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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 $16B
CV's Substack 10 clicks

From X

@convequity

Convequity on X

Private equity puts a floor under software valuations, and you can work out that floor with simple arithmetic. A private equity buyer takes the company private, removes unnecessary staff, lifts margins to 30%+ and keeps growth in the low teens. A company restructured that way should be worth at least 20x EV/EBIT. At a 33% EBIT margin, 20x EV/EBIT is about 6.7x EV/Sales. That gives a simple test for any software stock. If it trades well below that level, the market values the business at less than a buyer could get from it just by cutting costs. In our view, the market sees no differentiated future for that company. So why don't more of these companies get restructured? One reason is ownership. Dual-class share structures are common across large-cap and mid-cap tech, and they limit how much pressure private equity and activist investors can apply. That makes it hard for a company like $OKTA to accept legacy status and carry out a deep restructuring. We expect many SaaS companies to keep fighting slowing revenue with high operating expenses rather than restructure.
@convequity 1 click

Convequity on X

$NVDA vs $AVGO: The Optical Edge NVIDIA can keep growing while facing pressure from more directions. Custom chips, optical supply constraints and specialized inference systems give customers more reasons to consider alternatives. Broadcom’s optical capabilities could help it win the accompanying compute order. Customers need both accelerators and the optical components that connect them to bring capacity online. Securing those components alongside an ASIC purchase could shift the customer’s platform choice toward AVGO. Control across lasers, photonic and electronic chips, and packaging also gives Broadcom more freedom to optimize the complete design. Embedded lasers could reduce the laser power required, easing dependence on scarce, high-power external lasers, although replacement becomes harder. For AVGO, this remains a potential design route. NVIDIA can respond through partnerships, but separate suppliers still have their own margins and product priorities. Google ($GOOGL) and Amazon ($AMZN) are expanding the alternatives through TPUs and Trainium. Our ABBX model allocates 10GW of Anthropic’s 13.8GW planned capacity to those two platforms. The plans span different timelines, but show how a few large buyers could redirect substantial spending away from GPUs. Huawei adds pressure through its integrated optical approach and the prospect of Chinese models supplying cheaper tokens internationally. That could affect both hardware choices and the prices compute providers can charge. Cerebras ($CBRS) targets workloads where faster responses matter. It can compete for latency-sensitive decoding without replacing GPUs across every stage of inference. NVIDIA’s defenses remain substantial. GPU batching supports high total output, flexibility across workloads matters, and its ecosystem is deeply established. Customers can use GPUs for prefill and specialized chips for decoding. Wider enterprise model development would also favor NVIDIA because smaller buyers have less reason to fund custom-chip programmes. At comparable valuations, we prefer adding to AVGO: it can benefit from custom-silicon adoption while helping customers secure the optics needed to deploy it. For NVIDIA, the key question is how much market share and pricing power it retains as customers gain more alternatives.

Investor Letters

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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” 51 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 $88B
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 27 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 $17B
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 $17B
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 7 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 1 click

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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