FluentInQuality

He called the dot-com crash in 2000. He warned about credit all through 2007. Then, the week Lehman collapsed, he started buying aggressively. Howard Marks has done this for 35 years and 1,600 pages of memos. I read all of it. Here's the entire playbook in 9 ideas 🧵

Seeing $PLTR pop up on my fyp more and more people are getting interested in it again. FYI. It's still trading at 96x operational cash flow. Very unsustainable multiple.

@eatingvalue Definitely not. Someone should keep him in check from time to time for the sake of the shareholders and cash. However, I do think that Zuck is an excellent capital allocator and at least isn't afraid of trying, which I admire.

@FluentInQuality are you implying you want zuck spending as much as be wants on whatever he wants?

Everyone remembers Reality Labs burning ~$90B. Nobody remembers Zuckerberg bought Instagram for $1B, WhatsApp for $19B, and aggressively bought back $META near its 2022 bottom. One of the great capital allocators of our era. People just only count the losses. $META

From 22% to 4% growth in two years. It turns out that even the most-loved name in luxury isn't selling like it used to. $RMS

@pennystockabe What? Barriers to entry are extremely high... Yes, it is becoming more competitive, but that's with existing names. New entrants have no ground to stand on, haha.

@FluentInQuality Because barrier to entry is low And its 90% now it will be 60% in the future now Vantage is accepted

I'm curious when that VantageScore ''threat'' stops this absolute monster from compounding. Spoiler: it will not. $FICO

@pennystockabe $FICO a weak moat? If that's the case, how come it's running a monopoly? Its credit scoring models are used by approximately 90% of lenders to evaluate consumer creditworthiness A business without a moat cannot run a monopoly with ease like $FICO

@FluentInQuality FICO is a buisness with a very weak moat. They provide scores that come out of a credit model. Lots of buisnesses that want to do that and earn money.

"Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful." — Warren Buffett

I asked Grok to visualize me 10 stocks that will outperform the coming decade. Here are his picks: 1. $TSLA 2. $NVDA 3. $MSFT 4. AAPL 5. $AMZN 6. $GOOGL 7. $META 8. $CRM 9. $ADBE 10. $SHOP 11. $PYPL (cut off, but we'll add it)

$MSFT is getting VERY close to its lowest EV/EBIT since 2017. Probably nothing.

Do you think that companies that get most of their sales from defense spending are good investments? Once everything cools down, most will cut spending as per usual... impacting defense related companies.

"Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria." — Sir John Templeton

Everyone looks at $NFLX and sees a US streaming company that's basically done growing. Look closer at where the next decade comes from. In 2018, APAC was a rounding error at $946M. Today it's $5.6B and compounding at nearly 28% a year. Six-fold in seven years. LATAM more than doubled. And both regions are still a fraction of the size of the US and Europe. Here's the point. The mature markets pay the bills. APAC and LATAM are the call option nobody's pricing. Netflix doesn't need a new product to keep growing. It just needs the rest of the world to keep showing up. And it is.

Most people in the US have never used $MELI. So let me explain why it might be one of the best businesses in the world right now. Picture Amazon, PayPal, and a bank. Now imagine one company doing all three, in a region where most people are just getting online for the first time. That's MercadoLibre. And here's the thing that makes it special. It all feeds itself. They lowered the free shipping threshold in Brazil. Sounds boring. It isn't. Cheaper shipping means people order more. More orders means more delivery scale, which drops their shipping cost (down 17% last year). Lower cost lets them ship even cheaper. Round and round it goes. Now bolt on the bank. Every person buying on the marketplace is a person they can hand a credit card to. That card turns a casual shopper into someone who runs their whole financial life through $MELI. The credit book is already near $15 billion. So shopping feeds the bank. The bank feeds the shopping. And the logistics network gets cheaper the bigger it gets. Three flywheels, all spinning each other. The numbers are kind of absurd. Revenue up 42%. 126M buyers. 83M people using the fintech every month. They deliver 76% of orders in under 48 hours, on a network they built themselves. And the founder just stepped back to Executive Chairman, handing the CEO seat over from a position of total strength. Nearly three decades of culture, intact. The wild part? Latin America is still early. Most of this shift to online shopping and digital money hasn't even happened yet. A business this dominant, this early, with this much runway, doesn't come along often. $MELI is one to know.

$SPCX

"I don't want a lot of good investments; I want a few outstanding ones." — Philip Fisher

@remington00 Management itself isn't expecting a plateau. So, someone is wrong in this story. I have a feeling that the market might be a bit too pessimistic/wrong.

@FluentInQuality In 2016, the market correctly forecasted its growth ahead. In 2026, the market is forecasting a plateau going forward.

The market has decided $META is worth less every year. EV/EBIT in 2016: ~45. EV/EBIT today: 16. That's a 64% collapse in the multiple over a decade. In that same decade, Meta went from a single app to four billion users, 40%+ operating margins, and the best ad machine ever built. The business got dramatically better. The price the market pays for it got cheaper. It now trades at 16x, against a 22x ten-year median. One of the most profitable companies on earth. On sale.

Partially agree. Barriers to entry aren't their moat; it's the network effect that's a moat. Also, their data advantage protects them. Agree that the recent CapEx has primarily gone to waste, but in the past, Zuckerberg has made wonderful investments. Zuckerberg knows that the current spending is questionable, and it's (hopefully) a matter of time before he switches around. $META remains a business that has products that are being used by billions of people and the untapped leverage in this userbase is still worth something, quite a lot in my eyes.

@FluentInQuality The ad market is only so big. They captured a good amount of it so its like they can keep scaling forever. Meta (FB really) is just an ad conpany. The ad market very cyclical. Revenue that can vanish Zucks capex havent panned out Easy barrier to entry(TikTok, insta, snap,etc

$UBER is up for grabs. 15x EV/OCF for a business like $UBER is TOTALLY worth it.

@Miguel89166461 Price hasn’t been pretty! Luckily it’s all about the fundamentals. Not that much to hate about the business besides a shaky moat.

@FluentInQuality Ouch

$PODD just did something almost no company on earth has done. Ten years in a row of 20%+ revenue growth. Not 20% once. Ten straight years. And the business behind it is far better than most investors realize. Let me show you 🧵