Best Idea(s) for 2025

[Longnose]

1 hour ago, Spooky said:

 

How did you get Gemini to do this? It's telling me that it is still January 2025

Mine gave me this 

[ranimo]

On 1/4/2026 at 7:37 PM, winjitsu said:

You can likely do this w/ Claude Code now with the Chrome browser plugin, or with ChatGPT Atlas. 

 

AI coming to take our jobs  
 

That's probably a good idea!

[brobro777]

22 hours ago, Gregmal said:

lol pretty much why I’m a lousy tech investor and have little motivation with a lot of these. With tech, you almost always(as in, sans the special situation, if you wanted to be regularly investing in it) you need to buy overvalued stuff and have it keep executing. And if it does, the gains are stupid good. But if it doesn’t, there’s a lot of ways to get fucked on the rerate down from the standard 30-40x non GAAP ex SBC starting points.

 

Yea this is what happened with TTD I think - executed well for years but underperformed and got destroyed last year

 

 

[John Hjorth]

Why can't this topic just EOL, ref. the topic title?

 

[Btw., I think SD [ @SharperDingaan ] calls it 'to quark' or something like that, no ducks involved, though  ]

[bargainman]

On 1/6/2026 at 2:50 PM, Longnose said:

Mine gave me this 

 

 

Interesting.  I went back and tried and it refused to chart things for me.  Then I realized i had manually pasted the earnings from a site, and then asked for more info..  Trying with this prompt gave me the attached chart which I downloaded.  (in the chat it was way lower resolution)

 

"can you chart the adbe earnings vs the stock price during the same period? Adobe Annual EPS2025$16.702024$12.362023$11.822022$10.102021$10.022020$10.832019$6.002018$5.202017$3.382016$2.322015$1.242014$0.532013$0.562012$1.662011$1.65

Adobe Quarterly EPS2025-11-30$4.452025-08-31$4.182025-05-31$3.942025-02-28$4.142024-11-30$3.752024-08-31$3.762024-05-31$3.492024-02-29$1.362023-11-30$3.242023-08-31$3.052023-05-31$2.822023-02-28$2.712022-11-30$2.532022-08-31$2.42 Also since there are way more price points than earnings can you show the weekly stock prices."

 

 

[Spekulatius]

Just use TIKR. The stock price has tracked earnings very closely from 2014 to 2019 and after that , things got wobbly. Before 2014, earning were suppressed by the fixed  license to SaaS transition for a while. I don’t think the divergence was ever as large than it has been now.

 

[gfp]

That's the problem with an investment that still trades at a 4.95% earnings yield on suspect GAAP earnings after a huge decline and disconnect into "value territory" - is anybody getting rich buying risky 4.95% earnings yields?  I guess some are but not on downslope of the story.  

 

(if you are paying me 4.95% you better be the sovereign issuer of the paper)

Edited January 8 by gfp

[UK]

1 hour ago, gfp said:

That's the problem with an investment that still trades at a 4.95% earnings yield on suspect GAAP earnings after a huge decline and disconnect into "value territory" - is anybody getting rich buying risky 4.95% earnings yields?  I guess some are but not on downslope of the story.  

 

(if you are paying me 4.95% you better be the sovereign issuer of the paper)

 

More optimistically it trades at 6.6% EY or 15x on 2026 estimates with an expected 10+ growth. The biggest problem is to answer if it is not newspaper business of 2000 though. 

[brobro777]

1 hour ago, UK said:

 

More optimistically it trades at 6.6% EY or 15x on 2026 estimates with an expected 10+ growth. The biggest problem is to answer if it is not newspaper business of 2000 though. 

 

Boy you value investor guys are harsh as hell - newspapers from 2000? What you gonna say next, Adobe Creative cloud with 41mil paying subscribers is Yellow Pages?

 

Damn!

 

[UK]

4 hours ago, brobro777 said:

 

Boy you value investor guys are harsh as hell - newspapers from 2000? What you gonna say next, Adobe Creative cloud with 41mil paying subscribers is Yellow Pages?

 

Damn!

 

Sorry, sometimes I tend to hyperbole to make my self clear:)

[Cod Liver Oil]

@brobro777 I’m on the board of a small music tech company. Our head designer (formerly with Apple) said this about his use of the Adobe suite:

“Figma has integrated googles image editing and I’m using Adobe even less now. Their ai doesn’t work for image editing - I think they are dead. I keep my subscription to open and resize files and access to fonts.” 
No horse in the race, just scuttlebutt.

Edited January 8 by Cod Liver Oil

[Red Lion]

11 hours ago, gfp said:

That's the problem with an investment that still trades at a 4.95% earnings yield on suspect GAAP earnings after a huge decline and disconnect into "value territory" - is anybody getting rich buying risky 4.95% earnings yields?  I guess some are but not on downslope of the story.  

 

(if you are paying me 4.95% you better be the sovereign issuer of the paper)

 

Most of my best investments over the years have been somewhere in the 4.5-6% earnings yield territory. With a capital light / high margin / high ROIC business and HSD/LDD growth this can be a real sweet spot. 

[Eng12345]

12 hours ago, gfp said:

That's the problem with an investment that still trades at a 4.95% earnings yield on suspect GAAP earnings after a huge decline and disconnect into "value territory" - is anybody getting rich buying risky 4.95% earnings yields?  I guess some are but not on downslope of the story.  

 

(if you are paying me 4.95% you better be the sovereign issuer of the paper)

I mean doesn't that only imply a ~3% growth rate given a 10% hurdle rate? They're far exceeding that. 

 

The general sentiment that the market may never rerate ADBE to 20-25X though is the real risk.

The risk of them becoming a fading business is a real risk as well but may not show up in earnings immediately until it is too late. 

[formthirteen]

9 hours ago, brobro777 said:

Boy you value investor guys are harsh as hell - newspapers from 2000? What you gonna say next, Adobe Creative cloud with 41mil paying subscribers is Yellow Pages?

 

Did someone say YELP? Left for dead cannibal with improving numbers:

[brobro777]

3 hours ago, Cod Liver Oil said:

@brobro777 I’m on the board of a small music tech company. Our head designer (formerly with Apple) said this about his use of the Adobe suite:

“Figma has integrated googles image editing and I’m using Adobe even less now. Their ai doesn’t work for image editing - I think they are dead. I keep my subscription to open and resize files and access to fonts.” 
No horse in the race, just scuttlebutt.

 

That's a good point and that's the kinda shit that makes these established industry standard software valuable in my opinion. Your designer dude may think Adobe sux ass and other stuff is superior and this assessment may be totally correct. But he's still paying ADBE cuz of stupid fonts or files sizing or compatibility issues or whatever, right? ADBE is still getting the money, their paying subscriber base is still growing

 

Many years ago I tried using Open Office cuz I thought fuck you MSFT, I'm not paying for your Excel/Word bullshit, look at Open Office it's fairly decent and free! But I returned to MS Office because there would be these weirdo compatibility issues or column sizing or annoyances or whatever that pissed me off - what do you know, years later MS Office still printing money

 

 

 

[Longnose]

On 1/8/2026 at 10:20 AM, brobro777 said:

 

That's a good point and that's the kinda shit that makes these established industry standard software valuable in my opinion. Your designer dude may think Adobe sux ass and other stuff is superior and this assessment may be totally correct. But he's still paying ADBE cuz of stupid fonts or files sizing or compatibility issues or whatever, right? ADBE is still getting the money, their paying subscriber base is still growing

 

Many years ago I tried using Open Office cuz I thought fuck you MSFT, I'm not paying for your Excel/Word bullshit, look at Open Office it's fairly decent and free! But I returned to MS Office because there would be these weirdo compatibility issues or column sizing or annoyances or whatever that pissed me off - what do you know, years later MS Office still printing money

 

 

 

Did similar with open office. Wife couldnt adopt... Tried to push her to exclusively use google docs/sheets. Still couldnt adopt.  So back i am to paying for GD microsoft. 

 

Google has gotten good I think they are picking up most SMB players. But if your deeper into bigger data and try to gradutate from SMB you end up in microst. Microsoft still owns the big guns. 

[thowed]

Ha ha - I've never dared try to get anyone in the family use Open Office, but use it myself (well, Libre Office now).  Very happy, but I get that people don't want to change, and the older I get, the less I want to as well!

[brobro777]

2 hours ago, Longnose said:

Did similar with open office. Wife couldnt adopt... Tried to push her to exclusively use google docs/sheets. Still couldnt adopt.  So back i am to paying for GD microsoft. 

 

Google has gotten good I think they are picking up most SMB players. But if your deeper into bigger data and try to gradutate from SMB you end up in microst. Microsoft still owns the big guns. 

 

That's another thing - if you've been using particular software for years and you're used to it, using stuff like hotkey shortcuts, you don't wanna learn new stuff, no way 

 

Like Godfather 3 I thought I was out but MS Office pulled me back in

 

[Spekulatius]

I have worked for a few companies but none without Office. Out of the office suite I could live without all apps (Word, Power Point) but not  without Excel. Excel is sacrosanct,  not because it so great but be she everyone uses it and there are billions of spreadsheets that might have issues upon conversion. I do think AI bots could take some pain points regarding conversion away but then again, why would you do it?

 

I will happy dance on the grave of SharePoint however.

[brobro777]

32 minutes ago, Spekulatius said:

I have worked for a few companies but none without Office. Out of the office suite I could live without all apps (Word, Power Point) but not  without Excel. Excel is sacrosanct,  not because it so great but be she everyone uses it and there are billions of spreadsheets that might have issues upon conversion. I do think AI bots could take some pain points regarding conversion away but then again, why would you do it?

 

I will happy dance on the grave of SharePoint however.

 

Yea if you got a 10 year old Excel file with 30k rows of customer data with pivot tables, you probably don't want to mess around with Open office or anything else - you're gonna pay MSFT for Excel

 

Even with Word, if you got a long contract with 150 track changes from lawyers with odious personalities, you're not switching to Word Perfect. And I actually worked at a place that used nothing but Word Perfect in 2007!

 

 

[UK]

3 hours ago, Spekulatius said:

I have worked for a few companies but none without Office. Out of the office suite I could live without all apps (Word, Power Point) but not  without Excel. Excel is sacrosanct,  not because it so great but be she everyone uses it and there are billions of spreadsheets that might have issues upon conversion. I do think AI bots could take some pain points regarding conversion away but then again, why would you do it?

 

I will happy dance on the grave of SharePoint however.

 

Yea, a while ago I thought about possibility of using it on Tablet, but it seems is not the same, so Excel is basically the only reason I still own a PC:)

[winjitsu]

10 hours ago, brobro777 said:

 

Yea if you got a 10 year old Excel file with 30k rows of customer data with pivot tables, you probably don't want to mess around with Open office or anything else - you're gonna pay MSFT for Excel

 

Even with Word, if you got a long contract with 150 track changes from lawyers with odious personalities, you're not switching to Word Perfect. And I actually worked at a place that used nothing but Word Perfect in 2007!

 

 

Actually I think both are great examples of how you can move off these formats with AI. 

The Excel should have been a database or a SQL file in the first place. Before, it'd require some techy savvy and coding knowledge (or a developer/dba) to run the scripts to get the same info as a pivot table. Not user friendly, and we spawned a generation of financial analysts creating god-awful 100 tab, 10k row, vba heavy workbooks that get sent around in emails with names like q3_analysis_v12_final.xlsx

But now with AI, you can do that very, very easily do it the right way with a DB + SQL/Python Scripts to a dashboard or pulled into excel. The world will be significant better off moving data off of offline worksheets. 

 

Ditto with the word doc, you can easily ask AI to create a table with before and after comparisons. 

[brobro777]

11 hours ago, winjitsu said:

Actually I think both are great examples of how you can move off these formats with AI. 

The Excel should have been a database or a SQL file in the first place. Before, it'd require some techy savvy and coding knowledge (or a developer/dba) to run the scripts to get the same info as a pivot table. Not user friendly, and we spawned a generation of financial analysts creating god-awful 100 tab, 10k row, vba heavy workbooks that get sent around in emails with names like q3_analysis_v12_final.xlsx

But now with AI, you can do that very, very easily do it the right way with a DB + SQL/Python Scripts to a dashboard or pulled into excel. The world will be significant better off moving data off of offline worksheets. 

 

Ditto with the word doc, you can easily ask AI to create a table with before and after comparisons. 

 

See bro that sounds way too complicated. These lawyer types don't wanna deal with that - they'll just pay MSFT some more money and move on to being awful people that they are. Besides, they don't want their precious legalese to be tampered with AI, let alone put into some weirdo box!

 

No!

 

[brobro777]

11 hours ago, winjitsu said:

Actually I think both are great examples of how you can move off these formats with AI. 

The Excel should have been a database or a SQL file in the first place. Before, it'd require some techy savvy and coding knowledge (or a developer/dba) to run the scripts to get the same info as a pivot table. Not user friendly, and we spawned a generation of financial analysts creating god-awful 100 tab, 10k row, vba heavy workbooks that get sent around in emails with names like q3_analysis_v12_final.xlsx

But now with AI, you can do that very, very easily do it the right way with a DB + SQL/Python Scripts to a dashboard or pulled into excel. The world will be significant better off moving data off of offline worksheets. 

 

Ditto with the word doc, you can easily ask AI to create a table with before and after comparisons. 

 

Not the legal word doc but you may be right about AI and Excel data yea 

 

 

[benchmark]

15 hours ago, winjitsu said:

Actually I think both are great examples of how you can move off these formats with AI. 

The Excel should have been a database or a SQL file in the first place. Before, it'd require some techy savvy and coding knowledge (or a developer/dba) to run the scripts to get the same info as a pivot table. Not user friendly, and we spawned a generation of financial analysts creating god-awful 100 tab, 10k row, vba heavy workbooks that get sent around in emails with names like q3_analysis_v12_final.xlsx

But now with AI, you can do that very, very easily do it the right way with a DB + SQL/Python Scripts to a dashboard or pulled into excel. The world will be significant better off moving data off of offline worksheets. 

 

Ditto with the word doc, you can easily ask AI to create a table with before and after comparisons. 

It's not the data, but the usability of the excel sheet that makes it stick. I agree that always connect to the 'right data source' is better, until dashboard becomes easy to create/use/share, excel has a long life line.