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Thursday, October 8, 2026

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Boyz in the Hood

Robinhood’s AI agents, 24/7 equity trading and 10:1 crypto perpetual futures encourage higher retail trading velocity, leverage and momentum.

HOOD $91B
WHAT ARE WE DOING? “Contrarians At The Gate” 1 click

From X

@HaydenCapital

Fred Liu on X

Happy to share our Q4 2025 letter. Especially at a time when the future of internet and software business models are being questioned. In it, we offer our take on: - The "AI Scare Trade". The market is pricing in fear, not facts. These businesses aren't broken (yet), but investors are selling indiscriminately. - What's still investable? Software faces real headwinds - disruption to terminal value assumptions and forced pricing model shifts. But ~80% of a software company's value is trust, reliability, and headache-free solutions. That doesn't disappear overnight. - Network effects are real moats. Gaming, ecommerce, consumer internet - they're all down substantially from highs. But as AI reduces barriers to entry, the barriers to scale go up. Distribution grows more valuable. - Thoughts on $SE, after a -45% drawdown. We don't think the TikTok boogeyman is as scary as the market fears. In fact, the opposite. - New Oriental $EDU exit. Originally bought near net cash, and business has stabilized since. Time to move on. Full letter linked here: https://t.co/0WPoxoHt7t
@HaydenCapital 2 clicks

Fred Liu on X

AppLovin - Interview with Xiaochuan (architect of $APP's Axon engine). Thought this was the most in-depth public conversation on AppLovin's business to date. (P.S. Youtube has great subtitle translation) Axon & Technical Philosophy - Axon was built by just 5 people in 3 months - AppLovin was the first to implement models with prediction windows exceeding 7 days - Deliberately avoids developing its own LLMs, preferring to use the best available models on the market — building LLMs in-house wouldn't generate the best ROI E-Commerce Expansion - Decision to enter e-commerce made in May 2024, with the product launching later that year; original team was only 10 people - Entering e-commerce was effectively building a new model from scratch - The gaming and e-commerce algorithms share nothing except infrastructure and accumulated organizational experience Core Competency & Culture - AppLovin's edge isn't industry-specific — it's rooted in how the company approaches problems (the culture itself), which he believes positions them to tackle challenges well beyond gaming and e-commerce - His relish for being called an "underdog" comes through clearly throughout the interview Social Media Ambitions - Already working on building a next-generation social media platform - Strategic logic: Meta started with captive organic traffic and built an ad platform on top; AppLovin is doing the reverse - starting with the ad platform and building toward organic traffic - Owning that organic traffic, if achieved, would be a significant advantage Short Seller Response - When the short reports were published, Xiaochuan personally reviewed the systems and code to assess whether the claims had merit Hiring Philosophy - After 2023, overhauled hiring: moved to paying among the highest salaries in Silicon Valley, and shifted focus away from seasoned veterans toward people with fewer than 2 years of experience - Core belief: experience is overrated, the capacity to learn is underrated; breakthroughs come from willingness to abandon convention - "You can't operate like a large company if you don't have a large company's resources" - Most prominent AI researchers are overpriced — high visibility and intense competition drives salaries beyond their marginal value - Targets talent at the "periphery of the spotlight": technically strong but undervalued by the market, and still carrying the underdog mentality that well-known names often lack (i.e. "Moneyball") - Entire engineering org runs on fewer than 100 people https://t.co/vXaWUZGkZt

Investor Letters

All letters

Golar LNG q2’26 Operational Update

Golar LNG ordered a $2.45 billion fourth FLNG vessel, targeting 3.5MTPA of capacity and $400 million in annual EBITDA under a 20-year…

GLNG $4.7B
Monte Independent Investment Research
ISRG 2026-10-08

Top Rebound Stocks for Oct’26

Intuitive Surgical, down 32% from its January 2025 peak, faces slower US procedure growth and new robotic-surgery rivals despite $10.1…

ISRG $151B
Rebound Capital 2 clicks

Vertiv Holdings Co. (VRT)

Vertiv's 33% stock decline followed a 2026 forecast increase, despite a $15 billion backlog and rising AI data-center demand for power and…

VRT $79B
SixSigmaCapital: Navigating the Financial Markets
POST · long

Post Holdings INC

Post Holdings remains a large position after the stock's recent decline.

POST $3.5B
Value Investors Club

Research Roundup Vol. LV

OpenAI’s enterprise privacy push and Synopsys’s Factory 2 royalty model anchor a technology roundup, alongside oil above $100 and Bitcoin’s…

SNPS $90B
Monte Independent Investment Research

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