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Sunday, November 15, 2026

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Intel Custom ASICs?

Intel’s custom ASIC business more than doubled last quarter as it pursues hyperscaler demand, AI accelerators and a stronger Intel Foundry.

INTC $317BQCOM $185B
Chipstrat 2 clicks

From X

@calvinblissett

Calvin Blissett on X

Passed on: - $TK: screens at net cash ≈ market cap, but that cash is TNK's. Parent cash plus its TNK stake is ~$1.01B vs a ~$1.23B market cap. Buy TNK directly. - $DFIN: ran to $68, and the SEC's semiannual-reporting proposal hits filing volume. - $RICK: NY AG indictment, CEO and CFO out. - $BAER: ~$15M of equity under ~$650M of debt and preferred. - $CMRE / $DAC: big backlogs, but contracted net earnings don't cover EV yet. - $MATW, $ACTG, $ARKR, $CVEO: FCF or leverage. - $GRND: not cheap.
@calvinblissett

Calvin Blissett on X

$NMM ~$89.03 Navios Partners: containerships, drybulk and tankers, mostly on charter. ~$2.58B mkt cap at ~0.7x book, ~4x annualized earnings. Contracted revenue jumped from $4.4B to $5.0B in one quarter after $735M of new charters, and it runs through 2037. That's ~1.9x the market cap. It's shrinking the unit count. Units are down 2% in a year on a new $200M buyback ($12M used in Q3), and net debt fell $55M to ~$1.74B. The discount is about governance. The payout is $0.06/qtr, Frangou controls it, and $703M of newbuilds was just ordered. But mgmt said it will "recalibrate" return of capital in Q1, the first sign that could change. No AlphaSense expert or broker coverage in 3 months. Nobody's looking.
@calvinblissett

Calvin Blissett on X

$TNK ~$89.43 Teekay Tankers runs 33 mid-size crude and product tankers, mostly spot. ~$3.10B mkt cap, $1.42B cash, no debt, ~$1.7B EV. First-half EPS was $10.87, already above all of 2025 ($10.10), and Q3 added $5.04. Q4 so far: Suezmax $272K/day and Aframax $208K/day, 30x+ its breakeven. Clarksons has year-end net cash at ~$53/sh. EV is only ~0.4x the value of the ships, so you're getting the fleet at ~40 cents on the dollar plus the cash. The catalyst: the board will consider a special dividend with Q4 results in February instead of May. The $0.25 base hasn't moved since 2023, so the pressure on the payout is all one way. It's also selling old ships at high prices (4 for $211M) and ordering newbuilds for 2030. Why rates could stay up: OECD inventories are at a 20-year low, the U.S. SPR is ~half its pre-2020 level, and the orderbook mostly just replaces old ships. Risks: rates mean-revert and Teekay Corp controls it. BofA raised 2026 EPS by $12 and still rates it Underperform.
@calvinblissett

Calvin Blissett on X

$PRDO ~$28.99 Perdoceo runs online for-profit universities: Colorado Tech, American InterContinental, and Univ. of St. Augustine (PT/OT). ~44,400 students. Up ~3x in three years and +201% over five. ~$1.80B mkt cap, $777M of cash (~$12.50/sh, 43% of the price), no debt. FY26 guide is $3.15-3.19 adj. EPS: ~9x, ~5x ex-cash. It's quietly been buying itself back. Shares are down from 70M in 2019 to 62.6M (-11%), and the dividend went from nothing in 2022 to $0.17/qtr. South University (11 campuses, health sciences) is the next leg: $130-150M of cash plus an earnout, closing ~April. It adds a campus-based nursing business to an online model, bought with cash that was sitting idle. AlphaSense: a former admissions advisor says past enrollment was inflated by "ghost students," which a short report has also alleged. A Purdue Global exec says AI search is breaking the paid-lead funnel. Bull: low price points mean the new federal loan caps hit PRDO less than peers. CTU -0.5% is the number to watch.
@calvinblissett

Calvin Blissett on X

$ARCO ~$7.21 "We are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business." — Harry Sonneborn, McDonald's first CFO Arcos Dorados is the world's largest independent McDonald's franchisee, with exclusive rights in 20 Latin American and Caribbean markets and 2,582 restaurants. ~$1.5B mkt cap, ~4% dividend yield, consensus EPS $0.80 for 2026 and $0.86 for 2027, so ~8-9x. LTM adj. FCF $156M (~10% of the market cap), net debt 1.3x EBITDA. McDonald's itself trades at 20x+ earnings. Its biggest franchisee, running the same system across a continent, trades at less than half that. Munger once described the ideal small-town portfolio as the best office building, the best apartments, the dominant car dealership and the top McDonald's. Headline earnings look worse than they are. Q3 EPS fell to $0.15 from $0.71 because last year included an $85.6M Brazilian tax credit. Excluding it, EBITDA was up 9%. Digital is where it's winning: 66% of sales, loyalty members +60% to ~38M, and 29% of sales now tied to an identified customer. October Investor Day targets: 550-600 openings in 2027-30, high-single to low-double-digit EBITDA growth, and a $25M buyback started. Bear: margins are off the peak (9.5% vs 12.8%), Brazil comps were only +3.5%, and the +46% in the south is mostly Argentine inflation. $1.3-1.5B of capex eats a lot of the FCF.
@calvinblissett

Calvin Blissett on X

$TTWO ~$228 Rockstar (GTA, Red Dead), 2K (NBA 2K, BioShock) and Zynga. GTA VI launches 11/19 after 13 years. It's the last big independent publisher on the public market: Microsoft bought Activision for $68.7B, and EA went private for $55B. Gabelli Funds owns it, and Gabelli's playbook is private market value plus a catalyst: - EA sold for ~7.4x revenue and Activision for ~7.8x. - On Value Line's $10.0B fiscal 2027 revenue (year ending March 2028), that's a $74-78B EV, or ~$390-410 a share. - It trades at ~4.4x the same revenue. The preorder data says people aren't buying the cheap version. Average selling price is ~$97, so most are taking the $99.99 edition over the $79.99 one. ~$1B of preorders already beats GTA V's $800M first day. Guidance looks sandbagged. It implies only ~30M GTA VI units vs a 37M broker forecast, and since 2007 Take-Two has beaten the low end of its bookings guide every year. Zelnick: "uncharted territory, with preorders trending well above our expectations." The long tail is GTA Online. Recurring spending is 81% of bookings, and experts expect battle passes and a creator marketplace this time. The last time a GTA came out, the stock went ~5x over four years. Mgmt expects to be net cash by March. Bear: an expert sees no buyer in the next 5 years (Sony is the only logical one). On Value Line's margins, 2027 EBITDA is only ~$1.8B, so the PMV needs GTA margins to look more like EA's.
@calvinblissett

Calvin Blissett on X

$CLVT ~$2.33 Clarivate owns the databases researchers, universities and patent lawyers pay for every year: Web of Science, Journal Impact Factor, patent data, ProQuest. Down ~93% in five years, and it bottomed at ~$1.65 this fall. ~$1.49B mkt cap, ~$3.4B net debt after the ~$600M Life Sciences sale, ~$4.9B EV. FY26 guide: $865-885M adj. EBITDA and $320-340M FCF, ~5.6x EBITDA and a ~22% FCF yield. Consensus EPS is $0.67, so ~3.5x. The math that matters: equity is only ~30% of EV. Every $100M of debt paid down moves ~7% of the market cap to shareholders without the business growing at all. Three years of FCF at this pace retires ~$1B. It's tendering for 2028 notes below par now. Recurring revenue is most of the mix, with 45% EBITDA margins and organic ACV +1.8%. The new co-development deal with IP law firm Sterne Kessler is mgmt's answer to the AI question: put AI on top of its own patent data instead of letting someone else do it. AlphaSense expert calls cut both ways. Bull (11/11): the data quality is the moat, and AI run on Clarivate's content beats AI run on open data. Bear: AI is bolted onto a patchwork of acquired systems, and open data could close the gap in 2-5 years. Risks: AI, transactional revenue -58%, $284M of impairments YTD, ~3.9x levered.

Investor Letters

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Q3 Earnings Updates

Q3 updates cover Crocs, Entravision and Fiserv beats, coal and oil weakness, and Xerox’s sharp decline, testing the underlying cases for…

CROX $7.5BEVC $874M
Hidden Rock Capital's Newsletter 3 clicks

The Spy Who Shagged The Market

Nvidia’s leadership scandal puts its AI-market role under scrutiny, with comparisons to AIG’s pre-GFC liquidity influence.

AIG $43B
WHAT ARE WE DOING? “Contrarians At The Gate” 4 clicks

Is Nebius Fucked?

Nebius’ Q3 beat relied on $325 million of one-off partnership fees as it raised 2027 CapEx to $40–45 billion and may need $6–11 billion of…

NBIS $32B
Daniel Romero 6 clicks
SLND · long

Southland Holdings INC

Southland Holdings, a $34 million construction contractor, specializes in water and marine infrastructure and carries significant debt.

SLND $51M
Value Investors Club

Vicor Update, Part Two

Vicor uses ITC exclusion-order cases to license power-module patents, with published royalty multipliers rising from 1.0x before filing to…

VICR $7.3B
CV's Substack 5 clicks

Expert Call | Nebius

Nebius’s 1 GW annual active-capacity target from 2027 is realistic, according to a former product manager, with greenfield data centers…

NBIS $32B
P Equity Research 5 clicks

Dell's Tailwinds

Dell booked $131.7B of AI server orders in four quarters and held a $95B backlog as enterprise AI demand accelerates.

DELL $217B
Chipstrat 4 clicks

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