Greg Speicher

Nobody buys intelligence. They hire it. The demand for intelligence is invariant. What won't change? The world will always want more intelligence, ubiquitously available, at the lowest cost possible. The jobs to be done with it are infinite — from legacy work like summarizing documents and answering phone calls, up to the frontier of human intelligence like designing new medicines and chips, all the way to problems we can't yet articulate that a country of 50 million geniuses could solve. Economic actors will seek the cheapest intelligence that does the job. That one fact organizes the whole market along a Pareto curve of cost and capability. And Jevons guarantees the job count keeps expanding: cheaper intelligence doesn't shrink the market. It creates it. One company is pursuing this in plain sight. Sundar Pichai has repeatedly said Gemini's goal is to lead "the Pareto frontier of cost, performance, and latency" — on earnings calls, at I/O, at every Flash launch. Jeff Dean gave an 84-minute interview literally titled "Owning the AI Pareto Frontier." They're not hiding the strategy. They're publishing it. Go read the primary sources and ask: who else is building for every point on the curve? $GOOGL #google The AI Price War Is Here, Piling Pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic wsj.com/tech/ai/the-ai… via @WSJ

At the 2026 Oslo Freedom Forum’s Freedom Tech track, Anaïse Kanimba, founder and director of the Africa Bitcoin Institute, warns that stablecoins are becoming a major obstacle to Bitcoin adoption in Africa. Many builders present them as an easy fix for inflation, payments, and dollar access, but she argues that outsourcing African financial life to foreign-issued digital dollars creates deeper long-term dependence. Her call is to keep building on Bitcoin to make it easier to use, so people are not pushed toward shortcuts that may solve today’s payment problem while weakening Africa’s financial sovereignty tomorrow.

@DimitryNakhla Munger only bought on the quality of the business not technical filters.

The quote is widely attributed to Charlie Munger: “IF ALL YOU EVER DID was buy high-quality stocks on the 200-week moving average, you would BEAT ‘most INVESTORS’ by a large margin over time.” Here are 10 high-quality stocks trading near their 200-week moving average 🧵

@killthepedophil @NietoSnieto10 These are strong points, as is cox taking equity. A cynical take is they really don't have a choice. In a sense, they have to play out the hand they have. Which may end up being a pretty good hand.

@NietoSnieto10 @Greg_Speicher The companys board and managment and John Malone apparently does not think so, because why the insane stock buybacks? They argue capex will fall over a cliff I agree that the debt makes me sweaty, but why do they keep buying back massive amount of stock if this is existential?

Been running numbers on Charter. Even with pessimistic assumptions, the math you get to with free cash flow and buybacks is so absurd you keep wondering what you're missing. Mr. Market, either I'm missing something big time, or you're on one hell of a bender. $CHTR

@NietoSnieto10 the debt really impacts the margin of safety here

@Greg_Speicher too much debt

John 20:22-23: "And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained." (KJV) Matthew 16:19: "And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." (KJV) Matthew 18:18: "Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." (KJV)

@nic_carter You don't need a priest to confess your sins Nick Jesus is the great high priest Hebrews 4:14-16

Tonight I was received into the Catholic Church. I received the sacrament of Communion and Confirmation under the patronage of Saint Andrew at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Miami Beach, administered by Bishop Delgado.

Hey Claude, what's up? I think my lead researcher took a coffee break.

@nic_carter Awesome news. Welcome home. Powerful Witness.

Is it just me, or is Claude bogging down on deep research this morning? Come on, man!

Interesting tension in @ChrisBloomstran's recent commentary. He's been publicly skeptical of hyperscaler AI capex — ~$400B in 2025 against <$40B of related revenue — arguing it rhymes with the dot-com fiber buildout. Google just guided 2026 capex to $180-$190B, almost double 2025. He's also said he trusts Greg Abel on capital allocation. In his very first quarter as CEO, Abel tripled Berkshire's Alphabet stake from ~$5B to ~$17B, making it a top-5 position. Alphabet is one of the biggest spenders in the capex pile Chris is worried about. Would love to hear him reconcile those two views. Aside: noticed Li Lu was in Omaha. Fun to wonder whether his long-running conviction in Google had any influence on Abel through conversations or shared research.

The Buffett Doctrine No One Talked About — Until Last Week Buffett, 1998 letter, on what Berkshire did with General Re's inherited equity book the moment the merger closed: "Once we knew that the General Re merger would definitely take place, we asked the company to dispose of the equities that it held. General Re subsequently eliminated its positions in about 250 common stocks, incurring $935 million of taxes in the process. This 'clean sweep' approach reflects a basic principle that Charlie and I employ in business and investing: We don't back into decisions." They ate a $935 million tax bill rather than carry 250 stocks they wouldn't have bought themselves. Not a discount. Not a trim. Not a "monitor it for a while." A clean sweep. 28 years later, Greg Abel files his first 13F as CEO. 16 positions — gone. Visa, Mastercard, Amazon, UnitedHealth, Domino's, the Liberty trackers, Atlanta Braves Holdings. What looks like the Todd Combs book, liquidated in a single quarter. Portfolio cut from ~40 holdings to ~26. Top 5 now roughly 68% of the book. Cash sitting at about $397 billion. Combs left for JPMorgan in December. Abel didn't wait. He didn't curate. He didn't get sentimental about positions Buffett had tacitly blessed for 15 years. The principle travels — and it's actually bolder than '98. In 1998, Buffett liquidated someone else's portfolio that came in via acquisition. In 2026, Abel liquidated positions built inside Berkshire itself. Same logic, sharper edge: no one babysits anyone else's book. Not even your predecessor's. A lot of people on X have spent the week parsing the individual trades — Abel swapped Amazon for Macy's, somebody said, as if that's the story. It's not. The story is the framework. Holding a stock you wouldn't buy today is backing into a decision. Every day you carry it without re-underwriting the position, you are making a tacit buy you never made. It's about conviction.

I love Tom Gayner, and he's a big part of my Markel thesis. You don't have to do extraordinary things every year. But if you do ordinary or better-than-ordinary things every year consistently for decades, you get an extraordinary result. This is something I learned from Tom. And it's a powerful lesson, both in investing and in life. $MKL Markel Group - 17th Annual Gabelli Omaha Value Investor Conference youtu.be/dfCkzZrYNDE?si… via @YouTube

JANA Partners Sends Letter to Markel Group Board of Directors prnewswire.com/news-releases/…

@abroninvestor Mr. Market...weird guy

@Greg_Speicher Intruiged that "boring" $MKL $BRK and $FFH.TO all been weak and look interesting to me in a "go-go" market environment.

Why $MKL looks cheap. Tom Gayner publishes his intrinsic value methodology right in the 10-K — Item 7, Capital Performance. Classic Buffett-Munger discipline: better to be roughly right than precisely wrong. The stickman: Start with the earnings side. Take adjusted operating income — $2.30B in 2025. Strip out dividends from the equity portfolio — $156M — and interest on cash — $228M. What's left is roughly adjusted earnings: $1.92B. He then takes a 3-year average — $1.60B — and applies a multiple. Then the balance sheet side. Add equity securities at fair value — $13.0B — and cash and short-term investments — $6.0B. Subtract debt, preferred, and noncontrolling interests — $4.8B. You get $14.2B. Divide by 12.59M shares. Tom shows three multiples — 8x, 12x, 16x: 8x → $2,143 12x → $2,651 16x → $3,158 Stock today: ~$1,779. Below his most conservative anchor. Where Tom is being conservative: Even Tom's own smoothed 3-year average earnings figure has compounded at 16.5% per year over the last five years — through COVID, through the 2023 reserve charge, through everything. Balance sheet value has compounded too — $9.0B in 2020 to $14.2B in 2025. That's a 9.5% CAGR, with faster growth over the last two years as the equity portfolio compounded and cash built. The math on multiples matters. A 12x multiple at a 12% required return only needs roughly 4% growth to be justified. Markel's actual growth has been multiples of that on both engines. Now invert it. At $1,779, the market is paying about 5x for the operating businesses after backing out the marked-to-market balance sheet. Five times. That is a very low look-through multiple for a business that just put up record earnings. There is one important caveat: Markel is not a simple industrial company with excess cash sitting on the balance sheet. Some of the investment portfolio supports the insurance business and its liabilities. So the balance-sheet value is not identical to excess cash at a software company. But that is also the point of the Markel model: insurance float, disciplined underwriting, public equities, and operating businesses all compound together. And it's not just the math. You get Tom Gayner running it. You get the Markel culture — nearly a hundred years of underwriting discipline and reserve conservatism. And you get optionality across three engines: insurance, public equities, and operating businesses, all feeding each other. Buffett taught us that this kind of optionality increases your chances of getting a date on Saturday night. Tom's putting his money where his mouth is — 223K shares bought at a $1,894 average in 2025. Bought another $134M in Q1 2026. The key underwriting question is whether recent operating performance is durable. The key valuation question is whether you are careful not to double count investment income that is already reflected in the investment portfolio. But even after making those adjustments conservatively, the setup looks unusually attractive. The 10-K shows you exactly how Gayner thinks. Do the math yourself. $MKL looks cheap. Not because the math is complicated — but because the market may be underpricing a boring, durable compounder hiding in plain sight. One specific item to flag from the Q1 2026 10-Q: Markel disclosed a collateral shortfall on a State National fronting relationship. Management has engaged outside actuaries and stated it is not material to capital position. Worth watching in subsequent filings, but not a thesis-breaker.

STRC isn't the question. Bitcoin is. The structure is just a preferred stock funding BTC accumulation — it works or fails based on what's underneath. The people calling it a scam almost always haven't done the reading. A hundred hours gets you an opinion worth holding. A thousand gets you conviction.

Nik Lentz woke up today and chose violence. 😂 Anyone care to counter $STRC being a scam claim? cc: @JoshMandell6 @PunterJeff @nithusezni

The 133x figure is forward and bakes in the 2026 capex doubling — which is the whole point. Ex-growth capex, you're at ~35x owner earnings on a business compounding OCF at 30%+. Maintenance vs. growth isn't a quibble — it's the entire question. Same mistake people made on Amazon for 15 years.

🚨Alphabet $GOOGL trades at 133x free cash flow. For context: its pre-COVID multiple was ~20x. And free cash flow hasn't grown since 2021. GQG Partners — one of the world's top institutional investors — just published a full research note titled: "Not Much Alpha Left in This Bet." Their three concerns: 1. AI is cannibalizing Google's core search revenue. Over 50% of searches may now end without a single click. No click = no ad impression. 2. CapEx is exploding. Google Cloud's capital spending now exceeds the revenue it generates. $175–185B in CapEx planned for 2026. Google Cloud generated $ 59B in revenue in 2025. 3. Advertising is cyclical. When the economy slows, ad budgets are the first to be cut. The last time this happened — 2022 — the stock fell 40%. Alphabet is an extraordinary business. But 133x FCF leaves no room for anything to go wrong. And a lot could go wrong.

"Amazon, more than any other company, actually operates with decade-long timeframes, consistently making real-world investments at massive scale that (1) convert their marginal costs into capital costs and (2) gain leverage on those capital costs by selling them to other businesses." - @benthompson This is why I have owned $AMZN for many years and am comfortable holding it as a permanent holding. Stratechery by Ben Thompson – On the business, strategy, and impact of technology. stratechery.com

As a long-time shareholder, I am liking Greg Abel's no-nonsense focus on operations and accountability. I think he will drive improvements across the portfolio. $BRK.A $BRK.B