Maran Capital Q4 Investor Letter

In its Q4 investor letter (you can download a copy below), Maran Capital, a Denver-based value-driven investment management firm located founded by Dan Roller in 2015, reported a return of 10.5% net of all fees and expenses for the fourth quarter of 2017. Whereas, the firm had a net return 23.9% for the full-year 2017.

Maran Capital’s top five positions were Clarus Corp., Turning Point Brands, Scheid Vineyards, Biglari Holdings, and Atento.

Meanwhile, talking about the blockchain and cryptocurrencies, Roller – who is founder and chief investment officer of Maran Capital – noted that there are elements of the market today that are reminiscent of the “dot com” bubble of the late ’90s.

“In 1999, the announcement that a company was appending a “.com” to its name was often worth hundreds of percent of appreciation. Recently, announcements that a company is launching an “initial coin offering” or otherwise creating a blockchain have led to similar outcomes. For example, a few weeks ago, Ameri Holdings (AMRH) stock more than doubled the day it put out a press release titled “AMERI Holdings to expand offering with blockchain solutions to bring trust, transparency, and efficiency to customer supply chains.” Separately, Kodak’s (KODK) announcement of the launch of a cryptocurrency called “KodakCoin” sent the stock up over 200% in the following two days. How well thought out was this new venture? Kodak had only registered the kodakcoin.com domain in the week prior to the announcement,” Roller said in the letter.

You can download a copy of the letter here.