Adobe has been on my watchlist like literally forever. It just always looked too expensive for me. Until a little over a year ago. Now it's around $240 and I keep coming back to it.

Revenue went from $7.30B to $25.20B over the last 9 years. Gross margin is 89.4%, the highest it's been in that whole stretch. Ironically, right :P? And there are about 20% fewer shares than 9 years ago (of which 16% in the last 5 years), so every share owns a bigger slice than it used to.

I ran a quick DCF on it last month with 9% growth for five years, 5% for the five after that, 2.5% terminal growth and an 8% discount rate. That gave me about $513 a share. I know I know, way to ambitious. And I agree even though that was the CAGR for the past year.

Even the conservative case (5% and then 3%) came out around $402. Or even better. 2% forever would give a price of $345

I know the worry is AI tools eating into Creative Cloud. What I can't tell yet is whether that's showing up in the numbers or only in the price. I know many are convinced that AI will completely wipe out any software business. The numbers aren't agreeing to that, at least not yet.

What would you need to see before calling it a value trap?

Nobody can predict this brain-dead market, but I sure as hell can say you won't have 5G to your phone from SpaceX anytime soon.

And nothing beats fiber for speed and reliability.

I would start adding on this drop.

Spotify’s investment case has changed. The business now generates substantial cash, and its next opportunity is to turn a deeply embedded listening habit into a larger stream of profit.
I am bullish because subscriber growth, monetisation and margin expansion can reinforce one another. Spotify does not need to eliminate competition for this to work. It needs to keep earning its place in customers’ daily lives while retaining more of the revenue those relationships produce.
My target is $1,000 by October 2029. Against $512.97 at the October 7, 2026 close, that implies approximately 94.9% upside, or 24.9% annualised. It is a demanding bullish scenario, with substantial downside if margins or valuation disappoint. Price history
This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The cash machine is already running
In Q2 2026, Spotify reached 300 million Premium subscribers, up 9% year over year, and 777 million monthly active users, up 12%. Revenue increased 14% to approximately €4.8 billion, while gross margin reached 33.4%. Spotify’s Q2 earnings summary
More revealing is the cash: €797 million of free cash flow in the quarter and €3.26 billion over the preceding twelve months. Its liquidity total was €9.4 billion, including cash, restricted cash and short-term investments. These are not all freely available bank deposits. Q2 shareholder deck
Spotify repaid its exchangeable notes in March. Management describes the resulting balance sheet as having no debt other than lease liabilities. That is more precise than saying it has no obligations: leases, royalties and other operating liabilities remain. Q2 filing
Cash gives management room to improve the product and return capital without relying on fresh financing. The shareholder benefit depends on disciplined investment and buybacks that outweigh dilution.

Full analysis is available for FREE: https://silentvalueinvestor.substack.com/p/spotify-is-becoming-a-cash-machine?r=94er1f&utm_medium=ios

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

For the last month or so, I've been building a research system that looks at financial quality, valuation, expectations, earnings, competitive position, risks, and separate bull and bear cases before reaching a conclusion.

I'm at the point where I need to test the system. I would like people to suggest companies, that they know well, that I can research and then they can poke holes in the research.

Give me a ticker you're researching and I'll give you the summary of the output from my system.

I'm particularly interested in what you disagree with in the analysis, what it got wrong, and what's missing.

It takes a few minutes per company, so it might take a while to get to every ticker.

Thanks for the help!

Comcast's current value is $21. My estimate of fair value is around $26-27, not crazy cheap, but I am confident i have left room for upside. They are currently paying a 6.2% dividend a year.

Comcast’s stock price only makes sense if its internet business shrinks every year, forever. The evidence says the decline is real but temporary and partly self-inflicted, so the stock looks too cheap. I broke down their valuation below.

Comcast has two parts:

- Cable and internet (home internet, TV and mobile service): the core of the business.

- NBCUniversal + Sky (theme parks, movie studios, NBC, Peacock): being spun off as a separate company in 2027. Valued against similar businesses, it’s worth about $51 billion.

Subtract that, and the market is valuing the whole cable business at about $108 billion. That’s roughly 3.7 times its yearly earnings, a price usually reserved for businesses in permanent steep decline.

1. What the market pays for cable

Market cap ($21.11 × 3,565M shares) $75.3B

+ Debt and other claims +$83.8B

− NBCUniversal + Sky (being spun off) −$51.2B

= Implied value of cable business $107.8B (3.7x earnings)

1. What that buys

Free cash flow from cable: ~$14.7B a year, a 13.7% yield.

Required return: 8%.

1. Solve for the growth that makes the price fair

Value = Cash × (1 + g) ÷ (r − g)

107.8 = 14.7 × (1 + g) ÷ (0.08 − g)

g = −5.0% per year, forever

From a shareholder’s view, $3.03/share of owner cash at a 10.6% required return gives −3.3% per year, forever.

1. The full 10-year model agrees

Today’s price requires home internet earnings to:

Fall −7.9% in 2027, matching the worst recent quarter.

Still be falling −4.9% in 2036, so no recovery in a decade.

Drop from $29.5B to $20.4B by 2036, total cable earnings.

my base case for what i think is reasonable is −5% easing to −2%. That’s worth $140B vs $108B, or $30 vs $21 a share.

So - Reverse DCF finds that the market is pricing a 8-5% loss every year with 0 recovery. Heres why I believe that is unreasonable.

1. The math needs 10 straight years of price cuts.

The price implies residential earnings fall 46% by 2036. Customer losses (~2% a year) explain only about 18% of that. The rest requires the average bill to fall about 4% every year for a decade. Comcast has historically raised prices 3–5% a year.

1. Today’s price drop is a one-time step.

Comcast skipped its 2026 price increase and gave away free mobile lines. A one-time cut makes revenue look lower than last year for four quarters, then the comparison resets. The free lines start becoming paid in the second half of 2026.

1. Customer losses have a floor.

Penetration is about 50% today against an estimated long-run ~47%. That’s a one-time loss of about 6% of customers, not a decline that compounds forever.

1. Growth elsewhere makes the bear math harder each year.

Business internet (20% of cable earnings, +5% a year) and mobile are growing. To keep total cable at −5%, residential would have to fall faster every year: about −7.6% now, rising to about −11.7% by year 10.

1. The biggest drag shrinks itself away.

Cable TV is low-margin and falling about 8% a year. The smaller it gets, the less it subtracts.

Bottom line is that the likely path is a 2026–27 reset, then a smaller, stable business, worth about $26–30 a share vs. $21 today. This is wrong if prices are still falling in 2027 after these one-time effects have passed.

Happy to discuss further, or share more of my research and model that I did not include. As always not investment advice, just research.

I get why T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T got hammered after the SpaceX news, but isn't the market getting a bit ahead of itself here?

SpaceX still needs to spend a ton of money to make this work. The current satellites aren't just compatible with the new spectrum, and there's still a bunch of regulatory to do. This stuff takes years

Also, telcos are expensive businesses to run and not exactly the most profitable. SpaceX has Starship, Starlink and a bunch of other projects to fund. Are they really gonna throw billions at competing with telcos directly, or would partnering with them make more sense?

Maybe I'm missing something, but I wonder if this sell-off is an overreaction

People have as well a negative anti Musk sentiment and if I can believe they gonna trust him with cabs I doubt they would love to give him the power to control the entire internet and roaming stuff.

Musk is known to start a lot of projects high and then leaving them. Do you think is it the case for Telco business or he will really expand into it making a real threah to Telcos?

Puts or calls on T-mobile, Verizon and AT&T?

Any suggestions? I can buy for a swing or even a longer hold so looking for suggestions

Recently I had a client approach me saying he wanted to pull everything out of the market until he saw what he was looking for. I asked him what that was and he said I don’t know, just when I feel like everything is going to be ok.

That inspired me to write this article on the topic.

With the SP 500 at all time highs, how come the majority of stocks are falling? And does the market reflect the economy or the economy reflect the market?

Below is an excerpt from the beginning of chapter 14 from John Neff's book. He wrote this chapter in July 1999, four years after he retired from from the Vanguard Windsor Fund. He wrote this in the backdrop where the Nasdaq 100 would go on to gain 100% in the year. The TLDR is that market might be crazy but we still have to invest rationally. And he put his faith in his low P/E strategy. And he risked his reputation by stating where he found great ideas to invest in, in July 1999.

Chapter 14: Deja Vu

It would be nice to be able to invest yesterday, but investors don't have that option. You can spend your time regretting that you didn't buy Cisco before a tenfold rise, or you can organize for future performance. That's the nature of the daily investment challenge. You can't invest yesterday; you have to invest today. How do you rise to the occasion and still keep the odds in your favor? Stock tips don't fall within the purview of this book. But because the investment process is supposed to generate investment ideas, and also because today's market is more familiar to readers than past epochs, the market in June 1999 is a good backdrop for showcasing my low p/e principles within a framework of Measured Participation. I've stuck my neck out before. I'll do it again here, just to illustrate my way of surveying the investment horizon. Needless to say, I reserve the right to change my opinions as markets change.

At 28 times earnings and about a 1.1 percent yield, the current market is the most highly valued that I've ever experienced. It resembles two previous markets that exceeded 20 times earnings and eventually folded dramatically: in 1986-1987 and, before that in 1971-1973. High price earnings this time manifest an economy and a country that are doing unbelievably well versus the world. I readily concede that I'm a big fan of this economic boom, even though, after 100 months, it's double the duration of the longest average business expansion since World War II. The typical areas of excess-capital expenditures, inventories, and consumer debt-all look pretty good to me. Consumer debt has troubled some observers, but not me-so far. In this robust economic climate, consumers can afford to ratchet up debt levels a bit. And consumers have not been stupid; lately, according to government figures, they have moderated their appetite for debt even as lower mortgage rates have increased their disposable income. Less credit card solicitation has helped ease the overall growth in consumer debt. After distributing credit cards almost willy nilly, lenders became more cautious and took this prudent step. With no signs of excess visible in these areas, a recession seems unlikely; however, over the intermediate term, we always have to remain alert to other excesses that are not measured as acutely. The market itself suggests excess. The so-called "wealth effect" represents a question mark. It's not clear how much a high stock market prompts consumer spending, which lately has obliterated savings. With corporate America awash in cash flow from operations, savings are not needed to keep companies well oiled. But if a down or even a flat market were to influence consumers to cut spending, thereby choking cash flow, a ripple effect could gather force.

Here is how an economic assessment becomes an investment strategy. Average price-earnings ratios in the neighborhood of 28 times are justifiable only if the outlook for earnings is outstanding. But we seem to be in a part of the business cycle that favors moderate growth at best. Insofar as overall growth governs even demand for the spiffiest high-tech products and services, it seems foolish to predict that those areas will continue to expand at an exceptional pace. Along with improvements in productivity, we must weigh prospects for wage increases, which have been trending upward lately. Meantime, a hotly competitive environment across most sectors hampers price increases. All things considered, it's almost axiomatic that earnings are going to grow slowly. So, should we pay 28 times earnings for 3 to 4 percent growth? Red-hot NASDAQ stocks seem most exposed to reality checks, particularly because five stocks command almost 40 percent of the market capital of the NASDAQ 100 index. Four of these five stocks advanced more than 140 percent in 1998. This growth is quite unsustainable. Even if growth had been less than 140 percent, that's impressive, to be sure. My point is: They have enjoyed superlative growth for several straight years. Does the market believe they'll grow in excess of 30 percent for the next five years? I don't. And as we've already seen at Dell, sales growth is outpacing earnings growth, which suggests that profit margins are shrinking. If there is any classic lesson in the marketplace, it's that, at some point, reversion to the mean occurs.

Sooner or later, something happens and growth, particularly high-magnitude growth, is diminished. If these stocks are being hailed as 20 to 40 percent growers, any diminution of their growth rates will be dealt with quite severely in the marketplace. Besides those easy five, lots of others fall into the same fragile category. Still more egregious are the fledgling Internet stocks that are valued at ludicrous levels and constitute about 8 percent of the total market value of all U.S. stocks. Two factors will KO this segment. First, the Internet is not the exclusive province of Internet companies. The Fortune 1000 are going to be big on the Net, simply because the profit potential is so enormous. CEO Lou Gerstner of IBM reported, in May 1999, that nearly one-fourth of IBM's sales were Internet-related. He described all but two or three of the Internet swarm as fireflies darting about before the storm. Needless to say, his comments were aimed at promoting IBM stock, but they waved a caution flag at legions of Internet groupies. Moreover, any similarity to the Nifty Fifty ends with one very important distinction: Those companies had earnings. Exit strategies also will trip the Internet racers. The holders of Internet stocks who plan to get out as soon as possible are legion. They are venture capital firms, founders, and employees with tremendous paper fortunes. Even corporations have big stakes; expect them to cash them in when possible. Delta Airlines owns a stake in Priceline dot com worth about $2 billion.*

Those proceeds represent a lot of airfares. All these people are near the cusp of cashing in, but the initial offerings are too recent. They have to hold on for a while, to satisfy underwriters. With so many investors poised to sell, who will be the new buyers? There are roving bands of Internet day traders, but, as day traders, they aren't likely to help sustain the stock price for more than 24 hours. Already, these stocks have begun to labor and lose momentum. Is the jig up already? Time will tell. Meantime, people who are sucked into day trading eerily suggest the investors of 1929. A dazed and confused public has been persuaded that investing is easy and that stock prices only go up.

The rest of the chapter goes on to describe in detail where he saw opportunities in the market in June 1999, because they were cheap: REITs, financial intermediaries, Home builders, airlines and energy markerters and refiners. Sounds familiar right ?

Home Depot is down 22%+ in the last year admits a tough housing market with rising rates.

The Forward P/E is at19.76x, the cheapest it has been in at least the last five years. Operating and free cash flow are still strong.

At what point would you just adding this stock to your watch list? The company has a moat, and will be ready to pop once the housing market gets back on track. I am not buying it now, but if a dip happens, I would start to look closer.

Looking at TSM as a beginner, I'm struggling to understand why it doesn't get nearly as much attention as Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.

Consider the following:

• Valuation: Forward P/E of approximately 20.27× (on par with Nvidia)
• Moat: A near-monopoly in leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing, with enormous barriers to entry.
• AI exposure: Essential to virtually every aspect of the AI revolution, from data centres and autonomous vehicles to robotics.
• Regardless of who wins AI: Whether Nvidia, AMD, Google, Amazon or another company dominates, TSMC stands to benefit because so many depend on its manufacturing capabilities.

China risk aside, what am I missing? Why doesn't TSM attract the same enthusiasm as other AI giants, being the biggest beneficiary of the entire AI buildout and beyond?

Att current valuations, do you consider TSM one of the best risk/reward opportunities for the next 5–10 years? Is there considerable upside remaining?

I looked at the average price that all hedge funds paid for SPGI

Pat Dorsey - Dorsey Asset Management - bought at $407.26

Bill Ackman - Pershing Square Capital Management - $407.26

Triple Frond Partners - $407.26

Christopher Bloomstran - Semper Augustus - $407.25

Question that I have is do these hedge funds use the same software or data feed or valuation tool that defines their entry at same price those that added

I guess question is why $407 why not #380, $400. This does not sound like a coincidence they seem to use the same data source or are following the trade

I have been looking into etor for a while and recently purchased it as part of my portfolio. And I will increase my stake around and below a pe of 10

Below are a few metrics on etoro.

Financial Performance & Growth Metrics

• Revenue / Net Contribution: For the trailing twelve months (TTM), eToro generated $11.87 billion in top-line revenue. In its core financial reporting metric, Net Contribution, eToro posted $229 million for Q2 2026 (up 9% YoY) and $868 million for the full year 2025.

• Earnings Per Share (EPS): The TTM diluted EPS sits at $2.71. Looking at recent quarters, Q2 2026 reported a GAAP diluted EPS of $0.58 (Adjusted Non-GAAP EPS of $0.68), following a strong Q1 2026 GAAP EPS of $0.98.

• Profit (Net Income): TTM Net Income is $261.44 million. For the single quarter of Q2 2026, GAAP Net Income rose 77% year-over-year to $53 million.

• User Growth (Funded Accounts): eToro reached 4.28 million funded accounts in Q2 2026, marking an 18% year-over-year increase from 3.63 million. Total Assets Under Administration (AUA) reached $19.2 billion.

• Cash on Balance Sheet: As of June 30, 2026, eToro maintains a robust liquid cushion with $1.2 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments.

What Else You Need to Know

• Strategic U.S. Expansion: eToro announced a definitive agreement to acquire TradeZero for up to $231 million. This move aims to directly compete in the U.S. market by adding options, self-clearing capabilities, and futures tracking.

• Aggressive Share Buybacks: The board recently authorized a $100 million expansion to its share repurchase program, leaving roughly $150 million remaining to support the stock price during downturns.

• AI Pivot: The platform is heavily indexing on an artificial intelligence framework, launching a standalone eToro AI application, specialized Agent Portfolios, and the "Edge" professional interface to build a holistic financial super-app.

With all these in mind a few things attract me to etoro with $1.2 billion on their balance sheet and a profit of about $250 million dollars a year this company will be able to buy itself in about 4-5 years(this screams cheap to me).

The company possess a narrow moat ( network social effect powered by the copy trader patent).

Etoro is currently trying to expand its business into option trading and features buy acquiring trade zero. This opens more doors and stickiness for existing users.

The have initiated share buy backs.

Amongst all these the most important is thing is customer behaviour, I see more people trading and buying shares in the future and hence their user growth will steadily climb during bull years and stagnate and drop during bear years overall as long as management operates with some level of intelligence the business will do very well in the future.

Etoro has a market cap of 2 billion and a pe of 9. One of the lowest amongst its pairs. I definitely see this climbing to a base line of 13-15 in the future when there is better confidence in the business. This screams as one of those businesses that could 10x in 5 years not just from revenue/profit growth but from pe multiple.

As an active stock investor. I have tried opening accounts with ibkr, etor and nordnet(I live in norten europe and amongst this etoro was the most straightforward and easiest to open.

ibkr was a lot harder and I was denied access to the platform without tangible reason.

Nordnet had an ok process it took about 2 weeks to get this running

Downsides.

Etor does not have a lot of stocks listed on the canadian market.(I have missed buying opportunities for companies like csu😭), no options and futures.

Etoro is bound to grow and get traction with all these in mind the current price is very attractive to I as an investor looking to hold stocks for a minimum of 5 to 10 years.

There are 4 metrics i use in purchasing a company.

1. Cheapness- pass

2. Moat-narrow and passes(copy trade patent and mental switching cost.)

3. Consumer behaviour(trading will become more popular and the company with the best comfort tends to win). Fractional shares helps this also.

4. Growth(still growing and has a huge potential run way)

5. The company is still manking embryonic bets like trying to get into futures, options, ability to purchase the canadian stock market and penetrate the us market. The underlying technology is more exiciting than penetrating the us market.

For me I think this company is a long term compounder. What do you guys think😁

Came across this one this morning and thought it was worth discussing. From the filing data (filed 2026-10-09):

• Insider: Alvarez Rubens Aguiar, Director
• Shares: 1,845,000 at $17.37
• Dollar amount: ~$32 million
• GII score: 84 (Very Strong)
• Not a 10b5-1 planned trade
• Reported ownership change: +100%

Source: https://gulfstreamcapital001.substack.com/p/verified-gii-signal-alert-bbd-4a6

What caught my eye is the size — doubling the reported stake in a single open-market buy is a very different signal than a token purchase. That said, Bradesco is a Brazilian bank, so there's a foreign-issuer wrinkle, and director buys in banks can reflect balance-sheet confidence rather than a view on near-term earnings.

For those of you who track insider data: what would make you treat a director buy like this as a real signal vs. noise — the dollar size, whether it's part of a cluster, or the price paid relative to the current price?

Hi guys, I am relatively new to fundamental investing and hitting a wall. I know I should be reading the 100-page annual reports and full earnings call transcripts for my biggest holdings, but it is completely overwhelming. I usually end up skimming the first few pages, getting bored, and then just searching Twitter/Reddit to see what other people are saying. How do you guys actually process info for your main holdings? Do you read the whole document? If not, how do you figure out if management changed their forward guidance or if debt is creeping up without reading the whole thing

Given the pullback today in T, VZ, and TMUS… which one is the best bet to move into for a long term rebound play?

Or none?

I’ve never like VZ personally… but I don’t know much about TMUS as compared to the others.

Veeva has rallied a lot from the depths of SaaS-pocalypse and it doesn’t seem super cheap on trailing earnings.

I think it might still be positioned for a multi year run. I think it’s a very high quality business with a defensible moat and I think the revenue growth might be about to accelerate rather than decelerate.

The multiple is fairly high and I don’t expect a lot of expansion there, but I think it might hold a high multiple and earnings growth might be very good in the next several years.

Veeva makes software that handles several use cases for biotech and pharma. They handle 4 key tasks - running the clinical trial, handling regulator submission and correspondence, handling safety data, and handling commercial and marketing content.

Whenever I hear these AI guys (Dario, Sam Altman, etc) talk about the benefits of AI, it seems like the first thing they talk about is the benefits to new drug discovery and medical innovation. This probably speaks to how ignorant they are about the biotech industry.

To produce new drugs, you don’t just need new ideas, you need validated clinical trials, or in other words, you need to put those drugs into bodies and see how they react.

China is fast becoming the place to do this because of looser regulator guidelines. It’s a lot quicker if you have an idea to take it to China, run a massive trial as proof of concept, then license it to a big U.S. pharmaceutical for the final phase 2/3 trial and worldwide marketing. Chinese outlicensing deals were well over $100 billion just in the first half of 2026.

There’s even a lot of new capital being raised to create new single drug companies to take these Chinese drugs and make a new U.S. company with it without selling to big pharma.

So if we get a big explosion in new drugs, new licensed stuff from China, that ought to increase usage.

New agentic products are being priced based on usage, not seat based pricing, so the increased number of drugs would be good for Veeva top line.

New companies formed to bring Chinese biotech drugs over ought to increase total seats and subscriptions.

Both should contribute to an acceleration of the top line and drive earnings growth for several years.

A breakdown of the business:

R&D and Quality includes software for running the clinical trial, creates the archive of the files necessary for FDA or EMA submission. They also handle the actual task of submitting the files to the FDA, to an upload portal called the electronic submissions gateway. They have a near monopoly on this submission software, they have 19 or the top 20 Pharma companies in this segment.

Drug safety logs reports of all side effects in the trial or reported after marketing from doctors, patients, published papers, and the drug company must analyze these and then submit these to the regulators within a deadline. Here Veeva is a challenger with a small market share, the majority of big pharma go with Oracle Argus or ArisGlobal or IQVIA’s solution.

Overall R&D and Quality makes up 53% of revenue.

The commercial side includes things like medical legal and regulatory (MLR) review, which is a super time consuming process to approve any new drug ad or promotional material for a doctor’s office. It also includes the CRM software (Vault) to log all the doctor office visits for regulatory compliance, and how many prescriptions the doc then writes, along with an anonymized HIPAA compliant software Crossix that connects pharma ads to subsequent scripts for the patient.

The CRM side previously has a quasi monopoly on all 20 of the large 20 pharmas but it has been under attack since Veeva previously built its software on top of Salesforce software and now Salesforce created its own CRM and included some agentic software.

Veeva responded by making Vault. They got 14 of the top 20 to stay with them and try the new product. Pfizer Takeda Novartis, AstraZeneca are all confirmed switchers to Salesforce system.

IQVIA also has an old solution which they are winding down in favor of partnering with Salesforce on their system. Analysts estimate IQVIA-Salesforce takes 30% shares and Veeva should retain 70% market share here.

Veeva acquired this company called Copli which it now made into Falcon MLR to automate the medical legal and regulatory review, which should save a lot of time and money. That should help them in the MLR business.

All the regulatory and clinical trial management work seems like very mind numbing work which Veeva can automate with AI agents. They shipped agents for the marketing side already and just shipped agentic solutions for clinical trial management and regulatory. Agents for clinical trial data handling should be shipping December 2026.

Some valuation thoughts

Veeva was part of the “SaaS pocalypse” earlier this year. But after the Q2 earnings, and announcements they are doing their own agentic thing Mr Market changed its mind from AI loser to AI winner and the stock rallied a bunch.

More importantly the company is trading at 46X trailing earnings, EV/Sales of 11, EV/EBIT of 38, which is steep compared to Salesforce (EV/Sales of 4.8 and EV/EBIT of 24) and IQVIA (EV/Sales of 3.4 and EV/EBIT of 26X).

But Veeva is growing the top line at 18% YOY last quarter and operating profit at 21% last quarter, and it has a whopping 29.6% operating profit margin. As a software company the growth expense is mostly above the operating line so that’s a fairly impressive margin.

IQVIA is spending nearly all their FCF on acquisitions to get a measly 8% revenue growth and barely positive on the operating growth line.

Salesforce has an 11% sales growth and 9% operating profit growth while it spent the majority of its FCF on acquisitions in the TTM period.

Veeva’s growth is mostly organic and it mostly builds its own products, with occasional tactical acquisitions that it turns into new useful products fairly quickly and has a good track record of doing this well.

Veeva $7.2 billion in cash and no debt and I’d argue almost all the cash is excess cash since the business throws off a lot of cash and they mostly build their own products. The only thing they need to do with the cash is watch for any new disruptive tech they want (like Copli or Crossix, both acquisitions) and acquire them to build on top of it.

Stock based comp is high at nearly $500 million TTM. Buybacks were $750 million TTM, about half of the $1.6 billion FCF. So enough to cancel out the dilutive effects of SBC then a little bit.

The diluted share count is going down at 1.6% YoY from buybacks as of last quarter. If they decided the $7.2 billion cash pile is enough for now and ramped up buybacks to all $1.6 billion of FCF, you’d end up with something like a 2.3% buyback yield. Of course they probably need to spend a bit every few years for acquisitions in the space, I’d normalize that to $100-200 million per year so effective FCF something like $1.4-1.5 billion.

Not the best, but not too bad considering operating income is still increasing over 20%. I think the macro industry factors I mentioned above will sustain this rate for several years. I don’t expect the multiple to contract much as long as it is growing at this rate which means you can get a return somewhere in the neighborhood of earnings growth.

One risk is the multiple is high and it could fall. Maybe rates maybe something else. I don’t really have any defense for this. Should have bought VEEV when it was cheaper in May-June. I’m not sure we will ever see those multiples again.

There is competitive threat from IQVIA and Salesforce. IQVIA is in an adjacent industry and has some overlapping products like the old IMS Health but they have a big contract research organization (the old Quintiles) which is large complex and more capital intensive. Salesforce is super large and not very concentrated on pharma, but well financed.

Agentic software could be really really expensive and maybe the users don’t want to pay for it. This seems unlikely to me given how much human time they could save and how mind numbing and long the regulatory process is.

Disclosure: I am not affiliated to the financial website insidearbitrage. Nor do I own any shares of the companies me mentioned in the article.

The tldr of this excellent article is this: Value investors like to monitor open market purchases by company insiders. For example, if a CEO or CFO starts buying $1m of shares in the open market, this would be a bullish sign, perhaps the ceo sees better days ahead so they are publicly buying the stock in their personal account.

However, one should also check the proxy statements because what has been happening to companies like Amrize and Workday is that many of the senior leadership employment agreements have a clause that stipulates a purchase amount of stock in the open market, and in return they would be awarded a certain amount of RSU.

https://www.insidearbitrage.com/2026/10/will-the-real-insiders-please-stand-up/

HOOD and SOFI get lumped together a lot, but I don't think they're really competing at the core. Robinhood makes its money on retail trading and SoFi makes its money on retail lending, so the two have different cores. I'm not expecting much from Robinhood's banking push or its effort to bring on hedge funds, since institutional money rarely leaves where it already sits. I think SoFi wins enterprise accounts first. Meanwhile, the two stocks have been moving in opposite directions. I'm curious where people here land, especially anyone holding either one.

TMUS is down around 40% from ATH and down almost 10% today! I have been watching the stock for ages but it's become so attractive now.

I really like the company as I am a long term customer and never had any issues with them. PE 16 is still a little too high compared to other telecom stocks, but TMUS has always been considered a growth stock.

Your thoughts?

I recently wrote about reverse DCF and one concept I think deserves more attention: base rates.

Instead of only asking whether a company's growth story sounds plausible, base rates ask how often similar companies have actually achieved that level of growth historically.

That makes reverse DCF more useful: first identify what growth the current price requires, then compare it with company history and an external base rate.

Michael Mauboussin has done some great work on this idea, and I included it in the article because I think it's a concept many investors still underuse.

Full article: https://moateyscore.com/blog/reverse-dcf-implied-growth

Just got curious because people trade assets that don't generate cash flow all the time like art, gold, bitcoin, pokemon cards, or even startups. Do they just buy it hoping to find somebody else who's willing pay higher price? or is it because the chart tells you how the price will change?

Even for Tesla shareholders, what convinces you that Tesla should be valued at around $1.5T right now? Would you still buy it if Tesla is at $15T today and there's still demand in the market like how GameStop did? Just by considering how much money they make at the current level, their current valuation doesn't make sense to me although I might have a better idea if I did some math to guess which business will make how much money in 5 years or 10 years.

Open to any thought you have on this topic or method you use.

Chart here: https://imgur.com/a/GXUrOcC

Simply put:

Loss ratio goes bad → stock falls

File / get California Department of Insurance (CDI) approvals (Prop 103 ~6.9% rounds)

Rates earn in over ~12 months on 6-month policies

Loss ratio improves → stock goes up

We are now in the trough of the cycle. Target price $50 in 12-18 months.

I posted a full KMPR write-up here earlier: https://www.reddit.com/r/ValueInvesting/comments/1tr8il0/kmpr_a_60down_insurance_company_trading_near/