MBI Deep Dives (Page 4)

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Why I am buying Floor & Decor

Since becoming a public company in 2017, Floor & Decor (FND) is currently going through its largest ever drawdown in its history. The stock is currently down ~65% from its peak in late 2021. However, looking at NTM EV/EBIT multiple, it may appear the stock is still trading at

Ryan Specialty: The Unconflicted Middleman

Programming Note: I will take the next two days off. MBI Deep Dives will be back on Monday next week. You can listen to the Deep Dive here Pat Ryan, currently 88-year old, is a living legend in the insurance industry. Soon after graduating from college, he entered insurance industry

Nadella's Flip-Flop

There are perhaps few things in the current AI revolution that keeps my opinions grounded than watching Microsoft’s evolving position in the post-ChatGPT world. It can be tempting to imagine investors just frenetically changing their labels to Microsoft as “AI winner” or “AI loser” every few months, but the

Survival of the Fastest

More than a decade ago, Peter Thiel wrote: “Monopolists lie to protect themselves. They know that bragging about their great monopoly invites being audited, scrutinized and attacked. Since they very much want their monopoly profits to continue unmolested, they tend to do whatever they can to conceal their monopoly—usually

OpenAI's Dilemma

WSJ yesterday had an interesting reporting on why OpenAI is pondering to focus more on enterprise. Some excerpts from the piece: “OpenAI’s top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users, recognizing that a “do everything all at once”

The Neocloud Trojan Horse

One of the most frequent pushbacks that I have received to my recent posts on AWS (see here, and here) is that the neoclouds are not a legitimate concern for hyperscalers such as AWS and Azure in the long term. Frankly speaking, I myself operated under this assumption for the

Veeva Model Update

As I have promised earlier, I have updated my Veeva model yesterday. If you are not familiar with the company, I suggest you read my Deep Dive (September 2024), and an update on the company from December last year. I will briefly go through the model and share some thoughts

Meta at the AI Crossroads

A couple of days ago, NYT reported that Meta will delay releasing its new foundational AI model to May this year. While Meta never really publicly disclosed when they would likely release their new model, it was widely believed to be sometime in March. However, NYT’s reporting indicated that

Editing Adobe

At first glance, everything seems to be chugging along just fine at Adobe. Their earnings yesterday continued to show that revenue is still growing at double digit rate with operating margins remaining quite stable. In fact, Adobe mentioned their ARR from “AI first” offering tripled YoY with monthly active users

Meta's Chip Resilience

AWS, Google, and Microsoft have all deployed a similar chip strategy with varying degree of success. Google has its TPUs, AWS has Trainium, and Microsoft has its Maia chips. The success of their chips so far are also in that order with TPU being ahead of the pack and Maia