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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 14 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

2026.42: Home At Last

Stratechery’s weekly bundle covers Apple HomeView and SpaceX’s cellular ambitions.

AAPL $5T
Stratechery by Ben Thompson – On the business, strategy, and impact of technology. 6 clicks

TSOH Weekly Roundup (10/16/2026)

Bumble agreed to a $1.3 billion take-private deal, while Netflix cut about 1,000 jobs and Meta discussed its Muse superintelligence models.

NFLX $511B
TSOH Investment Research 12 clicks

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

PesoRama: Research Flash

PesoRama will reach 54 JOi Dollar Plus stores by November after raising C$28.4 million, funding more than 50 additional Mexican store…

TBBB $7.2B
Atrium Research - Equity Research 7 clicks
LLY · long

LILLY (ELI) & CO

Eli Lilly trades at 33 times this year’s earnings and 26 times next year’s, versus roughly 12 times for big pharma peers.

LLY $1.2T
Value Investors Club 4 clicks

Modine Deep Dive

Modine, soon Modexus Solutions, has a $4 billion hyperscaler cooling contract but must ramp factory output and restore margins as data…

MOD $7.9B
CV's Substack 20 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

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