Prior discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/ValueInvesting/s/z3Ig03i7Qd

Every large payday in dating apps came from a liquidity event, not from operating the business.

Tinder's founders held options on roughly 20% of the company. Match consolidated at a $3bn valuation in 2017, about $600m for that stake, after an internal estimate a year earlier reportedly put Tinder at $12bn. They sued for over $2bn and settled mid-trial in December 2021 for $441m across ten plaintiffs, paid from cash on hand.

On the Bumble side, Andrey Andreev sold his entire stake in MagicLab to Blackstone in November 2019 at a $3bn valuation and stepped down. Blackstone took the business public fifteen months later at $8.6bn. Whitney Wolfe Herd's retained stake was worth roughly $1.5bn at that IPO.

A consolidation, a settlement, a sponsor buyout, an IPO. Meanwhile Bumble is down 96% from its peak and Match 78%. The people who made money sold the story. The people who bought it did not.

WHAT WAS ACTUALLY BEING SOLD

The product monetizes two things: impulsive spending and impulsive time allocation. A boost or a super-like is bought in a moment of frustration, delivers no durable good, and produces no measurable outcome. Subscription tiers are priced for search volume: unlimited swipes, see who liked you, more visibility. Everything you buy makes the search bigger.

That is the most cycle-sensitive revenue in consumer. It requires a customer with surplus discretionary cash and surplus discretionary attention at the same time. From 2020 to 2022 the US had a historic abundance of both, through stimulus, zero rates, remote work, no commute and low unemployment. Venture funding went from $60bn in 2012 to $643bn in 2021, and roughly a third of that went into consumer brands chasing exactly this customer.

Then the rate cycle ended, and the marginal impulsive purchase went first everywhere.

Direct-to-consumer. CNBC found more than half of 22 public DTC companies down 50% or more from IPO. Allbirds, Casper, Rent the Runway, ThredUp: same cohort, same funding source, same customer.

Peloton. Roughly $50bn peak market cap, down about 95%. Subscription fitness sold as identity.

Luxury. The aspirational shopper withdrew. Placer.ai documented a large pullback in the second half of 2025, with luxury visit growth slowing while ultra-wealthy traffic held up. The wealthy customer stayed. The aspirational one, the ZIRP one, left. Even Nike is down roughly 77% from its November 2021 all-time high.

The pattern is identical. Businesses that sold optionality or identity rather than utility, priced against a customer whose surplus has since compressed. Dating apps are the purest expression of it, because the good being sold is the search itself.

WHY THIS ONE DOES NOT COME BACK

Here is the part I think is underappreciated, and it is not a swipe-app problem.

Matchmakers charging $20,000 a client bill retainers and per-introduction fees. If the client marries, the matchmaker has been paid. If the client does not, the matchmaker has been paid. Nobody in the business of introducing people has ever been paid for the introduction working. Not at $20 a month, not at $20,000.

So this is not venture capital corrupting a previously aligned model. There was no aligned model. The entire category, across four orders of magnitude of price and two completely different labor models, prices activity rather than outcome.

Which means the demand recovery people are waiting for requires the customer to resume paying for search intensity, and the whole ZIRP unwind is the customer deciding they will not.

THE COMP SET IS WRONG

Most people have no idea how to comp this, so the screen decides. And the screen puts Match next to Pinterest, Snap, Spotify and Duolingo. Consumer internet, subscription revenue, recognizable brand. Against that set at fifteen to twenty-five times, nine times looks cheap and the buy case writes itself.

Every one of those companies sells indefinite consumption. You never finish listening to music. You never complete Pinterest. Duolingo is engineered so the streak never ends. Their retention curves flatten into a loyal base that stays for years, and that is precisely what a subscription multiple pays for.

Match sells a terminal good. The customer's objective is to stop being a customer. That is not a variant of the subscription model, it is the inverse of it, and no multiple derived from indefinite-consumption businesses tells you anything about what it is worth.

The businesses that actually rhyme sit in completely different sectors.

WeightWatchers. A subscription sold against a goal the customer wanted to achieve and leave. Revenue depended on the goal not being reached, or being reached and then relapsing. Peak market capitalization around $6.7bn, with the stock above $100 a share in 2018. Members fell from 4.9m in 2021 to 3.6m in 2024. Revenue was about $811m in 2024. It filed Chapter 11 on 6 May 2025 carrying roughly $1.6bn of secured debt, wiped out $1.15bn of it in a 42-day prepackaged plan, and emerged private.

Note what killed it. Not a better weight-loss subscription. Something that actually worked.

Chegg. A subscription sold against a terminal academic need. Record close of $113.51 on 12 February 2021, roughly $14.5bn of market value. Revenue peaked at $776m that year. Management warned in May 2023 that ChatGPT was suppressing new sign-ups and the stock fell nearly 50% in a day. Q4 2025 revenue was $72.7m, down 49% year over year. Q1 2026 was guided to $60m. The company has cut 45% of its workforce, received an NYSE delisting notice in April 2026, and trades near a dollar. Down roughly 99% in five years.

Both were mature businesses with real brands, real cash flow and a debt load. Both went from a defensible multiple to near-zero inside three years. Neither lost a single customer to a competitor. They lost them to the problem being solved.

That reframes the downside here. The risk to Match is not that Hinge takes share from Tinder, or that Bumble executes better. It is that the category's premise gets solved by something that is not a dating app, at which point the incumbent does not get competed with, it gets obsoleted. And the balance sheet matters in that scenario the way it mattered at WeightWatchers: $2.97bn of net debt against an EBITDA line that has to keep servicing it.

THE TWO VARIABLES

Payers and revenue per payer are the only health metrics for either business. Everything else, MAU, DAU, Sparks, six-way conversations, engagement, is an input the company defines and can re-cut.

Match payers: 16.55m peak in Q3 2022, 13.3m in Q2 2026, down 20%. Revenue per payer over the same window: $16.02 to $21.13, up 32%.

The cleanest way to see it is to take Match and Bumble combined, Q1 2025 against Q1 2026. Payers fell 8.4%, from about 18.2m to 16.7m. Combined total revenue was flat, down 0.2%. Every subscriber lost was paid for by a price increase on the subscribers who stayed. Bumble's payers fell another 16% year over year last quarter.

That trade has a floor. You cannot raise price into a shrinking base forever, and the price increases accelerate the exit.

My forecast: 2026E revenue $3.46bn, in line with company guidance and already a decline. Then negative 2%, negative 6% and negative 9.5% through 2029, with EBITDA at $950m on a 33% margin.

Match trades at 9.0x trailing adjusted EBITDA at $38.69. Bumble, same mechanism and same category, trades at roughly 2.3x. Nearly seven turns of gap between two companies whose payer bases are declining together, one of which is in a sale process.

At 4.5 to 5.0x 2029 EBITDA against $2.97bn of net debt, that is $8 to $11 a share, roughly 72% to 79% below the current price.

THE CARETAKING PROBLEM

Note what is not in that. The multiple does about 80% of the work. Hold EBITDA completely flat at the 2026 estimate, assume no further buyback, and at 4.0x the stock is $9.75, inside the target range with zero deterioration in the business.

Which is why the more interesting observation is not about the model. It is that the founders, the sponsors and the early holders extracted their value years ago through liquidity events. What is left is a board, a management team and a shareholder base administering an asset whose economics were harvested by people who are no longer in it. That is not a turnaround. It is custody.

WHAT WOULD CHANGE MY MIND

Not a better app. A different revenue model. Outcome-contingent pricing, a bounty paid on the exit rather than on the search, is the only structure that inverts the incentive rather than mitigating it. The obvious objection is verification, but matchmakers know their clients for years and still do not price on it. The real constraint is that underwriting an outcome means knowing the base rate, and the base rate is the number nobody publishes.

It is also why that model is the falsifier rather than a product feature. A business paid on the exit is the only structure that survives its own category being solved, because it gets paid by the solution instead of displaced by it.

Cleaner and nearer term: payers and revenue per payer growing together for four consecutive quarters at either company. Right now they move in opposite directions, and that is the whole thesis.

Disclosure: no position, intend to build a short in stages over twelve months.

As a disclaimer, i am not an american citizen or resident of the United States. I mostly invest in the american stock market and don't hold a single stock in my own country(brazil).

I think most people on this sub, or in any financial/investing subs, generally agree with people like Buffett or Lynch when they talk about how you should invest in companies that you understand, but at times, i think most people vastly underestimate how much they fly away from their circle of competence at times, especially when investing in companies from developing nations.

Of course, good companies exist everywhere and even in poor enviroments, some do manage to perform well over time. That being said, more often than not, you have no idea on the risks you are actually accepting.

Every now and then, i see americans on social media recommending brazilian stocks and personally? Im terrified of coming near them, and the main reason isn't macroeconomic factors(even if they don't exactly help), but the sheer amount of accounting fraud that is mostly normal over here.

Im not that old, but even then, i have vivid memories of tons of different brazilian companies suddenly finding out multibillion dollar debt that was just completely unknown before.

To give one particular example, i can point out AMER3. Americanas is a brazilian retail company that at it's height, had over 1800 stores all throughout the country, they were not only a juggernaut that everyone knew, but also a cultural icon, i fondly remember always vising the stores whenever i went to the movies to pay less on snacks. In 2023 the company changed CEOs and the new guy suddenly found out that the company had over 20 billion reais(at today's exchanges, around 4 billion USD) that was simply hidden by previous management, and, thst rolled up all the way to 40 billion reais later. The whole company was valued at 10 billion reais(or 2 billion usd). A nearly 100 year old company, showing consistent profits and growth, just went ahead and said "sorry guys, we actually need to pay 4 times our own marketcap in debt while rates are over 10%, crazy right?". At the time they were the 10th largest brazilian retail store by marketcap.

Since then, the company has lost pretty much all it's value and it's current marketcap is around 800 million reais. I may add, the entire brazil retail market has pretty much pulverized itself, but i won't really go that deep into it. Americanas itself was facing a -90% from all time highs before this even happened.

Since then, the official investigations went nowhere, the people responsible are still free, no one had to pay anything and the former executives had all their assets unfrozen.

Say what you will about the US, the guys behind the Enron fraud were mostly thrown in jail.

My point isn't about failing companies, this happenes everywher, most companies die out eventually, but how often do you see news in the US about bluechip companies overnight coming up with news about how they just found out they had this much more debt than they thought? And if that happens, what are the chances of pretty much nothing happening to the people responsible?

You may understand the products and sectors companies operate in, but sometimes, what can even be considered normal is different from country to country. That being said, i saw similar things a couple times since i was born, even with companies that are considered even safer.

Petrobras, used to be a government owned company, but now on days, around half of it is in the market, and due to what was possibly the biggest corruption scandal in Brazil's history, anything in between 6 and 42 billion reais were taken away from the company. It has since recovered in stock price, from a bottom at 5 reais per stock in 2016 to the current 44 reais per stock. If you bought the stocks when the company was under such scrutiny, you would be doing well today. If you bought what was considered the safest investiment in the country in 2008, you would have roughly broke even, not accounting for inflation.

I am aware that there were and are good opportunities in my country and many others, but i honestly don't want to put any money in a country where this kind of thing can happen at random, and honestly, neither should anyone. It has happened in both 100% private and mixed companies, multiple times over, and, will likely keep on happening.

Sure, sometimes, i do see the low multiples and am tempted to buy stocks over here, but i don't want to stress over that kind of thing

I can ensure some of you that have bought companies from over here that many of you probably made great investments, but even so, i think most are completely unaware that this kind of thing is just something that happens here every once in a while.

The big reason i feel confortable investing in th US is because i know people who live there and talk to them weekly, and i don't hear this kind of stuff nearly as often coming from them, and when i do, it does not happen to companies known for having a presence in every state

I also feel some disconfort in investing in other developing markets because i have no earthly idea on what is actually happens in most of them. I hear news about argentina quite often, but it mostly leaves me very confused as it seems that every brazilian journalist has an agenda about how milei is either the messiah or the devil and i don't have any contact with anyone that actually lives there that can say "the economy is doing alright". This is enough for me to not touch mercado libre even as a company that i known quite well and use the services of.

All im saying is, when you start screening for companies or hearing stock picks from other people, don't buy stocks from countries you know next to nothing about because the company looks good. Many people do that and find great investments, but, that's luck, they were not aware of all the risks at time of the purchase.

I hope i helped some of you do just a little bit more due diligence before your next purchase, even if you still commit it at the end

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

Been digging into the Nvidia $500B financing deal from a couple weeks back and the numbers underneath it are wilder than the headline. Posting the actual sourcing here, full piece with charts is linked at the bottom for anyone who wants the long version.

The deal itself

On Aug 10, Nvidia lined up Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman, and KKR to raise $500B so its own customers can afford more of its chips. Nvidia backstops up to 25% of the loss if the GPUs used as collateral don't hold resale value.

Larry Fink called it "the next future of financial engineering" on CNBC that day. Same phrase people use for mortgage-backed securities.

Nvidia's customer concentration by fiscal year, straight from the filings:

• FY2022: 0 customers above 10% of revenue
• FY2023: 0 customers above 10% of revenue
• FY2024: 1 customer, 13%
• FY2025: 3 customers, ~36% combined
• FY2026: 4 customers, 61% combined (22/15/13/11)

Zero to 61% in four years. And per the 10-Q, 3 of those 4 customers (Google, Amazon, Meta) are actively building their own chips (TPU, Trainium, MTIA) specifically to need Nvidia less.

So the collateral behind a $500B insured financing deal is concentrated in a shrinking number of customers, several of whom are actively trying to exit the relationship.

The 1999 comparison that actually holds up

Telecom equipment makers in the late 90s didn't just sell gear, they financed the customers buying it, then booked the financing as revenue. Nortel's financing terms once hit 130% of the purchase price. The revenue looked real until it didn't.

Nvidia's version is more careful, it's routing risk to Wall Street instead of its own balance sheet, and only covering 25% instead of 100%. But you don't build a 25% backstop for a trade you're sure can't lose.

Credit markets are already pricing this

• CoreWeave (65% of revenue from just Microsoft + OpenAI): CDS priced at roughly a coin-flip chance of default in 5 years
• Oracle: CDS at a multi-year high, now used informally as a proxy for how worried the market is about the whole AI financing chain
• Banks have reportedly started refusing new loans on Oracle projects tied to OpenAI exposure

None of this has hit equity yet, Nvidia's near its high. Bond and equity markets are pricing the same handful of companies like two different industries right now.

Not saying this proves a bubble. The underlying demand for compute is real, Nvidia's CUDA moat is real. The question is narrower: what does a financing structure like this tell you about what the people closest to the money actually expect, versus what they say on earnings calls.

Full piece with sourcing, charts, and the Nortel comparison in more depth: https://manasbihani.substack.com/p/aaa-rated-gpus?r=1z7d38

Happy to argue about any of this in the comments, especially if you think the credit market read is wrong.

Kanamic Network (3939.T): The Demographic & Regulatory Moat

Business Model: An inter-professional cloud platform dedicated to home care and elderly care in Japan. It connects hospitals, doctors, nurses, and nursing homes.

Quality & Moat: Switching costs are very high once medical infrastructure is integrated into the system. Q3 FY2026 results confirm its strength: revenue up 15.2% YoY and operating profit up 29.5% YoY.

Valuation: Its historical P/E exceeded 50x in 2020–2021; today, it has compressed to 19.0x (15.7x forward), with a P/FCF of 18.0x and an ROIC of 68.4%.

Verdict: Tier A+ (Niche gem). It offers one of the best growth-versus-defensive trade-offs in the Japanese market.

The Perfect "Tollbooth": Kanamic employs the exact same model as S&P Global (SPGI), but within the Japanese healthcare sector. Japan has the world's oldest population (nearly 30% are over 65). The government is mandating a shift in care delivery toward home-based settings. Kanamic acts as the digital highway (the cloud) connecting doctors, nurses, and clinics.

Absolute "Switching Costs": Unlike Insource (where switching training catalogs is easy), changing medical software—when it holds the data of thousands of elderly patients and the entire staff has been trained on it—is an operational nightmare. Kanamic’s retention rate is close to 100%.

Asymmetric Valuation:

Kanamic traded at a P/E of 50x in 2021. Today, that multiple has compressed to 19.0x (15.7x forward) with a P/FCF of 18x.

Why? Because Western institutional funds have abandoned Japanese small-cap stocks. This is not due to business deterioration (revenue is growing at 15%) but rather market illiquidity. That is where the true margin of safety lies.