High Yield Reads - 4/19/14

Summary of recents posts and pieces of interest, sometimes enduring, to investors:

• Financial Matters - great list by A Wealth of Common Sense of what does and does not matter to investors

• A Dozen Things I've Learned from Bill Gates by Tren Griffin. Great list, especially "Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.”

• Charting a Tasty Future for Post -  not a dividend payer, but William Stiritz' history is well told in the excellent book The Outsiders.  The CEOs in The Outsiders are not big on paying dividends, they are more around growing free cash flow. Stiritz delivered returns of 20% over 19 years at Ralston Purina with many deals. He has running the same playbook, it appears, at Post Holdings, most recently with a $2.5B acquisition of Michael's Foods.

• David Herro says Emerging Markets are Still Overpriced. He cites a systematic overvaluation where countries look cheap on a P/E basis, say a P/E of 10 for Brazil, but then when you look at the more successful companies within those countries that you would want to own they are priced very high, Brazil's drugstore chain, Raia Drogasil, has a P/E of 30.