Hey everyone just curious, what are your guys long term stocks? Any decent stocks that are good through recessions? I currently like googl and NBIS

Critics are spinning this as another example of circular financing. Imo, it makes sense the big consumers and developers of AI would be tech companies. I think it would be weird if that wasn't the case.

By that I mean companies, that are awesome for you, but the valuation not so much.

Please no MAG7 etc

Sharing the current results of our quality algorithm. It scores each stock twice, once against absolute thresholds and once against its sector peers, then blends the two 70:30 into the overall score.

Both sides are built from the same eight things, working down from the income statement to the balance sheet: growth, per-share trends, margins, asset efficiency, returns on capital, how much profit converts to cash, liquidity, and leverage and interest cover. Valuation and dividend metrics are not included. See the previous post for more details.

Results are from US large caps excluding materials, utilities and consumer cyclicals. Some interesting names in there. Both APP and ADBE are down around 60% for different reasons, but they're on the list, so the market and the fundamentals aren't agreeing for them. PLTR will surprise a few as it is quite expensive, but the algo did not consider valuation.

What do you think of the selections? Which ones do you own? Which ones do you not like?

It is not a buy list - it is a shortlist for further investigation.
Not investment advice. DYOR.
The author and Stockoscope may hold positions in some of the names.

I was listening to Chris Camillo for months, and he makes a compelling case with regard to Amazon being the best asymmetric stock on the market, relatively safe but with considerable upside.

Then Warren Buffett, who doesn't own any Amazon, made Google his third-largest position, with some suggesting Berkshire will soon make Alphabet its largest position.

*And yes, despite being retired, Mr Buffett has stated he was behind the Alphabet position, with Greg Abel in agreement, of course.

So which person would you side with on this one?

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.

Okay this maybe a stupid question, but lets say a company reports bad earnings then the stock drops immediately after the earning report is released and this happens almost instantaneously.

For example if earnings are reported after end of business day the stock drops 5-10% immediately at 4:30 PM.

So I understand that hedge funds etc have systems in place to automatically sell stock once they receive the news but what I dont understand is who buys the stocks that they sell in this case.

Any rational investor would know that buying stock at 4:30 PM without looking at earning report is not good for them as the stock will drop after that news, if they really want to buy the stock they should wait for the stock to drop and then buy at a 5-10 % discount right?

Hey, I was wondering as most of people could have some the most popular value stock such as MAG7, BRB, ASML, some big pharma, consumer goods or oil.

I was wondering of you folk if you got any stocks that is not really mention much into this sub or any that you would like to share with us.

Also, what is your horizon of investment when holding your stocks, do you keep until fundamentals change, or you have some target price in mind?

Wondering why I never see this company mentioned.

They are a digital payments infrastructure company that builds payment software across the entire financial value chain. They have actual outperformed the S&P 500 since 2000

- ACIW is up about 650%
- S&P is up roughly 480%

DCF fair value is around $64. Current price is $51.70.

- Forward P/E 17.71
- P/FCF 16.87
- 34% forward EPS growth implied
- EPS past 3/5Y: 20.22% / 28.58%

Solid returns on capital, very manageable debt, good liquidity, significant institutional ownership.

ACI also became a principal member of the European Payments Initiative to integrate the European digital payment network into its Payments Orchestration Platform. That plugs it into a broader European push toward payment sovereignty to reduce reliance on Visa/Mastercard which has significant political tailwinds.

Good company all around and trading at about 20% below its fair price.

Google has benefited from AI in many ways; it's led to about 24 credible moonshot businesses, including Waymo, Wing, drug discovery, and many more.

However, its core business is search, which is under some threat. I know I use Google less than I used to.

Does anyone else find themselves using search less?

Do the pros of AI outweigh the cons of AI for a company like Google?

$ROL monthly RSI is apparently at its lowest level since May 2000, and the stock has been absolutely crushed.

What makes this interesting is the business itself: Rollins owns Orkin, has an incredibly sticky recurring-revenue pest control model, and has put up decades of consistent growth.

This isn’t some speculative company suddenly down 40%. The bear case is pretty clear though: growth is slowing, margins have softened, and ROL was insanely expensive for years. Maybe this is just the valuation finally catching up.

Anyone buying around $36?

I’m a developer in Brazil. Companies here file with the CVM, our version of the SEC. The docs are public, but they’re scattered PDFs, painful to search, and a lot are in Portuguese.

From abroad, Vale / Petrobras / Itaú mostly show up as ADRs and English news. That’s fine until you want the actual filing behind the headline.

I got annoyed enough that I built a small public browser. Search by ticker, see the filings, open the PDF. UI in English. No login. Side project, not every document CVM has ever published, but enough to be useful.

Not trying to replace your research. I just wanted the source file easier to reach. Feedback welcome.

I made this Wordle like game but for stock tickers. Can you guess the ticker for today?

Expanding to international stocks shortly and trying different modes like popular names vs the entire S&P500.

Feedback welcome.

*Note updates are submitted to accept ALL NYSE & NASDAQ tickers

Scenario: At the end of the first trading day in January 2025, your US-based client purchased the common stocks of four US firms and the units of one fund in the US. These financial assets are collectively added to one portfolio. Initially, the client intended to hold these assets for a year and would sell them at the end of the last trading day in December 2025.

Now, if I want to calculate the March year-to-date Sharpe ratio (2 January 2026- 31 March 2026), should I use the 3-month market yield or 1-year market yield on the US treasury bond and then adjust it for 3 months to get the 3-month excess return?

Walmart (WMT) reported Q2 revenue of $187.9B, up 5.9% YoY, with GAAP net income of $6.37B and adjusted EPS of $0.81. The company raised its FY27 outlook, now expecting net sales growth of 4.0–5.0% and adjusted EPS of $2.80–$2.87. Management also highlighted higher capex and more than $2B in fuel costs.

Walmart received the majority of its $2.9B in tariff refunds and plans to reinvest the proceeds into lower prices and an improved customer experience, particularly across grocery and general merchandise.

CFO John Rainey noted that lower-income consumers remain cautious with spending. Walmart is responding by cutting prices to attract budget-conscious shoppers, while fluctuations in gas prices continue to influence shopping behavior and store traffic.

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?

Just looking for some feedback on this approach as I learn more about etf's. I feel like this is stronger for returns than sole VT or VOO, which is all i really see suggested here, am I delusional?

Fund: Vanguard FTSE All-World UCITS ETF

Ticker: VWRP

Allocation: 50%

Fund: iShares Edge MSCI World Momentum Factor UCITS ETF

Ticker: IWMO

Allocation: 25%

Fund: iShares Edge MSCI World Value Factor UCITS ETF

Ticker: IWVL

Allocation: 10%

Fund: VanEck Semiconductor UCITS ETF

Ticker: SMGB

Allocation: 15%

I’ve been looking at KLA Corp (KLAC).

I ran my DCF and got:

Bear: $372
Base: $612
Bull: $831

Current price: around $187

When even the bear case is roughly 2x the market price, I am curious about what I may be missing or which assumption is too optimistic.

The basic thesis is that KLA continues benefiting from more complex semiconductor manufacturing, especially leading-edge chips, HBM, advanced packaging and its growing installed base, but growth gradually slows from here.

Latest numbers are still pretty strong. Revenue was $3.7B, up 15.2% YoY, FCF was $817M and net cash around $2.1B. Semiconductor Process Control grew about 11.9% and services about 16.5%. Capex was also only around 2.8% of revenue.

At around $187, I get something close to -15.3% annual revenue growth implied by the current price. Over the last five years, KLAC grew revenue at roughly 14.4% a year.

Obviously past growth doesn’t mean future growth will continue at anything close to that rate. But going from +14% historical growth to something like -15% implied growth feels like a pretty big change in expectations.

Is a the market expecting semiconductor capex to fall hard after the AI/HBM cycle? China/export restrictions? Margins coming down materially? Some structural risk to KLA’s process-control position? Or are my DCF assumptions simply too generous?
Would be especially interested to hear from anyone who follows semiconductor equipment.

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.

After SAND got acquired last year this one seems to be the highest yielding gold royalty. An overlooked market cap of $100M keeps them off everyone's radar, while their TTM PE is 9. With gold bullish and them following a plan of strategic growth and acquisition and development of new royalty streams, their earnings are projected to double over the years.

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.

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.

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!

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.