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Wednesday, September 30, 2026

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@convequity

Convequity on X

$PANW and $DDOG both put something real inside the customer's systems that an AI lab cannot recreate by calling SaaS APIs. Palo Alto's install is still harder to replace with AI. 1. Datadog's agents mostly sit outside the traffic and watch production. A bad agent version rarely takes the business down the way a bad firewall rule can. 2. Palo Alto's firewalls and SASE cloud gateways sit inside the traffic and decide what to allow, deny, decrypt or inspect. A wrong allow or deny hits live traffic and live machines. 3. Many Datadog users start the day in a coding agent and open Datadog when something looks wrong. Many Palo Alto users start in its console and stay there through alerts, triage and response. For them, an outside AI agent is an add-on. Cybersecurity work splits two ways on AI risk. Work done before code ships ("shift-left") or from outside the traffic, such as scanning code, checking cloud settings and sorting collected alerts, gives answers that are easy to check. AI agents are already taking over more of it. Work in live traffic and on live machines ("shift-right") means judging whether an attacker is still inside and whether blocking them is safe. That is more ambiguous and mistakes cost more, so enterprises move slower and demand earned trust. Palo Alto is not risk-free. In our view its exposure is the easily checked detection and vulnerability work inside its platform, which AI agents can take over sooner. The threat is not an AI-native firewall startup.
@ActAccordingly

PAA Research on X

Following the action in $FICO, it seems this post from @pulte has drawn increased investor attention to $STC $FAF $ORI $FNF and their title insurance pricing policies. We have had a short call on $STC and $FAF for some time. There's no doubt there are several technology options that could lower title insurance costs (AI) if not eliminate the need for it altogether (blockchain). You already have many brokers offering bundled solutions for title, mortgage, and advisory. Lots of pressure on these busineses.

Investor Letters

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Toll roads in the sky

Asia's elevator boom favors maintenance and modernization providers, with Otis deriving nearly 90% of operating profit from after-sales…

OTIS $24B
Asian Century Stocks 1 click
ANET · long

Arista Networks INC

Arista Networks, at about $150 per share, is a $190 billion data-center networking franchise generating $9.7 billion of LTM revenue with…

ANET $260B
Value Investors Club 4 clicks

Precision AI

Adobe’s licensed vector data, corporate workflow integration and compliance framework could give it an edge in precision AI as frontier…

ADBE $92B
Bearstone

Intuit deep dive

Intuit’s QuickBooks, TurboTax and SMB ecosystem face AI-native challengers, tax-filing disruption and pressure on payroll and payments…

INTU $72B
Global Outperformers

What I've Been Reading

Yesway, Dollar General and Expedia feature in a research roundup spanning convenience retail, discount stores and AI-driven travel search.

DG $26BEXPE $32B
Stock Thoughts

Everyone Bought the Shovels

Element Solutions sells consumable chipmaking chemistry, with a $75 target from $44 based on an AI-driven semiconductor-materials rerating.

ESI $9.1B
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