The role of an investor prospecting businesses is to always be educated how differently they can look at a business and what they can gather from the data provided. One of the main problems that I used to have is to assess the level of capital expenditure of a business and how to make sense of whether:

• what is the nature of this business in terms of their capital expenditure needs
• more capital expenditure is good
• less capital expenditure is good
• how do we present capital expenditure to ourselves and peers so that it reduces the overhead in interpretation
• what should it correlate with? revenue, free cash flow or profit?

Professor Damodaran has a good piece recently in his series to profile a few car based trajectories like Uber, Lyft. In this piece, it is the possible upcoming IPO of Ferrari. If I can take away one or two things ......