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Saturday, October 17, 2026

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Semtech Analyst Day Review

Semtech raised Q3 guidance and targets $3.2 billion of fiscal 2030 revenue, excluding upside from its AI data-center optical and copper interconnect businesses.

SMTC $13B
CV's Substack 13 clicks

From X

@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
@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

Investor Letters

All letters

Is The Market Turning The Page?

CoreWeave’s debt and equity price action is framed as a wake-up call for investors amid a broader market discussion.

CRWV $34B
WHAT ARE WE DOING? “Contrarians At The Gate” 54 clicks

AppLovin Deep Dive

AppLovin rebuilt its ad model with AXON 2.0, lifting LTM revenue to about $7 billion and margins to 77% as Unity competition threatens…

APP $92B
Speedwell Research 27 clicks

Constellation: Stars Aligning?

Constellation Brands trades near $127 at roughly 11x next-twelve-month EV/EBIT, with recent business results offsetting concerns over…

STZ $22B
TSOH Investment Research 28 clicks

October 2026 Random Ramblings

October 2026 market commentary covers SOLS’s cancelled merger, a hypothetical Starbucks-Chipotle deal, Russell 2000 weakness and AI…

CMG $39B
Yet Another Value Podcast 87 clicks

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…

LEN $18B
Latticework by MOI Global 15 clicks

Lennar, Part Two: The Deep Dive

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

LEN $18B
Latticework by MOI Global 13 clicks

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…

GRAB $12B
Asian Century Stocks 8 clicks
AMADF · long

Amadeus It Group SA

Amadeus IT Group turns long after shares fell more than 20% since a November short call.

AMADF $25B
Value Investors Club 2 clicks

Vicor Update, Part Two

Vicor uses ITC exclusion-order cases to license power-module patents, with published royalty multipliers rising from 1.0x before filing to…

VICR $10B
CV's Substack 5 clicks

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