CapexAndChill
@CapexAndChill • 11,096 subscribers
Long-term value in high conviction holdings. All thoughts are my own. NFA
Videos
Ackman views $MSFT as having an "impossible to disrupt" position in enterprise software. The base Microsoft 365 package has 450M users at a very low cost per seat, roughly $200 per customer. It would be nearly impossible for an enterprise to replace these various components with 3P vendors, even at twice the price. Microsoft Copilot gives enterprise employees a secure way to access AI tools without putting the company at risk of extreme cloud computing bills or exposing proprietary data.
CapexAndChill722,281 次观看 • 9 天前
When asked about the ratio of successful bets to failures, Zuckerberg dismissed the concept of a "batting average" in tech creation. He argued that in creation, "the upside is almost infinite," meaning a single product reaching billions of users financially eclipses numerous failed, expensive hardware experiments. He said that Meta's company culture is "not very afraid of failure" and can "tolerate being ridiculed for long periods of time". Zuckerberg views expensive experimentation not as sunk costs or failures, but as the necessary "price of learning" in a market where you must build things physically to see if they work. For a long-term strategist, this means Meta's R&D budget will remain highly aggressive, and they are structurally insulated against short-term Wall Street pressure to pull back on currently unprofitable bets. $META
CapexAndChill125,627 次观看 • 6 天前
Chief AI Officer Alex Wang is subtly confirming that $META's previous AI paradigm failed, and they are executing a strategic shift to close their ecosystem, capture personal data, and build a regulatory moat. For the last few years, Meta’s entire strategy was to open-source frontier-level models like Llama 2 and 3 to commoditize the foundational layer. Now that Meta is building highly lucrative Personal Agents, they are keeping their best tech proprietary.
CapexAndChill275,303 次观看 • 28 天前
Ackman’s core thesis for 2026 is exploiting market distraction. While capital rotates heavily into the 'AI race,' semiconductor manufacturers, and new IPOs like $SPCX, Pershing Square is taking concentrated, heavy positions in what the market currently dismisses as 'old tech'. Ackman argued the market is ignoring $MSFT and $AMZN's near-infinite runway in cloud computing. He views $AMZN as one of the most dominant companies in history because it maintains its moat not by pushing prices up, but by aggressively driving down delivery times and costs. He views $META not as a legacy social network, but as an immediate beneficiary of AI. AI has significantly optimized Meta's ad delivery, simultaneously increasing advertiser ROI and user engagement.
CapexAndChill66,200 次观看 • 16 天前
$MSFT CEO recently issued warnings to all of other CEOs. He claims for almost all industries AI will be the future of the firm. He frames the interplay between human expertise and machine intelligence as token capital. Rather than relying on external APIs, Microsoft is pushing enterprises to use Azure AI Foundry to bring models inside their own controlled perimeters. He argues by keeping the trajectories of how work gets done local, enterprises compound their own Token Capital.
CapexAndChill40,944 次观看 • 12 天前
One important lesson for all investors comes from Berkshire's Ajit Jain's exact mandate to his underwriting team: "Your job is to say no. Every now and then you will come across a deal that'll hit you with a 2x4 and it'll be screaming money." Abel and Jain are not budging. They are earning a risk-free yield and waiting for structural market dislocation. The capital discipline remains ruthless. $BRK.A $BRK.B
CapexAndChill154,164 次观看 • 2 个月前
Just last week $NOW CEO Bill McDermott had an hour-long interview on the No Priors podcast. He gave away several operational metrics that were missing. This gives a clearer look at their real competitive advantage right now. First, he shut down the analyst narrative about integration risk. On the earnings call, Wall Street worried that merging Moveworks, Veza, and Armis all at once would break the core platform. McDermott revealed they can fully integrated all of these businesses into the core system in just 20 days. That kind of engineering speed is impressive for major enterprise software mergers. It proves their internal architecture is incredibly agile. Enterprise deployment times have collapsed. Historically, big software installations take months or even years. McDermott stated that massive customers are now going live on their autonomous platform in under 30 days. This completely changes the return on investment math for buyers. If a CIO can show value in one month instead of one year, budget approvals happen much faster. He specifically noted that "the dance has gotten brief" and customers are making highly decisive, rapid purchasing choices. He finally explained the math behind his claim that building AI workflows from scratch costs ten times more than buying ServiceNow. It is not just a marketing number. They factored in three specific costs. They added up the massive cost of human capital required to write new code to mimic existing workflows. Then they added the capital expenditure of the necessary GPU compute. And finally, they added the ongoing variable cost of language model tokens. When you stack those three expenses, trying to replace their platform with raw AI becomes an incredibly difficult financial decision. He also dropped a massive usage statistic to prove their scale. They currently process 7 TRILLION transactions across 85B active workflows. McDermott gave a rare look at his daily sales management. He personally sat down for one-on-one calls with 17 different quota-carrying sales reps just yesterday. He has 72 of these calls scheduled for this month alone. A CEO of a company this size directly interviewing ground-level salespeople shows intense, micromanaged execution. It also means management has a flawless, real-time read on exactly what enterprise buyers are doing. It is easier to trust their forward guidance because the CEO is literally talking to the people closing the deals every single day. Wow!
CapexAndChill120,541 次观看 • 2 个月前
One of the main points retail investors miss can be summed up by this clip of Berkshire's Greg Abel. Berkshire Hathaway builds its stock-picking philosophy around long-term survival rather than quick profits. When evaluating a company, they ignore standard discussions about immediate financial gains. Instead, they look closely at terminal risk to identify exactly what could destroy the business. They apply a strict ten-year rule to measure this risk. They must be able to clearly picture the company's economic health a full decade into the future. If that future is uncertain, they conclude the investment has no margin of safety and they pass on it entirely. To find the best investments, they focus directly on the single biggest threat facing the company, just as they focused only on the threat of rooftop solar when evaluating NV Energy. A business must prove it can survive its worst operational threat to earn their investment. $BRK.A $BRK.B
CapexAndChill74,220 次观看 • 2 个月前
Hohn’s strategy essentially redefines quality as extreme resilience against substitution and competition over a multi-decade timeline. Hohn targets super-companies where physical, non-replicable assets create monopolistic barriers to entry, rendering executive talent largely irrelevant to the underlying cash flows. He deliberately avoids high-growth sectors vulnerable to disruption, viewing terminal value as the greatest source of alpha missed by short-term analysts. For instance, in infrastructure, he targets assets like cell towers, rail lines, and literal toll roads where tenancy ratios allow for near-100% margin expansion on zero-cost additions, and cash flow yields are contractually linked to inflation. In aerospace, his conviction is absolute. TCI's largest holding is $GE Aerospace. Hohn categorizes this as an unbreakable moat because the complexity of building aircraft engines has prevented any new market entrants in over 50 years. The true economic value, however, is not the engine itself, but the captive aftermarket spare parts and servicing ecosystem. Once an airline adopts an engine, the switching costs are effectively insurmountable, guaranteeing decades of highly predictable, high-margin revenue. Hohn’s view on moats is dynamic. He believes even the strongest moats can erode. In a definitive move in early 2026, TCI slashed a large portion of its $8B stake in $MSFT, which is a position held for nearly a decade. Hohn explicitly cited that the rapid advancement of Generative AI posed an existential risk to Microsoft's core Office and Azure moats, proving that he will mercilessly abandon a historically 'high quality' asset the moment technological disruption threatens its terminal value.
CapexAndChill27,269 次观看 • 1 个月前
There is a massive misunderstanding about what $APP actually is, and the recent Adam Foroughi interview just handed investors as a class in capital allocation, efficiency, and strategic vertical integration. At its core, AppLovin isn’t solely an ad-network or a gaming business but an arbitrage engine. APP is essentially run by a skeleton crew of about ~400 core engineers and product builders generating $1.3B in cash flow a quarter. The gaming studio acquisitions were purely strategic. From roughly 2018 to 2023, APP bought up mobile gaming studios. It was accumulating over 15 studios and 1,500 headcount. This was not because they wanted to be a gaming company, but strictly to harvest first-party conversion data. They needed proprietary behavioral and return on ad spend data to train their Axon deep learning models because third-party advertisers wouldn't share it. Once the Axon 2.0 model launched in April 2023, it became so hyper-effective that the entire gaming industry had no choice but to plug in and share their data to access the platform's unparalleled returns. Having served its purpose, APP then shed the distraction, selling off the gaming portfolio to Tripledot Studios. This was pure strategic rent extraction. They used the asset to train the AI, built the moat, and immediately dumped the asset. Then there is the capital allocation execution. Back in 2022, when the broader market abandoned the stock and pushed APP's market cap to a floor of $3.8B, the business was still printing over $1 B in EBITDA. Instead of executing standard open-market share repurchases, management identified that their private equity backers and early insiders held nearly 50% of the float and eventually wanted liquidity. Management bypassed the public market entirely. They negotiated directly with those institutional holders to execute a massive $6 billion leveraged buyback. They effectively retired a huge portion of the company at rock-bottom valuations. Foroughi noted this singular move generated $50 to $60 B in retained value for remaining shareholders as the stock rebounded. While the rest of big tech hoards headcount, APP actively fired 40% of its workforce in recent years while growing revenue by nearly 100% YoY. The C-suite consists only of the CEO, CFO, CTO, and General Counsel. There is no CRO, no COO, and virtually no salesforce. They replaced standard enterprise bloat with LLMs. Over 80% of their codebase is now written by AI, multiplying the output of their highest-tier engineers up to 100x. The product nearly sells itself. Advertisers plug in, set a performance goal, and if the ROAS is positive, they scale spend infinitely. It turns advertisers into blind arbitrageurs. The TAM expansion is also clear. Now that the model has perfected gaming monetization, APP is unleashing Axon onto e-commerce and local SMBs. They don't need a massive sales team to do this. The AI matches the right intent with the right ad, pushing conversion rates up. The company literally has internal compensation triggers tied to a $1 T market cap. Given they have grown from under $4 B in 2022 to roughly ~$154 B in market cap today, betting against this lean, hyper-competent team does not make much sense.
CapexAndChill24,419 次观看 • 2 个月前
Fintech President Osvaldo pretty clear on the opportunity for $MELI. Investors panic when they see ecom margins compress from free shipping, but they miss that MELI isn't trying to just succeed solely as a retailer. They are building the operating system for LatAm finance and using shipping costs as their CAC for the bank. Gimenez revealed that their yielding account product is capturing massive deposits simply because traditional LatAm banks refuse to pay interest on savings in high inflation economies. Once a user parks their money in Mercado Pago to survive inflation, they will rarely leave. Even crazier is their stealth play to disrupt SWIFT with the Meli Dollar because Gimenez noted current crossborder fees are hitting 16%. They have thousands of engineers building their own banking core from scratch while competitors rent legacy infrastructure.
CapexAndChill43,194 次观看 • 4 个月前
$NOW's Financial Analyst Day took place yesterday. A huge focus was on the headline $30 B+ subscription revenue target for 2030, but there is also a margin expansion story as well that management highlighted. The market fears AI inference costs will compress software gross margins. Management focused on dismantling this narrative. AI reasoning represents less than 10% of their cost to serve. The other ~90% is workflow orchestration, governance, and their 20-year CMDB context. They are maintaining 80%+ subscription gross margins while pulling $300 M in annualized agentic AI cost savings straight to their own bottom line for 2026. That self-funded internal efficiency gives them the exact cover needed to commit to 100 basis points of non-GAAP operating and free cash flow margin expansion in 2027. The debate over seat compression versus consumption is looking promising for NOW. ServiceNow has shifted to a hybrid model. Non-seat based pricing already accounts for 50% of their net new ACV. When a customer uses AI to cut a 20 person support team down to five, ServiceNow captures 6.5x more in AI agent consumption. The total spend from that customer actually grows over 5x by year five. This underlying consumption momentum is exactly why management aggressively raised their 2026 AI ACV target from $1 B to $1.5B. They expect AI to drive 30% of total ACV by 2030. They are backing this up with a new go-to-market execution strategy, guaranteeing total satisfaction for AI go-lives in under 100 days. Management is also trying to be more disciplined with capital allocation. They are tackling dilution. They hit their sub-15% stock-based compensation target early in 2025 and just established a hard target of sub-10% by 2029. They doubled their share repurchases with a $2 B accelerated share repurchase in Q1 2026 alone. This move makes them dilution net-neutral for the entirety of 2026. They still have $4.2B in authorization ready. Recent tuck-in acquisitions like Moveworks, Vza, and Armis were heavily scrutinized as buying top-line growth. Management confirmed zero revenue from these hit the last report. They bought them strictly to build out the AI Control Tower and push their TAM to an aggressive $600 B. Overall, the day provided a little more clarity and I appreciated it. Looking more interesting to me. In the clip, Gina addressed seat compression and the margin expansion story.
CapexAndChill20,394 次观看 • 1 个月前
CFO/COO Brittany Bagley shared some insights on $AXON a few months ago. Taser now makes up less than 40% of their revenue. They have morphed into a massive software and AI powerhouse. Their software revenue has been growing near 40% YoY into 2026. Almost 95% of their total revenue is tied to sticky subscription plans. They use AI to solve massive police understaffing. They rolled out a product called Draft One. It uses bodycam audio to automatically write first drafts of police reports. This saves understaffed departments up to 12 hours a week per officer. They also added instant push-button language translation right on the cameras. But Axon is not stopping at just software. They are going all in on drone technology. Drones are now acting as first responders to keep officers out of dangerous situations like high-speed car chases. Their acquisitions of Fusus and Dedrone have been allowed them to build a single pane of glass for real-time crime centers. They are aggressively expanding into the enterprise space. Retail workers are now wearing Axon bodycams to de-escalate store conflicts. Their largest single booking ever recently came from an enterprise customer. Bagley is both the CFO and the COO. She actively runs the business. That dual role is a unique edge for capital allocation. Axon recently upsized a massive $1.75B debt raise because investor demand was so high. They are going to use that cash to hunt for more acquisitions. The enterprise upside definitely seems interesting.
CapexAndChill21,170 次观看 • 2 个月前
$APP's pivot to e-commerce is a very intriguing strategy. The market perceives the entry of non-gaming advertisers as a potential friction point that could crowd out core gaming clients or inflate pricing, but this ignores the massive asymmetry between AppLovin’s reach of over one billion daily active users and its historically thin roster of active advertisers. This imbalance has meant that the vast amount of inventory were previously under-monetized, as the algorithm could only serve gaming ads to users who had no intent to install new games. By layering in e-commerce demand, the platform effectively monetizes this wasted inventory, driving up overall yield and floor prices without cannibalizing the high-intent impressions reserved for gaming clients. This creates a margin-accretive dynamic where the same unit of supply generates significantly higher revenue per user solely through better demand matching. This efficiency gain feeds directly into a data-driven moat that becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to replicate. The flywheel is the introduction of transactional e-commerce data that radically improves the Axon AI model's predictive capabilities for all participants. Unlike app install data, which is binary and relatively sparse, e-commerce purchase data provides immediate high-fidelity signals about user intent and purchasing power. As the model ingests this new layer of behavioral data, its ability to predict conversion improves universally, meaning that gaming advertisers actually benefit from the presence of e-commerce bids through sharper targeting and higher return on ad spend. The rapid 50% week over week growth in the self-service pilot is a great preliminary validation that this automated demand engine is functional. This signals that AppLovin can scale this new vertical with software operating leverage. The requirement for high-production video ads has left out the long tail of millions of small business advertisers who dominate platforms like $META. The launch of generative AI creative tools targets this specific bottleneck, commoditizing the production of high-performing video assets and allowing AppLovin to unlock global SMB demand instantly. If successful, this creates a self-reinforcing liquidity cycle where increased advertiser density leads to better data, which drives superior model performance, which in turn attracts more diverse advertisers. This helps decouple the company's growth trajectory from the cyclicality of the mobile gaming market. Really interesting biz and great CEO.
CapexAndChill29,897 次观看 • 5 个月前
$HEI has been one of the best compounders of the last 3 decades. A $10K investment in 1990 is worth over $8M today. Listened to this interview with Co-President Eric Mendelson and its pretty clear why this has been such a strong business. The business model is very simple but extremely difficult to replicate. In 1990, HEICO was a struggling business with a ~$25M market cap. Management discovered a regulatory loophole to challenge aerospace OEMs. They used FAA regulation to engineer replacement aerospace parts. They proved to the FAA that their parts strictly matched the fit, form, and function of OEM parts. This broke the OEM pricing monopolies. They have shipped 85M parts with zero in-flight failures. The capital allocation strategy is the secret sauce behind the stock. The Mendelson family runs the company, but they refuse to operate it like a traditional family business. Larry, Eric, and Victor Mendelson require a unanimous three-way vote for any major decision. If one says no, the deal dies instantly. This strict filter kills bad capital deployment. They have acquired 100 companies over the years. 98 of those acquisitions have been successful. They focus exclusively on businesses generating 20% or higher margins. They also run the balance sheet with extreme discipline. They try to target roughly a 1x debt-to-EBITDA ratio. This protects the equity from macroeconomic debt cycles. HEICO operates like a highly decentralized portfolio. It does not run like a typical billion dollar aerospace behemoth. It runs as roughly 140 separate businesses. Each unit makes unde $100M and employs arround less than 100 people. Corporate buys companies led by great operators and leaves them completely alone. They do not force typical corporate integration or micromanagement. They also build extreme employee loyalty. Their recent M&A execution proves the decentralized model scales very well. In August 2023, HEICO acquired Wencor for just over $2.05B from private equity firm. They paid almost 13x EBITDA. This was the highest multiple they ever paid for an asset. However, Wencor has outperformed expectations so aggressively that the effective multiple is now in the single digits. Management also eliminates geopolitical risk. They refuse to manufacture anything in China. They actively protect their intellectual property from theft. Mendelson noted that China is at least 20 years away from matching western commercial aircraft technology, and engine technology parity will not happen in his lifetime.
CapexAndChill18,129 次观看 • 2 个月前
$APP's strategy in the streaming market is to turn the TV into a direct performance engine. Traditional television relies on broad brand awareness but free streaming is shifting toward measurable outcomes. AppLovin is using Wurl to connect television inventory directly to its massive base of mobile and ecommerce advertisers. Their predictive algorithm matches these performance driven advertisements to specific viewers based on precise data rather than basic demographics. This solves the industry bottleneck and creates a powerful cycle where better targeting drives higher ad revenue which then funds better content and attracts more viewers.
CapexAndChill18,578 次观看 • 4 个月前
Forrest Li on $SE's path to a $1T valuation hinges on transforming into an AI-centric organization, but the takeaway here is operating leverage rather than just hype. By automating ~80% of customer service inquiries and accelerating game asset production, $SE is targeting tangible margin expansion and a defensive logistics moat that pure-play competitors like TikTok struggle to replicate. The strategy signals a mature pivot from user acquisition to unit economic efficiency and long-term free cash flow growth. I love it!
CapexAndChill14,593 次观看 • 5 个月前
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