TIP807: Portfolio Review: Analyzing Holdings and Watchlist Companies for 2026 w/ Daniel Mahncke, Shawn O'Malley, & Kyle Grieve

“The market cap of Exor itself is only 13 billion euros. So that means you're buying those assets at a 60% discount to what they're actually worth on paper in the public markets. And then everything else—CNH, Stellantis, Phillips, they also have stakes in Juventus, the football club, and Christian Louboutin, as well as the business magazine, The Economist—you get all of those for free more or less.”

“I call them a conglomerate of 100 small monopolies because what they do is they require businesses in the aerospace industry. The FAA or its international equivalents, they certify specific parts from specific manufacturers, and then once your part is on that design, it has to stay on that design. You cannot substitute it out even if a competitor builds something functionally identical.”

“One of the craziest changes when looking at Reddit has just been the inflection and the margins of the business. Net income margins in 2024 were negative 37%, and by 2025, a year later, they were 24% in the positive direction. I'm not sure if I've ever seen such a margin turnaround for a company in one year or two years, even if some of that negative 2024 number is distorted by one-time IPO costs.”

“Every time a major city announced restrictions, which for example happened in New York City, but also in Barcelona, it kind of reminded investors that Airbnb's supply is ultimately dependent on regulatory tolerance. And that basically creates this uncertainty premium that a business like booking.com, which aggregate hotels that are obviously already legally operating, just doesn't carry to the same degree.”

“Once you own the rights to a song, you essentially own a perpetual royalty stream with almost zero marginal cost of production. You don't need to manufacture anything. You don't need to run servers. You don't need to reprint the music every single time that somebody plays it. And that's why their free cash flow conversion is so astronomically high—north of 80% of operating profit converts to cash flow.”

“Trade Desk on the other hand has zero inventory. So they exclusively represent the buyer, which means that their incentive is entirely aligned with getting the advertiser the best possible outcome. And that neutrality is only much a structural advantage that the walled gardens, which is a term for these closed ad ecosystems like Google, like Amazon or Meta, generally can't replicate without actually dismantling their own business models.”

“The FHFA, the regulator that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, officially approved Vantage Score 4 as an alternative scoring model for those government-backed loans. And Vantage Score is owned jointly by the three major credit bureaus. This broke FICO's exclusive mandate for the first time in the company's history. So it was a big deal.”

“For the first time in Nintendo's history, a new console didn't mean that Nintendo had to rebuild its customer base. The Switch 2 is the first console that embraced an ecosystem-like approach. And so one major difference being backward compatibility, which means that a new console could play games from older console generations. That is just a huge value add and really simplifies things.”