global contract manufacturing, automotive, regulated, and industrial technology segments:

RoleAppointed ExecutiveContext / Notes
Chief Executive OfficerMichael HartungPromoted to CEO (previously Flex's President and Chief Commercial Officer).
Non-Executive ChairmanRevathi AdvaithiServing a transitional period as Board Chair to ensure continuity during separation.
Chief Operating OfficerRodrigo DallOglioLeading global advanced manufacturing footprint across 30+ countries.
President, Integrated Technology SolutionsDennis KirkpatrickOverseeing communications, industrial, and technology manufacturing solutions.
President, Regulated Manufacturing SolutionsMike ThoenyLeading automotive, mobility, and healthcare/life sciences manufacturing units.
Chief Business Transformation OfficerIvan BrockmanFocuses on capital allocation, productivity, and organizational transition.
Chief Financial OfficerSearch in ProgressKevin Krumm remains Flex CFO until close; Flex has initiated a search for a permanent successor.
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