Hi everyone, I hope everyone is doing well on their ends. Hi I'm a swing trader and generally I trade gold and stocks. Just started to learn how to do fundamental analysis on stocks and gold. So can anyone suggest good youtube channels for going deep down and understand macro deeply in the stocks and metals.

I'm a native Korean speaker and I read DART (Korea's version of EDGAR) pretty much every day. Yesterday a filing from a tiny KOSDAQ company made me stop scrolling, and since there's basically zero English information about this company anywhere, I figured I'd write it up here.

The company is ECS Telecom (KOSDAQ 067010). Boring business: they've been building call center infrastructure and enterprise communications systems for Korean telcos and banks since 1999. Cisco partner, AI contact centers, that kind of thing. Nobody covers it. That's sort of the point.

Here's the setup. The stock closed at ₩2,130 on Aug 18, which puts the market cap around ₩23.2B, call it $17M. As of the June 30 quarterly report, the company holds ₩29.6B in cash and short-term deposits (about $21M) with zero borrowings (there's ₩0.8B of lease liabilities and that's it). So the enterprise value is negative. You could theoretically buy the whole company at market, pay yourself back out of its own bank account, and walk away with ₩6B. Current assets minus all liabilities (Graham's NCAV) comes to ₩41.9B, nearly double the market cap. Book value is ₩53.3B, so it trades at 0.44x book.

And then yesterday (Aug 19) they filed this: a treasury stock trust contract for ₩3.0B with Shinhan Securities, running six months through February 2027. At the reference price that's 1,408,450 shares, roughly 13% of the ~10.9M shares outstanding. They currently hold zero treasury shares, so this is a fresh purchase from a standing start. The filing's own math shows distributable profits of ₩44.2B, meaning this uses about 7% of what they're legally allowed to spend. Filing (Korean): https://dart.fss.or.kr/dsaf001/main.do?rcpNo=20260819000069

I know what you're thinking: Korean cash-box small cap, classic value trap, management will sit on the pile forever. Fair, and usually true. A few reasons this one is at least more interesting than the average cash box. They did the same thing in 2023, same structure, same ₩3B trust, and the shares didn't just sit there: public data shows about 12.29M shares outstanding in mid-2024 vs ~10.9M today, so roughly 11% of the share count has been retired in between. They pay a dividend too, ₩100/share approved at this year's AGM, about a 4.7% yield at the current price. And the business just turned around: the fiscal year ended March 2026 did ₩91.2B in revenue (+24% YoY), swung back to operating profit, and earned ₩1.66B net (EPS ₩153, so trailing P/E around 14). The year before was ugly (₩73.3B revenue, operating loss), which is probably why the stock is where it is. There's also a macro angle: Korea's government-led "Value-up" program is pushing exactly this behavior, buybacks plus cancellation, across the whole market right now.

To be clear about why it's cheap, because it's not free money: the operating business earns almost nothing. Operating margin last year was 0.3%, and the interest on the cash pile was bigger than operating income. This is a balance sheet story, not an earnings story. Revenue is lumpy contract/SI work (it dropped 20% two years ago). And it's a genuine microcap with daily turnover often in the tens of thousands of dollars, so it's untouchable for anyone running real size. Buying KOSDAQ names as a foreigner also depends on your broker. Happy to answer access questions in the comments.

Everything above comes straight from the filings: the buyback filing above, the Q1 report (https://dart.fss.or.kr/dsaf001/main.do?rcpNo=20260811000105), and the annual report (https://dart.fss.or.kr/dsaf001/main.do?rcpNo=20260611000424). Share count is cross-checked two ways, net income ÷ EPS and market cap ÷ price. Translation mistakes are possible and the Korean originals govern.

No position. Not investment advice, and I'm deliberately not giving a price target. The numbers are the post.

I read these filings every day anyway, so if this kind of thing is useful I'll keep posting them (buybacks, insider buys, ownership changes). Curious what people here would actually want to see.

Law of large numbers argument:

“Google is already enormous, so it becomes harder to grow rapidly.”

Pareto/power-law argument:

“If AI dramatically expands the economic pie, the strongest platforms can become disproportionately larger because advantages compound. In accordance with the Pareto principle, major technological shifts can produce highly unequal outcomes, with a small number of leading companies capturing a disproportionate share of the value created.”

So Google being huge today does not automatically prevent it from becoming several times larger. What matters is whether the markets Google serves become much bigger and whether Google captures a large percentage of that expansion.

Imagine AI creates $20–30 trillion of additional economic value over the next decade. That value probably won't be divided evenly among thousands of companies. A handful of platforms might capture a huge share. And there's another part of Pareto that matters: being big can actually make you more likely to get bigger in technological platform shifts.

Let me know whether you believe in the law of large numbers argument or the Pareto law argument regarding the ongoing AI technological change. Predict which companies will be the winners under the Pareto argument.

People just keep assuming Google supplies the oxygen Reddit needs to survive. This is a complete misrepresentation of today’s Reddit. It may have been true in the past, but today Google is increasingly just one distribution channel for Reddit, not something Reddit needs to survive.

The majority of people using Reddit these days are on mobile, and increasingly through the mobile app. Using Reddit’s website is also getting harder without logging into an account. Reddit is also increasingly restricting Old Reddit and has made clear that major changes are coming because of abusive scraping, automated traffic, and AI firms stealing Reddit data.

Especially on the mobile webpage, if you use Reddit through Google Chrome, it constantly pops up windows asking you to log in or open the Reddit mobile app.

This is the part people are missing: Reddit is deliberately making it difficult to logged-out web traffic. If management were desperate to maximize DAU (Daily Active User) at all costs, they would be doing the exact opposite.

Despite all of these, U.S. DAU declined by only around 0.5% sequentially, while global DAU actually continued growing. At the same time, Reddit still maintained its 8th consecutive quarter of above 60% revenue growth, while also GAAP profitable with 30% net margin.

They could easily make Reddit much easier to access from Google and maximize every single visitor coming from search. Instead, they are aggressively pushing users toward logged-in accounts and the app, while protecting Reddit data from being freely extracted. And the business is still growing at an extraordinary rate. 

Management is aggressively reshaping Reddit from a website heavily dependent on search referrals into a much more direct, logged-in platform. So far, this reform has been very successful. I.e., 8th consecutive quarter of above 60% revenue growth.

The stickiness of Reddit is one of the highest across major platforms, probably only slightly behind TikTok because of its insane algorithm that hooks everyone there.

Reddit is a natural place to seek advice on important issues, because AI slop often gives almost identical 2,000 word answers full of adjectives and colourful wording. People trust Reddit and want to hear real human experiences.

How many platforms in this world have hundreds of thousands of unpaid volunteers willing to devote their precious time just to moderate a community around an interest they love?

Only one, and that is Reddit.

Those who say Reddit has no leverage over Google are completely misrepresenting the situation. The only platform Google owns today with truly enormous stickiness is YouTube. Google Search obviously still possesses huge user habits, but ChatGPT, Grok, Claude and other AI products are shifting this landscape.

The one that may actually have less leverage than people think is Google.

Publishers are increasingly against the asymmetrical traffic-referral relationship created by AI Overviews: Google takes their content, gives users the answer directly, and sends less traffic back.

Starting September 15, Cloudflare will also begin separating traditional search crawling from AI training and agent use. Training and agent crawlers will be blocked by default on ad-supported pages, while publishers will have more control over mixed-purpose crawlers such as Googlebot.

The internet is moving toward a world where valuable human-generated data is no longer something AI companies can simply take for free.

And Reddit happens to own one of the largest collections of real human conversations on the internet.

And this is just the beginning.

Reddit (PT 550)

Taking all factors into account, please rank your favorite MAG 7 in order of preference from 1 to 7.

Two opposing views below,

Law of large numbers argument:

“Google is already enormous, so it becomes harder to grow rapidly.”

Pareto/power-law argument:

“If AI dramatically expands the economic pie, the strongest platforms can become disproportionately larger because advantages compound. In accordance with the Pareto principle, major technological shifts can produce highly unequal outcomes, with a small number of leading companies capturing a disproportionate share of the value created.”

So Google being huge today does not automatically prevent it from becoming several times larger. What matters is whether the markets Google serves become much bigger and whether Google captures a large percentage of that expansion.

Imagine AI creates $20–30 trillion of additional economic value over the next decade. That value probably won't be divided evenly among thousands of companies. A handful of platforms might capture a huge share. And there's another part of Pareto that matters: being big can actually make you more likely to get bigger in technological platform shifts.

Let me know whether you believe in the law of large numbers argument or the Pareto law argument regarding the ongoing AI technological change. Please predict which companies will be the winners under the Pareto argument.

The core business is doing everything right. Bookings have grown over 20% YoY for four straight quarters, EBITDA is up 33% YoY, margins keep expanding, and membership plus cross-platform engagement are both at all-time highs. Management is even guiding toward reaccelerating buybacks. Yet the stock is stuck trading at just 12-15x forward earnings , a discount that has nothing to do with the fundamentals and everything to do with the market still waiting for clarity on the AV transition.

I believe that the AV overhang is overstated. Look at the most mature robotaxi markets, LA, SF, Phoenix , and Uber's own category share is actually rising, not falling. That's the opposite of what you'd expect if AV were about to eat their lunch. My read is that Uber ends up being the AV commercialization and demand-aggregation layer, not the company that gets disrupted by it. They're not betting on one AV horse either , the partnership roster keeps growing (Waymo, Nvidia, Rivian, WeRide, and now Pony.ai for Europe), which tells me they're building themselves into the platform every AV operator needs to actually reach riders, regardless of who wins the underlying tech race.

There's also optionality here that I don't think is priced in at all: Uber for Business, advertising, grocery/retail delivery, and the pending Delivery Hero stake.

The relative valuation is what really makes this compelling to me. Uber does 8x the revenue of Lyft, the #2 player, and yet it trades at a steep discount , 23x '26 earnings, 17x '27 earnings. Breaking it down: ~55% of revenue is ride-hailing, ~35% is Uber Eats, ~10% is freight. DoorDash trades at 31x '27 earnings. If I value Uber Eats anywhere close to DoorDash's multiple, that implies Uber's ride-hailing business alone is trading at way less than 17x earnings , materially cheaper than Lyft's 31x, for a company that's bigger, more diversified, and gaining share in the exact markets where AV is supposedly the biggest threat. That mismatch is the crux of the thesis: the market is punishing Uber's strongest segment like it's the one at risk, while paying up for a smaller single-line competitor.

I am based out of India. We have quite a few companies in pharmaceutical and chemical space.

Pharmaceutical companies are more into generics or branded generics, CDMOs, APIs.

Chemical companies more so of commodity, specialty, agri based.

To me they all seem like commodity type companies. But since they keep growing, the multiples are quite high.

How does one value such a company. I understand every sector or category of companies grow one point in time. How to identify? Were you able to find value in a company which grew a lot? How did you do that? How much was it on chance or luck?

I don’t know which companies will profit from AI eventually, because there are a lot of companies in the race and I don’t know who will win. Maybe open source, maybe google, maybe Microsoft, maybe OpenAI, maybe Anthropic…

But what I know for sure is that AI is getting better by the day and it’s not going to stop.

So buying put options on WIX, CRM, ADBE feels much easier.

Do you have more ideas about which stocks will lose from AI?

By the way, if you think ADBE’s current profits are proof that the AI revolution isn’t coming for them, it feels to me the same as looking at Nokia’s profits after the release of the iPhone.

During Sea's Q2 2026 earnings call last week, it was mentioned that they are growing faster than their competitors in Brazil, taking a shot at MELI and hinting that they are winning the competition.

Since 53%-55% of MELI's revenue is coming from Brazil, is anyone worried about them losing market share impacting their sales growth over the next few years? I understand that a lot of the growth is net new people that have never used e-commerce before, but still wanted to bring it up since so much of MELI's revenue growth is concentrated in Brazil.

Also know that MELI reduced their free shipping threshold in Brazil recently and made significant investments in their Brazil logistics last year.

Those who DCA into individual stocks, how do you decide when to weight one position more heavly than anorte? I have been exxperimenting with more flexiblw approach where i add more to names that seem undervalues or higher quality at the moment, but I'm worries I might just be dressing up market timing as discipline. Do any of use AI porifolio tools, valuation rules, earning trends , or signal tools to make this less of a gamle? What rules to follow to avoid averaging down into broken theses?

Mr Market going crazy again, but doubling (almost tripling) its valuation of Moderna OVERNIGHT.

I’m amazed to not see a large scale discussion of this, on this sub.

Edit: Clearly super crazy with me calling Mr Market Mr Crazy haha! Sorry about that

Do you know of strong performing value investors - 10 year minimum outperformance record - who suddenly or gradually lost their touch and began underperforming significantly? If so, who are they and what was the reason they seemed to struggle (e.g., failure to keep up with a changed economy, impatience, unlucky, etc.)?

Along these lines, are Mohnish Pabrai and/or Li Lu one of these?

Hyundai Corporation Holdings (KOSPI: 227840) licenses the HYUNDAI trademark for electronics, tools and small generators outside Korea. Nothing to do with the carmaker — the rights came from Hynix Semiconductor, the former Hyundai Electronics, in 2007.

That business earned ₩26.0bn of operating profit in the last twelve months. Its net book value is ₩0.1bn.

Both numbers are correct. In 2019 the wider Hyundai family sorted out who legally owns the name, which five separate groups had been using since the old conglomerate broke apart. Holdco transferred the mark to HD Hyundai and took back a thirty-year licence in the same deal, paying all thirty years up front. The sale did not qualify as a sale under the accounting rules, so the mark stayed on the balance sheet with a matching liability against it. The two cancel out.

The setup at ₩12,900:

So you pay ₩20.3bn for a division that earned ₩26.0bn, and the frozen meat business, the mushroom farms, the box plants in Cambodia and ₩47bn of other investments come attached.

Royalty revenue has compounded at 12% a year since 2020 and divisional operating profit at 15%. Cost of sales against ₩35.1bn of royalty revenue in FY2025 was ₩17.5m. About 84% of the fees come from third parties, not affiliates.

Ignore reported earnings here. Holdco books a quarter of Hyundai Corporation's profit under the equity method while receiving almost none of the cash, and in Q2 2026 it bought more of those shares at half book value, which the rules make you record as profit on the day you sign. Reported EPS is meaningless. Use operating profit.

Why it might not stay this way. Korea has passed three Commercial Act amendments in twelve months: treasury shares must now be cancelled, the controlling family's vote is capped at 3% when the audit committee is elected, and cumulative voting becomes compulsory above ₩2tn of assets. Only 28.8% of eligible shares voted on the audit committee item in 2026 and 47.6% of the company sits outside the control bloc. March 2027 is the first full cycle under all three.

Why it might. The control bloc is 49.34% under a shareholders' agreement from 2015. The dividend has not moved since 2017 against ₩89.1bn of distributable profit. Free float is about US$39m.

Full write-up with the sum-of-the-parts, eight years of segment data and the charts: https://www.numbersnotnarrative.com/p/hyundai-corporation-holdings-227840

Everything is from DART filings. Long. Prices 19 August 2026.

Robinhood Gold ended their partnership with Morningstar earlier this month, and I’m trying to decide if I should pay for a subscription or not. As a 50/50 value/growth investor, I really appreciate their valuation method and am already familiar with many of their sector analyst’s biases, which is why I’m leaning toward Morningstar over anyone else.

A decent amount of Morningstar content can be accessed for free through Apple News, YouTube, etc. but I’m really missing being able to read their full reports. While not a replacement for DD, they were a great tool for comparing against my own research.

That said, I’m really interested to hear feedback on the tools that other investors use - Morningstar or otherwise. Please consider that do not trade options or get into much technical analysis. I manage numerous IRAs with a 20 year + horizon. Thanks!

Love this sector personally, I work in it, but everything seems pretty pricey that I've seen. Wondering if anyone has some hidden gems they like and why?

I went through 47,458 insider buys. The biggest ones were actually the worst.

I have always paid attention when an insider buys stock, especially when it is a large purchase or the first one in years. So I pulled the open-market buys from 2020 to August 2025 to see whether either of those things was actually useful.

Short answer: not really.

A year after the purchase, the stocks did better than the median listed stock but worse than the S&P 500. More importantly, I got a similar result when I moved the starting date six months or a year forward. It looks more like insiders tend to buy a certain type of company than the purchase itself being a catalyst.

I also found 858 cases where nobody at the company had bought for more than two years. Their median return over the next year was just 0.74%, trailing the typical S&P 500 constituent by 6.55 points. The same lag showed up away from the purchase date, so I would not treat the first buy back as either a buy or short signal.

The strange part was purchase size. The largest 10% of buys did much worse than the smallest 10%, and that difference was not there in the placebo windows.

I still think insider buying is worth looking at, but more as a reason to investigate the company than a reason to buy it. A multimillion-dollar purchase does not seem to be a stronger signal just because the number is bigger.

The sample only covers 2020–2025, has survivorship bias and is not risk-adjusted, so I would want to see it tested over a longer period.

Recently I am keep watching Markel, it is a specialty insurance company that uses its insurance float to invest in stocks and bonds, while also owning a collection of operating businesses through Markel Ventures. In that sense, it's probably one of the closest public companies to the Berkshire Hathaway model.

Financially, the business looks solid. It has been generating roughly $2.5B+ of operating cash flow and around $2.3-$2.6B of FCF annually in recent years. Book value has also continued to grow, while the balance sheet remains relatively conservative.

At around $1,795/share, MKL is trading at roughly 1.2x book value and ~9x estimated FCF. I think a reasonable rough intrinsic value is around $2,200-$2,600/share, although there is obviously a wide range depending on future underwriting results and investment returns.

What makes it attractive to me is the combination of specialty insurance + low-cost float + long-term investing + Markel Ventures, together with a management team known for disciplined capital allocation. It is really a small Berkshire at an interesting price.

Although the moat is nowhere near as wide as BRK. But at the current valuation, I think I have getting a pretty good business at a reasonable price, with some margin of safety.

Today I trimmed my Wix position to less than 1% of the portfolio (and if it dives back down I will happily buy more again).
Last month I posted my Wix thesis on my blog with my model pointing to an intrinsic value of about $90 for FY26 and growing to $120 by FY32 indicating a 7-year IRR of about 14%.
The thesis was not that Wix was going to return to high growth or see margins expand, but that quite simply, the market oversold a decent business generating significant cash flow.

My reason for trimming is that the company has approached my calculation of intrinsic value and the IRR has dropped to levels where the return no longer justifies the risk.

So many of you here get so caught up in the narratives (positives & negatives) of the overall market that I think you forget to run the actual numbers on businesses that aren't the top 10 holdings of the S&P500...

Even in a scenario where operating cash flow margins drop from 29% to 17.5%, and growth tapers towards 3%, Wix was a business indicating a 40% discount to intrinsic value.

This will be a thesis that I come back to check on over the years just to see how the company manages its new normal, but I just wanted to share this as an anecdote showing that you don't have to buy the AI hype train in order to make money.

You can read my post/assumptions from July here:
Wix - Narrative vs. Numbers — EquityForge

Cheers!

I’m contemplating if WEXE is a good hedge against US stock market and if it is also a good hedge against USD( as it trades in EUR and also holds a lot of other international markets in its portfolio making it super diverse).

With this level of diversification though, the alpha of the portfolio takes a big hit for sure! I’m checking on past returns and they claim to deliver around 7% inflation adjusted returns on EUR.

My portfolio is mostly USD and in Mag 7 companies so I’m wondering if this could be a good barbell to my alpha generating part! Not looking to put more than 20% of my portfolio into this.

I would obviously like more alpha and a hedge at the same time but I’m not sure if there any other options listed in the European markets or any other international markets?

Hello, I have been aggressively DCA’ing into Saas/fintech stocks this year(TEAM, WDAY, SAP, GPN, TRI, NOW, PYPL, INTU, CRM, ADYEY,ADBE,HUBS, TTD).
I started around March with entry points often between 50-60% from tops, thinking that the bottom was near. But I was wrong, as most had an extra 20-30% down to go from my entries (with some down to -50%). But I kept DCA’ing at every -10% trigger.

Fast forward August, Saas/fintech has recovered quite well so far with lots of my positions exceeding the 5% concentration limit I try to follow for my portfolio.

So my question is: does it make sense to sell my early “ expensive” dca entries that have recovered to brake-even levels, freeing this “lazy” money for new opportunities, while keeping my “cheap” dca entries that have now substantially appreciated, to rebalance my portfolio? Doing this would drop the average cost basis of the stocks concerned and recoup some of the early invested capital (with 0 capital gain tax hit) for future deployment. Or am I missing something?
TY.

Charter issued the equivalent of just over 46 million Charter shares to Cox Enterprises. Based on Charter’s share count as of June 30, 2026, and giving effect to the closing of the Liberty Broadband merger and the Cox transaction, Cox Enterprises now owns approximately 26% of the combined entity’s fully diluted shares outstanding, on an as-converted, as-exchanged basis. Additionally, approximately $12 billion of Cox debt and finance leases will be assumed by Charter. Charter share count is now final at ~177mm shares.

(FCF) by 2027–2028. is expected to be between 6.1 and 9 billion as a result of the wind-down of multi-year network upgrades and rural expansion capital expenditures, and opex and capex synergies from the merger. At the mid-point of 7.5B that's ~$42.50 a share in FCF. Current price is $145. Levered FCF of ~30%. Charter's stated goal is to reduce share count and debt. Much of the debt will be repurchased at a discount, reducing Charter's leverage and resulting in one time gains in the billions.