

m0xt
2.9K posts

@m0xt_
Analyst at @Milkroaddaily | Hunting mispriced conviction | Building @Portfolio_OS








.$FIGR dropped 9% yesterday. No bad news. The stock had ripped 20%+ the prior week, including a 13% pop on June 30 when the IPO lock-up expired without heavy insider selling. Yesterday was light volume profit-taking on an extended name. Then, after the bell, they released unofficial Q2 marketplace volume numbers. $4.26B . Up 47% from the prior quarter. Q1 was $2.9B in volume at a 49.6% adjusted EBITDA margin. A year ago that margin was 32.6%. The platform is getting more profitable as it scales, not less. They beat the high end of their own Q2 guidance by $160M! In the quarter they also closed a $300M fully prefunded securitization. Institutional capital was locked in before the loans even closed. Figure built on blockchain rails from the ground up. If you think blockchain is dead, this is the inconvenient data point. Real volume, real margins, real institutional demand. No speculative token attached to it. The market sold off on nothing. The business printed a record quarter. I have been building a position in FIGR in my Milk Road PRO portfolio over the last few months. You can track my real-time moves (link in bio).

Agentic AI adoption is on fire at @Uber, and it's changing the way we build, not just in engineering, but across the entire company. Today, 99% of our engineers use AI tools. More than 70% of pull requests are attributed to local or cloud agents. And our engineers have built 2,500+ agent skills across the software development lifecycle. Those numbers are exciting, but they led us to a much bigger question: How do we bring agentic AI beyond engineering? Finance. Legal. Operations. Marketing. Customer Support. HR. Procurement. These functions run on complex workflows that are often manual, highly nuanced, and spread across dozens of systems. You can't automate them effectively by looking at process diagrams or documentation. You have to understand how the work actually gets done. So we created something called Agentic Pods. The idea is simple. We handpicked ~30 of our most AI-proficient engineers (people with deep knowledge of Uber's systems) and paired each of them with a domain expert from a business function. Then we gave every pod just two weeks. • Days 1 – 2: Shadow the expert. Observe every step. Document workflows. Ask questions. Build intuition. • Day 3: Prioritize opportunities based on scale, repetition, business impact, and data availability. • Days 4 – 5: Build a working agent alongside the person doing the job. • Days 6 – 9: Validate with several others performing the same work. Does it generalize? Does it actually make their job better? • Day 10: Ship. In just the past two months, we've run 16 Agentic Pods across 16 different business functions. • Capital allocation across 150 cities: 15 hours → 30 minutes. • Financial pacing reports: 2 days → 10 minutes. • Marketing web quality assurance: 2 weeks → 50 minutes. • Support workflow creation: 9,000 manual workflows → self-service automation. The productivity gains are impressive, but what surprised us most wasn't the speed. • It was how quickly engineers embedded in unfamiliar domains uncovered opportunities that had been hiding in plain sight. • The biggest wins rarely come from automating one task. They come from rethinking an entire workflow. Once you redesign the workflow around AI, you often eliminate handoffs, remove unnecessary approvals, replace legacy tooling, reduce vendor spend, and dramatically accelerate decision-making. • The workflow becomes the unit of automation - not the individual task. • The most impactful agent skills cut across teams, orgs, functions, tools, and systems. The biggest lesson? The best AI opportunities are rarely visible from the outside. You discover them by sitting next to the people doing the work, understanding every friction point, and building with them, not for them. We're now forming a dedicated team to scale this further and go deeper. They'll deeply understand the work, redesign it from the ground up, and use AI to fundamentally change how the business operates. It's exciting times!

Starbucks is replacing Microsoft and IBM to cut $400 million in software spend. That is what the headline says. Here is what it actually means. Starbucks is not just cutting costs. It is replacing rented intelligence with proprietary AI platforms the company owns and controls. That is a different decision. And it is about to become the most important strategic choice every large company makes this decade. Let me explain why. The most valuable thing inside most companies today is invisible on the balance sheet. You can see the patent portfolio. You can see the brand. What you cannot see is the distributed know-how: how your inventory team spots a shortage before the system flags it, how your maintenance crew knows which equipment is about to fail before the sensor does, how your store managers make a hundred small judgment calls every day that no manual captures. That knowledge lives in people's heads, in workflows, in ten thousand decisions accumulated over years. That is what a business actually is in 2026. Human capital is not an HR metric. It is the operating system behind every competitive advantage that matters. Here is what changes. In five to ten years, the businesses that win will not be the ones with the best people. They will be the ones that learned how to convert their people's judgment into something that compounds without them. Not by replacing people, but by encoding what makes them good into systems the company owns and controls. Satya Nadella calls this "Token Capital." The concept is not new. The name is. The model itself is a commodity. What is not a commodity is the institutional context, the decision patterns, the corrections and overrides and failure modes that teach a system how your organization specifically thinks. That asset has the properties of land: finite, appreciating, impossible to replicate at cost. Using AI for trivial tasks is not a strategy. It is the minimum. Every serious company should already be there. The question that actually separates winners from losers is what comes next: are you on a deliberate trajectory to rebuild the company around AI, or are you using AI to make last decade's company run a little faster? Starbucks just answered that question. The $400 million is not the story. The story is that they are choosing to own the learning curve instead of renting it from Microsoft and IBM. The companies that win this decade will not have adopted AI. They will have used the first wave to learn how their own organization thinks, encoded that judgment into systems they own, and then rebuilt their operating model around those systems. The moat is not which tools you bought. It is whether you captured the learning before it walked out the door or leaked into someone else's model. Markets still price companies as if talent, brand, and registered IP are the durable advantages. They are not underwriting the new moat yet. The investment question is not which companies are using AI. It is which companies are rebuilding around it. I am on the lookout for those companies. Follow my research at Milk Road (link in bio).

The mega bull case for AI infrastructure would be *if* market share shifted away from certain frontier labs with 90%+ inference margins toward cheaper models, whether open-source or closed. It would increase the ROI on AI spend for end customers by increasing intelligence per dollar, which would drive incremental token demand. Margin dollars would effectively get redistributed from the frontier labs to AI infrastructure providers. The infra winners would be those with the lowest per token cost and the winners at the model layer would be those with the highest token efficiency. There are many reasons Jensen is so focused on open source, but this is likely the most important one as I think he is probably less worried about a monopsony these days. Lower margin % at the model layer = more margin $ at the infra layer all else equal. With SpaceX and Meta being vertically integrated and possessing the #3 and #4 models respectively it is more possible than ever. Note that Grok 4.5 is ahead of Fable for some useful tasks at a much lower cost, so ranking them #3 is conservative. This is not happening yet. Cheap, mostly open source tokens are likely the majority of volume today but the majority of economic value is still accruing to the most intelligent models. Might change though. We will see.















SK Hynix IPOs on the Nasdaq this Friday. Largest ADR listing in US history. $28 billion. Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness fund, Baillie Gifford, and Coatue committed $7 billion as cornerstone investors. The guy whose AI thesis the entire industry reads, and one of the sharpest tech funds on the planet all want this in their portfolio. The IPO reference price is based on SK Hynix's July 3rd Korean close at 242,500 won, which works out to ~$158 per ADS. The expected pricing? $166. A 5% premium before it even starts trading. Meanwhile SK Hynix has traded down in Korea since July 3rd. US investors are paying more than the current Korean price to get in. That's not speculation. That's real demand. Now here's what makes this interesting for me. I don't own SKHY. I own SK Square, the holding company that owns 20.5% of SK Hynix. And right now there are three discounts stacked in my favor. Let me walk you through them: Discount 1: SK Square trades at a 49% discount to the value of what it owns. Its stake in SK Hynix alone is worth almost double SK Square's entire market cap. So for every $1 you put into SK Square, you're getting roughly $2 worth of SK Hynix exposure. Discount 2: SK Hynix has traded down in Korea since July 3rd. The stock is currently below the reference price that the US IPO is based on. Discount 3: The US IPO is expected to price at $166 per ADS, a 5% premium to that already-higher reference price. Aschenbrenner and Baillie Gifford are paying $166. Through SK Square, I'm getting that same exposure at roughly half price. So the smartest AI investors on the planet are paying a premium to buy SK Hynix at the US IPO. I'm buying the same company through its holding company at a 49% discount to the Korean price, which is already below what the US IPO is charging. I added more yesterday. I might be adding more today. Friday the US listing goes live. When a trillion-dollar AI monopoly gets real US price discovery, that 49% holdco discount has nowhere to hide. SK Square is my second biggest position. You can see exactly how I'm sizing it and every other position in my Milk Road PRO portfolio. Real-time portfolio access for $1 (link in bio).



