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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

From X

@calvinblissett 1 click

Calvin Blissett on X

$NTB: $56.15, $2.22B mkt cap, 9.8x trailing and 8.1x forward earnings, a 21% ROE, a 3.6% dividend, and 5.4% of the shares bought back in the last year. ~2.2x tangible book of $25.32. Butterfield has been banking in Bermuda since 1858 and also runs trust and wealth businesses in Cayman and the Channel Islands. Offshore deposits are sticky and cheap, and the trust business is a fee stream that doesn't care about rate cuts. Q3 core EPS was $1.58, flat with Q2, revenue beat at $161.9M, and tangible book dipped 3.3% on bond marks. gary9 wrote it up on VIC in 2017 at $33.94 and nailed why it stays cheap: "NTB screens as expensive on a P/B multiple, while the higher ROEs are dismissed due to a 0% tax rate." Nine years later the same thing is true. 2.2x tangible book looks expensive for a bank, until you see it earns 21% on equity and sends ~9% of its market cap back every year in dividends and buybacks. Value Line rates it Safety 2 with a Price Stability of 75, the steadiest name in the issue. The thing to watch is taxes. If Bermuda's global minimum tax ever reaches a bank this size, the 0% rate goes away, and so does part of the ROE.
@convequity

Convequity on X

Spirit's data auction shows what office AI is missing. Google ($GOOGL) opened at $5m and was selected at $10m for Spirit Airlines' internal data in August. Mercor was the $7.5m backup. Then micro1 proposed $12.5m. The sale still awaits court approval, with a hearing scheduled for November 6. The material includes emails, Teams conversations and business records. Google's counsel confirmed that it wants the data for AI training. I think this competition for records of real work will keep pushing up the value of enterprise data. This fits our earlier argument about why coding agents advanced faster than office automation. Coding has public repositories and tests that provide fast feedback. In office work, the context behind a decision is often scattered across private documents and conversations. Knowing how to use a spreadsheet is only part of the job. Knowing why an exception was approved, and what happened afterward, is much harder to learn from the public internet. My read is that Google is preparing for that gap. Internal records could help models learn how work moves through an organization, provided those records can be turned into tasks with outcomes that can be checked. Also it remains an open opportunity for $MNDY https://t.co/Rmzyg6DE0y, and other AI-native productivity startups to tacle. Gemini 4 Carbon already leads Artificial Analysis' AutomationBench-AA, which tests simulated workflows across business applications. Google is competitive in the kind of work this data could help models learn. Anthropic's IPO filing also puts adoption in perspective. As of September, over 50% of the Fortune 500 generated at least $100,000 each in trailing-year revenue for Anthropic. Among the publicly listed customers in that group, spending on Anthropic averaged under 0.1% of total expenses in 3Q26. We still think enterprise AI is falling short on office automation. Having access to a model tells us little about how much work a company can delegate to it. I find Google's enterprise opportunity more compelling over time than Meta's emphasis on personal AI. Google already has Workspace and Cloud as routes to customers. If better training on real work makes its models reliable enough to complete office tasks, it has a way to sell that capability. The unlock still requires models that can carry a task through the office environment with limited supervision. That remains some distance away. I think acquiring real work histories now could be a fruitful long-term bet for Google.

Investor Letters

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Molina & Kinsale

Molina Healthcare and Kinsale Capital’s earnings are reassessed through a long-term lens, emphasizing conviction and detachment during…

KNSL $8.3B
Bearstone 8 clicks
OKLO · short

Oklo INC

Oklo is framed as a portfolio basket short and a concept company that could become a compounding short.

OKLO $5B
Value Investors Club

Short LUMN

Lumen Technologies faces a fading boost from its PCF-related sugar high.

LUMN $4.9B
Shallow Dives

The Skills AI Can’t Replace

Duolingo is presented as an AI-resilient opportunity after SaaS stocks sold off on fears that coding tools will compress software moats,…

DUOL $6.4B
Modern Value Investing

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