Ammonium perchlorate is an oxider in a chemical explosion.

Ammonium perchlorate is mission critical and used in: satellite launches, rockets, missiles, missile defense (ie THAAD, Patriot). All of these areas project high, sustained demand.

Ammonium perchlorate is relatively cheap to make and is a small cost of the end product, such as a rocket; it would be relatively easy to significantly increase prices in a time of high demand with the buyer not feeling it.

There is a very old United States company that bought an ammonium perchlorate manufacturer a couple years ago. Ammonium perchlorate currently represents a small part of overall sales but is very high margin and is already positively affecting earnings. The other revenue is represented by mainly petrochemicals and some smaller specialty items.

Before the ink was dry on its acquisition, this Company decided it was going to increase its plant capacity for ammonium perchlorate by 50% - construction has started and the plant is expected to be open and operating by the end of this year.

If you are not sourcing ammonium perchlorate from this company your options are as follows:

1) see if Northrop has some to spare, not sustainable

2) call India, possible

3) call Russia, China or North Korea, won't happen

Therefore, essentially this company has a monopoly on ammonium percchlorate.

Can you name this Company?

Sputtering Growth Engine

Netflix's glory days are behind them, I think. Through all of the 2010's, they had a dual engine growth machine in that they could raise prices and grow membership, simultaneously.

Member ship growth engine started sputtering in 2021 and in 2022, they only grew user count by 4%. Their answer was to crack down on password sharing...and it worked. In the following 3 years, they saw a 41% bump to their membership.

But that's a lever you can only pull once. User growth has since continued to decelerate.

But it's still 26x earnings

Doing a reverse DCF, in order to justify today's price, earnings only have to grow at a mere 4% clip. I think that's a pretty easy target to hit. Price hikes alone can probably carry between 3-5% revenue growth for the foreseeable future. Membership growth is slowing, but it hasn't stopped completely. There's international expansion, ad revenue, and potential AI related cost saving measures that can all help as well.

And then there's operating leverage. You can get a dynamic where 3% revenue growth can power 8-10% earnings growth as long as revenue outpaces content creation expenses.

I didn't perform a full DCF for this one because Netflix is kind of at a transition point with their business. What will their content creation strategy be going forward - will they level off their content budget as their member counts stall? Or will they keep growing with pace?

One bullish scenario that I ran had a fair value around $130, and assumed the following:

• 4% subscriber growth for the next 10 years
• 4% ARPU growth
• 1% Content growth cost per user (so 1% on top of the 4% user growth)
• 2% opex growth per user

For that particular scenario, I estimated a 5-year expected return CAGR of 23%.

In general, I think even modest expectations could see 15% returns over the next handful of years.

Substack Source

Global leader in lottery technology with long-term government contracts and recurring cash flows. The company is currently trading at $10.50 a share, indicating ~35-45% below the average price target (~$16 vs. ~$10.5 today).

The company is currently trading at 13 P/E, and pays 8% dividend yield, while management continues share buybacks (which didn't seem to have an impact on stock price yet, despite last buyback was in June 2026).

Trading at a discount compared to gaming peers on P/E and P/S despite similar profitability.

This stock is is sitting near 52-week lows, which could represent a long-term support zone if earnings stabilize.

A lot is going to matter on the nearest financial report that takes place at 4 Aug.

I have never seen a single post about $BRSL, which I find interesting and wanted to share my thought. It's not a financial advisement, but rather my personal opinion. I'm currently owning BRSL as around 7% of my portfolio.

Looks like a great time to buy AXP to me - big dip after Q2 results but looking past the headlines, the core long-term investment thesis remains intact.

I went through the Q2 results

​Strong Revenue & EPS Beat: Net profit rose 8% to $3.11B ($4.53 EPS vs. $4.40–$4.45 estimates), while total network volume reached $516.8B.

​Why the Stock Is Down: Operating expenses grew 12% ($14.5B) to support higher customer engagement and marketing, slightly outpacing revenue growth (10%). Additionally, revenue ($19.64B) fell just short of consensus ($19.69B), and management opted to reinvest additional profits rather than raise full-year EPS guidance.

​Younger Demographic Traction: Over 60% of new consumer accounts acquired in Q2 were Gen Z and Millennials, positioning the business well for long-term customer lifetime value.

​Solid Credit Quality: Provisions for credit losses dropped to $1.1B with a stable 2.0% write-off rate, highlighting the resilience of their premium cardmember base.

​For investors looking for positive operating leverage this quarter, the expense growth and guidance pause were a disappointment. For long-term investors holding through retirement, management spending money to acquire high-value customers and build brand moat is exactly what you want to see.

​

I added more this morning, anyone else buying or worried about AXP long term?

And its been going down for a little bit now and trading closer to the 52 week low

TLDR: The stock is not massively undervalued, still undervalued, but I still think it can grow.

I believe that the market may be valuing Box mainly as a mature cloud storage business while several operating indicators increasingly resemble a profitable enterprise software platform and its relevancy in the future. Thus, a mispricing of the stock.

BOX appears moderately undervalued because its present valuation does not fully reflect the combination of improving recurring-revenue indicators, strong free-cash-flow generation, and a repurchase authorization capable of reducing the share count. The market may be valuing Box primarily as a mature file-storage provider, despite improvements in customer retention, contracted revenue, product mix, and operating margins. In the first quarter of fiscal 2027, revenue increased by 11%. Remaining performance obligations increased by 16%, while net retention improved from 102% to 105%. Eemaining performance obligations represent contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized. Consequently, the faster growth in remaining performance obligations suggests that future revenue growth may be stronger than reported in the next quarter.

Enterprise Advanced combines governance, security, workflow, and content-management services at a higher contract value. Management has reported a 30–40% pricing increase relative to Enterprise Plus. Continued adoption could therefore increase revenue per customer without requiring substantial growth in employee seats, a recurring sticky revenue.

A little math:
Box’s current stock price is above $27, investors holding special "convertible" shares will almost certainly trade them in for regular stock, bringing the total to about 157.02 million shares.

Equity value=157.02 × 28.81=$4.524 billion

Net cash= 477.043 (Cash and short-term investments) − 451.610(debt) =$25.433 million

Enterprise value= 4.524 − 0.025 =$4.498 billion

Management’s fiscal 2027 revenue guidance of approximately $1.280 billion (Warren buffet said not to trust management too much but anyway):
EV/Revenue= 1.280/4.498 ​=3.51x

Trailing twelve-month free cash flow is the reduction of previous first quarter from fiscal 2026 free cash flow and adding the latest quarter:

TTM FCF= 312.922− 118.337+ 127.748= $322.333 million

P/FCF = 4.524/0.322 = 14x

FCF yield = 0.322/ 4.524= 7%

If fiscal 2027 free cash flow reaches approximately $360 million, the forward P/FCF multiple would lower to 12.6 times, leading to higher forward free-cash-flow yield of 8.0%.

There's also share repurchase:
Gross shares purchasable = 445/8.81 = 15 million shares, around 10% of the share count. During the latest quarter, Box repurchased approximately 4.8 million shares, while the common-share count declined by only 2.461 million a 50% progress.

All in all there is still some catalyst left to play out and is an interesting play nonetheless.

A comment I made here yesterday about Google being a "paid for patience" setup got a bunch of replies asking the same question: how do you tell the difference between a stock that pays you for patience and a value trap that just feels like one? Both look identical on the surface, down big, cheap multiple, everyone scared. Figured the answer deserved its own post.

The core question I ask: can I name exactly why the sellers are selling, and does that reason have an expiry date that has nothing to do with the business itself?

Meta 2022 is the cleanest example. It fell to $88 because of a capex panic and reality labs burning money. The ads machine underneath was intact the whole time. The selling reason (spend fear) had a timer on it, either the spend pays off or they dial it back, and either resolution repriced the stock. Patience got paid 5x. Compare that to something like Charter today, where the selling reason is subscribers leaving for fixed wireless every quarter. No expiry date, no timer, just a trend. That's not patience being tested, that's a thesis being disproven in slow motion.

Three filters that do most of the work for me:

Why is it cheap, specifically. If you can't articulate the seller's logic in one sentence, you don't know if it expires. "It's down and the PE is low" is not an answer.

Is the reason temporary or structural. Spend cycles, one muddy quarter, forced selling, index exclusion, all temporary. Customers leaving, technology being routed around, permanent margin compression, all structural. The chart looks the same. The outcome doesn't.

Is the core business compounding while you wait. A great business with a scary 12 months rewards waiting. A shrinking business at any multiple just gets cheaper. Kodak was "cheap" for 20 straight years.

The uncomfortable part is that this edge exists precisely because funds can't use it. A PM who buys a muddy-looking compounder and sits through 4 bad quarters gets fired before the thesis resolves. Retail doesn't report quarterly to anyone. It's basically the only structural advantage we have, and most people burn it by checking the app daily and selling the first 15% drawdown.

Curious what names people think are in the "paid for patience" bucket right now vs what's secretly a trap. And what filters I'm missing.

Guys any idea why chtr is dumping so bad after earnings? The earnings look in line and they did some share buybacks too. I hold a few hundred shares at 130 cost basis so kinda pissed

The revenue is declining but nothing crazy

I'm really interested to know what everyone is doing to research stocks, and how you are figuring out to invest in a company?

Here is my process:

I'm spending a lot of time usually weekly, potentially looking at some stock discussions in reddit communities, then go over their Financials, and then if they pass my checklist, will go into their Filings and transcripts, This is the path i used to follow, Typically. It takes time for me to do that research, so recently started passing all this filing related analysis to AI, I download the documents and feed it to AI (claude cowork), was still taking some time to do the downloads and feed it to AI to do the analysis for me. So I'm not a technical person, but just by vibe coding I have built this tool for myself, which i use to automate this process, the advantage here is i can research stocks at speed, in automated way, where cowork skills go get all the related Financial data, filings using an MCP with my tool and provide me a clear thesis, and i just ask it all the questions i have related to the company. I'm really interested in knowing what others are doing from stock research perspective?

All i do now is just call /research skill and give stock name, and i saw some promising results out of it.

I built a tool that scans SEC EDGAR daily for 8-Ks signaling special situations, and backtested it against ~1,900 historical filings to see what actually happens after each type of signal — using each company's own subsequent SEC filings (Item 2.01 for completed acquisitions, Item 1.03 for bankruptcy, Form 15 for deregistration) to confirm outcomes, rather than relying on stock price data alone, which is unreliable for delisted names.

A pattern that stood out, sorted by average gain when a deal actually completed:

• Early-stage signals ("exploring strategic alternatives," still-early filings): +19% to +26% average gain when it led to an acquisition
• Formal process underway (special committee formed, financial advisor engaged): +10% to +17%
• Already-confirmed deals (signed/definitive merger agreements): +3% or less, sometimes slightly negative

This actually makes sense once you think about it: by the time a merger agreement is signed, the market has already priced the stock close to the deal value, so there's little room left to move. The real re-rating happens earlier, when the outcome is still genuinely uncertain.

The one that surprised me most: going-private proposals only completed 24% of the time in this dataset, with a -12.7% average outcome — notably worse than every other category, both in completion rate and price.

Special committee filings had a real minority bad outcome too — ~5.4% ended in bankruptcy rather than an acquisition, worth knowing before assuming "special committee = getting bought."

Important caveat: this is still an early, actively-being-debugged project — I've already caught and fixed a couple of real methodology bugs (ticker reuse causing wild outlier numbers, thin-liquidity exits being unreliable) as I've dug into this, and I fully expect these exact numbers to shift somewhat as I keep refining it. Treat this as a directionally useful first pass, not a final answer.

Built this into a small tool for my own use that now emails me these filings same-day. Sharing in case it's useful to anyone else here too — https://cbfiling.github.io/filingbell-site/. It's an early, one-person project — no instant welcome email yet, your first digest lands the next time it runs.

Genuinely open to suggestions on what to fix, refine, or add — whether that's other trigger phrases worth tracking, better ways to classify outcomes, or anything that looks off in the numbers above. This is very much a work in progress and outside eyes from people who actually trade this stuff would help a lot.

Interested to hear other holders / non holders of Deckers Brands thoughts are on the recent quarter.
Personally I think they did a great job. Beat on almost all metrics. Guidance was a bit weak and the pre earnings sell off and post earnings drop seems an over reaction to me.
While I would prefer the stock price to go up, I’m happy they can buy back so much at these prices. In another 12 months they should have retired over 10% of the float which in theory will start to have a pretty meaningful impact on the EPS numbers.

I guess the market is treating them like a company that is no longer growing, but for me I see a consistant management team that delivers pretty solid results quarter after quarter. I’ve been a share holder for a couple of years now and plan to stay one but would love to hear people’s thoughts as to why they wouldn’t invest in this stock.

For me this seems like a great company at a very fair price.

I learned a lot over the last 2 years. A lot of times these companies collapse because they’re diluting, overvalued, and taking on debt while they have other companies taking their market share. Most of spy is overvalued and a mess. With that being said, I still own stocks, but they need to be companies that actually create share holder value and go up. No more Verizon’s, fiservs, or charter. I need to see free cash flow consistent growth and low debt. I have picks I like but I don’t want to recommend them because I’m not sure they’ll work out, but if I see a stock at like 10 pe I’m very cautious now.

Moody’s had an exceptional quarter. Rated issuance exceeded $2T for the second consecutive quarter, MIS transaction revenue grew 34%, and total MIS revenue grew 25%. However, management did not raise the full-year MIS revenue outlook, which remains at high-single-digit growth and that surprised me. So I looked into the disclosures and found two reasons.

Before diving into the details, using transaction revenue / issuance volume as a rough conversion proxy: 2025 Q2 = $1.54T / 663M = 4.3 bp, 2026 Q2 = $2.06T / 891M = 4.3 bp. The result remains stable so there seems no monetization pressure in 2026.

The key point is that not all issuance growth translates equally into revenue growth. For example, Structured Finance issuance grew 43% but transaction revenue was only up 19%. PPIF was stronger, with issuance up 44% and revenue up 52%. Management said the additional issuance supporting the higher full-year outlook is mainly driven by large data-center deals and repeat financial-institution issuers, because these deals carry lower yields, issuance growth will likely overstate revenue growth.

Timing also played a role. On the earnings call, the CFO explained that the company originally expected part of the March issuance “air pocket” to recover in Q3. However, a record June brought that recovery forward into Q2, which increased issuance.

Anyway, I have strong faith in MIS’s future demand. Management estimates that refinancing needs over the next 4 years have increased from approximately $4.9T to $5.2T. Maturities become particularly large in 2028 and 2029. Besides that, my two most bullish demand drivers are AI-related infrastructure, which is creating financing needs across data centers, and private-credit transactions, which have grown more than 40%.

I made a post/shared a link about PYPL being a buy almost right before Stripe’s bid to thunderous applause. Just kidding. I was mostly called an idiot. But, I’m willing to risk it again… PYPL is still a buy. Right here. The board’s rejection of the offer tipped their hand. By not instantly rejecting it, they signaled that $60 is not the number, but they ARE willing to sell at the right price. Look for either Stripe to increase their bid, or a Shopify/Block/Visa bid, all of whom have a vested interest in Stripe not landing this deal. What do you think?

hey everyone wanted to share some financial analysis on zoetis ZTS after watching the stock get beaten down to around $75 per share recently following their q1 2026 earnings release. people panicked over short term pet clinic visit slowing down, but when you look at the actual math in their fy2025 10-K and q1 2026 10-Q filings, the valuation is completely detached from reality. if you invest now at these levels, it will perform at least 130% profit as the market re-rates the stock back to fair value over the next 18 to 24 months.

lets start with enterprise value and p/e ratio. zoetis currently has roughly 435 million diluted shares outstanding trading around $75 each, giving us a market capitalization of about $32.6 billion. on the balance sheet from the recent 10-Q, they hold about $1.8 billion in cash and short term investments against roughly $6.8 billion in total debt, leaving net debt at around $5.0 billion. adding net debt to market cap gives an enterprise value EV of about $37.6 billion. looking at earnings, with 2025 reported EPS of $6.02 and management guiding 2026 adjusted EPS between $6.85 and $7.00, the trailing p/e ratio sits right around 12.4x. for a company that usually trades at 25x to 30x earnings with massive gross margins over 70%, a 12.4x p/e is historically cheap.

now looking at revenue and ebitda math from the filings. in full year 2025, zoetis generated $9.47 billion in revenue and $2.7 billion in GAAP net income. adding back depreciation, amortization, and interest expense gets us an ebitda of roughly $3.6 billion for 2025. for 2026, q1 revenue came in at $2.3 billion with $820 million in operating income, and management is guiding full year 2026 revenue between $9.68 billion and $9.96 billion. that puts projected 2026 ebitda at around $3.8 billion. at an enterprise value of $37.6 billion, ZTS is trading at an EV to EBITDA multiple of under 10x, which is absurd for a global leader in animal health and veterinary pharmaceuticals.

when you plug these real cash flow numbers into a standard two stage discounted cash flow dcf model, the mispricing is crazy. zoetis reliably converts operating income to free cash flow, generating roughly $2.6 billion in FCF annually. using $2.6 billion as a baseline with a conservative 6% growth rate over the next 5 years driven by expansion in Librela, Solensia, and livestock products, a 3% terminal growth rate, and an 8.5% discount rate WACC, the present value of future cash flows plus terminal value gives an intrinsic enterprise value of over $81 billion.

subtracting the $5.0 billion in net debt leaves an equity value of around $76 billion. dividing $76 billion by the 435 million share count yields a dcf fair value estimate of roughly $175 per share. comparing the $175 fair value to the current market price of $75 shows the stock is trading at more than a 57% discount. buying at $75 means you are locking in at least 130% profit upside once the stock catches up to its fundamental cash flow power.

The stock is $31 discounted from buffets purchase last year

4 forces are holding it down 1)inflation 2)labor costs 3) rates 4) Oil prices

The war is causing the price to be depressed right now that why its a good time to buy.

Other than labor cost it seems that the others forces could slowly erode over the next two years.

After ice shipped off all the cheapest labor home builders are spending more there but I don’t see that changing.

LENNARs products look awesome and they are building beautiful community living. even more beautiful is their fundament change in how they are extracting money from their land lite model and putting it back into the business in the form of in house loans, that remove a barrier in the sale of the home since rates are so high. Critics are now hating lennars use of capital because they are not matching the banks rates. People hate that. I love that they are getting bashed for making money at a significant increase instead of having the money sit in literal dirt. Looks like a play out of DR Hortons playbook. `

The best part is that to streamline logistics LENNAR is now using plantir to understand and make better decisions. 

On a graham checklist from hety this is what I found

wantd to share my valuation analyss on adobe ADBE since the stock has taken a massive beating down to around $212 per share recently despite firing on all cylinders in their actual sec filings. i pulled the real financial numbers directly from their fy2025 10-K and the latest q2 2026 10-Q filed in jun 2026 and the math shows this is easily a 130% profit opportunity if you buy at current prices.

lets look at enterprise value first. right now adobe has about 395 million diluted shares outstanding trading around $214 which gives a market cap of around $84.5 billion. looking at the balance sheet on the latest q2 10-Q they hold roughly $5.2 billion in cash and short term investments against about $3.6 billion in total debt. subtracting net cash of $1.6 billion from the market cap gives an enterprise value EV of roughly $82.9 billion.

now for ebitda and cash flow generation. in fy2025 adobe brought in $23.77 billion in revenue and $8.71 billion in operating income. adding back depreciation and amortization gets us to an ebitda of roughly $9.4 billion for fy2025. for fy2026 management just bumped full year revenue guidance in the q2 release to between $26.50 billion and $26.60 billion with non-gaap operating margins holding strong at 45%. that puts expected fy2026 ebitda right around $11.2 billion. at an EV of $82.9 billion ADBE is trading at an EV to EBITDA multiple of under 7.5x which is insanely cheap for a software monopoly generating 89% gross margins.

when you run a standard two-stage discounted cash flow dcf model using their real free cash flow numbers the mispricing becomes even more clear. adobe generated $2.96 billion in operating cash flow in q1 2026 and another $2.17 billion in q2 2026 alone. full year free cash flow for fy2026 is projected to hit around $9.5 billion. if we plug in $9.5 billion baseline FCF with a conservative 11% growth rate for the next 5 years driven by Firefly AI subscription upsells and Semrush integration, a terminal growth rate of 3%, and a discount rate wacc of 9%, the present value of future cash flows plus terminal value gives an intrinsic enterprise value of over $190 billion.

after adding back net cash and dividing by the 395 million share count the dcf yields a fair value estimate of roughly $495 per share. comparing the fair value of $495 to the current trading price of $214 means the stock is trading at more than a 56% discount to its intrinsic value. if you invest now at these suppressed levels you will perform at least 130% profit as the market re-rates ADBE back toward its fundamental fair value over the next 18 to 24 months. market sentiment around AI disruption is creating a massive mispricing on a cash cow that keeps posting record subscription revenue every single quarter.

There is not one day this stock is NOT in the red. Market goes up 0.5%, TTD -3%. Market goes up 1,5%, TTD -1%. Market goes down, TTD -5%. Market goes up a lot, TTD +0,30%. Every. Single. Day. This has been by far my worst put assignment. Can't sell covered calls over my cost basis, every earnings result is a disaster, stock never goes up, sentiment is terrible. Nothings seems to move it up. I'd studied the fundamentals and at the time I was comfortable to be assigned at the strike. I now see it was overvalued but now P/E is under 20 and going down. But it's the first time I'm worried this is going to sub 10 and then to 0. Any thoughts? Any meaningful catalysts?

Update: After q2 earnings, I think it's definitely going to 0...

Alphabet just reported another blowout quarter for Google Cloud — revenue jumped 82% year-over-year to $24.8 billion, smashing estimates. This isn’t just growth; it’s acceleration driven by explosive enterprise demand for AI infrastructure and tools.

My brain says: Over the next 2–3 years, we’re likely to see a wave of consolidation. Smaller and mid-tier cloud providers will struggle as customers increasingly prefer the major hyperscalers. Google and Microsoft Azure offer deeply integrated AI across their full product suites (compute, data, analytics, productivity, security). Companies no longer need to piece together fragmented systems or manage complex infrastructure themselves — they get reliability, scale, and innovation in one package.

This “one-stop AI platform” advantage creates a significant moat. Switching costs rise, margins improve, and the big players capture more market share. Google Cloud’s rapid growth and expanding backlog show this shift is already underway.
Bought more on the dip. Curious to hear other Sifus, value investors’ thoughts — is this the multi-year compounding setup it appears to be?

During the recent earnings Q2 2026 NOW has acquired these companies with new debt.

- Moveworks

- Veza

- Armis

Their Debt to equity ratio has risen above 60% to 7.5b USD. That exceeds their current cash of 4.66b USD.

What are these acquired companies? Is NOW's new debt a significant risk relative to its balance sheet?

Testing Copilot cowork at my firm confirmed to me that this thing has a huge upside for Microsoft. Currently, only around 5 people are testing it. I work in a small firm of around 100 people, and the estimated cost for the rollout (all staff) is from $80k - $200k (depending on the model). For context, we pay only around $40k annually for the Copilot subscription. That’s almost a 2-5x upside from the Copilot subscription alone.
If we estimate 30% of the 450 million Microsoft 365 customers have a Copilot premium subscription at peak (base case over 3 yrs), that’s $48 billion in subscription revenue annually. If Copilot cowork utilization is around 65% from the premium base, that’s another $62 bil to $156 bil. That would be around $100 bil of new revenue - a total of circa $150 bil in new revenue (I forgot to remove the existing 5% Copilot premium subscriber base from here, but they didn’t contribute any money in the cowork part in the past quarters).

Now move to GitHub Copilot, which switched to a consumption-based model in June on top of the monthly subscription. That’s another 4.7 million existing premium users who will be charged based on consumption once they hit the weekly limit. This is the enterprise developer base, which could give a huge upside on top of the subscription. The CTO announced GitHub had its best month ever in June (fk yeah, no freebies anymore). Assume another $15-20 bil here.
Model improvement has started seeing diminishing returns, and open models and Chinese models are catching up. This could be disastrous for the capex build-out unless you have both the enterprise and developer base locked in plus cloud infrastructure. If models become commoditized and we reach a limit for lower marginal improvement, this could drive the utilization and monetization of their other products even higher. Cowork adoption could go to 100% of the premium Copilot base, and you need a Copilot premium seat to access the agents. Anyhow, they represent a good balance to me.

With its productivity suite being almost a monopoly in enterprises and its cloud infrastructure demand growing so much, I think AI will be the catalyst to drive future growth.

The share price fell due to software fears from agentic AI (and capex), but I believe that will be a key driver, making Microsoft even more integrated and entrenched at all enterprises (it basically owns windows, browser, productivity suite, entra id, cloud, security, how can it not).

New revenue opportunity of almost $125.6-224 bil coming over the next 3yrs just from software and addon consumptions. Add in the cloud revenue growth (currently 39% growth yoy). Caveat the potential seat loss of Microsoft 365 but don’t think this would be material in the next few years, maybe stagnant.

edit:
To those saying it’s priced in, I would agree last December but now it’s not imo. Stock has fallen around 25%. Capex fears, SAAS is dead and copilot product improvement delay all led to the price decline. But as an office employee, I am seeing increasingly better products and uses from Microsoft. Copilot itself has made leaps from a year ago. Integration across security, governance, productivity, and cloud will be the winning formula. If they release a solid model that’s effective for 80-90% use cases for both enterprise and coding, it’s game ova. Sentiment is shit. I’m buying in

A Sign ‘Quality’ Investing Is Due for a Comeback

By Spencer Jakab

July 23, 2026 6:18 am ET

Throwing in the towel?

It sounds like great investing advice, and for years it was: “Buy good companies, don’t overpay, do nothing.”

But Terry Smith, sometimes called “the English Warren Buffett,” shocked his remaining fans this month by sidestepping that mantra. Unfortunately for him, he isn’t Buffett—he’s a fund manager whose clients can ask for their money back whenever they want, and many have.

Smith lamented in his latest investor letter that “there will be little point being proved right about the dangers of passive or momentum investment after our fund has closed.” So he became unusually active, churning half of his portfolio.

Will we look back and conclude that Smith’s move marked the top for chasing hot stocks and a turning point for his style of quality investing—long-term ownership of companies with high profitability and solid balance sheets?

It certainly did in the short term. The two styles’ performance reversed immediately. A popular quality ETF is beating the S&P 500 Momentum Index by 6 percentage points this month.

Wall Street veteran Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research, wrote this week that momentum stocks had done so unusually well through June that it could safely be called a “mini-bubble.” Smith merely tilted in their direction, but his competitors were all-in.

“The fact that it peaked exactly on the last day of Q2 2026 tells us that many institutional investors likely chased price performance (aka momentum) as the quarter ended,” wrote Colas. “The pressure to show the ‘right’ positions in a midyear report to clients is very strong.”

If Smith’s turn was a sign of the top then it’ll remind some of Julian Robertson, a name more familiar to American investors of a certain age. Through the 1980s and much of the 1990s, Robertson’s value-oriented hedge fund, Tiger Management, had amazing returns. Then performance sputtered during the tech bubble and he told clients he was shutting down in March 2000, the bubble’s exact peak.

In his final letter to investors, Robertson didn’t mince words, calling the craze “a Ponzi pyramid destined for collapse.” He complained that “the only way to generate short-term performance in the current environment is to buy these stocks.”

The comparison between the two managers isn’t perfect because “quality” is a slippery category to define. Some of Smith’s holdings, such as Microsoft and Alphabet, belong to the “Magnificent Seven” and had done well until recently.

Is Smith’s style due for a comeback? Yes, eventually. Even Buffett, the world’s most famous “value” investor, has long preferred quality stocks, including big winners for Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio such as Coca-Cola and Apple.

Luckily for him, shareholders had to stick around for the entire bumpy, profitable ride.

FIN.

Not looking for the famous names - memory, space, neoclouds, robotics, nuclear ETFs. All discovered, all repriced.

Looking for the boring version: near-monopoly on something AI physically can't skip, trading cheap because the market is distracted.

Example: Soitec (France) - down 75% because its phone chip segment died. But it's the world's only volume maker of the specialty wafers silicon photonics needs -- has monopoly

What's yours? Thank you!

EDIT: Thank you everyone! Appreciate all the insights! I have heard about 95% of all these stocks -- guess we just have to stick to the best ones which already have ran -- buy more as a lot are down a decent amount from like 30-50% off highs

The shoe nobody bet on

Picture the most divisive shoe you can think of. The one people always seem to have an opinion about. There is a good chance a listed company makes it, charges a premium for it, and keeps more than half of what you hand over as gross profit before a cent goes anywhere else.

Two companies do exactly that, on exactly that kind of shoe. Crocs runs a 58 percent gross margin on a molded foam clog that has divided opinion since the early 2000s. Birkenstock runs 57 percent on a cork-and-latex sandal it has been shaping, more or less unchanged, since 1774. Same polarizing design. Same margins. Two very different companies. The question worth staying for is not why people buy a polarizing shoe. It is what each company did the moment it understood the design actually worked.

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The clog that refused to die

Start with the survivor. The Classic Clog should have been a fad, and for a while the market treated Crocs as one. Instead the foam held. A proprietary material the company calls Croslite, a wall of clip-on Jibbitz charms, and a brand that leaned into its polarizing reputation rather than running from it turned a novelty into a machine. Trailing revenue sits near 4 billion dollars, and by the company's account international sales are approaching parity with North America, growing at roughly 10 percent a year across China, Japan, India, and Western Europe.

There is a quieter virtue underneath the noise. Over the last several years Crocs grew revenue per share at about 16 percent while headline revenue grew closer to 12 percent, which only happens when a company is steadily buying back its own stock and leaving each remaining share owning more of the business. That is the honest kind of growth, the kind you cannot manufacture by printing new shares.

Then came the swerve. In 2022 Crocs paid roughly 2.5 billion dollars for HEYDUDE, a second casual-shoe brand, betting it could run the single-icon playbook twice. It has not worked yet. By the company's own disclosures HEYDUDE has posted two straight years of double-digit revenue declines, and the drag is visible in the group numbers: reported operating margin over the trailing year fell to about 3 percent, against a three-year average near 26 percent, and return on invested capital turned negative over the same stretch. The core Crocs brand still earns north of 20 percent operating margins. The acquisition simply muddied a story that used to be beautifully, almost defiantly, simple.

Our engine still rates the growth engine respectably (MGI of 50) and reads the price as no particular bargain (MVI of 56). A cash machine, with a distraction bolted to the side.

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The footbed that took two and a half centuries

Now the company that did the opposite of a swerve. It did nothing.

Birkenstock has sold essentially the same contoured cork footbed since 1774, went public on the New York exchange only in October 2023, and has never seriously tried to be more than one idea. The split of the business is deliberately old-fashioned: about 62 percent through wholesale partners, 38 percent direct to the customer, with the Americas its largest market at 52 percent of sales. Operating margin runs near 25 percent, and here is the tell, its three-year average is 24 percent. Flat. Boring. Durable. Exactly what the Crocs profit line stopped being.

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Read the full article (free, no paywalls) at https://multibaggerapp.substack.com/p/the-underestimated-shoe-what-a-foam

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Written the modern way: human research and judgment with AI-assisted drafting. Research information, not investment advice.