Mostly Borrowed Ideas
@borrowed_ideas
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Equity Analyst. I publish one in-depth research on a public company every month. Subscribe: https://t.co/bBHyta1Omy
Joined July 2019
Meta’s stock is on a tear. The stock has ended higher in the last 19 consecutive trading sessions. Given such optimism, it is perhaps even more relevant to probe into what exactly is embedded in today’s stock price of Meta. My 2025 update on $META below.
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My wife and I had our own “Christmas miracle” last night!!
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So I got my Ray-Ban Meta Smart glasses today. Based on my first impressions, here’s what I think about it.
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1/ Thread: $FB long-term bull thesis. It's Zuck. Of course, there are other reasons as well. But Zuck is at the center of my bull thesis. Here's why.
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I find it hard to think any other company in the world that produces as much consumer surplus as Google. So for $20/month, you get 2 TB storage, access to all Gemini models (including Deep Research with likely higher limits than OpenAI), and integration with your Gmail and
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1/ $GOOG 1Q’22 Update. If you are *owner* of GOOG, this was mostly another impressive (yawn!) quarter. Just a little deceleration in YouTube, and boy this almost became YouTube earnings call despite contributing ~10% revenue and even less earnings. Here’s my notes.
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1/23 Warren Buffett's 2021 Annual Letter. What a wonderful way to start my Saturday morning! My notes from the latest $BRK letter:. "Charlie and I are not stock-pickers; we are business-pickers.".
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Munger met Buffett at the age of 35. How many people actually meet their best friends after 30s?. Munger met Li Lu when he was nearly 80 years old. How many people actually form deep intellectual partnerships at such an age?. If there's anything I want to learn from his life, it.
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Today is a special day. In <10 months, MBI Deep Dives just crossed $100k Gross ARR. I'm one of those people who consider $100k a life-changing money. I could easily toil in obscurity, so you can only imagine the depth of gratitude I feel for fintwit community. It is “Day 1”.
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Management Compensation and Incentives. I was recently reviewing management incentives at $AAPL, $MSFT, $GOOG, $AMZN, and $META in their 2022 proxy statements. My best to worst ranking purely on incentive structure below:.
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If you thought $GOOG fumbled on its AI demo, wait till you actually see how $MSFT did on their demos. This was eye-opening.
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Back to long Google. If I am being honest, I missed being a Google shareholder. $GOOG $GOOGL
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Naomi Gleit, 29th employee at $META, mentioned some cool anecdotes on her work experience with Zuck over the last 20 years.
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"A portfolio at 12% compounded for 30 years does 2x better than a portfolio compounded at 20% for 27 years and 3 years of -50%. But the second portfolio gather 5x the applauses."- @RishiGosalia . Unintuitive. That's why I want to drill it down to my head everyday.
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"When a FCF generating company is down 50%, the probability of another 50% decline likely decreases. When a non-cash generating asset such as crypto is down 50%, the probability of another 50% decline likely increases" -paraphrasing a DM from a friend.
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By now, most of you probably already read this. But in case you didn't, here is Buffett's eulogy to Charlie Munger.
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1/6 Thread: The art of selling your stocks. Since 1926, top 4% companies explain the net gain of the entire stock market in the US. Yes, 4%!. The rest 96% in aggregate matched the US treasury bill returns. Few investors understand this better than Chuck Akre. Here's why.
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Big day at MBI household!. Finally fully paid off my ~$160k student loan that I took to finance my MBA. As someone who grew up in Bangladesh, this student loan transformed my life for the better. I profusely thank the bank that underwrote my loan.
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1/ Thoughts on Research Process. I was invited to present my research process at a college in the US. I am sharing all ten slides here.
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Not sure if I have ever underlined as many sentences as I did in this book. Something tells me I will have to come back to this book every once in a while for years (decades?) to come.
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Right after watching this, I put on my Quest 3, bought the app for $9.99, and played piano for the first time in my life for 15 mins. No actual piano or expensive piano lessons required. While I’m tweeting this, my wife started playing. Maybe this VR thing is for real 😅.
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Someone asked in my DM how to pitch a stock in an interview. Sharing if anyone else may find it helpful/relevant.
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1/ MEGA THREAD: Long $ISRG. ISRG has been an incredible compounder ever since its IPO back in 2000. It's a pure-play in robotic surgery. Robotic surgery penetration is still just ~2.5% of worldwide surgery procedures. It's still Day 1 here!. Let's start with some history.
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“Even if you knew the future, you would still be mostly wrong.”
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Love this Bezos quote. Yasantha, a Sri Lankan guy, went to Princeton with Bezos. He went on to have 54 patents and 40 pending under his name (as per a 2018 article on him). It's incredible how self-awareness can be such a wonderful tool to find the playing field that suits you
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1/ Thread: My twitter philosophy. I have been active on fintwit for almost a year and half now. When I decided to get out of my lurking phase, I could never imagine this account could ever become such a huge part in my life. Let me share my philosophy for building this account.
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1/7 Thread: Ergodicity . Let’s play a game. Assume you have $100. We’ll flip a coin 100 times. Your wealth will be +50% for each Heads, and -40% for Tails. Wanna play?. Of course, you should! The expected value for each flip is $5. But should you really? Let’s figure out.
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1/ Thread: $FB 3Q'22 Earnings Update. When Evan Spiegel was busy cajoling Apple during the disruptive iOS changes, Zuck understood the gravity and prepared FB quite well ahead of the changes. But the battle seems to change every quarter. Now it's capital allocation.
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1/ $FB/Meta 1Q'22 Update. Phew! Meta is NOT dead. Well, at least, not yet. Even after +20% AH, Meta's "Family of Apps" is still likely priced to be terminally ill business, and its shiny new "Reality Labs" is likely priced to be worth negative! . Here's my notes.
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What is Meta's Moat?. It's NOT network effects. That moat "expired" sometime ago. In today's piece, I showed how unit economics of different social networking companies has evolved over time, and how far $META's competitors have been lagging.
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Interesting leadership principle by Zuck shared on Morning Brew's podcast today:. "probably one of my most controversial leadership or management things is I don't actually believe in delegating that much. I kinda think like the way a founder should work is you should basically.
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1/ MEGA THREAD: Long $BRK. I follow three steps while investing in BRK. 1. Read BRK annual shareholder letters.2. Read Semper Augustus (SA) annual client letter in which @ChrisBloomstran discusses BRK for >50 pages.3. Mostly ignore others opinion on BRK and sit tight.
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1/ Thread: $AMZN 2020 Shareholder Letter. This is Bezos' last letter as CEO of Amazon. I have been saying this for a while: Buffett and Bezos are two best business writers of our time. It truly is a fitting letter to end Bezos' tenure. Here are my highlights.
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1/ Thread: Meta's/ $FB maintenance capex . While maintenance capex is hardly reported, it is perhaps one of the most important data points for investors, especially for companies going through a massive investing cycle. Let me take a shot at Meta's maintenance capex.
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1/19 $META 4Q'21 Earnings. "although the direction is clear, our path ahead is not yet perfectly defined." . The word "headwind" or "headwinds" appeared 30 times on this call. Market listened. Stock is -23% AH.
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1/ Thread: The Math of Value and Growth @mjmauboussin . "The value of a financial asset is the present value of future cash flows. If you don’t believe that, please put this aside and resume your normal daily activities.". This disclaimer equally applies for this thread.
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1/ Okay, twitter. Time for a story of how I got to meet my wife yesterday after 263 days. No, I wasn't in Afghanistan or in Iraq. I was in Ottawa, Canada, and she was in Ithaca, New York during this time. So, what happened?.
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Good range of outcome table by @AswathDamodaran . If we assume ~4% risk free rate, ~5% Equity Risk Premium (ERP), and earnings miss 15% below estimates for S&P 500, we are looking at ~5% downside from today's level.
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updated digital advertising industry dashboard
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1/ Thread: $META/ $FB MS Conference Notes. Dave Wehner, for a change, sounds a bit positive. Nothing too dramatic, but perhaps a bit more clarity on their outlook and what needs to happen to see incremental positive changes. Here's my notes.
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To take photos, I can just press the right corner of the glass or say “hey Meta, take a photo”. Here’s some unedited photos.
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1/ Thread: $GOOG 3Q'21 Earnings Update. Google continues to post numbers that would probably break analysts' DCFs. What really boggles my mind is YouTube, a ~$29 Bn run-rate biz, is growing at ~40% 2-yr CAGR whereas $NFLX, a comparable topline company growing at ~22% 2-yr CAGR.
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In the most recent @morganhousel podcast, he mentioned:. “Part of the reason that the German military was so powerful in the early years of World War II is it had to forfeit every gun and tank and ship and plane to the Allies after World War I which meant that when it rearmed in.
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1/12 Thread: $GOOG 4Q'21 Update. Another bonkers quarter for GOOG. Yawn, right?. For the first time in a quarter, revenue from YouTube ads exceeded $NFLX revenue. 15 years ago, GOOG bought YouTube for $1.65 Bn. The king of AVOD *grew* its topline by ~9 Bn in 2021.
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1/8 Thread: Phil Fisher's investing philosophy. If Ben Graham popularized "value investing", Phil Fisher was the OG of "growth investing". Buffett even characterized his philosophy as "85% Graham and 15% Fisher". Just read a good piece on Fisher. Some quick notes.
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It doesn't fit in a tweet, so I'm doing this.
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this one is perhaps the best @JeffBezos interview I have ever listened to. I'm sharing a random bit that I liked, but frankly speaking, I lost count how many bits I would like to quote from this interview.
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How to lose time and money. (A relevant, timeless, and powerful short essay by Paul Graham published in July, 2010)
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Why I bought some $QQQ Jan 2026 $440 put options
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If you haven't listened to the Charlie Munger podcast episode with @collision, I highly recommend it. Let me briefly share a key takeaway from the episode. I noticed how Munger repeatedly mentioned Kodak's failure. But this particular bit stood out:. "Imagine the Kodak company,.
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I received a couple of DMs asking about "hey, what's going on in Bangladesh". While I left Bangladesh in 2017, my almost entire family still lives there. So I'm keenly aware of what's going on. I'll briefly cover what happened and the implications.
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if anyone has difficulty staying patient, this Howard Marks story can help. (Also, anyone who's up 100% YTD will not come back to inform you that they're down 50% or whatever when/if that happens in some future year.)
It is a lot harder to be a patient investor when it seems like everyone else is up 100% YTD.
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1/ Thread: The Wisdom of Crowd . In 2007, @mjmauboussin wrote a paper on the wisdom of crowd, and showed with simple maths and experiments why the crowd can trump individuals. Some of the takeaways were VERY counterintuitive and it materially influenced my thinking.
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1/ $FB 1Q'21 Update. I have been told “nobody uses Facebook”. Last quarter, 1.88 Bn “nobody” used Facebook daily. Lots of interesting data points and snippets on this call. Here are my notes.
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Notes from $META Connect 2022. First things first, as expected, Meta appears to have moved on from its strategy to sell hardware at negligible or negative gross margin. Quest Pro will cost $1,500 and is primarily directed at enterprise customers, focusing on work/productivity.
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I personally admire Apple's ability to serve their customers in an aesthetically and technically superior ways, but it is indeed often underappreciated that Meta and Google may be the only two companies in the history of capitalism to make most of their products affordable and
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This was the best* podcast I have listened in 2024. I was driving when I first started listening to it. 10 minutes in, I decided to pause as I realized I actually want to read it to absorb it at my own pace and ruminate a little while doing do. Dwarkesh outdid himself in this
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1/ Thread: The trick to own a stock for the long term. One of the most common mistakes in investing is to sell too soon. I believe most of us will own the future 10 or 100-baggers at some point, but very few of us will actually realize the full return.
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another great interview of @danielgross and @natfriedman by @benthompson . Some notes from the interview: . on Japan:. ". We’ve been puzzled by why TSMC’s margins aren’t better for a little while. Why are they not taking more of the margin? And I think you just said it, they’ve.
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1/5 "Munger: "You really have to understand the company and its competitive positions. That's not disclosed by the math. Buffett: "I don't know how I would manage money if I had to do it just on the numbers.". Munger, interrupting, "You'd do it badly.".
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1/ Some scattered thoughts on $META. I have been exchanging DMs with a few people in the last few days on META. Just summarizing some of these conversations here. META trades the way it does because a) FOA is presumably terminally ill, and b) RL is too speculative compared to. .
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1/ Thread: $FB 2Q’21 Update. Everyone sort of expected Facebook to post a big quarter. It was big indeed, but wasn’t quite jaw dropping big!. I found interesting details about ad inventory (there was a great answer from Sheryl), metaverse etc. from this call. Let’s unpack.
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1/17 $GOOG 2Q'22 Update. 2022 is the year of tough comps, along with macro uncertainty. The word "uncertainty" was emphasized by CFO Ruth Porat because "the data are complicated". Let's look at some simple data from the most recent quarter first.
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Ben Thompson's podcast with Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman is SO good that I had to stop listening after 40 mins as I wanted to take notes. Leaving my notes after the first 30-40 mins of conversation.
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two things I thought were interesting from $GOOG 1Q'25:. 1. both Google Cloud and AWS grew at the same rate when they had $12 Bn quarterly revenue!. 2. Google Services reported 30% operating margin when ChatGPT was released. They just reported 42% operating margin.
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"The Internet is Tokyo. The Internet allows you to be niche at scale. Niche at scale is something that I think young people should aspire to.". h/t @JamesClear
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1/4 I am 30 today. As I reflect today, I realize I will probably never be as confident about the world as I was in my early 20s. The hubris of early 20s, thankfully, faded away.
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1/ Thread: Value of fintwit. Since we are seeing some exodus (temporary or permanent) from fintwit, I want to share how I perceive the value of fintwit to me and perhaps many of you. Before I get into that, some brief reminders on life before fintwit (or social media).
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Whenever a friend/acquaintance gets interested in learning how to short stocks (not atypical during bear markets), I quickly send them this gem from Bronte Capital, and ask them to evaluate whether they are willing to manage risks as tightly and rigorously as shorting requires.
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Today's edition of "Investing is hard". In July 2017, a genie came to you and gave you Facebook's/ $META next 5-year operating performance and then offered you to buy the company in ~22x GAAP EBIT at that time. You thank the genie for its generosity, and then make 0% for 5 years.
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After thinking long and hard over the last few days, I sold my $ETSY shares yesterday. I show you my work and rationale behind this decision. No Paywall.
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1/ Thread: $SQ 3Q'21 Earnings Update. Cash App and seller ecosystem continue to grow at an impressive rate. My notes from this call.
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"I tell my guys in finance, I don't want you guys to ever benchmark anybody else because you can only get bad ideas".
Apple CFO Luca Maestri out here making capital management sound like fine Italian arts 🤌🏾 $AAPL just built different .
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$AMZN 3Q'23 Update. Imagine opening Amazon’s earnings report 5 years from now and what do you think you might hope you paid more attention to? It’s very unlikely to be AWS topline growth rate this (or any) quarter.
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spoke with a couple of $GOOG bears. Here's what they think. GOOG EBIT was $10 Bn in 2010 and $41 Bn in 2020. So it took them 10 years to increase EBIT by $31 Bn. Then they increased EBIT by $37 Bn in 2021. Bear case is GOOG EBIT doesn't grow till 2024(base)-2026 (bear).
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Todd: “Warren, I have a new company that likely clears our hurdle. We used to own it back in 2011. We made a quick 50% on the stock. It’s Dollar General.”. Buffett: …
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1/ Thread: $GOOG 1Q’21 Update. Hey Google, what’s the best business capitalism has ever come up with?. Google: It’s our search business. Here are my highlights from the earnings call and quarter.
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While Adyen raised ~$300 Mn to build a company worth $30 Bn, Stripe raised ~$10 Bn to be allegedly worth $70 Bn. I say allegedly because they both process similar payments volume, but one is barely profitable whereas the other (Adyen) has ~50% EBITDA margin.
Lots of firms say that they're long-term oriented, but Sequoia actually is. 14 years after their first check in Stripe, they're making their largest investment yet. (This is a secondary transaction; no funds will go to the company.).
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1/10 Thoughts on market this week. $QQQ is down ~17.5% from ATH and we may flirt with new lows again. If people are asked how would they feel in a 20% drawdown scenario, many people imagine they would be excited to buy.
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very lucid explanation from @eric_seufert why effective digital advertising is essentially "printing money".
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After launching in September 2020, it took MBI Deep Dives 10 months to reach $100k ARR. The next $100k then took another 33 months. It had its twists and turns but glad to be above $200k ARR. Thank You for allowing me to do what I want to do: study one business every month!.
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1/ $AMZN 1Q'22 Update. "these profit levels are super high now. They're becoming super high at the company if you ex out the COVID costs. Is Jeff aware of how profitable the company is becoming? Is he happy about it?". RBC's Mahaney joked in 2Q'20 call. Here's what happened since.
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1/8 Thread: The ServiceNow Story. Fred Luddy, founder of $NOW, has an interesting backstory. Luddy was CTO at Peregrine Systems. After working there for 13 years, he had $35 mn stake at the company. It was worth zero when Peregrine filed for bankruptcy due to massive fraud.
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$META 3Q'22 Update. ". I think that those who are patient and invest with us will end up being rewarded" Mark Zuckerberg. From October 26, 2015 to today (after-hours), the stock is flat. The "reward" remains elusive. Here are my highlights from 3Q'22.
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After reading this, I gained a decade or two worth of wisdom. "Enough is elusive because when you reach it, you’re no longer the person that once desired it. Once you occupy an entirely new world, that prior version of yourself is largely inaccessible.".
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1/7 Quick thoughts on $ADBE acquisition of Figma. In June'21, Figma raised $200 Mn at $10 Bn valuation. Even though a lot has changed since then in the public markets, ADBE just paid $20 Bn for Figma. No wonder VCs don't mark to market 😉. Here's how I'm thinking about the deal.
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1/ Thread: $GOOG 2Q’21 Update. As investors kept searching for the next “Google”, it turns out you could have done pretty well betting on the real Google with YTD of ~60% or ~30% CAGR in the last 3 and 5 years. Here are my highlights from the earnings call and quarter.
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One of my theories about Meta’s approach to online social network is Zuck basically imagined all the different ways online social networks may evolve in the next 10-15 years and he has a specific bet for each of those scenarios which makes Meta a less risky company than most.
WhatsApp is actually a lot cooler than I realized… it isn’t a messenger - it is actually a hidden encrypted full social network.
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Despite the material drawdown in software this year, it is surprising to me the kind of assumptions I still have to believe to make decent return. Take $DDOG for example which is widely loved.
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1/ Six months ago, I launched MBI Deep Dives. I publish one deep dive of a publicly listed company every month for $10/month or $100/yr. Subscribers receive only one/two email each month, and each deep dive is ~8-10k worded piece. Here's how it went. A thread.
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1/7 Andy Jassy just published his first letter to shareholders as CEO of $AMZN. While reading the letter, one could sense the guy was running AWS before taking the CEO job. Here's my notes.
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Semiconductors: "To see a World in a Grain of Sand". My Primer on Semiconductors.
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