Flash Capital

@FundamentEdge @bucketshopcap The cost disease in NYC is incredible. I don’t know how people do it with young kids in the city.

Completely agree. I was fine living frugally as a single guy (I actually loved those days splitting a 3br in East Village with 2 buddies, even as I started making great money), and even engaged / young married my burn was very low relative to my income…my wife and I lived in a small studio in midtown and I was able to save 100% of my bonuses for 7-8 years, on top of a couple nice guarantees. But I actually have zero advice on how to avoid the exponential growth in spend with kids in NYC. The utility of the apartment went from “a small place to sleep” to the “cornerstone of the family unit” and all of a sudden you need a nicer, more well-located space with amenities (the studio next to the Harley Davidson store on 56th & Lex no longer cut it). Incremental rent & nanny alone 3x’d burn. The private pre-school inception is so powerful “i want the best for my kids” and tuition to Tribeca community school x2 accelerated it further. It becomes so stressful that letting off steam is no longer a bucket of beers at Frying Pan, it’s a trip down to Turks & Caicos and a Hamptons rental for the summer, and all of a sudden you have pre-spent some or all of your expected bonus. Then you’re on the treadmill with no escape plan, needing $1m+ income just to maintain your lifestyle. My wife and I considered moving to the tri-state suburbs to lower burn, but I struggled a lot with the concept of being a weekend dad, on the 5:30am train in the morning, back by 7:30pm at night. And we both just wanted to be on West Coast long term (I’m from Idaho, she’s from Arizona). Leaving NYC was the right decision for us as it allowed us to completely restructure our burn and rebase cost structure: Nanny for live in au pair (at 1/5th the cost, and no longer needed now that the boys are older), modest house cash, and public schools. That gave me a lot of time to breathe and figure out what was next for me, which was critical. The one standard piece of advice I give to hedge fund professionals is to put away 3 years of burn coverage in low risk assets, before you do anything crazy like buy a bigger apartment or Hamptons house. And scale this as your burn scales…if you can’t afford the 3x pivot fund, you can’t afford the lifestyle asset. We are all highly intelligent problem solvers, and in a 3-year window pretty much anyone can figure out any pivot they need, whether that is new HF seat, pivot to another career, and/or geographic re-location. But you need sometimes a few years to figure that out, and the stress of paycheck to paycheck (or bonus to bonus) living won’t give you the degrees of freedom to find your path.

Def not a dunk on TBU but a lot of young guys are understandably solving for P&Lmaxxing. Having kids will change everything, be prepared- we all learn it only through the experience. Bet @FundamentEdge would have some thoughts/advice on how mid-level and above ppl make it work.

@WaterworldCapi1 @tangentstyle should have started off covering quantum computing. HFSP

@Flash_Capital_ @tangentstyle Telecom

@WaterworldCapi1 @tangentstyle What sector did you start out covering?

@Flash_Capital_ @tangentstyle I'm a generalist.

@WaterworldCapi1 @tangentstyle Are you closer to a generalist? You opine on lots of very diff sectors

@tangentstyle Don't have much...long Santander...just not a lot on my radar (out of ignorance and not my thing really).

@BoringBiz_ What a LOSER

Fortune Magazine profile on Jamie Dimon from 1984 when he was just 2 years out of his MBA at Harvard

@SouthernValue95 3 years ago, $300/mo spend would have sounded insane and unnecessary. in 3 years it might be very mainstream in knowledge work. AI is the worst it will ever be, today.

Some crude AI TAM analysis: - It was recently reported that $CRM is on track to spend ~$300M on Anthropic this year. That works out to ~$300/mo per employee - A GitHub copilot customer I spoke to was quoted a 10x price increase in June ($300/mo) - I myself happen to spend ~$300/mo in AI subscriptions - Let’s use $300/mo as a proxy for decent penetration of AI into a knowledge workforce. $MSFT 365 has ~450M users, $GOOG Workspace has a similar number (est., not disclosed). That’s a decent proxy for global knowledge workers ex-China at ~900M. If every knowledge worker consumed $300/mo of tokens, that’s a $270B monthly or $3.24T annually. Would equate to ~5-6% of global white collar labor spend ($50T). On consumer side: if every GOOG/META DAU consumed ~$20/mo of tokens, it would be ~3B * $20/mo * 12 = ~$720B. GOOG/META could basically fully subsidize this with their existing business models within a few years. Let’s assume $20/mo of tokens is covered some mix of ads, subscriptions, commerce share, and subsidization. Combining the TAMs we get to ~$4T of token spend. Keeping to simple numbers, at ~50% gross margins, it would sustainably require ~$2T of infrastructure spend to support these tokens. That would be ~2x the 2026 rate of ~$1T of AI infra spend ex-China. So from there: - Is enterprise token spend too high or too low? Could argue token consumption will only grow for CRM, but also that cost per token will fall, and the avg company won’t consume that much. - Is consumer token consumption too high or too low? Maybe consumers will be more willing to spend on subscriptions for this than in past consumer tech cycles. Maybe it’s too high if ai models don’t monetize. But at least $300/mo per user for enterprise and $20/mo for consumer are tangible numbers I can get my head around. That feels like the bogey for infra cycle to have another double from here and not be a huge bubble, and probably need another double at least for the stocks to work. Very crude round numbers throughout here. Appreciate thoughts and pushback.

Financial nihilism wins again

@WaterworldCapi1 @bucketshopcap $OKLO

@bucketshopcap $ONTO

There’s a proliferation of retards who reply to any post with a semis ticker. Can’t even tell anymore if they’re bots or their brains are just cooked. Normal stuff, good work team.

@returnoncap now is the time to be revisiting these

Insurance brokers (particularly business and specialty) seem to be capital light, easy to scale and a royalty type growth on the insurance industry. I have been looking at $BRO $RYAN $AJG . Anyone have any thoughts about these in terms of franchise and business quality?

@bucketshopcap Valuation doesn't matter if the market thinks its an AI loser. still high teens on GAAP.

There were a few smart accounts here saying INTU is a short & a lot of ppl were doubting it. Should be a midwit meme where the ends of the curve are for a stupidly easy AI disruption thesis. No one cares if it’s real anymore, perception is all that counts.

@WaterworldCapi1 not this again

You know who the market leader in quantum really is? $GOOG. Just saying.

@littlelion51 right, i think its an open question how capable AI assisted tax will be in the years to come, and what share it might take over time. clearly DIY is a first stepping stone i dont have worries about QBO at this time as a business, think IES will continue to do well

Correct me if I’m wrong but Prime Meridian isn’t assisted from the standpoint that there are no humans, no audit backup, etc. Even though AI is “assisting” you, it’s still technically DIY market, at least in terms of how Intuit categorizes it. If those types of solutions take some of that market share, I think the bull case still works here if they can grow assisted and build out their newer product offerings like the enterprise suite. In terms of QBO, I don’t have any concerns. Do you?

$INTU Decline of 8 million to 7 million nonpaying TurboTax customers should not be completely ignored and is central to the bear thesis. You could make the case that nonpaying customers are a potential pipeline and signal for future paying customers. However, if TurboTax Live is 53% of TurboTax revenue and growing at 38% driven by new customers rather than price, it could imply the opposite - the next generation of filers is actively choosing the human-assisted, higher-value tier. It also reframes the AI threat. If the growth is going toward Live, then free AI tools may actually be pushing people up the value chain rather than stealing them. Someone who tries to DIY their taxes with an AI agent, gets nervous, and decides they want a real person reviewing it is a TurboTax Live customer, not a lost customer. There's still uncertainty here for sure, especially in the how one decides to interpret the loss of nonpaying customers. But I think the market is discounting how much signal lies in the TurboTax Live customer growth.

@littlelion51 As of right now, they can probably pull enough price in assisted to offset lower end volume losses in the short/medium term to hit numbers. question is, is AI assisted tax from new entrants like prime meridian the next shoe to drop? and then, what about QBO?

Claiming they're not winning on DIY for earners under $50k due to price, not because of AI.

@returnoncap MRSH is interesting here

Adding to $SPGI and $MA with some fresh funds today. I also added a little to $MRSH. Thinking long term

@WaterworldCapi1 I've heard that Bezos actually has $1B for every American. We can all be rich. He's a hoarder!

In Bezos's couch cushions alone, there is $1 million for every American. For shame dirty capitalist...

@bucketshopcap Wow a publicly posted portfolio list, what is this, 2015?

Doubled down today.

@evrgn11112231 LPS need and demand weekly thesis updates thx

Type of guy running a "short-term levered long momentum" strategy but calling it "long-term fundamental" and wondering why his stocks are "randomly" going down while the "thesis is on track".

@valuations_ Guess what? Money is the same color no matter how it’s made. And owning big tech has been the right call for 15 years now.

@WaterworldCapi1 @Maku_Capital @aresearchguy Might be a long now

@Maku_Capital @aresearchguy Covered yesterday

I'm so confused right now why the market isn't panicking about this Iran situation.

@At50w50882 What is his problem?

@NateSilver538 This comment has to be a joke, right? You can call out Ackman when it is deserved, but just shitting on someone with false allegations just because you dont like his politics just reveals your lack of intelligence and judgment.

What evidence is there that it works? Ackman is a nepo baby, and I'd expect him to underperform index funds absent inside information and possibly even *with* inside information given how much of a tool he is.