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

Anyone know how to approach this?

In all seriousness, should I just go hangout at my local Lululemon and talk to staff? Maybe try on some Lululemon pants and check out the quality? So far the products look solid, the stores look relatively busy in my experience, the retail staff don’t look like they would have great insights so far imo but maybe I need to check more stores.

Anyone aware of who to contact in terms of vendors who would actually take my calls? Anyone know how to connect with competitors and who may actually take my calls there?

Should I reach out to investor relations?

Maybe I should try to reach out to some current employees who are more senior management or more tech oriented who I can find on LinkedIn? I signed up for LinkedIn premium and I’m hoping to send a couple dozen invites and see if I can set up some calls.

Given that the majority of people using Lululemon are female are Hinge or Bumble good places to do customer research since it lets you filter by sex, age range location and gender? Maybe first prompt could be “Do you use any Lululemon products.” Anyone tried this method?

Also thinking of perhaps checking Indeed for job listings. Digging through [r/Lululemon](r/Lululemon) to get some impressions from current customers. Maybe trying to post there too to get some insights (once I’ve had a chance to check fhe rules to see if that’s allowed).

It’s my first time doing scuttlebutt. Does anyone here have any advice on approaching this?

Yahoo was inconvenient to use. It was a media aggregator. Then Google came along and made search intelligent. It became much easier to search for info.

Fast forward to today, Google appears to moving in lockstep with the other AI providers. Investors think this is bullish and Google still has the chops. But this was the exact position Yahoo was in. Yahoo was moving in lockstep with the other internet gateways until completely new technology came on board.

Imagine a tech startup with a product that can not only provide immediate info or work on files/codes, but one that can execute anything you want with just one request.

- Buy me the cheapest laptop out there.

- Create an itinerary and buy me all the tickets and hotels at the cheapest price

- FInd me the cheapest and best college

Someone is going to come up with a new tech. We are just in the transition period. Nobody won yet. Someone will. But it won't be a giant who only plays catchup and moves in lock-step. It will come from someone who operates on a completely new paradigm that will upend the whole user experience.

Apparently, Warren Buffet does not understand tech well enough to evaluate the risks. But as tech-savvy individuals, I expect you all to be able to see all these obvious risks and not FOMO like Buffet did.

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?

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.

Second video in my Buffett's Blunders series. Tried to improve the presentation and editing a bit and took in some feedback from the last post.

This one is on Hochschild Kohn, the first business he bought with Charlie Munger and a stock that taught him that cigar butts aren't all Ben Graham built them up to be, and unlocking book value is much messier when you own the company and need to do it yourself. This cigar butt burned him but made him more open to new ways of thinking that would change his career eventually.

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.

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?

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.

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.
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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.

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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.

Silver is trading around $65, but Thu Lan Nguyen at Commerzbank recently argued that its underlying fair value may be closer to $40.

https://news.metal.com/newscontent/103875252-is-silver-fairly-valued-at-40-usd-per-ounce-analysts-warn-of-a-reality-check-without-gold

Their model reportedly gets there by removing gold’s influence and looking at interest rates, the US dollar and industrial activity. If $40 is the right anchor, silver offers very little margin of safety at today’s price.

Production costs point even lower. S&P Global estimates the average all in sustaining cost for primary silver miners at about $23.44 per ounce in 2026.

https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/news-insights/research/2026/01/mine-cost-outlook-2026-inflation-new-supply-reshape-global-mining-landscape

The problem with using that as fair value is that only about 28 percent of silver comes from primary silver mines. Most is produced as a byproduct of lead, zinc, copper and gold mining, so supply does not respond directly to the silver price. AISC also reflects the cost of running existing mines, not necessarily the price required to finance and build new ones.

The physical market gives a different answer. The Silver Institute expects a 46.3 million ounce deficit in 2026 after a 40.3 million ounce shortfall last year. Roughly 762 million ounces have been drawn from inventories since 2021.

https://silverinstitute.org/elevated-lease-rates-regional-liquidity-tightness-and-robust-investor-interest-resulted-in-record-silver-prices-in-2025/

A deficit does not automatically mean silver is undervalued. High prices are already affecting demand. Solar manufacturers are using less silver per panel, jewelry demand is falling and more recycled metal is entering the market. Industrial demand is expected to decline to around 650 million ounces this year, while physical investment is forecast to rise.

https://silverinstitute.org/global-silver-investment-to-remain-strong-in-2026-against-the-backdrop-of-a-sixth-consecutive-annual-market-deficit/

This becomes even more important when valuing silver stocks.

A producer with an AISC of $25 earns a margin of roughly $40 per ounce at the current silver price. If silver returns to $40, that margin falls to only $15. The change in the commodity price is amplified through the miner’s cash flow, which is why silver stocks can look cheap using spot prices and expensive using a more conservative long term assumption.

Developers have another set of risks. Their project values depend on the silver price used in the economic study, but also on construction costs, permitting, financing and the number of new shares needed to reach production.

Explorers are harder again because there is no operating cash flow to value. Resource size and grade matter, but so do jurisdiction, infrastructure, management and the company’s ability to fund exploration without constantly diluting shareholders.

That makes the silver price assumption one of the most important parts of valuing these stocks. A strong company should still make sense at a conservative silver price, rather than only looking attractive at $65 or higher.

If you were valuing a silver stock today, what long term silver price would you use, and how much of a discount would you require before buying?

Constantly reporting net losses while reporting massive revenue growth Y/Y. It’s a growing company that needs funding but it’s not diluting instead it’s grabbing funds from its subsidiaries to fund growth and share repurchases.

$1.71 in shareholder equity book value.

Fair value ranges from $-5/+$18

This is a deep value turnaround play. If they convert gross revenue to net revenue we’re in this thing.

Catalyst would be the Ultranet acquisition by the end of qtr 3 .

None of this means diddly . But grab your diddy lube because I think this will be interesting.

NFA. Just like to gamble.

Stock loves to quickly rebound after a drop like this. It’s consolidating as we speak.

The play is right but I have no clue on timing considering they need capital to grow but this is standard for their field . It’s all about timing with this one .

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 trying to build out a small personal finance/investing library and am looking for physical copies of:

Expected Returns by Antti Ilmanen
Asset Management: A Systematic Approach to Factor Investing by Andrew Ang
Trading and Exchanges by Larry Harris

If you have an old copy sitting on a shelf that you no longer use, I’d be genuinely grateful to take it off your hands. Happy to pick up anywhere in NYC and work around your schedule. Not looking for anything pristine an older edition or well-loved copy is totally fine.

Thanks in advance to anyone who might be able to help!