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Wednesday, October 28, 2026

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@ActAccordingly

PAA Research on X

"That would be PRESUMPTIOUS!" I'm listening to the $ORCL investor day and I found the response to the question about potential vendor/partner financing and whether or not the company has committed/signed deals quite interesting. The tone was defensive and I started to immediately think of Jimmy Cayne. In late 2007, a few months before Bear Stearns blew up they hosted an investor event in NYC to calm the markets following the blow up of 2 hedge funds. I was in the room. An analyst asked about how Bear Stearns planned to manage risk going forward in light of the "unprecedented" events in the capital markets (hedge funds blowing up, subprime defaults, credit spreads widening etc.). Jimmy Cayne responded: "You cannot create a risk model for something that is by definition UNPRECEDENTED". The tone was what I remember most. Defiant, condescending, angry. That's what I heard today with "PRESUMPTIOUS". No $ORCL is not Bear Stearns, but it's obvious to anyone that can read a balance sheet or track CDS, the financial risks for the company are growing rapidly. Negative variance on funding could have massive implications for the company. Assuming they have their financing needs secured from vendor financing or partners would be PRESUMPTIOUS.
@StableBread

Fajasy on X

I compared the 8-K on Quantum’s $QMCO CFO firing to the one on its chief accounting officer’s exit in August. $QMCO terminated William White as CFO on October 9, 2026, effective immediately, eight months after appointing him on February 2, 2026. When I first wrote up $QMCO on May 6, White was its newly appointed CFO, after the seat had been empty since August 2025. The 8-K gives no reason, and I found no press release about the firing on $QMCO’s investor relations site. Instead, the 8-K says $QMCO expects to file its September-quarter 10-Q on time. The filing also says $QMCO expects to meet or exceed its guidance for the quarter, even though it was still “early in its financial closing process.” Chief accounting officer Hiral Patel took over as principal financial officer, so she now signs off on $QMCO’s financial statements with the CEO. Patel only joined $QMCO on September 1, after the company decided on August 11 to replace Laura Nash as chief accounting officer. The 8-K on Nash says there are “no disagreements” between her and the company, but the one on White doesn’t say either way. So within two months, $QMCO replaced both of its top finance officers. $QMCO’s June-quarter 10-Q still reports material weaknesses (the most serious kind of gap in a company’s financial reporting controls) in revenue recognition, inventory, and income taxes. It also says $QMCO “lacked sufficiently qualified staff or resources to perform control activities.” None of the weaknesses has led to a material misstatement, but $QMCO has restated its financial statements before, in May 2024 and again in August 2025. In my May 6 write-up, I listed restatements as a risk that could break the story, and wrote that a third “would be a serious credibility hit.” $QMCO expected to fix one of its three revenue weaknesses, the schedules that set when service revenue is recognized, by the end of the September quarter. Its June-quarter 10-Q was also officially filed on August 11, a day after its 40-day deadline, and its FY2026 10-K needed a notice of late filing in June. So with open material weaknesses, a history of restatements, and a 10-Q filed a day late in August, I’d rather see the September-quarter 10-Q, due November 9, before taking $QMCO at its word.
@convequity 1 click

Convequity on X

Circular AI financing keeps getting bigger. A record $63 billion vehicle, partly supported by Broadcom ($AVGO), will buy Broadcom chips for Anthropic, and it only pays off if enterprises adopt AI beyond coding. The vehicle borrows, buys Broadcom XPU accelerators (custom AI chips) and networking gear, and leases them to Anthropic. Deliveries are expected from 2027. Broadcom guarantees a residual value of $40B+. This is the latest example of the banks, hyperscalers, model labs and chipmakers are frontrunning AI demand they expect to be insatiable. Without faster enterprise adoption, that demand may not arrive, and the financing stays circular. AI has to spread from coding into the rest of the enterprise. Coding can be checked, because code has to compile and pass tests. Other domains need the same verifiability, which means codifying context that lives in employees' heads, or at best across email, Slack, WhatsApp and work-management platforms. Vendors that can codify that context should extract immense value. Palantir ($PLTR) is the closest so far. Palantir's ontology, a structured account of an enterprise's objects, relationships and rules that software can use to check a result, is critical because it is instrumental to verifiability. We think it can make an average Nemotron model state of the art for that enterprise's own work. If the result is good enough, enterprises will use it and achieve sovereign AI. Once that context is codified, enterprises will not want to blindly run closed frontier models on it and give their know-how away. Broader adoption depends on data sovereignty. The shift has been visible since Palantir's Alex Karp warned earlier this year that handing closed frontier labs their data, models and institutional know-how means losing control of the value. The path is intelligence sovereignty plus more verifiability, then greater enterprise adoption, which would justify this frontrunning. It would also benefit Nvidia ($NVDA), which needs enterprise adoption because hyperscalers and model labs are leaning toward custom chips.
@ACapitalLP 1 click

A Capital on X

Interesting setup in $VOYA ahead of Q3 earnings and TCIM’s November 24 no-confidence referendum. Can certainly see a path to $150+ in a strategic takeout given the quality of the retirement franchise… My hesitation is how much activist premium is already embedded in the stock. Shares are up ~30% since TCIM surfaced in April, and the referendum is non-binding. If Q3 disappoints and the activist fails to gain traction, hard to see why this couldn’t trade back toward the pre-activist ~$75 level. Love the potential upside, less convinced by the asymmetry at ~$97… Thoughts welcome.

Investor Letters

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Danaher’s robotics era

Danaher’s new CEO paired a Q3 beat and raised EPS outlook with a 2027 4%-5% organic-growth starting point, while pitching AI-enabled…

DHR $163B
Best Anchor Stocks 1 click

ORCL Update

Oracle rose about 12% intraday on October 28, 2026 as AI infrastructure and cloud-demand sentiment improved and credit-spread concerns…

ORCL $438B
Cestrian Capital Research 2 clicks

Meta Earnings, Muse and the Frontier, Musebook

Meta’s earnings hinge on whether investors back Zuckerberg’s Muse vision and the compute spending required to build it.

META $1.6T
Stratechery by Ben Thompson – On the business, strategy, and impact of technology. 1 click

Anthropic Deep Dive

Anthropic’s $80.7 billion first-half loss was mostly fair-value marks, while $16.3 billion revenue and compute economics showed a $974…

AMZN $2.6T
CV's Substack 7 clicks

My Last GFL Update - Hopefully

GFL’s take-private structure hinges on BC Partners rolling 60% of its stake to preserve debt portability under the 40% permitted-holder…

GFL $16B
310 Value’s Newsletter 5 clicks

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