Wednesday, October 14, 2026

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October 2026 Random Ramblings

October 2026 market commentary covers SOLS’s cancelled merger, a hypothetical Starbucks-Chipotle deal, Russell 2000 weakness and AI premiums for Oura and home builders.

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Broken Moats on X

$BSP lockup comes right at the end of the year....might want to file that date away, and go read the S1. Difficult to find a more flawed business model and aggregios valuation then this. It is Upland reincarnated and perhaps Valeant if they start getting dodgy on their receivables as financing starts drying up. BSP business is simply a game of removing almost all costs of broken, zombie software companies (bring r&d to near zero, remove a bulk of the employees, jack the price to any residual customers, report improved metrics, do not report the metrics you do not want to show (stopped reporting NRR, other metrics post IPO). An Italian based rollup of a collection of 2012 point solutions (Vimeo, Brightcove, Eventbrite, AOL (yes that AOL), and a bunch of others that were failed investments on their own right and in decline. Very little in shared synergies. The cadence of deals and size of deals has been dramatically increasing since 2003 (as you would expect). sub 300m in 2023, 800m in 2024, 2B in 2025, and already at 4B for 2026. This law of large numbers will continue to have to scale to continue to be able to show the financial wizardly of improved adjusted profits. Because as the cohorts exhaust the initial boost from price increases and cost cuts the businesses start more aggressively shedding their customer base (increasing the melt of the ice cube), so before these metrics infect their financials they need new deals to over run the melt (not a coincidence deal flow is faster and bigger). And thats the game, the equity price (and future dilution a certainty) (as they are around 6-7B net debt once they close their recent acquisition, this is post the ipo raise too). Once/if the story, law of numbers cannot run anymore to the right with financing, the gig will be up. Plenty of prior versions of this exact model as predecessors just go look at Upland software $UPLD. Won't end well but weird float dynamics with the A shares, IPO, lockup (12/28) and the aggressiveness of software/semi currently that is squeezing lots of more obvious AI disrupted software vendors, so its obvious where their ends up ultimately but might be treacherous on its path there, certainly tough until the float increases to short. Should be fun to watch, and an opportunity once liquidity opens up

My 2028 numbers

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Lennar, Part One: The Story

Lennar grew from a Miami builder into one of America’s two largest homebuilders, controlling land largely through options and land banks…

Lennar, Part Two: The Deep Dive

Lennar’s second audio program examines the homebuilder’s business for professional investors and housing analysts.

ASML Q3 FY12/26 Earnings Review

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Insider activity September 2026

Asian insider buying rose 19% to US$2.4 billion across 930 September transactions, led by Grab CEO Anthony Tan’s US$30 million purchase…

WDC · long

Western Digital CORP

Western Digital, a hard-disk manufacturer, is pitched as a long after significant share-price moves deter investors.

Expert Call | Corning

Corning’s NVIDIA-backed 10x fiber expansion, enterprise connector demand and carrier capacity plans frame its optical communications…

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