FR: Mango Habanero-Flavored Food For Thought

Article: Mango Habanero-Flavored Food For Thought

Up first in my “Fool Revisited” series is my first piece of published writing for which I received compensation. This was published about a month into my time with the Writer Development Program, after we had spent the previous month learning about investing and writing in the “Foolish” way. After this initial month, we started learning about individual sectors, and we started with the restaurant sector because it was a “low value” sector for the site and they just wanted us to get some practice.

As indicated in the lede of the article, I thought the Buffalo Wild Wings (Nasdaq: BWLD) was going to benefit from the end of the NFL Lockout. I don’t think I ever went back and followed up on this thesis down the road – most likely because of the low value of the sector – but I did give it the “green thumb” on Motley Fool CAPS the month prior, so I must have thought it was going to do okay.

The catchy title was an attempt to get folks to click on the article as it showed up in their Yahoo! Finance feeds, but it really didn’t work, as this article was one of my worst performing articles that I wrote while I was writing for the Fool. Nevertheless, it was a nice introduction to being a published writer on the internet, and I was hopeful that it would lead to bigger and better things:

Had an investor purchased and held onto Buffalo Wild Wings after the publication of my article – which didn’t really have a direct buy recommend but was generally positive – they would be a fairly happy investor, though B-Dubs did have some bumpy spots along the way. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and total growth of Buffalo Wild Wings stock outperformed the S&P 500 from article publication (August 9, 2011) through the end of December 2017:

Source: Yahoo! Finance & author calculation; Stock prices include dividends & stock splits

Buffalo Wild Wings tenure as a public company will soon be coming to an end, with Arby’s parent Roark Capital agreeing to purchase the company for $2.9 billion, or around $157 per share, which is why Buffalo Wilds Wings stock price hasn’t moved much since the deal was announced. There is still a very slight upside if you wanted to get in on the action now, but at this point, I’d think it’s best to leave Buffalo Wild Wings in the past as a potential investment.

Until next time…

Disclaimer: I do not own shares in Buffalo Wild Wings, nor have I in the six months prior to writing this post. I also have no plans to purchase shares within the next 60 days. You can read a little about my personal investment philosophy here.