Stockpicking Analysis

Learn, Search, & Research. Rule 1 - Don't lose money. Rule 2 - Aim to compound at the highest profit possible.

@LogWeaver Dude, this post is longer than the average @BillAckman post. You took a 5 paragraph idea and turned it into a full-blown novel, repeating the same point 23 different ways like we wouldn’t get it the first time.

BREAKING: Bill Ackman just IPO'd his hedge fund. He targeted $25 billion two years ago. He raised $5 billion yesterday. And the retail investors he spent two years courting on X didn't show up. Here's what actually happened, and why it matters for every investor who thinks following a famous name is a strategy. Wednesday, April 29. Bill Ackman rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Two listed entities hit the market. Pershing Square USA (PSUS), the closed-end fund. Pershing Square Inc. (PS), the asset manager. PSUS priced at $50 a share. It opened at $42. It closed at $40.90. Down 18% on debut. One of the most famous hedge fund managers on the planet went public, and his fund lost nearly a fifth of its value in a single trading session. Now look at how the money actually came in. Of the $5 billion raised, $2.8 billion came from a private placement. Family offices took 30% of that. Pension funds took 25%. Insurance companies took 22%. Ultra-high-net-worth investors took 12%. Institutional investors accounted for over 85% of total orders. The remaining $2.2 billion came from a public offering of 44 million PSUS shares. Some of that was retail. Most of it was not. Ackman has 2 million followers on X. He spent two years marketing this fund as a way for regular people to access hedge fund returns at $50 a share. He even said it on CNBC the morning of the IPO: "Hedge funds are sort of known for managing money for rich people. And now we have the opportunity for someone with $50, could be a long-term shareholder. Usually, the retail gets cut massively back, the institutions are favored. We did the opposite." The retail audience he was talking to didn't believe him. The institutions did. Two years ago, the original target was $25 billion. Yesterday, the final number was $5 billion. That's an 80% downsize. This is one of the most watched investors in the world. He gets booked on every major financial network. He posts daily to millions of followers. He has been pitching this exact deal since 2024. And the deal still came in 80% smaller than planned. Here's the part nobody is connecting: The retail audience for hedge fund products is fundamentally different from the retail audience for personality content. Ackman built a following by being loud on X. Loud on takeovers. Loud on politics. Loud on universities. Loud on ETFs. Loud on macro calls. Followers love that. They follow. They reply. They retweet. But following someone is free. Wiring money into their closed-end fund at NAV with no performance fees and a fee structure most retail investors can't even read is an entirely different decision. The market just made that distinction for him. Now zoom out, because this is the structural lesson. The $2.8 billion private placement was wrapped up before retail even saw the deal. Family offices. Pension funds. Insurance companies. Sovereign wealth. These are the buyers who get the call before the IPO is announced. They get the term sheet. They negotiate. They commit. By the time the public sees the listing on a Wednesday morning, the institutions have already locked in their allocation. The retail investor sees the same news, gets the same prospectus, and reads the same ticker. Different game. Same name on the door. And then PSUS opened down 16% and closed down 18%. Every retail buyer who put in $50 at the IPO price was sitting on a $9 paper loss before lunch. The institutions had locked in better terms in the private placement. Same fund. Same manager. Two completely different starting positions. This is how the structure of capital markets actually works. Every. Single. Time. The brochure says democratization. The cap table says the institutions got there first. This is the same lesson the Blue Owl and BlackRock private credit stories taught us last year. When a famous money manager opens a vehicle to retail, the fine print and the fee structure and the timing of the allocation all favor the people who already have access. You can have a manager with no performance fee, with bonus shares attached, with two million social followers, and a stage on CNBC. The math of who gets in first and at what price is still the math. So what does this mean for you? It means a famous name on the cover is not a strategy. It means following an investor on X is not the same as being invested with them. It means the retail audience for entertaining finance content is enormous, and the retail audience for actually deploying capital into a complex product is not. The wealthy don't pay famous investors for personality. They build systems that don't depend on a single human being having a good year, or a good fund debut, or a good narrative on social media. Ackman's reputation got him on the front page. It didn't get the stock above its IPO price. The math always catches up. The personality doesn't change the math. Boring? Yes. Effective when a $25 billion vision becomes a $5 billion raise that opens down 18%? Also yes. This is exactly why we built Surmount. Automated, rules-based investment strategies. Built for the retail investor who doesn't want to bet a portfolio on whether a famous fund manager has a good debut:

They just gave #TRUMP a huge boost in the #Midterms

@PeterSchiff China’s (and the rest of the world) right to retaliate, was also clear when Iran blocked the SOH. Oh, but than you didn't say anything, because only If Trump does it you call him out. To your point, this is probably exactly what Trump wants, to test how China will respond.

Trump using the U.S. Navy to blockade the Strait of Hormuz could easily be considered an act of war by other nations impacted by the action. What right does the U.S. have to use military force to prevent China from buying oil? However, China’s right to retaliate would seem clear.

@barneyxbt How do you know it's 95% and not 5%. You need to know how much info was there, and only there, to know how much was lost.

just a reminder that 95% of the worlds history is unknown due to the burning of the library of alexandria.. guess who burned it

@TheASXDegen To your point about debt paydown being based only on massively reducing inventory, this is a 2 way street, the debt was also up only because of inventory build up for Q3 and 4, if $SPWH wasn't a seasonal company, their debt would stay flat year around at 90-100 M $.

@TheASXDegen IMO the upcoming inflation is a short term tailwind for $SPWH, since everyone will rush to buy before the prices go up. Long term, I think the gun sales cycle will start to rebound, unless a real financial crisis hits the economy.

2025 $SPWH unit sales outperformed NSSF data by 3-12% NSSF data since January 2025 1.25: +0.9% 2.25: -9% 3.25: -3.8% 4.25: -3.4% 5.25: -1.6% 6.25: -5.1% 7.25: - 8.1% 8.25: - 9.9% 9.25: +2% 10.25: -0.3% 11.25: -7% 12.25: -3.4% 1.26:-0.7 2.26: +3.5 GL shorting $SPWH at ~0.2 BV

CME applies for inclusion in Trump’s Fast-41 project.

@FragmentsValue @traderInosuke The market (including you) still has no clue what Paul Stone has accomplished at $SPWH. SPWH isn't on the verge of a turnaround, it's entering its growth phase. Taking a near BK company in a declining sector and delivering what he has is straight up phenomenal.

@traderInosuke $SPWH x.com/FragmentsValue…

Where should I put 50K? Give me the ticker.

@entityjim @HilzFuld You should think about your profile

@HilzFuld What a powerful and precise speaker he is. Sure glad I did watch this video . Excellent . Just excellent.. 🔥🙏🏻

This is an absolute must watch video. If you laugh when people say that God is protecting the Jewish people, I’d watch this if I were you. It’s going to blow your mind. Guaranteed!

@MattWalshBlog Agree with you on this one. GCC should send their boots to defend themselves.

We have been told many times that there won’t be boots on the ground. Many (almost all) of the pro war accounts here have given breezy assurances that there won’t be boots on the ground. If we do end up with boots on the ground, prepare yourself for the most shameless gaslighting campaign we’ve ever witnessed, as all of the same voices insist that no such assurances were ever given, and in fact we always knew there would be boots on the ground and were never told anything different.

@MattWalshBlog There are lots af Americans who don't have a freaking clue about anything out of their comfort zone. So it really depends if you're asking people who know some history and understand global events, or people who are young and ignorant.

I’ve never seen such a disconnect between the commentary on this site and what I hear in the real world. I’ve talked to dozens of normal conservatives in real life about the Iran War and I haven’t met a single one who’s actually enthusiastically in favor of it. At best they’re warily optimistic. In most cases they’re opposed. In some cases they’re not only opposed but deeply furious. And yet here if you utter a word of criticism about the war you’ll be shouted down by throngs of alleged American conservatives who allegedly have wanted nothing more than for America to go to war with Iran. It just doesn’t reflect what I see on the ground. That’s not just cope because my position is unpopular with “my side.” I’ve held plenty of unpopular positions. I really don’t care. But in this case the social media vs real world divide is stark and unlike anything I’ve seen before.

@shanaka86 1. I highly doubt #Iran produces 10,000 Shahed drones per month, if true they would be sending 1,000's each day. 2. $2K drones are manual. 3. They don't control debris. 4. #GCC don't want their life to be like in #Ukraine They probably want an extra layer of defence nothing more.

BREAKING: Zelensky just landed in the UAE and signed a defence cooperation agreement with President MBZ. The deal on the table changes everything about this war. Ukraine is offering Gulf states 1,000 drone interceptors per day. Each Sting interceptor costs $2,100. Each Patriot missile it replaces costs $3.9 million. In exchange, Ukraine wants the Patriot missiles the Gulf states are burning through, because Kyiv cannot get enough of them to stop Russian missiles. Read that again. The country America refused to arm fast enough is now arming America’s allies with a weapon that costs 1,857 times less than the one America cannot produce fast enough. The National reported on March 27 that Zelensky told reporters: “We’d like to quietly receive the Patriot missiles we have a deficit of, and give them a corresponding number of interceptors.” AFP confirmed the UAE agreement on March 28. Eleven countries have formally requested Ukraine’s drone defence expertise per Zelensky’s own count. Over 200 Ukrainian military specialists are already deployed across the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan. Here is the arithmetic that should terrify every Pentagon procurement officer on earth. The United States fired 943 Patriot interceptors in the first four days of the Iran war per a US Congressional study cited by the Jerusalem Post. That is eighteen months of Lockheed Martin’s annual production consumed in 96 hours. Each of those 943 shots cost $3.9 million. Total expenditure: $3.68 billion in four days on defensive interceptions alone. Iran produces 10,000 Shahed drones per month per Reuters. Each drone costs $20,000 to $50,000. The cost exchange ratio is 114 to 1 in Iran’s favour per Military Times. Ukraine’s Sting interceptor inverts this arithmetic entirely. At $2,100, the cost ratio flips from 114-to-1 against America to roughly 10-to-1 against Iran. Ukraine can supply 1,000 per day. That is 30,000 per month against Iran’s 10,000 Shaheds per month. For the first time in this war, the defender’s production rate exceeds the attacker’s production rate at a fraction of the cost. And the country that built this weapon is the same country that Trump publicly rejected. “No, they are not helping. We do not need their help. We know more about drones than anyone else” per Fox News. He doubled down: “The last person we need help from is Zelensky.” Meanwhile the Pentagon notified Congress of plans to redirect $750 million in Ukraine-bound Patriot missiles to Gulf states per House of Saud reporting. America is simultaneously refusing Ukraine’s cheap solution and cannibalising Ukraine’s expensive one. Zelensky framed this explicitly. He told The National: “No matter how many Patriots, THAADs, or other air-defence systems are in the Middle East, that alone is not enough for fully effective air defence.” He told the UK Parliament: “When it comes to shooting down massive Shahed attacks, only Ukrainian experience can really help with this today.” The Pentagon is spending $3.9 million per interception, raiding Swiss fighter jet accounts to cover shortfalls, and diverting Ukraine’s own Patriot supply to the Gulf. Zelensky is offering the same result for $2,100 and producing 1,000 units per day. The market has a word for this kind of disruption. The $2,100 drone is the most important weapon in this war. And the country that built it is the one America said it did not need. Full analysis - open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

@killthepedophil @ekwufinance Exactly my point - all the X-perts are saying the world is over in a month, I see a serious bump in the road but not all this fearmongering. What am I getting wrong?

@StockpickingA @ekwufinance Well its very serious that around 10% of global supply disapears over night and we will need to take a lot from onshore storages But during that time there is possibility to ramp up oil production and drill for more oil other places Its not unproblematic but its controllable

If the Strait is closed for much longer we are f*cked. Peak covid lock down led to a ~8 mbpd oil demand destruction. The largest global demand destruction event in history. Current supply destruction is ~ twice as large, meaning even a covid style lockdown won't be enough to balance the market. Even with announced SPR releases of 400 MB from the US it will still not be enough. The size of the release doesn't matter what matters is how fast they can be drained, which should be ~2 mbpd. There is no policy tool which can offset the massive supply cliff which is unfolding

@killthepedophil @ekwufinance Fearmongering I'm no expert but I don't see the #OIL "crisis". Only 20% of global oil goes through #Hormuz Of that ~40% goes to #CHINA which has no problem so far. Japan India SoutKorea are the countries highly dependent on this oil - They can't get oil from somewhere else??

@ekwufinance You are analysing it wrong The world have a lot of oil in onshore storages to keep os going for years In covid most storage was all ready filled up, and they produced so much that oil went negative What is your point?

Just let me dream for a short time what this means for $HPP before I return to reality.

@Micro2Macr0 @WellsFargo Most banks are crap, but American banks are crap de la crap. To big to fail translates into bad customer service and no competition.

I've been a customer of @WellsFargo for OVER 30 years!!! After ALL THAT TIME, 4 active car loans, a 6 figure investment account, 1 million + in deposits last year, and never missing a payment on any of these accounts, and they just told me I have to wait for a letter to find out why they dropped my card limit to almost 0 on one account and will NOT activate another. This is after talking to 7 people to try and activate one account. Everyone should leave legacy Banks like Wells Fargo. They're absolute trash. I'm going to move everything I can over to @SoFi and just be done with this SHITTY customer service. Have you all had this problem with your banks? I've never heard of this before. And I used to work for a bank in the credit card division. 😆

@gnoble79 Where can I see the full interview? Thanks

For years they told you stock picking was dead. "Just buy the index. Don't bother with research. The passive bid will carry you." I'm here to tell you that era is OVER. And the people who don't adjust are going to pay for it. The S&P 500 just broke below its 200 day moving average for the first time in 214 sessions. It's on pace for its fourth consecutive losing week. The Mag 7 which carried the entire market for 3 years are getting dismantled. Microsoft down 18% year to date. Amazon down 10%. The Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF down 6% while the equal-weight S&P is outperforming. The rotation I've been calling for is here. R is for Rotation, not Recession. But here's what most people don't understand about passive investing, and why this unwind could be SAVAGE: The machine that drove prices up without caring about fundamentals is going to drive them down the same way. There's been no real price discovery in large-cap US equities for years. Money flowed in because money was flowing in. That's NOT investing. I saw the exact same dynamic in Japan in the 1980s. I ran the Fidelity Overseas Fund during that bubble. The Japanese market got to two-thirds of the entire non US equity index. Banks traded at 100x earnings, 10x book. The float was so tight you couldn't buy or sell ANYTHING in size without moving the market 20%. Jeremy Grantham, John Templeton - all the greats were screaming about it. They were early. But once the worm turned, it was fast. And the beautiful part was you didn't need to be a genius. You just had to avoid Japan and index everything else. Hit them where they ain't. That's where we are with US mega-cap tech right now. You don't need to make complicated bets. Just stop being concentrated in the same 7 stocks that everyone else owns. Step 1: switch your cap-weighted S&P into the equal-weight RSP. Overnight you cut your Mag 7 exposure from 35% to 0.2% per name. The equal weight has been winning all year. I think that continues. Step 2: look overseas. International markets have been outperforming the US in 2026. European equities, Japanese stocks, emerging markets - all cheaper, all under-owned, all benefiting from the capital rotation out of US tech. Step 3: get into real assets. Gold. Energy. Commodities. These are the sectors that perform when inflation is the dominant risk, which it is. Oil at $96 with a war in the Persian Gulf isn't going back to $50 regardless of what any politician promises. And step 4: if you have the stomach for it, there's a portfolio of overvalued garbage out there that's going to get cut in half. Companies with no earnings, no moat, and no reason to exist at current prices. The short side hasn't been this attractive since 2000. After years of the index crushing active managers, the tables have TURNED. Dispersion is widening. Fundamentals are starting to matter again. Stock picking isn't dead. IT WAS JUST SLEEPING

@tbanks316 @scottmelker I don't understand your point. There's a price to pay for getting rid of evil.

@StockpickingA @scottmelker It's easy to drop bombs. Nobody doubts that Iran can't beat two militaries. But while that's happening, the rest of the world including the US is paying a price for this

Trump says Iran has 48 hours to open the Strait, then says we don’t even need the Strait, then says you better open it, then says the war is basically over, then says it could go on for a long time, then says we’re not talking because there’s nobody to talk to, then says there are very productive conversations, then says we’re not negotiating, then says maybe we are, then calls for a 5-day pause, then says we don’t need allies, then says all our allies better step up, then says everything is under control, then threatens escalation again. Every position, every direction, all at once.

Wait for @SpecialSitsNews to start bragging that he bought the dip. He blocked me for this post, I guess I touched a nerve. Well, now he can't brag about buying the dip anymore.