market participant

@SharirAriel Agreed

@undrvalue Spend a year doing a deep dive on private market SST companies and the second I saw the news I jumped in heavy - extremely well positioned to execute in a highly in demand market

Saw that Coatue bought a lot of $ENPH. With their increasing AI & datacenter focus, seems like a good signal of the tech being real (as a generalist investor, I tend to rely on others to validate this, especially when my speculative bets get pricy).

@WagieCapital Game theory - if your competition can take users doing it, you must compete Incentives and resourcing - internal Codex adoption targets and marketing budgets means the Codex team can use some paid to juice their download numbers

Why are AI products with supposedly “infinite demand” regularly running social media ads?

@siyul No surprise. The problem is people assume one can simply “do better targeting” and break into the core mix

@undrvalue Yea, but there is no surprise here right? That's a function of ads revenue, all public data. we know it is still ~1/2 of PINS.

Still cant wrap my head around the breathless Reddit bull case. Why die on the hill of a speculative licensing business on top of a mediocre ads business? The numbers are good, yes… but for how long? Beware stocks that don’t reward good news…

My worst pick was $GTLB After witnessing coding agents cross the chasm of usefulness in 2025, Instead of loading up on hardware bottlenecks, I went for an undervalued beneficiary of increased code generation with excellent F100 penetration and lots of upside from incorporating AI workflows… What a frustrating stock to hold. Rode it down (and back up) from about $40. In no hurry to sell… Takeaway: Don’t be lazy about extrapolating megatrends to first-order beneficiaries and assume a vacuum of competition and macro behavior. Be thoughtful about both directions of business change from major technology shifts.

My filter question to assess if any investor (writer) is worth following: “What was your worst pick in the last 2–3 years? If you exited, what made you sell? If you still hold, why? What’s the takeaway?” The best ones answer with no hesitation and honesty; the rest dodge, spin, or blame the market. The truth: the most important step to improve as an investor (or anything) is to embrace your mistakes and ruthlessly analyze them. Happy to share mine. Any brave souls to share theirs?

@siyul Here:

@siyul For example.. Reddit not even on here

@siyul @ng_TO1 🫡

@undrvalue @ng_TO1 " $rddt is not a no brainer". 100% agree, and let me double down on it, I have zero "no-brainer pick" in my portfolio.

Fair! Durability is unknown but will be objective in hindsight Slapping on a better PE then Meta who has been driving amazing ROI for advertisers order of magnitudes higher spend, while still growing 30%, is just not a no brainer to me, is my point here When I talk about breathless takes, I don’t mean yours. I mean those who can’t zoom out and see that there’s competition and execution risk ahead

@siyul They can keep putting more ads in front of their engaged user base. I’m worried that it will have rapidly diminishing returns… UNLESS They can crack a new ad format that is not text based display that gets a 1% share of corporate budgets

Agreed! Here’s a snippet from a post I made a few months ago “78% of traffic is mobile and the native app accounts for 61% of sessions. App users spend 30 minutes a day on the platform. That’s a nice moat - habitual, sticky usage But logged-out users are now 55% of daily traffic, growing 2-3x faster than logged-in. These are the search-driven visitors. One thread, a few impressions, gone. They claim per-impression value is the same for both groups. Maybe. But even if each impression prices the same, logged-in users see more of them. The faster-growing cohort is the less engaged one. I learned that they are dropping the logged-in vs. logged-out reporting split starting Q3 2026. Sketchy”

@lngtermcapital They have a lot of outbound sales reps offering credits, we’ll see if it can sustain…

@undrvalue Ad revenue is increasing by 75%, so someone is spending money on the platform.

@obfuscated_id Best in what class?

@undrvalue Ad business is best in class. Advertisers spend less, convert more, and consumers spend >2x more. The lisencing business isn’t the bull case - only for those who don’t know what they’re talking about. Also the bear case for those who don’t know what they’re talking about.

@fivepointscap And btw, this is all in good faith, I have no position and no dogma here. I’d probably flip bullish around $120. My post is calling out the general overconfidence I perceive as if there’s no business risk and the market is blind

The business depends on a text-based display ads product that the users don’t want and aren’t influenced by. It’s a good free product for users. I am not persuaded by the quality of the business They have the POTENTIAL to cross the chasm and have a real solid search ads business with the Ask product, continue to improve targeting, ad load, etc But there’s a lot of competitive and execution risk ahead. Meta is objectively a much better business and has traded much lower in recent years

@EyeTestCapital Explain to me how their ads product continues to grow using data

@undrvalue It is fine to be bearish. There are plenty of reasons to be so. But you also should easily be able to wrap your head around the bull case

Based on these replies, it’s clear very few people have ever spent (lost) money Reddit ads.

@ng_TO1 Quality business is a very subjective term The durability of the ads business revenue growth is not proven

@undrvalue This might be the dumbest financial advice I've seen today (although the night is young). By this logic, no quality business is worth investing in when the stock price is down.

@lngtermcapital Show me some real businesses with Reddit as a meaningful and growing share of ad spend

@undrvalue I think her numbers prove that ad business isn’t so mediocre anymore and only has more upside