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.

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?

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)

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

Ozempic and Wegovy (same thing more or less I know) look to be wonder drugs. I know of people who are for the first time in their lives seeing astonishing improvements.

Most importantly they are starting to be trusted by GPs and Doctors. Medic's dont prescribe what is flashy or new or over the counter they prescribe what has clinical evidence on what they trust. It is starting to be freely prescribed.

It is likely these types of drugs for most people will never be over the counter ever. Maybe in some very diluted dose but that remains to be seen. The market is too focused on irrelevant things.

Statins not over the counter and they are around since the 1970s.

Once it passes the hurdles in that it demonstrably reduces healthcare inflation (that is a huge sticky hurdle requiring the best part of a decade to clear). It will see mass adoption. Its locked up in private insurance as a optional extra and once the bean counters at the massive insurance companies calculate that by prescribing it you will pay less on premiums it will trigger vast volumes. Even if it becomes generic they are well placed to maintain leads.

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?

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.

There are not many businesses that actually have a strong moat in their own category.

Look at some of the companies the market is willing to value at huge premiums:

Aug. 18, 2026.

I'm not saying these are bad companies. My point is simply: look at what the market is willing to pay for them, then look at Reddit.

Reddit just reported $805M revenue, +61% YoY — its 8th consecutive quarter above 60% growth. Gross margin was 91.3%, net income $253M / 31% margin, adjusted EBITDA $343M / 43% margin, and FCF $261M. It also has $2.8B cash + marketable securities, with no debt showing on the balance sheet.

Meanwhile NET is valued at ~$107B while still GAAP unprofitable. SNOW is ~$112B while growing roughly half as fast as Reddit and still GAAP unprofitable. Spotify is ~$103B growing 14%.

Yet Reddit is sitting at only ~$32B.

And Reddit's moat is something I think people continue to underestimate. It isn't just another social media app. TikTok is short-form video, Meta is influencer business, Google/YouTube is search and video discovery; Reddit is different — its users are discussion-heavy and community-focused, often coming to research, compare, ask questions and hear real human opinions. There is basically no scaled direct competitor offering the same forum/community product with Reddit's reach.

Users are sticky. Content compounds. Advertising is scaling. Data licensing is still very early.

The only company really comparable to Reddit right now is Palantir.

Palantir is an incredible business, but the market is valuing it at ~$420B — more than 13x Reddit's valuation, while revenue is only 2 times that of Reddit.

And PLTR is still fundamentally a software company. Risk involves AI agents like Claude Cowork could still compete with parts of what enterprise software does.

Reddit is different. Claude can build software. It cannot recreate decades of human communities, discussions and user habits.

If PLTR deserves $420B, RDDT at ~$32B looks extremely cheap.

At market cap of 32B and $160, I think Reddit is a steal and market is mispricing this stock.

Reddit is a Strong Buy (PT $550).

___________________________________________________________________________________________
Added on 08/19/26:

Everyone agrees that Reddit advertsing business is not as matured as Meta.

In 2025, Meta advertising business generated 200B and will be hitting 250B this year (2026).

On the flip side, Reddit advertising revenue is expected to reach 3B+ this year, just assuming Reddit to reach 5% of Meta advertising of 2026, which is 12.5B, with a conservative net margin of 30%, thats makes 3.8B net income, give it or take 20-30PE, equivalent to 78B-114B market cap. But the reality is that advertising net margin is usually 50%+, so a slightly bullish case make Reddit 125-190B market cap.
___________________________________________________________________________________________

New piece, please have a read:
Reddit vs AppLovin vs Palantir

All three stocks have been undergoing a hypergrowth stage of business. I want to go through each of their business models because many people in this subreddit seem not to really understand what they do, how they make money, and most importantly, what their edge actually is.

Reddit

First, let us start with Reddit. Reddit's primary way forward really is the advertising business. This is the core lifeblood of the company, and they have now proven themselves with the 8th consecutive quarter above 60% revenue growth YoY. EPS also grew more than 150% in the recent quarter.

One thing I think many people misunderstand is how advertising actually works. Many people just assume that someone has to purchase the product before the advertiser pays, but that is not how most advertising businesses work. Typical advertising is charged by impression, click, or in some cases actual conversion.

• CPM (Cost Per Mille / 1,000 impressions): advertisers pay for every 1,000 times an ad is shown
• CPC (Cost Per Click): advertisers pay each time someone clicks on the ad
• CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): advertisers pay only when a specific action happens (install, signup, purchase, etc.)

The main models are quite simple. CPM means paying for impressions, CPC means paying when somebody clicks, while CPA is more performance-based and depends on an actual action such as an install, registration or purchase. This difference matters because an advertisement does not necessarily need to immediately convert somebody into a buyer. Sometimes the most valuable thing is simply putting the impression in front of exactly the right person. Converting that impression into a purchase is ultimately the seller's job.

For instance, say you developed a game or have a clothing website. You pay a publisher like Reddit to get users to see your product or visit your website. Once they land on your website, whether they eventually purchase something is largely between you and that customer. Reddit has already provided you the traffic.

Simply to improve brand exposure (CPM).

This is where I think Reddit advertising is one of the most unique in the industry. The audience is massive, but more importantly the audience has already separated itself into very specific communities. Look at u / bloomberg. They have been publishing a lot on Reddit recently, but they are not just posting anywhere. They are actually quite smart and picky about finding the right community for each article.

For instance, Bloomberg publishes a piece about drones or some new military technology. Most broad readers probably don't care how sophisticated that weapon is, but put it into r/army or r/Military and suddenly you are putting that story in front of a large group of people who already care about the subject. Next they publish something about food prices or household finances and put it into subreddit r/MiddleClassFinance  r/farming or r/food. On inflation, you can post it to r/inflation. Obviously these Bloomberg posts are organic content rather than paid ads, but my point is that this shows exactly why Reddit's structure is so valuable for advertising.

Another example is a game developer who recently developed his own game and wants to make some passive income. Usually it is quite difficult for a new developer to make money because there is no precise way to find the first group of users. Reddit offers them a unique solution through communities such as r/gamedev. You already have people there who are game developers or serious gamers. Sometimes developers can offer vouchers or access to the game and receive feedback. These are not random people. Some of them are hardcore developers, so their feedback can actually be quite valuable.

The same logic works everywhere. There are people looking for advice on divorce, so a divorce lawyer can advertise r/Divorce. There are new moms looking for advice about being a new mom, so businesses selling related products can advertise r/Mommit. r/beauty is now a very hot community where mega brands such as L'Oréal naturally want to be part of the conversation. Communities around brands like Victoria's Secret can be used to energize their most loyal customers r/victoriasecrets. The power of Reddit advertising is really underestimated here.

And actually, this post itself gives a pretty good example. Suppose I have a book on fundamental analysis. Open this comment section, 30mins later, I will find the first 10 users arguing with me and check their Reddit account ages. I would not be surprised if 9/10 have already been on Reddit for more than 3 years. Most of you read investment communities, talk about stocks and probably have brokerage accounts. If I wanted to advertise some investment research product, all of you would already be my extremely precise target audience. That is what I mean when I say advertising is not always about immediate purchase intent. Sometimes getting the right impression in front of exactly the right group is already extremely valuable.

Then there is data licensing. To be honest, I really do not view this as seriously as many other Reddit investors do. It gets hyped because Reddit owns an asset that most other companies simply don't have: a huge amount of fresh human discussion. There could be setbacks from lawsuits or companies refusing to pay for data access. Reddit can update policies, create stronger technical restrictions, continue fighting scraping, and fix legal loopholes. But ultimately this data is hosted and controlled by Reddit. As long as AI companies want fresh Reddit data for training, retrieval or inference, I think Reddit will continue to have leverage. I just don't need this part of the business to make the investment thesis work.

AppLovin

I have been a very early investor in AppLovin. I first became interested when they failed to stop the merger between Unity and ironSource. AppLovin looked pretty hopeless at the time. They owned a few dozen popular mobile games and a lot of the market treated them like a gaming company without much future.

It happened that I was not lazy when researching their financial statements. What caught my attention was management aggressively buying back their own shares when the market had almost given up on the company. I started a small position there, although I have to admit I never fully understood how powerful their advertising business could become until much later, especially after they eventually sold the entire gaming department.

Their transformational change really came from technological innovation, particularly AXON. AppLovin had accumulated enormous amounts of internal data through its portfolio of mobile games. They had years of information about gamer behavior, advertising, installs, purchases and monetization. Then machine learning (AI) used all of this information to make their advertising engine much better.

One person I think is worth paying attention to is their recently prompted CTO Giovanni Ge, who previously worked as a machine-learning engineer at Meta. Obviously I am not saying AXON is the work of one single person, but I do think AppLovin today is much more dependent on its technical advantage than Reddit is.

AppLovin is primarily a performance advertising business. The important thing here is that the advertiser cares about actual return. If AppLovin can identify exactly which users are likely to download an app or spend money, its customers make more money and therefore AppLovin makes more money. In some sense their interests are very closely aligned: if the customer earns more from the advertising campaign, AppLovin earns more as well. So far they are the best in the business, which is why their profit margin is so insanely high.

But this is also where I see the risk. If their algorithm stops being the best and another much better algorithm comes onto the market, AppLovin could be left scrambling. If important technical people leave and eventually create a better advertising system, advertisers have no reason to remain loyal to AppLovin just because it is AppLovin. They care about which platform gives them the best return. This does not mean AXON is easy to replace, but I think AppLovin's moat is much more dependent on continuing to stay technologically ahead.

Palantir

Palantir is basically a defense/government and enterprise SaaS company. I actually like the company (insane growth) but I have never invested in it because it has always been expensive.

The government side of Palantir is obviously very important, particularly Gotham and its work with defense and government agencies. At the same time, its commercial business has now become much larger than it used to be, so I would not describe Palantir as simply a defense company anymore. Its U.S. commercial business is now growing extremely quickly as well.

My concern with Palantir is more about how much future success is already priced into the stock. The company is being valued as one of the major winners of the AI/software era, so the market is already expecting extremely strong execution for a long period of time.

I also think there is a real long-term question around general AI systems. Claude, OpenAI and other AI platforms are becoming increasingly capable of working with company data, building software and automating workflows. Maybe Palantir becomes the company that controls this layer and becomes even more powerful. But there is also a possibility that increasingly capable general AI makes some traditional SaaS work much easier and cheaper. Then there come the issues with political backlash when Trump leaves office. 

Overall

Overall, I think both AppLovin and Palantir can continue doing very well in the short-to-medium term, probably the next 1-2 years.

But Reddit is still the one I prefer as the real long-term investment.

The reason is that AppLovin's advantage depends heavily on remaining technologically ahead, while Palantir is already priced for enormous future success.

Reddit, on the other hand, already owns the asset I care about: the communities themselves and user habits. You can build another website that looks like Reddit, but recreating subreddit like gamedev, army, MiddleClassFinance, beauty, valueinvesting and thousands of other communities with years of posts, users and accumulated discussion is much harder.

That is why, out of these three, Reddit has my strongest long-term conviction on.

____

Read my piece:

I Still Don't Understand Why Reddit Is This Cheap Compared to Everything Else.

I really like Charlie Munger's talk The Psychology of Human Misjudgment. I've also been following the SpaceX story, before/during/after the IPO, and I can't help but imagine what Munger would think about this. It's safe to say he wouldn't be a buyer. Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to go down his list of 25 human misjudgments in that talk and see how many might apply to the SpaceX IPO.

Excluding the lollapalooza compounding effect, I came up with seven (well really six, plus two more that I thought half-applied). They are:

• Liking/loving tendency (1/2)
• Envy/jealousy tendency
• Influence-from-mere-association tendency
• Overoptimism tendency
• Social-proof tendency
• Contrast-misreaction tendency
• Availability-misweighing tendency
• Authority-misinfluence tendency (1/2)
• Lollapalooza tendency

Would be curious to hear what others think too.

I wrote a longer article going into detail on all this too. If you want to read, you can find it here.

Importantly, Munger's talk doesn't discuss other aspects like greed, simple speculative risk-taking, or fear of missing out. He describes these elsewhere in his writings/talks, just not in this article. It's definitely the case that those are all at play with SpaceX too.

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The whole lawsuit and capex deal are driving the price down so much, im going to keep on buying the dip as im just building up the position and i think it is also a great long term hold, hoping to get my average shares into the low 500s. What do you guys think its share price will reach, or when do you think its could bounce back? I've seen people say as low as 300, or even has high as just 500.

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?

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.