Lee Roach@leevalueroach
I ate 56 hot dogs at a Fourth of July party yesterday. This was not the plan. The plan was to eat a normal number of hot dogs, watch fireworks, and go home. The plan was destroyed by a man named Bill.
Bill is my wife's coworker's husband. I had never met Bill before yesterday. I will now know Bill forever. Bill cornered me by the grill at 3:47pm and by 4:12pm he had explained the entire investment thesis for Palantir. By 4:31pm he had explained the entire investment thesis for a company called Recursion Pharmaceuticals. By 4:58pm he had used the phrase "asymmetric upside" nine times and the phrase "convexity" four times and I had eaten, without noticing, 22 hot dogs off the platter next to us. The hot dogs were a nervous eating situation. I was trapped. Bill was between me and the exit. The platter was the only thing my hands could do.
By 5:30pm Bill had moved on to the case for Cloudflare and I had moved on to my 31st hot dog. By 6pm he was walking me through the total addressable market for humanoid robotics and I was on hot dog 39. The bun-to-dog ratio had collapsed at hot dog 24 when they ran out of buns and I had switched to eating them plain, folded in a paper napkin, like a war crime. Bill did not notice. Bill was describing the CEO of a company I had never heard of as "generational." I was staring past his left shoulder at the keg, and past the keg at the bonfire, and past the bonfire at nothing, and in that nothing I was thinking about a 94-year-old Pennsylvania manufacturer trading at 0.4x book that had just announced a small buyback.
The manufacturer does not have asymmetric upside. The manufacturer does not have convexity. The manufacturer has a 71-year-old chairman and a daughter who went to Wharton and a building in the industrial park that has been depreciated to $180,000 on the books but would sell tomorrow for $6 million. That is the entire thesis. Bill would hate this stock. Bill has never heard of this stock. Bill will never hear of this stock. This stock and Bill exist in parallel universes that do not intersect except in the mind of the man being held hostage between them, which was me, holding hot dog 43, staring at a bonfire.
At 7:14pm my wife found us. She had been looking for me for 40 minutes. She had, in the interim, been talking to Bill's wife, who is by all accounts a wonderful person and who had been trying to have a normal conversation with my wife about the school district while my wife's husband was 30 feet away eating his 46th hot dog and being explained to about Palantir. My wife made eye contact with me. The eye contact contained information. The information was: we are leaving in nine minutes and you are going to explain what is happening. I nodded at her. I had a hot dog in each hand. Bill was mid-sentence about a Series C valuation.
I want to be clear about what happened next because it will matter for the marital reconstruction. Bill said the word "moat" and I, without meaning to, laughed. It was not a mean laugh. It was the laugh of a man who has held pink sheet stocks for eleven years and who has heard the word "moat" used incorrectly so many times by so many growth investors that the word itself has become a kind of joke to him. Bill heard the laugh. Bill asked what was funny. I told Bill the truth. I told Bill that the word "moat" gets used by people who have never actually seen one, and that the actual moats in American business are 60-year customer relationships in industries nobody wants to enter, and that Palantir does not have a moat, Palantir has a contract, which is a different thing, and that the difference will show up in five years when the contract expires. Bill went quiet. Bill's wife heard from 30 feet away. My wife heard from ten feet away. The bonfire crackled. I ate hot dog 51.
Bill said "you must be one of those value guys." He said it the way a person says "you must be one of those men who collects Civil War bayonets." I said I was. Bill said "how's that working out for you." I said very well, actually, thank you for asking, and I named my compounded annual return for the last decade, which is 21%, which is higher than his, which we both knew, which is why he stopped talking. My wife closed her eyes. Bill's wife took Bill's arm. The party continued around us. I ate five more hot dogs in the ensuing silence because the platter was still there and my hands still had nothing to do.
We left at 8:03pm. In the car my wife did not speak for the first four miles. At mile five she said "56 hot dogs." I said "I was trapped." She said "you were not trapped, you were performing." I said "I was performing hostage." She said "you were performing superiority." I did not respond. She was correct. I had been performing superiority. I had been performing superiority for two hours by the bonfire and then I had performed it more explicitly by naming my return in front of Bill's wife, which had made Bill's wife's evening worse for no reason, which is the actual crime, not the hot dogs.
At mile eleven she said "why did you eat 56 hot dogs." I said I did not know. I said the hot dogs were the only thing I could control. She said "you cannot control hot dogs by eating them. You are the opposite of controlling them. You are being controlled by them." This was also correct. I did not respond.
I am now on the couch. It is 9am on July 5th. The house smells like hot dogs. My stomach has entered a state that I can only describe as negotiating. My wife is upstairs. She has not come down. I have been thinking, for the last two hours, about the Pennsylvania manufacturer. The stock is up 0.6% pre-market on the buyback news. Nobody at the party knew about the buyback. Bill does not know about the buyback. Bill's wife does not know about the buyback. My wife does not know about the buyback and if she did she would not care because the buyback is not the point, the point is that I ate 56 hot dogs and humiliated a stranger at his own barbecue, which are two things that a normal husband does not do.
I am going to bring her coffee in a minute. I am going to apologize. The apology will be for the hot dogs, which I do not fully regret, and for Bill, which I do. I will not mention the manufacturer. I will not mention the buyback. I will not mention the 21% return. I will mention only that I love her and that I will do better at the next barbecue, which is a lie, because there is no version of me at a barbecue with a man like Bill and a platter of hot dogs and a keg and a bonfire and a Pennsylvania manufacturer in my head that does not end in exactly the same place I ended yesterday. But I will say it. And she will accept it. And we will move on. And in ten weeks I will do it again at a Labor Day party, and the man's name will be Chad, and he will be pitching me on quantum computing, and there will be brisket instead of hot dogs, and everything else will be the same.
