MBI Deep Dives

MBI Deep Dives

The Appeal of Cash

Last month, Michael Mauboussin and Dan Callahan published a report on history and implications of cash holdings among publicly listed companies in the US. Excluding financial firms, US companies had $2.5 Trillion cash at the end of 2024 (4.7% of total market cap). From 1970 to 2000, the

Google's evolving TPU strategy

Google built the first Tensor Processing Unit (TPUs) because general‑purpose chips were too slow and too power‑hungry for the surge of machine‑learning inference inside Google Search, Ads, Photos, speech etc. As Moore's Law, the long-standing observation of exponential growth in transistor density, began to falter,

Texas Instruments and Analog Devices at Citi TMT Conference

Both Texas Instruments (TXN) and Analog Devices (ADI) attended Citi TMT Conference last week. Let me share some of my notes from these calls. TXN stock reacted negatively a bit after management highlighted they are not seeing a “snapback” in the current recovery: …it's not quite happening a

Lululemon 2Q'25 Update

Over the last few quarters, there have been a murmur around Lululemon potentially needing a new management to right their ship. Given that they tripled their revenue in the last six years under Calvin McDonald’s leadership, I was reluctant to join this chorus. However, after yesterday’s call, admittedly

Technology vs Platform Shift, Portfolio Change

Is the current AI phenomenon a technology or a platform shift? Or is it both? I read couple of pieces yesterday that makes a pretty convincing case that it is only a technology shift so far. Casey Winters made this point almost a couple of years ago which I think

Why I bought more Alphabet!

Believe it or not, it’s not necessarily because of Judge Mehta’s ruling yesterday! After coming back to Google as a shareholder back in April this year, I will elaborate on my decision to add to my existing position in Alphabet behind the paywall. Subscribe

The Changing Healthcare Landscape

Last month, JP Morgan published a very interesting healthcare piece titled “Sick as a Dog” which I read yesterday. They also published a podcast on this piece, but I think you would enjoy reading the piece instead. I would like to highlight some interesting points from the piece. One of

MBI turns five!

On this day five years ago, I decided to start an independent research service. I had a simple idea: just one Deep Dive on a publicly listed company every month. It may seem there are a plethora of Substacks or independent research services today, but even five years ago, there

The ROI Question

A friend recently DM-ed me to highlight one of the quotes from Nvidia’s CFO in their recent earnings: "New NVFP4 4-bit precision and NVLink 72 on the GB300 platform delivers a 50x increase in energy efficiency per token compared to Hopper, enabling companies to monetize their compute at

Google's "first mistake"

I have been listening to Acquired’s latest episode on Google. I haven’t finished the episode yet; I’m half-way into the four-hour episode. As you can imagine, there are a lot of cool anecdotes from the spree of some of the best acquisitions Google has made over the