Topic

Portfolio_Change

A collection of 14 issues

What exactly is CSU's ROIC?

Yesterday, I mentioned “While CSU’s heydays of ~50-60% ROIC is clearly behind us, CSU’s ROIC in the last 12 quarters has been quite sticky around ~30% which is plenty good!” A couple of readers pushed back on how I calculated ROIC and after thinking through their points, I

Digital Advertising Industry Snapshot, Portfolio Change

As is the tradition in every earnings season, I am sharing my digital advertising Snapshot after 3Q’25 earnings. Digital ads market growth has accelerated to 18.4% in 3Q’25 (vs 15.7% in 2Q’25 and 14.1% in 3Q’24). Meta continues to gain market share every

Corpay 3Q'25 Update, Portfolio Change

Many payments companies are going through bit of a rough patch in the latter half of this year. Unfortunately, Corpay hasn’t been an exception. Thankfully, they reported a pretty decent quarter. I will cover my highlights from the quarter as well as some risks I see behind the paywall.

The Data Center Story: Part 2, Portfolio Change

So I finished the Data Center episode by stepchange yesterday. But let me offer a correction from yesterday’s piece first. I quoted “stepchange” saying, “Many enterprises had PUE numbers around 2, meaning twice as much power went to lights, cooling, and everything else compared to the amount of power

How people use ChatGPT and its implications, Portfolio Change

There was a lot of chatter about an NBER working paper “How People Use ChatGPT” yesterday. Unlike most survey work or academic paper looking into this question, what differentiates this paper is it is written by people at OpenAI. As you can imagine, there is a treasure trove of interesting

More Alphabet!

“Eventually, AI will change everything…though not everyone fully grasp the extent of the tsunami that is approaching…Training AI models is a gigantic multitrillion-dollar market. It's hard to conceive of a technology market as large as that one. But if you look close, you can find one

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

Tyler Technologies, Portfolio Change

I have published 61 Deep Dives over the last five years. Obviously, that’s a lot to keep track for one person. However, given that I already spent a month studying each of these businesses, it usually doesn’t take too long for me to get up to speed on

Digital Advertising Snapshot, Corpay 2Q'25, Portfolio Change

Digital Advertising Snapshot As is the tradition in every earnings season, I am sharing my digital advertising Snapshot after 2Q’25 earnings. Three key takeaways: 1. For the nine consecutive quarters, Meta has outpaced Google in terms of incremental share. If Meta’s guide is any indication, that will almost

The "humorless" and timeless machine of Booking Holdings, Portfolio Change

Almost three years ago, my friend Scuttleblurb described Booking in a way that I believe truly encapsulated the essence of the company: Booking is metrics – it iterates on performance marketing game mechanics and humorlessly monitors every bit of performance down the hour. Indeed, I doubt there is any better company