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Tuesday, November 3, 2026

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TWLO Q3 FY12/26 Earnings Review

Twilio's Q3 revenue rose 20% to $1.56 billion, but Q4 organic growth guidance fell to 11% to 12% and RPO declined 28%.

TWLO $33B
Cestrian Capital Research 3 clicks

From X

@convequity

Convequity on X

Why we exited $FIG AI coding agents and prompt-to-UI tools are changing the design workflow faster than most expected. Platforms such as v0, Lovable and Claude Design can already take a team from idea to a working interface without a traditional design file in the middle. Figma has added its own generative features, yet these have largely been layered on via external model APIs rather than a full re-architecture around AI-native workflows. Newer entrants were built for this environment from the start. In public interviews the founding team has consistently struck a defensive posture — essentially arguing the existing franchise is secure — rather than showing the urgency of a company prepared to disrupt its own model. That mindset is rarely a positive signal when a platform shift is underway. After several quarters of waiting for a more compelling response, we exited the position.
@convequity

Convequity on X

Why we exited $CRSP and kept $TEM AlphaFold solved the backend of the problem — predicting a protein’s 3D structure from its sequence. The harder frontend problem remains: knowing which protein or pathway is actually worth targeting. Most complex diseases are still poorly understood at the causal level. That distinction matters. The next real breakthroughs look more likely to come from AI-native groups that treat large-scale compute as the primary engine, in the same way OpenAI and Anthropic approached language before the ChatGPT moment. Public investors may only get clean access later via secondaries or IPOs. CRISPR sits on the earlier-generation side of that divide. Tempus is closer to the compute-and-data native side — building models while assembling a genuine clinical data moat. That is why one was exited and the other retained.
@evantindell

Evan Tindell on X

Finally got a chance to go through the $UMG earnings... Obviously, a disappointment on revenue growth and margins, which saw the stock drop like 20%. Subscription revenue was 6.7% organically, and the street was looking for >9%. So, a big miss. Still, I think things should improve. Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and YouTube music have all raised prices this year, and a portion of that will go to UMG. CFO Matt Ellis said on the call that these prices and "better market share to start the third quarter" make them "cautiously optimistic" (really sticking his neck out there!!) that growth will improve in H2 of 2026. Interestingly, Warner Music $WMG managed to grow revenue 12% in CC and adjusted OIBDA by 24%, so clearly this is a UMG-only problem, at least for this quarter. $UMG trades at 14x earnings on a NTM basis now... this seems pretty reasonable if not downright cheap for a company that has grown EBIT from EUR 1b in 2019 to around 2b today (11% organic EBITDA CAGR). We own this through Bollore, which currently has an NAV of just above 11 EUR by my calculation vs a last price of under 4 EUR. Notably, JPM thinks new AI tiers in Spotify and Apple Music will drive ARPU growth of 300 bps per year. Their price target was 48 EUR prior to the recent earnings release...
@orrdavid 1 click

David Orr on X

It's not THAT clear Citadel made a good bet. Probably good. But it could be losing. Three buckets: 1. Citadel brand buying the block creates a lot of buyers short term, letting them get out. A counter to this is: how many other funds/players blew up at the same time, with how much more stock still needing to be sold at any price by brokers? And redemptions. 2. The $SOXX drop was mostly just technical and will keep going up again after this. In which case Citadel will kill it. 3. The $SOXX drop was on real fundamentals, like the market knows the trade is over. In that case, Citadel stands to get slaughtered if the move continues down. Nobody really knows. Memory seems very questionable, though. I follow $TSM well and that seems merely fairly priced here, not a screamin' buy. $NVDA seems hard today, with all this chatter of competing chips / AI getting so powerful the software moat seems like probable junk in a few years.
@convequity

Convequity on X

Himax and the parallel optical bet $HIMX sits in two places in the optical stack: micro-lens arrays that route light into fiber, and a more speculative but potentially transformative position in microLED-based CPO. The microLED idea inverts the industry’s core assumption. Instead of fewer, ever-faster InP laser channels, it uses hundreds or thousands of simple low-speed lanes (4–10G each). High-speed SerDes and DSP largely disappear, energy drops below 1 pJ/bit, and the continuous-wave InP laser is eliminated entirely — replaced by GaN microLEDs from the display supply chain. Reliability improves and failures become graceful rather than catastrophic. Reach is limited to a few meters and the fiber-bundle ecosystem is still immature, so the technology is confined to short-reach scale-up. It remains pre-revenue and more debated than it was a few months ago. Yet the process know-how from Himax’s high-density display drivers maps unusually well onto this architecture. The stock is up ~55% YTD but down ~18% QTD, and currently trades around 31x EV/FCF and 10x EV/GP. For anyone who still sees a meaningful path for CPO — and views the microLED route as high-upside optionality rather than pure speculation — the current levels look like a reasonable place to build or add. We go deeper on the microLED architecture and its place in the broader optical stack in Part 4 of our Photonics series at Convequity.

Investor Letters

All letters

Stevanato down 30%. Yikes.

Stevanato fell 30% after forecasting low-single-digit 2027 growth as lower Nexa syringe volumes from a GLP-1 customer offset solid Q3…

STVN $3.6B
Best Anchor Stocks 3 clicks

Marvellous Value Destruction

Marvell’s proposed Lumentum deal risks alienating Cloudlight customers and losing engineering talent, despite limited optical integration…

LITE $48B
Irrational Analysis 2 clicks

FTAI Aviation Update, Part Two

FTAI Aviation’s $234 million Jereh JV deposit funds Power inventory, while customer concentration, lower cash guidance and pending U.S.

FTAI $17B
CV's Substack 5 clicks

BNTX Earnings Review

BioNTech's Q3 revenue beat consensus on €613 million of BMS partnership revenue, while COVID vaccine sales fell 35% and net cash totaled…

BNTX $22B
Cestrian Capital Research 1 click
BSP · short

Bending Spoons Spa

Bending Spoons is a software and digital-assets holding company that has completed more than 50 acquisitions since 2013.

BSP $29B
Value Investors Club 1 click

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