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My megapost on Fox Factory is up. One fun side quest I took in this one was trying to show how/why interest rates matter so much, and even built a little calculator everyone can play with. TL;DR, when the discount rate goes up, future earnings goes down and the TAM is sort of eaten, the stock price tanks. https://jeffbrines.substack.com/p/how-fox-factory-lost-a-decade?r=cfzd9…

I never thought this thread would require such a thorough education in EU insolvency/bankruptcy law...but here we are.

How did we ever have fun riding bikes as kids before batteries and motors? What a terrible childhood I must have had.

When I saw your post about Accell Group going into insolvency, I thought Diamondback would be one of the brands listed in the insolvency agreement alongside Raleigh. I remembered Accell owning Diamondback (another brand that we've observed to be struggling mightily in this thread), but I didn't see it on the list in the Reuters or BikeBiz.com articles about the recent insolvency agreement for Accell. Turns out Accell sold Diamondback and Redline (their US businesses) way back in 2019. Even if Accell still have a Diamondback landing page on their website: This is all a surprise to me. I either...

Fox Factory results are out. I'll do my normal substack thing but the stock has responded positively in post market trading with the stock up ~8% and up pretty notably on the week (from $16 to $20/sh). SSG (bike+baseball) sales are down year over year, with the company citing "oem order timing and channel destocking in response to market-wide economic conditions". Other interesting points as I skim the release... Guidance "raise" is fake. Revenue up, EBITDA unchanged. Zero incremental margin on the raise. Implied Q4 EBITDA: $41-69M. High end needs ~17.7% margin, never been done. Answer's in the bottom half...

Few thoughts going into the week... Fox Factory reports earnings Thursday. I'll cosplay financial analyst and cover it for y'all. My guess is "SSG remains flat" in tandem with phrases like "we are really excited about the next 18 months". Just to echo what @NoahColorado said, I too am happy with more choices and would love a world where a high number of motor/drive unit/gearbox companies are successful. Despite what I might have said on the pod, I actually don't think the motor race is assuredly going to become a monopoly where DJI owns the market. That said, this feels...

I also read 52 books last year! Well, I didn't exactly read each book all the way through. But I read the title on the spine, and if it sounded promising, I looked at the pictures on the cover and read the rest of the book jacket.

Great question. To your point, I think the cannibalism is worse than that, because instead of wanting multiple pedal bikes for different sorts of pedal days with granular differences between each model, one ebike is pretty much fine for everything. In the past, as a MTB pedaler, I would have loved to have at least three mountain bikes: a long travel enduro bike, a shorter travel trail bike, and maybe a hardtail or XC bike. Maybe more. If I wanted to give up on pedaling and get an ebike instead, I don't need two ebikes. For ebikers who want to...

If you're ever able to get this project going, I look forward to cheering you on, enthusiastically adopting your new tech, and inviting all my friends to join the platform with me, and then later calling down curses on you and the Brines family for generations to come for the inevitable enshittification of your platform after you've sufficiently saturated the marketplace.

I've always maintained that if you had to pay for your Gopro, I don't want to see your shit.