FrontRowBrian™ 🇺🇸 ₿

"Doesn't he remind you a little bit of Lenny Dykstra?" - Gary Cohen (On A.J. Ewing)

Anatoly Malykhin appears to be announcing his retirement moments after regaining the ONE Heavyweight title

NOW: President Trump arrives at Zhongnanhai Garden to meet with Chinese President Xi.

As two of the largest forces in equity markets -- growing index ownership and increasing amounts of capital controlled by extremely short-term-oriented, leveraged, volatility-intolerant investors -- converge, we have found occasional opportunities to acquire some of the most dominant long-term compounding franchises at attractive valuations. For example, we acquired Alphabet $GOOG when the stock declined substantially on the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, Amazon $AMZN in the weeks following Liberation Day, and $META more recently on the market's response to the company's unexpectedly large cap ex guidance and expenditures. In our 13F which we will file later today, we will disclose a new position in Microsoft, a company we have followed for many years now offered at a highly compelling valuation. While $PSUS will not be filing a 13F tomorrow, it has also recently made $MFST a core holding. Microsoft operates two of the most valuable franchises in enterprise technology, which account for approximately 70% of the company's overall profits: M365 and Azure. M365, the company's productivity suite, is the dominant operating platform for knowledge work, with over 450 million workers using Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams on a daily basis. Azure is the world's second-largest hyperscaler cloud platform and, like AWS in our Amazon investment, is a direct beneficiary of the multi-decade migration of enterprise IT workloads to the cloud, which is now further accelerated by surging demand for AI inference workloads. Both M365 and Azure are underpinned by Microsoft's unparalleled enterprise distribution and the security, compliance, and identity infrastructure it has built and refined over decades. Beyond these core franchises, Microsoft also owns a portfolio of other leading businesses, including LinkedIn (the world's largest professional network with 1.3 billion members), its gaming platform (Xbox and Activision Blizzard), and search and news advertising (Bing and the Edge browser). We began building our position in MSFT in February following a meaningful share price decline after the company reported its fiscal Q2 2026 results. We were able to establish our position at a valuation of 21 times forward earnings, broadly in line with the market multiple and well below Microsoft's trading average over the last few years. Notably, MSFT's headline multiple does not reflect the value of Microsoft's approximately 27% economic interest in OpenAI, which would represent approximately $200 billion, or 7% of Microsoft's market capitalization, at OpenAI's most recent funding round valuation. We believe Microsoft's recent share price decline has been principally driven by investor concerns around two key issues: i) the competitive positioning of M365 against increasingly capable AI lab offerings (notably Anthropic's Claude Cowork), and ii) the durability of Azure's growth, especially in light of Microsoft's evolving relationship with OpenAI. In our view, investors underestimate the resilience of the M365 franchise given its deeply embedded role across enterprises and highly attractive price-value proposition. Unlike point software solutions, which may be vulnerable to disintermediation by better-performing AI alternatives, M365 is tightly integrated into the daily workflow of nearly every large enterprise and is supported by Microsoft's identity, security, compliance, and data governance infrastructure, which would be nearly impossible to replicate. Attractive bundle economics further reinforce Microsoft's advantage, with monthly average revenue per user on the M365 suite at approximately $20, less than half of what customers would pay to purchase the underlying applications individually from different vendors. Moreover, we are encouraged to see Microsoft prioritizing its R&D efforts and investment in Copilot, its own AI agent embedded across M365, with direct involvement from CEO Satya Nadella. We believe these efforts will translate into improved product velocity and greater customer adoption over time. Alongside Copilot's rollout, the company has also begun shifting its pricing model from pure per-seat licensing to a hybrid model of seats plus metered consumption, which helps expand the company’s revenue opportunity as AI agents drive incremental usage that a seat-only structure would not capture. These initiatives should help sustain M365’s strong underlying growth momentum, which was already evident in the business unit’s 15% revenue growth (in constant currency) last quarter. We believe concerns regarding Azure's growth trajectory are similarly misplaced, particularly in light of the franchise's exceptional recent performance. Azure revenue grew 39% in constant currency last quarter, with company guiding to modest acceleration through the second half of the year. We view Microsoft's recent decision to restructure its OpenAI partnership not as a concession but as part of a deliberate pivot toward a more open, multi-model architecture that better serves enterprise customers, who increasingly seek optionality across model providers. Microsoft recently disclosed that over 10,000 enterprise customers have used more than one model on Azure Foundry, the company’s modular AI model marketplace. This model-agnostic approach also strengthens Copilot, which can auto-route queries across multiple models to deliver the optimal output for a given task. To support Azure's rapid growth amid persistent supply constraints, Microsoft has raised its calendar year 2026 capex budget to approximately $190 billion. Consistent with what we have observed at hyperscaler peers Amazon and Google, we view this spend as growth capex that should drive future revenue generation. This is particularly true for Microsoft, given that roughly two-thirds of its capex budget is allocated to server and networking equipment that correlates directly with near-term revenue. Like our purchases of $GOOG, $AMZN, and $META, we believe that $MSFT offers analogous and compelling long-term value at today's valuation.