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Thursday, November 5, 2026

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AppLovin 3Q26 Business Update: No Notes

AppLovin’s Q3 revenue rose 55% year over year as AXON model gains expanded margins, while ad take-rate compression remains the key competitive risk.

APP $118B
Speedwell Research 3 clicks

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@convequity

Convequity on X

Thoughts on Elon's recent neocloud comments "Neocloud" has always been a weak label. These businesses aren't really clouds, and they aren't particularly new. The more accurate term is GPU VPS. Most of them rent bare-metal GPUs. They generally don't offer redundancy across three availability zones, and they don't sell hundreds of platform services on top of the hardware the way a true cloud does. That puts them closer to VPS providers than to cloud platforms. CPU history shows the difference. CPU cloud concentrated among three to five players because platform services lock customers in and drive a demand flywheel. Customers use more of the stack over time, rather than only renting the hardware. That is how AWS-style clouds kept high margins and strong moats. CPU VPS went the other way: many providers selling essentially the same product, in a brutally competitive, commoditized market. If GPU supply stops being constrained by chips or energy, GPU VPS starts to look like CPU VPS, with gross margins of something like 50%. Better marketing and operations can lift margins and grow revenue, but they won't push gross margins to 75-80%. That is the long-term risk Musk pointed to when he predicted most neoclouds would go out of business. Most of these names are VPS businesses earning cloud-like profits and valuations from a temporary imbalance between supply and demand. $CRWV is part of that group. CoreWeave and $NBIS are also the two furthest from a pure GPU VPS, because both already sell platform services on top of the GPUs. CoreWeave is still the most exposed on financing. It pushed hard to maximize margins on each contract and took on interest-rate risk against fixed contracted revenue. Its counterparties, OpenAI, $MSFT and $META, may have played those deals more intelligently. So CRWV is the most vulnerable name on its balance sheet, yet one of the least commodity-like on product. That gap is where the return potential sits for investors willing to stick with CRWV.
@convequity 1 click

Convequity on X

Anthropic and Binance show why the speed of containment matters. Cathedral, an AI security startup, says its agents found routes into Anthropic's internal messages and employee records by exploiting third-party business software during a security test. Anthropic acknowledged limited sales, HR and IT exposure, but says its model weights and code were safe, its monitoring caught some activity, and access was cut the same day. I lean toward Cathedral on the significance of that exposure. Internal information can help attackers impersonate colleagues and target people with privileged access. The damage can extend beyond the data initially exposed. Supply-chain risk becomes harder to contain as more tools and agents gain access to company systems. Tighter permissions should help. Building more tools internally might reduce vendor exposure, but it also transfers maintenance and security work to your own team. Binance's October 29 hack involved a different suspected entry point. Its preliminary investigation says a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop may have let an attacker reach an internal service and submit unauthorized withdrawals. Binance estimates a $6.3bn impact, with roughly $3bn frozen so far. An attacker using a trusted employee's access can cause damage without any malicious insider. And TRM Labs says most of the funds leaving Binance moved in about 20 minutes. That is why I think shift-right security becomes increasingly important: detecting and stopping attacks while systems are running. Security teams need to recognize lateral movement, where an attacker moves between accounts or machines, and contain it before the attacker reaches systems that can cause much greater damage. This is part of why we like Palo Alto Networks ($PANW). Cortex combines network, endpoint and cloud data with response controls, including the ability to isolate compromised devices. Connecting an investigation to an action that stops the attack matters when the attacker can move this quickly. It also makes cybersecurity an interesting market for premium-speed AI inference. An AI security agent needs to investigate accurately and act quickly, with current data and permission to intervene. Where the model's reasoning time is delaying containment, paying even 100x more per inference call could make economic sense if the reduction in expected losses exceeds the extra cost. Faster inference becomes valuable when it lets the defender stop an attack sooner without sacrificing accuracy.

Investor Letters

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Intel: The CPU Comeback, Discounted

Intel's Q3 2026 results were hit by memory costs and an Israel shutdown, but enterprise AI inference could lift CPU demand as server…

INTC $287B
Monte Independent Investment Research 2 clicks

Thursday Tailwinds #13: Nov 5, 2026

Florida marinas are 92% full as boat counts rise and permits constrain new supply, creating pricing power for existing operators such as…

SUI $14B
Trade Ideas Flow 6 clicks

New Ideas From The Road

Aurelion Research increased healthcare exposure and sees opportunities in banking and defense, alongside research on Alcoa, Nike, ONON and…

AA $10BNKE $60B
Aurelion Research 4 clicks

Oracle: The Party Is Almost Over

Oracle’s CDS spreads exceed 320 basis points as debt approaches $135 billion and fiscal 2027 capex targets $95 billion, amid heavy reliance…

ORCL $363B
David Desjardins 1 click

Coupang: 3Q26 Business Recap

Coupang’s product-commerce growth rose 9% as data-leak effects fade, while management expects margins to return to pre-incident levels by…

CPNG $27B
Speedwell Memos 3 clicks

update on Gartner

Gartner’s growth has stalled after federal contract losses and cautious commercial spending, raising questions about its competitive…

IT $13B
scuttleblurb 1 click

Recycle Bin

Used aircraft engines can be repurposed as gas turbines, easing data center power constraints while tightening aviation supply.

EQT $33BRRC $12B
Doomberg 8 clicks

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