WayWardCloud

Goog does more SBC too.

The Constellation Software debacle is making me rethink my position in brokers. I think both they and CSU will be fine investments long term but right now it seems like only the "an insurance soft market in coming" bear thesis is baked into the price. When a startup like the one Benchmark mentioned above starts making headlines and their CEO makes huge claims on Twitter, we could see a similar carnage in brokers stock prices, whether warranted or not. I'm basically looking at my whole portfolio thinking "could this be the next AI disruption fear"? I'm thinking of playing it safe and lowering my allocation from 10% to 7% (half AJG half BRO). Both are about at cost so I wouldn't pay much taxes at all. Am I making a mistake?

Bezos is such a legend! I wish Blue Origin was inside Amazon so we could participate. The next generation of tech giants is staying private forever or IPOing at hundreds of billions when the big returns have already been made. This move from public to private arguably mimics our slide from a republic to an oligarchy. So grateful for public markets!

You could look into Fairfax India, they own the Bangalore airport.

+37% and my best year so far! I am not done with my full debrief of this year's trades but I'm expecting the over-performance to have come almost entirely from several big purchases of Alphabet between $145 and $160 in the spring. Google trading at a forward PE of ~17 for 2 whole months is proof that you don't need any special skills to jump over 1-foot hurdles. My goal is to keep it very simple and focus on those most obvious trades in the future, which of course are easier to identify in hindsight. The rest of the time I'll be happy to just sit on an all world ETF and high quality compounders. Thank you everyone who participated in the forums and educated me. Happy 2026 EDIT: Actually a second factor played into this year's performance almost as much as the Alphabet pick, levering up during the tariff tantrum. I went from ~85% long to ~125% for a couple months using IBKR margin.

Higher yield higher margins higher growth. 3 markets : Brazil 55%, Mexico 20%, Argentina 20% In Brazil, fierce competition : MELI has 40% of the market, Shopee 20% and Amazon 20% In Mexico two scaled players : Meli at 40% and Amazon at 30% In Argentina (where founder is from) shitshow economy obviously but because of it they have virtually no competitor so if Milei manages to turn around the country it could be huge They have built out their own logistical infrastructure in a five years plan 2017-2022 45% of revenue already comes from Fintech and it's growing faster than e-com (49% vs 33%) The other fintech mammoth is NuBank (more consummer focused, MELI is more merchand focused) LatAm in general seems to be turning the corner and voting for capitalism. LatAm fintech went through a major boom/bust cycle and I think the survivors could do very well from here. MELI's SBC is unfortunately egregious as well.

Almost half of that FCF goes into share based compensation, so it trades at like 80X true owner FCF. It's a great company but I don't see the value other forumers see at current price. I personally much prefer Mercado Libre.

I tried using Pinterest for home decor inspiration and 90% of the results were AI slop instead of real objects which made the website completely useless. Am I missing something?

33% All World Stocks ETF 20% Alphabet 8% US Corporate Bonds ETF 6% Mercado Libre 6% Constellation Software 5% Arthur J. Gallagher 4% Brown & Brown 4% Amazon 4% Microsoft 4% Global-E 4% Patria 3% Liberty Broadband

Always a fun (and humbling for me haha) game! My picks last year: Alphabet (up 60%) Airbnb (flat YTD) LVMH (flat YTD) My picks for 2026: Mercado Libre (MELI) Arthur J Gallagher (AJG) Constellation Software (CSU)

Thanks for explaining!

You can absolutely use the Gemini model on its own inside Perplexity but since its siloed off it won't provide you with the Google ecosystem integration you get from using Gemini directly and giving it access to your private data from all the other Google apps you've been using for years. So you will get great general responses but not personalized ones tailored to your current projects, your personality or your history. Which means for multi steps projects you will have to keep copy pasting things from one app to another in multiple tabs who don't speak to each other and also that your AI assistant will never learn how you like things done and how to serve you better specifically. I think for now this cross-functionality is barely starting but as agentic behaviors and personal date integration increase, the models who have permission to navigate into the already existing plumbing of your digital everyday life (maps, emails, calendar, docs) will prove much more useful and seamless.

The differentiation will come from integrating your personal AI chatbot (and soon agent) with everything else you already do. I use Gemini Pro and it's connecting to my gmail, google calendar, google photos and google docs and let's me retrieve and send information back and forth between all those separate apps. It's still early and not super useful all the time but I can see the unified vision taking place. Something that Perplexity can never do. Just like The Gemini team describes itself as the engine room at Alphabet, the Gemini model is planning to be the engine room or control center from which you pilot the ecosystem of all of your Google services. This is when decades of offering things for free pays off, in particular the trove of unique data assembled inside Gmail and Google docs. They know everything about you and now they're going to make it centralized, useful and accessible to you. The vision has been layed out a long time ago : "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". I would say the twist is that it's actually going to become much more "personal" than "universal". Microsoft has the opportunity to do the equivalent but for enterprise. So far they're bungling the execution though.

This podcast is just 100% AI right? Any particular nuggets of information you liked?

If an AI lab is able to massively improve drug discovery, I would expect them to divert a big chunk of the profits away from legacy pharma, turning them into a lower margin OEM, no?

I'd like to hear what exactly he's been right about for 40 years. Looks to me like he led Facebook nowhere and now Mark is left trying to catch up with everyone else even though he had the foresight to start an AI division at his company a whole decade ago.

Schadenfreude is such an odd thing to root for.

Added to Constellation too, let's see!

Thank you very much! You and Dealraker both recommend the Wells Fargo analysts so I'd be curious to put together 10 years of their price targets and see if they do outperform a simple buy and hold of the entire basket. If the alpha is substantial it could be a beautiful strategy to constantly hop onto the better short term horse inside a tax free account while maintaining a constant exposure to the industry. If anyone has access to this kind of data, maybe via Bloomberg or Factset, message me Happy to share the results here of course. Here are the latest price targets and implied upside from Elyse Greenspan. AJG and AON seem like her current favorites. Marsh and McLeanne $212 +18% Aon $448 +37% Arthur J Gallagher $366 +40% Brown&Brown $92 +15% Willis Towers Watson $382 +22% Ryan Specialty $64 +18% Baldwin Insurance $28 +27%

I'd love to hear your reasons for preferring RYAN (wholesale) to the big brokers (MMC, AON, AJG, BRO) if you don't mind sharing. RYAN seems like a bet on the continued growth of E&S contracts as a percentage of the overall insurance mix. I have no idea how to predict how long that trend will continue and what happens if it reverses but RYAN feels less diversified in their income stream so perhaps more risky.

Just hopped onto the CSU boat as well fellas. Very confused by the price action but I'll take it

I sold out of Lululemon today. Thank you for the idea Parsad and good luck to everyone. I believe you will do very well here but I realized I was just not comfortable holding fashion in general. The same thing happened to me in the past with LVMH. I understood the thesis but once I became an owner I never felt at ease. Trends and other people's taste are so subjective and mysterious... It freaks me out to depend on it. Also felt like raising a little cash wasn't the worst idea.

Wikipedia on the guy being interviewed : Chang has made numerous predictions of the imminent collapse of the Chinese government and fall of the Communist Party since 2001 including the specific years.[10][11][12] In the 2001 book The Coming Collapse of China, Chang insisted that the government would collapse in 2011. When 2011 was almost over, he admitted that his prediction was wrong but said that he was off by only a year and wrote in the Foreign Policy magazine, that "Instead of 2011, the mighty Communist Party of China will fall in 2012. Bet on it." Consequently he made Foreign Policy's "10 worst predictions of the year" twice in a row when his predictions were proven wrong again.[13] He's a fake expert who is only being brought onto the show because he says what they want to hear.

I used to separate my assets into three buckets on an Google Sheet : Real Estate, Passive Index Investing, and Stock picking. Because there was nothing to say or do about the first 2 buckets I would only focus on the 3rd bucket and it took all the space in my mind. A couple years ago I had a nice win on a stock. I was all proud until I realized that even though the return was great it was over such a small percentage of my actual net worth that being right had barely changed anything to my life and that I should have sized the bet much bigger. Since then I've merged all 3 buckets into one big pie at the top of the document and that's now what I'm starring at on a daily basis. All formatting options are just views of the mind obviously, but I believe switching to full net worth has really helped me get the right perspective. It helps me intuitively keep in mind some sense of an answer to this question : When I have a big conviction, how do I size it so that it's somewhat life changing if I'm right AND so that I live to fight another day if I'm wrong?

That's the thing with investing in Chinese stocks, it's the biggest insider trade ever if you happen to have any true insights into the Party. I'm sure many politicians and their families make a lot of money front running some of the decisions. I don't know anything about your background NSX but I'm a white foreigner who doesn't speak any Chinese so I'm very aware that I will always be at an informational disadvantage compared to a home buyer who has political connections and I don't like feeling like the patsy. Do you want to share your reasons for thinking a regime change could be imminent with us? If true this is massive news.