Fundamental Coverage – HAS, HBI, HD, HLT, HOG

Hasbro has had a stock price that has taken off last couple of years and a very good model of storytelling combined with games to make toys, which is sort of what we do here in Lucas Orchard (toy models or simple models) when we aren’t discussing serious topics of importance. It is important to understand where the boundary of storytelling lie or you would be generating fake news, and that is the storytelling boundaries lie in the distinction between opinions and facts. Stories tells us about opinions but can generate no new facts. So as long as you are cognizant of whether your story has any facts, you will know if your story is real. You can think of  facts as checking in hockey, while scoring is done by cool concepts like from pure mathematics. Checking brings you reality if you are making fake news, for example, if you are boasting about how great your team is on paper, but you quickly lose control of the game to a checking game.

Hanes Brands is about impulse shopping vs replenishment shopping. People don’t buy underwear on impulse generally.

Home Depot is about how online orders account for a small percentage of sales 6% or so, but half of them are picked up in store as opposed to delivered. Home Depot is also about a general store distribution that has a lot of stores in Canada for example in Ontario. Home Depot sells to professionals as well as the Do it Yourself crowd.

Hilton Hotels is unremarkable except to understand the hospitality industry you have to recognize at a bar or a club or a hotel, they are temporarily creating a world for you, not always a dream factory, but certainly a place you can stay away from the troubles of your home life. So they generate a corporate bubble along with malls and as long as the economy is doing well, you can live in this bubble though of course there are limits — if you have health problems, you have to go home.

Harley Davidson — motorcycles for lifestyles, but while a motorcycle in Latin America is more common, riding in the USA on a highway seems a good way to take a lot of risk but not fighting risk, just the risk of a gruesome accident, but some people like that, whether it’s with sports bikes or cruisers, or anything in between. If you want to take risk in a fighting way instead of a weekend warrior way where actually you are a dentist, then you’d have to live the complete lifestyle of a motorcycle warrior, and fight for the good causes and the banner of the right.