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Monday, October 19, 2026

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@ACapitalLP 50 clicks

A Capital on X

𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙝𝙖𝙥𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙉𝙚𝙤𝙘𝙡𝙤𝙪𝙙 / 𝘼𝙄/𝙃𝙋𝘾 𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙙𝙚 𝙡𝙖𝙨𝙩 𝙬𝙚𝙚𝙠: I like distilling complex topics down to plain English. Here’s my understanding of what happened. Please correct where wrong… $CRWV and its peers rent $NVDA GPUs to AI labs and hyperscalers under multi-year take-or-pay contracts. The capex is so large relative to cash flow that the model only works if they can keep raising tens of billions a year in new financing to build what customers have already signed for. Much of that comes from secured loans backed by specific chips and contracts, while the rest comes from unsecured bonds, converts or stock. Importantly, not all secured debt is non-recourse, and many of $CRWV’s GPU loans are guaranteed by the parent. Still, the secured facilities held up considerably better than the unsecured bonds, which went from ~12% to ~15% yields, while the cost of insuring them via CDS roughly doubled… Nothing fundamental appears to have caused it. No major customer walked, GPU pricing held up, and the quarter looks fine. What happened was a cluster of headlines landing on a nervous market with the 10-year near 5.2% and hundreds of billions of AI debt issuance expected: Chamath calling it a private-credit bubble, an analyst saying the equity could go to zero, Gartner forecasting that over 80% of neoclouds stop operating independently by 2030, a few smaller peers failing to get IPOs and debt deals done. Underneath sat the bigger question of whether neoclouds are durable businesses or really just financing wrappers that hyperscalers eventually insource and cheap open-source models undercut. Once investors doubt the parent can fund growth, the stock falls, which makes the equity leg more dilutive, which worries bondholders more. Credit and equity fed on each other and the whole group fell 10-30% in sympathy. Was it justified? In three parts. (1) The $CRWV unsecured bond move was likely overdone: a company with ~$17bn of liquidity and a $129bn contracted backlog doesn’t suddenly become a distressed credit because of a handful of headlines. But backlog isn’t cash flow, and secured lenders have first claim on specific assets and cash flows, with many loans also carrying parent guarantees. The question for unsecured creditors is how much cash actually makes it back to the parent after servicing the secured debt. Still, a move to ~15% yields looks more like aggressive HF de-risking with headlines as the accelerant than a sudden collapse in the underlying business. (2) The $CRWV equity move was more understandable, just not for the headline reasons: this is a levered financing business whose equity returns depend on the cost of the marginal dollar of capital. When financing gets more expensive, the residual value on every future GW shrinks, and any gap that needs to be filled with equity becomes more dilutive. That said, unsecured bonds trading at 15% doesn’t mean every new GPU deployment costs 15% to finance. A 20% haircut for a stock that may not self-fund until 2030 could be seen as fair, but it ultimately depends on how much parent-level capital is actually required. (3) The group ($CORZ, $CIFR, $WULF) selloff was the least justified: $CRWV finances depreciating GPUs and bears the risk of obsolescence and replacement. The miners converting to HPC are increasingly financing long-lived power and data center infrastructure leased to hyperscalers under 15-20 year contracts, often with the customer owning the GPUs. Their risks are construction, power delivery and financing, not GPU replacement or compute pricing. Different assets, different contracts, different capital structures. Yet the market sold them as though they had the same problem, and that’s where the mispricing most likely sits…
@calvinblissett 3 clicks

Calvin Blissett on X

LendingTree ($TREE) Upside: ~120% to ~$54. Assumes 7x the midpoint of 2026 adjusted EBITDA guidance ($148.5 million), less ~$280 million of net debt, across 14.0 million shares. The stock currently trades at about 4x. LendingTree is the largest U.S. online marketplace connecting consumers with lenders and insurers. The stock has fallen 65% from its high, first on a Q2 earnings miss and lowered guidance, then in September on a Wall Street Journal report about Meta’s “Muse” AI agent, which investors fear could let consumers shop for loans and insurance without visiting a marketplace. At $24.43, TREE trades at roughly 4x enterprise value to 2026 EBITDA guidance of $145–152 million. The AI fear overlooks two things. First, insurance is now about two-thirds of revenue ($209 million in Q2, up 42%), paid by carriers buying leads regardless of where the search starts. Second, loan brokering requires state licensing and fraud controls; management notes that ChatGPT and Gemini declined to process loan applications and referred users to marketplaces including LendingTree. Net leverage has fallen from 5.3x in 2023 to 1.9x, removing the balance-sheet risk that once hung over the stock. The disintermediation risk is real, but a 4x multiple prices in a lot of it.

Investor Letters

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LXS.DE: a 2028 sale it can force

Lanxess can force Advent to buy at least half its Envalior stake in April 2028, potentially raising about €745 million to reduce net debt.

LPTH $525M
Trade Ideas Flow 14 clicks

Build-A-Bear: A Narrower Path

Build-A-Bear's push into prestuffed toys and broader retail distribution tests brand stretchability, but recent results warrant caution.

BBW $317M
TSOH Investment Research 13 clicks
FINV · long

Finvolution Group

FinVolution, a China and ASEAN unsecured consumer lender, trades at 4x earnings and 0.5x book value.

FINV $711M
Value Investors Club 4 clicks

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…

SMTC $16B
CV's Substack 13 clicks

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