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Investment Thoughts 1) Buy high quality (above avg profitability) 2) Buy Dislocation (preferably high quality co's) 3) Buy misunderstood names w/an incentive (ie Spin-offs) 4) Secular growth that has lagged for correctable reasons 5) Small amount buy value/lev bet w/option value

Interesting, there is a idea when banks grow via new hires. that growth is risky & less creditworthy (IE bad growth). Why? When you hire an originator all his good loans are w/his last employer and new loan growth is loans that got denied from his prior employer. That is the loan origintors "low hanging fruit"

In 2008 when I started as a junior analyst at a Tiger Cub, I did a teach in with John Glass of Morgan Stanley. He showed me a very compelling analysis of casual diners and how there was a high propensity for concepts to come off the rails around 100 boxes. The inference was that, around that scale, management focus was diluted and the concept had picked the low hanging fruit and had to stretch into new & unproven geographies. Quite often, the new geographies wouldn't scale and the stocks felt the dual pressure of an earnings re-base and compression of the growth multiple. In looking for restaurant short ideas, this ~100 unit threshold become a consistent & reliable "pattern" that I would apply across concepts. This wasn't a deterministic process, but a reliable filtering mechanism for going deeper and hunting aggressively for signs of pattern alignment (often times, great concepts would grow through this level unimpeded). But it was a lot of work!! It would take me many weeks to build conviction on one of these ideas. Fast forward 18 years, and I can put a "pattern" like this into an agentic architecture. And with the right data ingested, I could automate analyses like: > Scoring of new site selection (automated demographics, MSA & brand awareness analysis) > New unit AUV vs. existing System AUV ramp > Cohort productivity tracking > Subtle languages shifts on expansion pace > Executive departures (COO or real estate office departures were interesting triggers) Analysis that I would do before, now at the push of a button: i.e. the ability to scale depth in a way never possible. The deeper I go into agentic processes, the more I realize that deep sector & vertical processes are where the real value is unlocked. There is ~minimal value in a generic earnings preview skill. But an earnings preview architecture encoded with the set-up & reporting patterns powered by your pattern recognition - now we have something. Not "XYZ managed care company is going to miss Q3 earnings", but a deep articulation of guidance hockey stick dynamics in that space, supported by deep regulatory filings work, management sentiment analysis intra-quarter, all my internal notes, a comprehensive healthcare trend tracker, and your own historical trading history in shorting these sort of set-ups. Again...the sort of work I would do as a managed care analyst, but deeply automated. What does this all mean? How do I build this out? Well, that's a work in progress. But as a build consideration, here is what i would recommend: > Begin to attempt to find the patterns in your investing. Patterns vary *materially* by strategy & by sector. I don't think any vendor or consultant (including me) will be able to give you an off the shelf pattern library: this will be deeply personal to your firm, your process, and your risk & duration envelope > Above all, view the technology stack as a flexible substrate to express these processes & patterns. A pattern such as above was very difficult to wrap in a chatbot (early finance chatbots like Portrait AI did a very interesting job in doing so and was popular amongst generalists for that reason, but it was a lot of work). My sense is some of the highest ROI motion for investors right now is *not* to get fluent in spinning up sub-agents in Claude Code CLI, but to actually put pen to paper on their process & patterns and let the super app / agentic workspaces catch up (I am running this process in Perplexity Computer and something like this takes about 15 minutes to spin up....THOUGH you need the awareness of the underlying logic of this pattern to tell the agentic what to design...this is where the advantage will sit in my opinion).

$FSK is a classic example of price leading fundamentals and why being a analyst is so hard You get all the fundamentals right (including NAV bleed and divvy cut) Yet stick up 2%

A dreadful qtr for $FSK - NAV down 10% (down 21% in a year). 55% of book, Dividend cut, NII continues to bleed and KKR steps in.  With all this bad news, i think it has a little more downside but risk reward is still 2 to 1-Dividend feels more stable but shrinking portfolio to preserve liquidity isnt ideal

Crazy to think the best way to tell about the credit cycle is to look at 21 VC returns and lag credit issues 12-18 months. Kinda like the good old days of credit card growth math #moreyouknow

@17catspaw Not China but India is my bet

@NDS0909 Be kinda 🤔 if Iran situation causes 🇮🇳 and 🇨🇳 to get closer because of energy needs.

d) US will force Israel to be the 3rd/4th biggest weapons exporter and top tech producer outside US e) A new middle east will be born, Saudi risks being boxed out unless they partner (Pakistan isnt it) f) Europe is toothless, they need tech, defense or something to be relevant g) Bias is sky high - look at Russian losses versus Ukraine and compare US to Iran yet people say Iran is winning

A few points for stocks / macro a) Unless Iran allies w/the US, its leverage w/the strait of Hormuz will decrease every day (eventually leading pipelines to bypass it) b) Everything the US has done over the past few months is about China. Restricting oil, restricting influence and showing capabilities that might save Taiwan c) Japan will be ascendant militarily

A few Macro / oil observations: TLDR: I think short term US is going to do something in Iran (why would UAE leave Opec now?) Yes they got USD swapline but timing is suspicious.

2) With the new IPOs coming, what does that mean for certain co's -- "the good, the bad and the ugly" Example SpaceX and AMT?

1) so a few thoughts i have: Data center construction / new development is going to be a lot less then people think -- AI is so unpopular So who benefits in that scenerio where we have less power than we think? Feels a lot like income inequality if you follow

Today is great. But what happens if construction for data center slows and /or gets held up? I have some ideas, do you?

@WestieWinston not bad but $CG is cheaper

@NDS0909 TPG?

anything more frustrating then a stock down 59% and it still is expensive vs peers $0WL super annoying wanted to buy. $APO screens the cheapest

2) Insurance skews $APO / $KKR $BX is just so profitable. but $CG is cheap on P/S, Aum to rev, pre tax income to mrkt cap and is underearning on AuM - only issue it never goes up

1) Took a closer look at PE comps. IMO a levered play on S&P, S&P falls 8% alts down 30-50% seems overdone. I think biggest reason is trumps endowment treatment as schools realize the power of liquidity. $CG is cheapest on every measure and its not close IMO

Laziest oil play PTEN and LNG Still like the BDCs if I had to hedge probably consumer finance

@MrMojoRisinX Correct - he got blocked too many times and Reed manhandled him. Carlos also had limited lift and struggled in the paint against real bigs

Boozer might win Naismith player of the year, fundamentally sound, a good teammate and a winner even in defeat, but I don’t think he is going to thrive playing the 4 (or even high post) in the NBA and I don’t think he has the outside shot or the handle to play the 3 nor the quickness to defend the wing

Is it still unbelievable to me how wrong i have been about $PYPL and how i continue to hold I just can't believe a bank or tech co hasn't taken a run at them.

So who else do i like $FSK is trading at 65% of its avg BV over past 3 years $PSEC probably a pass but $GSBD, looks juicy (post cut) and i would buy a little $CGBD (cut coming but feels 3 qtrs out if things get bad).Could avoid