Trouble at t' mill, page-11

"Honest question.
why do you post so much here when you don't hold the stock?
Are you interested to buy in at some point?
what's your buy price?"

@ElNuto ,

At the outset, I wouldn't say I post here "so much". I posted maybe 15 or so times two weeks back, and before this thread I don't believe I've attended the FMG in more than a week.

No matter.

To answer your question about if I'm interested in buying FMG at some point, I would if I understood what it is I was actually buying.

In short, I'm a deep-value investor, so my starting point is invariably to always start looking wherever market sentiment is negative. "Straw hats in winter" philosophy, if you like.
(As case in point, this post https://hotcopper.com.au/posts/75187032/single captures my investment approach .. and no, not a cross-promotion of a different stock, because I don't own that one either; I've merely commenced looking at it again after its prodigious fall.)

Market sentiment was clearly turning negative in the iron ore space, so I thought I'd start doing my research into some of the listed players. FMG had fallen by far the most, so I started here.

But it soon occurred to me that, while I understood the iron ore industry fundamentals and financial pedigree (i.e., the things that are essential for any value investor to understand, namely capital intensity, product pricing patterns, operating costs, margins, return on capital, volatility of returns, payback period on investment, etc.) FMG was getting involved in areas of business for which the financial pedigree was unknown to me.

So I did what is objectively a reasonable thing, namely go to a stock discussion thread where I sought insights specifically about the capital intensity, product pricing patterns, operating costs, margins, return on capital, volatility of returns, payback period on investment, etc. that were characteristic of the areas in which FMG's management was deploying shareholder capital.

Unfortunately I didn't learn much.

Which segues into your final question, namely what my "buy price" is for FMG: As a value investor, it is crucial to be able to identify and approximate future free cash flow streams, and then translate those - using an appropriate discount rate - into current money terms.

The problem with trying to value FMG is that I have very little idea what kind of financial returns are going to be generated on the capital being invested in non iron ore businesses.
Which makes it impossible to derive an intrinsic value for the company.

Objectively, none of this differs from the perfectly reasonable investment philosophy any self-respecting business owner, existing or prospective, would adopt with his or her capital.

.