Bullpen.News From Edwin Dorsey
Get Daily Recap Feedback

Saturday, October 3, 2026

Back to today

The Art of Doing Financial Engineering

AI infrastructure’s $6.3 trillion financing gap is driving structured debt and asset-backed solutions, starting with Meta’s planned 5GW Louisiana data center.

MS $294B
Net Interest 5 clicks

From X

@HaydenCapital 1 click

Fred Liu on X

On Applovin Ecommerce Ads $APP. (From Ecommerce Playbook podcast 3 weeks ago.) ** "So a couple things, number one: it turned out to be the third, the third largest investment out of all the channels that we, that we run for our clients over that period [Black Friday], which is wild. And that the new kid on the block popped up into the third spot... like bucked the trend. There’s no doubt in my mind that we’re going to see material, like orders of magnitude and investment into this channel for, for our clients in, in 2026 on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the holiday. So my prediction, one last point on Black Friday: third largest investment channel, but still a relatively small portion of the whole for the weekend, a little less than 5%. So, but my prediction for this coming year in 2026 is that Applovin is going to be 15 percent, 20 percent of the total investment in Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And the indication, like the reason why, is because number one, we can deploy a lot of media dollars really fast because there’s so many impressions available, and number two, it’s performing. So the media dollars actually flowed into Applovin towards the end of that period, which is an incredible signal. So the AppLovin trend was peak, not peak on Friday, high levels on Friday, down a little bit on Monday, Tuesday, the peak was actually on Monday. I remember, you know, when this conversation first started with more than a year ago, October, right, 2024, the initial conversation was like what if this could be the third platform and some of our, as these sort of incrementality tests went through that sort of just seemed to be coming to fruition. And I would figure out like how am I going to make, if I was running an e-com brand, I would, I would say to myself, how am I going to, how am I going to make this 20% of my media investment this year? I was trying to explore in YouTube, my, my third bet would absolutely, absolutely be on AppLovin. I think what we’re saying here is like that’s happening basically is the Applovin ads is the third platform now. And so it’s time to get on." https://t.co/PBUOSe899T
@HaydenCapital

Fred Liu on X

Just hammering this home. For simplicity's sake, let's use round numbers for 2025: 1) J&T Order Volume Grows: 75% y/y 2) Tiktok & Other Customers Grows: 40% y/y 3) J&T Grows Market Share from 27% in 2024 > 33% in 2025 (disclosed in the 1H25 Report) 4) Non-platform % of revenue goes from 0% > 10% in 2025. All the data-points line up. Takeaway: It can be true that J&T grew 75% y/y, AND Tiktok is slowing to 40% y/y orders growth (and 30% y/y GMV). - Market narrative of Tiktok competition increasing is likely wrong. - Means that Shopee's recent spend is not a defensive move or coming from a weakened position. - In fact, they're pressing harder, while competition is weak (That's just how they operate. They waited to grow Monee loans, until the digibanks started blowing up. That's why you see an inflection in loan growth 2 years ago. Compare that to when Indo digibank NPLs started blowing up, and you'll see the correlation). Included pictures of the math (thanks ChatGPT). $SE $1519.HK

Investor Letters

All letters

Nike, Part Two: The Deep Dive

Nike’s second Latticework program examines the company and the global athletic footwear and apparel industry for professional investors.

NKE $52B
Latticework by MOI Global 1 click

Nike, Part One: The Story

Nike grew from a $1,000 shoe-distribution venture in 1964 into the largest sports brand, using athlete endorsements, product innovation and…

NKE $52B
Latticework by MOI Global 2 clicks

Publications we follow

Every publication on this site, hand-picked.

129 publications

Newsletters 107

YouTube 4

Blogs 17

Seeking Alpha 49 of 228

Nominate a publication

X accounts we follow

Every account on this site, hand-picked.

88 accounts
Nominate an account

Investor letters we follow

189 firms

Sectors

Ordered by how often our editor reaches for them.