MBI Deep Dives

MBI Deep Dives

Amazon 2Q'22 Earnings Update

Disclosure: I own shares of Amazon Amazon may be the first and the last ~$1.5 Tn market cap company to report negative Trailing Twelve Months (TTM) FCF (-$23.5 Bn to be exact). It is quite incredible how Amazon management gained credibility and earned trust to ride through

Meta 2Q'22 Earnings Update

Disclosure: I own shares of Meta “…we seem to have entered an economic downturn that will have a broad impact on the digital advertising business. And it's always hard to predict how deep or how long these cycles will be, but I'd say that the situation

Shopify 2Q'22 Earnings Update

Disclosure: I own shares of Shopify “2022 will be different, more of a transition year in which e-commerce is largely reset to the pre-COVID trend line and is now pressured by persistent high inflation.” Let's dive into this "transition year"! While Shopify still maintains >50%

Spotify 2Q'22 Earnings Update

Disclosure: I own shares of Spotify “…we believe the Spotify machine is what differentiates us from other tech platforms. It leverages one consumer experience, powered by 3 revenue-generating business models: subscriptions, ads and marketplace.” After falling into the abyss, the "machine" mostly delivered this quarter which led to

Alphabet 2Q'22 Earnings Update

Disclosure: I own shares of Alphabet 2022 is the year of tough comps, along with macro uncertainty. The word "uncertainty" was emphasized by CFO Ruth Porat because "the data are complicated". Let's look at some simple data from the most recent quarter first. While

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Danaher: A compounding machine over four decades

Steven and Mitchell Rales, the two brothers who co-founded Danaher, formed an investment partnership in 1979 when they were still in their 20s. After buying a bankrupt REIT in 1983, they merged all the assets they owned and formed a public company named “Danaher”, which is named after a Montana

PayPal: Beyond the Button

Note: I also appeared on a podcast to discuss payments industry. You can find the podcast here. PayPal is a very special company in the Silicon Valley folklore. In 1998, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin started a company called “Confinity” which later merged with X.com, which was founded by

Adyen: The “Navy SEAL” Team of Payments

Adyen means “start over again”. In 2006, a group of entrepreneurs, including Pieter van der Does and Arnout Schuijff, founded Adyen. The name “Adyen” was chosen because the same group founded Bibit, a payment company, and after selling the company to Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), they decided to start

Ethereum: A Literature Review

Crypto can be quite divisive area of investing. It certainly does not help when Peter Thiel calls Warren Buffett “Sociopathic Grandpa” for criticizing Bitcoin or when Buffett characterizes Bitcoin as “rat poison squared”. When I tweeted on April 1st that I’m going to cover Ethereum this month, some of