Episodes

  • Coatue CTEK: One Ticket to Anthropic, OpenAI and the Private AI Stack — At What Price?

    Coatue CTEK: One Ticket to Anthropic, OpenAI and the Private AI Stack — At What Price?
    Oct 20 2026
    Coatue's CTEK is a tender-offer fund giving qualified clients one-ticket access to late-stage private tech — Anthropic (13.1% of NAV), OpenAI, Revolut, Databricks and Stripe — plus a public book anchored by Meta and TSMC, in a clean 1099 wrapper with no K-1s or capital calls. Class I is up 53.6% since the May 2025 inception, but much of that is unrealized private mark-ups from the great AI re-rating. The assessment: estimated all-in costs of 3.46% to 4.31% a year by share class, a 12.5% incentive fee charged on realized AND unrealized private value with no clawback, exits limited to discretionary quarterly tenders targeted at 5%, a 24% cash position dragging on a tech-exposure purchase, and half the fund in ten names. The case for it: genuinely scarce access, a first-tier manager, and better alignment terms (hurdle, high-water mark) than the private-fund norm. Watch: the tender fulfillment record, Anthropic's reported path to a Nasdaq listing, fee evolution at scale, and whether the cash gets deployed.
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    19 mins
  • EssilorLuxottica Q3 2026: Beating the Bar on the Toughest Comp Ever

    EssilorLuxottica Q3 2026: Beating the Bar on the Toughest Comp Ever
    Oct 20 2026
    EssilorLuxottica reported Q3 2026 revenue of 7.49 billion euros, up 7.2 percent at constant currency, beating the 7.36 billion euro consensus — on top of last year's record quarter (+11.7%). For the first time, management disclosed wearables revenue: 486 million euros, up 20%. Asia-Pacific grew 15.7%, myopia management (Stellest) grew 24%, and direct-to-consumer comped 6.8%. Alex and Jordan break down the regional walk, the smart-glasses engine and the September 24 new generation, Stellest and Nuance Audio Plus, Grassi's margin and tariff color, the vertically integrated franchise case, and the honest bear read: margin-dilutive wearables, the dropped margin targets, and Kering-Google XR and Apple competition.
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    17 mins
  • SpaceX Q3 2026: The SI Inflection — $14.6B Revenue and the $20B Cap Ex Question

    SpaceX Q3 2026: The SI Inflection — $14.6B Revenue and the $20B Cap Ex Question
    Oct 20 2026
    SpaceX's third quarter of 2026 was a transformation print: revenue up 161% to $14.6B and a swing to $4.4B of net income, driven by the Super Intelligence segment's jump to $7.6B on cloud compute agreements, the Cursor acquisition, and Grok. Starlink's Connectivity engine — 13.6M consumer subscribers, enterprise and government revenue up 91%, segment operating income doubled — helps fund a $19.6B quarterly cap ex program concentrated in AI compute, backed by $51B of cash. Starship flew its first revenue-generating mission, delivering roughly 10x the downlink capacity of a Falcon 9 Starlink launch. The open debate: SI revenue quality and cap ex intensity versus ownership of the scarce inputs — launch capacity, spectrum, compute, and orbital infrastructure.
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    18 mins
  • Netflix Q3 2026: The Margin Machine Beats, the Ad Business Trims

    Netflix Q3 2026: The Margin Machine Beats, the Ad Business Trims
    Oct 20 2026
    Netflix beat on EPS (/bin/bash.87 vs /bin/bash.82 consensus) as operating margin hit 34.6%, up from 28.2% a year ago, on revenue of 2.87B (+12%). Churn improved year over year globally and in the US, better than forecast, and 2026 price increases were absorbed cleanly — the engagement bears got no new evidence. The soft spot: full-year ad revenue trimmed to ~$2.7B from ~$3B on slower ad-product rollout, and Q4 guidance (margin 26.0%) carries a headcount-reduction charge earmarked for reinvestment; the stock slipped ~5% after hours. Capital return is now the story underneath: a record $4.8B buyback quarter, FCF of $2.9B, and the diluted share count down to ~4.2B. With the stock ~45% below its 52-week high versus a $93.38 consensus target, we lay out the bull and bear cases and the January watch list: the Q4 ad run-rate, the 2027 outlook, engagement disclosures, and buyback pace.
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    17 mins
  • MSCI Q3 2026 Deep Dive: Expense Guide Holds, Stock Rallies

    MSCI Q3 2026 Deep Dive: Expense Guide Holds, Stock Rallies
    Oct 20 2026
    MSCI's Q3 2026 print beat on revenue (892M, +12.4%) and adjusted EPS (5.11, eight cents over consensus). The decisive item, the full-year expense guide that sank the stock 10% after Q2, held firm, with only interest expense raised; the stock rallied about 5%. Alex and Jordan walk the KPIs: total run rate 3.57B (+12.1%), record asset-based fees of 246.6M (+24.9%) on record ETF AUM, 95.0% retention, and the segment stories: Index at 77% margins, Analytics' sales-versus-profit disconnect, the Sustainability and Climate stall, and Private Assets' investment drag, plus the index tollbooth franchise case and the risks to watch.
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    15 mins
  • Music in the Air, Ten Years On: The Business Moves From Adoption to Monetization

    Music in the Air, Ten Years On: The Business Moves From Adoption to Monetization
    Oct 20 2026
    Ten years after streaming rebuilt the music business, the debate has shifted from adoption to monetization. A new long-term industry model — the first upward revision since 2022 — sees global music revenue growing from roughly $112B to about $198B by 2035. Alex and Jordan work through the three debates that will decide who captures it: subscription pricing (paid streaming revenue roughly doubles to about $33B, with pricing the un-modeled lever), the under-monetized free tier (better segmentation and a possible ad-light middle tier), and generative AI (scaled platforms look like relative beneficiaries; labels and rights holders face a more balanced risk/reward). Plus the emerging direct-to-consumer leg and superfan economics. The stock ideas that screen best in the framework: Spotify, Alphabet/YouTube, Sony, Live Nation, Tencent Music, NetEase Cloud Music and HYBE — own the distribution and the fan relationship, not just the catalog. The pure labels, Universal Music and Warner Music, screen as great assets but fully valued for what they are. Thesis: music is becoming the template for all media monetization — segmentation, pricing ladders, and superfans — and AI makes distribution more valuable, not less.
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    20 mins
  • Following the $1.6 Trillion Money Trail: Where AI Cap Ex Actually Lands

    Following the $1.6 Trillion Money Trail: Where AI Cap Ex Actually Lands
    Oct 20 2026
    Strategy research maps 2027's ~$1.6 trillion of AI investment — hyperscaler and neocloud cap ex plus the leases headline numbers miss — down to single-stock revenue. About 65% of the spend lands as S&P 500 revenue (~5% of 2027 index sales, ~25% of index sales growth), and Nvidia alone captures roughly two-thirds of the absorbed flow. As cap ex growth moderates from ~60% in 2027 to ~14% in 2028, the edge shifts to whoever owns the bottlenecks: power (Caterpillar, Cummins, GE Vernova, Bloom Energy, Forgent Power, Innio, E-Rock), compute (Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom), memory (Micron, SanDisk, Samsung, SK hynix — a bottleneck trading near 3x earnings), hard drives, optical, the server OEMs, and the pricing-power leaders (Vertiv, Trane, Johnson Controls, Hubbell). Risks: the power constraint, spender ROIC, politics, and peak rate-of-change. This information is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice; please do your own research.
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    20 mins
  • Quality Breaks Out: The Mid-Cycle Playbook and the Stocks That Screen Best

    Quality Breaks Out: The Mid-Cycle Playbook and the Stocks That Screen Best
    Oct 20 2026
    Strategy research this week argues the market is mid-transition from early-cycle to mid-cycle — and quality has broken out. The quality factor sits at a new 52-week high, up about 6% since mid-August while the equal-weight S&P 500 fell nearly 4%, powered by an earnings-revisions spread between high and low quality of about 10% (second-widest since 2010) at a relative valuation near its post-2010 median. Meanwhile a financial-conditions composite of rates, the dollar, and energy is at its tightest since 2022, and the correction likely ends when the quality index catches down to meet improving breadth. Alex and Jordan walk the regime call, the Warsh swing factor, and the full 58-stock quality screen — plus the US.6 trillion AI money trail mapped into index revenues. This information is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice; please do your own research.
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    20 mins