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Saturday, October 31, 2026

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When the liquidity does not add up

Arbor Realty Trust’s dividend suspension is presented as creating $60 million of liquidity, raising questions about its ability to meet 2027 debt maturities.

ABR $2.2B
John Hempton's Newsletter 3 clicks

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@convequity 3 clicks

Convequity on X

What $MNDY can learn from Cursor’s breakout and $PLTR’s head start General productivity AI may still be waiting for the foundation-model capabilities that helped coding applications take off. That leaves a possible breakout ahead for MNDY. But waiting for the next model release would give its competitors the same opportunity. Our latest SaaS Survival Scorecard explores what MNDY could build in the meantime. During 2023 and early 2024, Cursor had already built its coding editor and an early harness around models such as GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo. That surrounding software supplied codebase context and helped developers apply and review changes. But the models still struggled to perform complex coding work reliably. Cursor had built a way to deliver AI assistance, while the intelligence available through it limited how much work developers could delegate. The turning point came with Claude 3.5 Sonnet in June 2024, which Cursor made its default model the following month. Its stronger coding capabilities made the application Cursor had already built much more valuable to developers. Subsequent releases, including Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Sonnet 4, extended what it could do. General productivity could experience a similar improvement. Coding, however, has an advantage that helps explain why it advanced earlier: verifiability. Code can be run. Tests can check whether it produces an expected result. A training system can try different approaches and reward the ones that pass. This gives model developers repeatable feedback about what worked. Work management combines verifiable actions with decisions that are much harder to judge. Did an agent send the document to the correct approver? That can be checked. Should the approval have been requested in the first place? Should one customer’s urgent request interrupt another team’s project? The answer may depend on commitments, exceptions and relationships that nobody has written down. The result may only become clear weeks later. Rewarding an agent for closing tasks quickly could even encourage it to close work before the customer’s problem is resolved. This helps explain why narrower AI-native applications have progressed faster. Harvey focuses on legal work. Sierra focuses on customer interactions. Their narrower scope makes it easier to define the job, connect the necessary systems and assess whether the customer received value. Legal interpretation and customer disputes still require judgment. The advantage is a more specific problem than “help everyone across this organisation work more effectively”. MNDY therefore has work to do before foundation models improve. It could capture more of the knowledge that managers use to coordinate people and departments, then turn that knowledge into rules and records an agent can check. For example, when a manager repeatedly overrides an assignment, the agent could ask why. When a project requires an extra approval, it could identify the condition that triggered it and ask the responsible person to confirm the rule. Over time, MNDY could connect those rules to named customers, documents, dependencies and permitted actions. It could then check whether the handoff was accepted, whether the work was reopened and whether the intended outcome occurred. That would improve the information available to today’s models and create better examples for evaluations and eventual post-training. $PLTR shows how valuable this preparation can become. Its forward-deployed engineers have spent years working directly with customers and the people who use its software. Those conversations reveal how work actually gets done, including exceptions that a standard process diagram leaves out. Consider a manufacturer waiting for a component. One customer can accept a substitute. Another requires a quality approval. A third faces a delivery penalty that makes the delay much more expensive. An engineer working with those users can discover these differences and build them into the software. This means the AI agent has explicit rules and relationships to follow instead of having to guess from a collection of documents. PLTR’s ontology also gives data from different systems a common vocabulary. The agent can recognise that an account in one application and a customer in another refer to the same organisation. This accumulated work helps explain why PLTR could make earlier, less capable models productive when it introduced AIP in 2023. It also gives PLTR an advantage that is difficult to reproduce quickly. MNDY’s off-the-shelf approach - as with typical SaaS - has historically placed more responsibility on customers to describe their processes through boards and automations. That makes the product easier to distribute, but leaves much of the unwritten knowledge in employees’ heads. PLTR’s customer-specific implementations have captured more of that knowledge through direct engineering work. MNDY’s opportunity is to find a cheaper, repeatable way to capture it across its installed base. Its existing harness work is a start. Context, memory, tool controls and evaluations take it beyond basic retrieval, which is why our report scores its model-layer integration at 2.5. The larger opportunity is to make more customer workflows explicit and verifiable. That could improve agent performance before the next model breakthrough arrives. Better foundation models would then operate with a maintained understanding of how each customer works. If customers depend on that understanding to complete work reliably, MNDY would have a stronger reason to retain their business than access to a model its competitors can also buy. The full MNDY report develops this analysis within our SaaS Survival Scorecard. #AgenticAI #SaaS
@StableBread

Fajasy on X

McCreedy West had “a few weeks” of development (the tunnels that reach new ore) ahead of its miners and no stopes (the blocks of ore being mined) ready to go when Magna Mining $MGMNF (TSX: $NICU) took it over in March 2025. So Magna spent 2025 catching up and missed its H2 2025 grade guidance, shipping ore at 2.64% copper equivalent (CuEq, which converts every metal into copper at set prices) in Q3 and 3.41% in Q4, below the 2.9-3.4% and 3.8-4.4% it guided. 2026 has gone better. In Q2, McCreedy West set Magna-era records for tonnage (98,446 tons) and cash margin, and production costs fell to US$144/ton processed from US$156 in Q1. Through H1 2026, McCreedy West produced 8.62M payable pounds of CuEq (the metal the mill and smelter pay for after recoveries). It needs 7.4-9.4M lbs in H2 to land in the 16-18M lbs guidance range, so repeating H1 would put the year inside guidance. Costs are inside guidance too. H1 cash costs (operating costs plus smelting and refining charges, per payable pound) of US$3.63/lb sit within the US$3.40-3.80 range. All-in sustaining costs (AISC, which add sustaining capital and corporate overhead) of US$4.39/lb also sit within US$4.20-4.70. Both exclude the precious metals stream held by Franco-Nevada $FNV, which buys half the mine’s gold, platinum, and palladium at a discount. Magna says the stream adds US$0.78-0.92/lb at its 2026 budget prices. Magna’s first reserve estimate for McCreedy West, effective December 31, 2025, came to 987,000 tonnes of probable reserves, which Magna says supports three years of production at its 2026 mining rate. Three years sounds short, but CEO Jason Jessup says it’s “in line with the reserves that McCreedy West has operated with since being restarted in 2003 by FNX Mining,” and that Magna “could have extended” the reserves. McCreedy West’s Intermain nickel zone isn’t in the reserves or the guidance. Jessup wants nickel to hold “north of $8” per pound “for at least a quarter” before restarting it, and says Magna could be shipping Intermain nickel to Vale $VALE “within 8 to 12 weeks” of a decision. At ~$7.48/lb nickel, the Intermain restart waits.

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Another Haircut with Avy the Barber

SoFi’s stock case hinges on interest rates, tangible book value and private-credit loan sales after its $1.5 billion equity offering.

SOFI $22B
WHAT ARE WE DOING? “Contrarians At The Gate” 3 clicks

Twilio CEO: ‘Buy the dip!’

Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler urged investors to “buy the dip” after earnings sent the software maker’s shares down 17% after hours.

TWLO $31B
The Technology Letter 2 clicks
PSN · long

Parsons CORP

Parsons generates roughly half of its $6.4 billion revenue from Federal Solutions, serving defense and intelligence customers.

PSN $5.6B
Value Investors Club

CoStar: 3Q26 Business Recap

CoStar’s 3Q26 revenue growth slowed to 14% as bookings fell to $37 million, while cost cuts lifted EBIT margin to 8.8%.

CSGP $13B
Speedwell Memos 3 clicks

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