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Thursday, November 12, 2026

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Looking Back at Another Successful Thesis

DoubleU Games raised its all-cash tender offer for DoubleDown Interactive minority holders to $16.25 per ADS from $11.25 after net cash made the earlier bid untenable.

From X

Mikro Kap David on X

Q3 absolutely sucked, and my performance currently stands at 37.8% YTD versus 65.8% at the end of Q2, marking the worst drawdown from a high since I started sharing my buy/sell decisions on Substack. Apparently, the Market Gods decided this is what you get for calling your last portfolio update “Half-time Lead.” …I’m just glad I didn’t use a Buffett quote. That might’ve finished me off. While I barely felt the pre-2024 election volatility, the spring 2025 tariff scare, or the start of the Iran war in 2026, Q3 broke that pattern. $EVC, my largest position, fell more than 40% from its highs and made sure I felt this one. The portfolio’s relative resilience, something I’d come to appreciate, disappeared with it. Of course, I have plenty to say about Entravision, but I’ll save the fundamental developments for later in the article. Q3 was a season of portfolio pruning (wow, I never thought I’d use that phrase). I exited two winners, realized one loss, added to a large position, saw a rare billion-dollar-plus company find its way into my portfolio, and ended the quarter with 6% in cash versus 0% at the end of Q2. I ended Q3 with 11 holdings, with the top three accounting for 53% of capital and the top five for 70%. Portfolio beta also came down from 0.95 at the end of Q2 to 0.80 at quarter end. That is still elevated relative to the portfolio’s historical level, largely because my biggest position carries a beta of 1.68, while every other holding sits below 1. I’ll save the longer performance review for year end, when we can hopefully put what I still consider a satisfactory 2026 into proper perspective. For now, I think it’s better to focus on what actually matters for a concentrated stock picker like me: what has changed fundamentally, how those developments affect the risk/reward, and where my conviction stands today. As usual, at the link below I went through the portfolio from the smallest position to the largest.

Convequity on X

$PANW and $DDOG both put something real inside the customer's systems that an AI lab cannot recreate by calling SaaS APIs. Palo Alto's install is still harder to replace with AI. 1. Datadog's agents mostly sit outside the traffic and watch production. A bad agent version rarely takes the business down the way a bad firewall rule can. 2. Palo Alto's firewalls and SASE cloud gateways sit inside the traffic and decide what to allow, deny, decrypt or inspect. A wrong allow or deny hits live traffic and live machines. 3. Many Datadog users start the day in a coding agent and open Datadog when something looks wrong. Many Palo Alto users start in its console and stay there through alerts, triage and response. For them, an outside AI agent is an add-on. Cybersecurity work splits two ways on AI risk. Work done before code ships ("shift-left") or from outside the traffic, such as scanning code, checking cloud settings and sorting collected alerts, gives answers that are easy to check. AI agents are already taking over more of it. Work in live traffic and on live machines ("shift-right") means judging whether an attacker is still inside and whether blocking them is safe. That is more ambiguous and mistakes cost more, so enterprises move slower and demand earned trust. Palo Alto is not risk-free. In our view its exposure is the easily checked detection and vulnerability work inside its platform, which AI agents can take over sooner. The threat is not an AI-native firewall startup.

Qure Anniversary Update

UniQure’s Huntington’s disease BLA has a May 1, 2027 priority-review date, with an FDA advisory committee expected in late first quarter.

Big Short: Fidelity & Guaranty

F&G’s main insurer held $66.5 billion of assets against $1.38 billion of statutory capital, while private credit, reinsurance dependence…

Top Rebound Stocks for Nov’26

Texas Pacific Land's 50% selloff reflects faded data-center expectations, while its Permian royalty business generated $498 million of 2025…

Peloton: Beyond The Bike

Peloton’s connected-fitness subscribers fell 9% year over year to 2.475 million, with another high-single-digit holiday decline forecast as…

MONOY · long

Monotaro CO LTD

MonotaRO, traded as MONOY in the U.S. and 3064 in Japan, is a Japanese MRO distributor recommended as a long.

Quick note on LSAK and GRPN

Lesaka expects its Bank Zero acquisition to close by end-January 2027, though it could still close this calendar year.

DoorDash’s FBA Moment

DoorDash’s $17 billion Instacart deal targets DashMart warehouse scale, where 99%+ order accuracy and faster delivery address the limits of…

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